I have a lot to be thankful for. I'm thankful that all of you tune in to read this blog every week. I'm thankful that we are making our way through this journey to move forward after miscarriage (or whatever personal upset you happen to be going through) together. I am thankful for the love and support of my incredible friends and family without whom I would have truly lost my mind this year. I am grateful for my husband who has been by my side heroically even through the midst of his own struggle to reconcile the aftermath of heartbreak. I am extremely thankful for the lessons this year has taught me and the ways it has helped me to grow. I'm also thankful for stuffing. And sweet potatoes. And pie. And the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. 

Truthfully, the thing I love about Thanksgiving is the tradition. I love the familiar voices, the familiar stories, the familiar flavors. We make and remake the same recipes year after year regardless of how the family around the table changes. This year there won't be a new baby at our table as we may have expected, but the comfort of this holiday is a constant. Life is so often fragile, and changeable, but Thanksgiving reminds us that family and tradition are not. So in the most maternal gesture I can think of to share with you, I'd like to make a Thanksgiving offering of my mom's sweet potato casserole recipe. This is the recipe I have prepared every Thanksgiving that I have not been able to be with my mom (including once overseas where, let me tell you, it is not easy to scrape together the ingredients for a turkey day feast). It's the recipe I bring to my in laws house to trick them into thinking that I'm a real live grown up that can make a Thanksgiving dish. It's the recipe that is my favorite thing to have left over. Enjoy! Wishing you, and whatever your family looks like this year, a beautiful holiday.

This year has had moments of tragedy and hilarity and here we are in the homestretch. In under two months I will be free and clear of 2014 : the year that changed me irreversibly. I'd like to think that all the baby / medical / general uterine drama that occurred this year left me with a richer and more complex world view, a wisdom, a maturity, a deepened connection to womanhood, and a heightened empathy. I think at least some of those things are in part true, but that's not what this post is about. You'll have to wait for my New Years post or something for those kinds of genuine sentiments. 

Right now what I can't stop laughing to myself about is the ways in which this year has made me even more ridiculous of a person than I already was. There are things this year made me do (it made me do it! I had no choice!) that are neurotic and hilarious and bizarre. In the interest of having a sense of humor about the tough things we go through and the ways they wedge themselves into our lives, here is a little list in the tradition of my early "fun" Friday miscarriage blog posts.
(A. yes i did just used "fun" as an adjective describing miscarriage posts, and B. for those of you who have been following me since those days : THANK YOU. And I'm sorry. And I love you):

Ways That This Year Has Considerably Upped My Level of (Lovable?) Zaniness: 

1. I talk without flinching about my uterus to anyone who seems remotely interested (ditto to those who don't). I no longer have any sense that it's not an entirely normal thing to talk about. I might as well be discussing the weather. 

2. I purchase teas that are supposed to support the female reproductive system but never end up drinking them.

3. There have been several distinct occasions where I have stared into my kittens eyes and literally gotten choked up at the thought that this tiny little thing needs me desperately (She on the other hand is probably just wondering why my face is so close to hers).

4. I sporadically take prenatal vitamins in an epic subconscious push-pull between preparing for a baby and rejecting the idea.

5. I am no longer squeamish about pretty much any body function. Particularly of the female variety. I've seen and felt it all and it's not cute and I'm willing to laugh about that because what else can we do? 

6. I track my cycle on a phone app that has little icons to indicate symptoms. One is a tiny fork that indicate "tender breasts". I mean. What??

7.  I carry a tiny satchel of precious stones and crystals around with me in my purse. I purchased them at a hippie store in Cape Cod. They are supposed to be healing me. Maybe they are. (and for those of you who know me well, ok, maybe we can't fully blame the miscarriage for this type of flower-child behavior) 

8. Instead of simply unsubscribing from the army of baby-related junk email I still get, I play this little game where I try to delete them faster than I can read what they are selling me and the baby they think I've had by this point. 

9.  Every time I eat raw fish, unpasteurized cheeses, or drink wine I do it with a new level of defiance and acute enjoyment as if I'm taking a dramatic political stand. Take that! I'm not even a little pregnant and I do what I want! 

10. I keep one of my positive pregnancy tests from December in my bedside table drawer. I can't bring myself to throw it out even though I have largely made peace with what happened to me. It just feels like an anthropological relic of something I always want to remember was real. I would at this point like to apologize to my best friend who I lead to believe I threw it out. I didn't. I took it out of the garbage after you left like a lunatic. (However he is the one to whom my lunacy is the least shocking I'm quite certain.)

And arguably the craziest of them all : I  share my inner most thoughts and fears about miscarriage and pregnancy on the internet every single Tuesday because I don't want you to think you're the only one who has them!! You're not crazy! Your sister or aunt or mother or best friend or colleague who had a miscarriage and got you interested in reading this blog is not crazy (or if she is, you can take comfort in the fact that she's in good company!). Whatever silliness has crept into your life as a means of adapting to this pain that no human should have to feel falls under the category of survival. I wear all this ridiculousness like a badge of honor. Keep laughing, keep moving, keep surviving one day at a time. 

I guess this is a bit of a continuation of last week's "Advanced Beginners" post. I've been thinking a lot about the circumstance of being at the starting line again, but this time with a knapsack of traumatic experiences on my back (and we're not talking one of those little mini backpacks I rocked in the 90s...we're talking like a hard core, forest green, book-schlepping kind of a deal with a lifetime guarantee and my initials embroidered onto it). I approach the possibility of a second time around with such mixed emotions. Just try to imagine the two most diametrically opposed viewpoints on the topic of getting pregnant again and then imagine that I am feeling those both. Simultaneously. Continuously.

We're not quite at the point of starting to try again because I want to give my body a little more time to heal and get back into its own rhythm, but I am aware that it is in the not-too-distant future. The other day I actually found myself getting excited about the thought of buying an ovulation kit. I walked by the aisle of the drug store that used to make me cringe and want to throw things and I felt a tiny spark of the same excited naiveté I experienced almost exactly a year ago at this time when it was my first rodeo. Because no matter what has happened to me, no matter what statistics I have read, no matter how many disheartening stories I have heard, I am still essentially an optimist at heart. I know that things could just as easily work out perfectly as they could terribly and I try to lean towards the "perfectly" side with as much of my might as I can muster.

This is not always easy. I saw a commercial on treadmill the other day (see how I nonchalantly mentioned that I was on the treadmill there like it was super normal for me for more than just the last month or so? nothing to see here, folks, just a gal who goes to the gym on the regular. no big. please hold your applause!) that rendered me That Girl Who Tears Up on the Treadmill (is that a gym archetype? I haven't been going long enough to know). The commercial is basically a big brother and little sister looking at the ornaments on their Christmas tree and the brother is explaining what they represent. There's one that says, "Baby Girl's 1st Christmas" and the little sister asks "Is this mine?" and the brother says, "No, that one is for Alice, but she doesn't know it yet. Mom says she's still cooking"  and then they cut to mom smiling knowingly on the sofa and resting her hand on her pregnant belly.  

The commercial got to me not for the reasons you might think, but because it made me realize how differently I think now. A few years ago I would have watched that commercial and thought nothing more than that it was cheesy (or maybe I would have even found it kind of sweet). Now I watch that and think things like : that baby is not a guarantee! oh gosh the brother and sister are already so excited what if something happens? how early did she allow herself to buy that ornament? how lucky that she was able to buy it without a second thought! I feel jealous that this imaginary mother in a commercial was confident enough to share with her little children that a baby was coming. I still feel wracked with guilt that my little nieces knew I was pregnant even though it seems that they probably didn't even register the news to begin with. One of the first things I thought when I miscarried was that I had to apologize to my sister-in-law for irreversibly scarring her children (it was a dramatic time). At this point I actually don't know if they ever thought about it or asked about it again or if they just assume the human gestational period is several years and they're still waiting on that dang baby to cook.

Perhaps the part of the loss that still smarts the most is that element of lost innocence regarding pregnancy. I wish I could rewind to the Becca who shared the baby news early and with reckless joy, who made a baby registry online (that i never had the heart to delete), who enthusiastically started filling out a pregnancy journal with no idea she would be leaving six months worth of its pages blank. 

I wonder so much about the second time around. Will I ever be able to relax into a pregnancy? Will I be able to tell someone the news without qualifying it? Will there ever be joy without fear? I know to some degree NO woman experiences pregnancy without a bit of anxiety (well maybe a fortunate few have 9 months of Zen, but I haven't met them yet), but I would have loved to have been one of the ones who was nervous based on nothing concrete. However, in the words of my 12th grade English teacher, "If "ifs" and "buts" were beers and nuts, we'd have a hell of a party". I know there is no point in wishing for or wondering how it would have been if only my circumstances were a bit different. All I can do is remain on the constant quest to accept what my experience has been and do my best with what has been dealt.

I do like the feeling of allowing myself to get excited again. I've always liked the feeling of falling in love even if it means your heart could be broken. For love it is always worth it.

No matter how much time passes I am always surprised at how each experience of "coming out" to someone as a miscarriage survivor is completely unique. You would think after talking the ear off of the entire internet I would have come up with a really slick way to answer the tough questions by now. Nope, not particularly. I mean, in fairness, for a while there I think I hit my stride with a pretty professional stock response to the answer "when are you guys having kids?", but now that I have a fair amount of distance from the topic in question, those conversations have taken on a new quality. It has found a way to cycle back to being a little awkward again for all new reasons. 

The other night I was chatting with a co-worker who I am very friendly with, but do not know at all outside of the context of work. We were talking about our relationships and she asked if we were planning on kids soon.  Within the space of the split second pause between her asking and my answering, I had an entire internal dialogue with myself. Sure, some of the old conflicts are still present (will this make the other person uncomfortable? will this make me uncomfortable? how do I share this in a genuine yet non burdensome way?), but there was a brand new layer to it. The new layer, I think, has to do with the difference between being actively in crisis and being in the aftermath. The truth is that at this point when asked I could simply say "oh, we're thinking about trying" and it wouldn't be a lie. I could easily omit the miscarriage spiel from the dialogue. For that matter, I could pack up this blog now and start fresh as just another lady on the road to baby town. Because I am. But I find myself still engaging in the conversation. 

Instead of dodging the real reason we don't have kids right now, I chose to share that we had lost a pregnancy at the beginning of the year. The question isn't difficult to answer because I felt sad or didn't know how to answer, it was difficult because I find myself feeling a little self conscious in this new role. Basically I have circled back to the starting line in many ways. After what felt like scaling a mountain, I am back on ground level looking up with all the same hope and excitement, but also with a new trepidatious knowledge of the rocky crags and thinning atmospheres that are very real potential dangers. I'm back to square one, but this time I'm not a rookie. How is the advanced beginner supposed to answer these questions? Do I just treat it like a re-do? Do I change how I approach everything? A little of both? 

I guess that's part of why I've chosen to continue to write every week when I could just as easily wrap up the conversation (aside from the general fact I feel that sharing stories is universally and mutually healing). I'm still writing because I still wish I had a guide through this. When I started this blog I needed someone to offer some real-talk about surviving a miscarriage and wanted to be one such voice for people who were looking for the same. Now I'd love someone to tell me what the heck comes next--so I'll keep trying to be that voice as well as I figure it out for myself as best I can. What does life look like after miscarriage? What does (here's hoping!) pregnancy look like after? What's the stuff that comes up that nobody talks about? A part of me longs to be that breezy, optimistic gal who is just trying to have a baby in a casual, natural way and part of me is a cynical old crone too jaded for words ...and somewhere in between lies this blog and my particular vantage point back here at the base of the mountain.