Monthly Archive

I had a wonderful weekend with my friend. It was so good to be with her. So good to be with someone you can just be yourself with. That’s a beautiful gift.

We ended up at Friendly’s in the mall for lunch. It’s one of the small restaurants, full of booths, no tables. We walk up to the hostess station, the restaurant is maybe 1/3 full. Of booths, no tables.

I say, “2 please”

Amy says, “Is there any way we can get a booth?”

We made each other laugh in this way all weekend.

This week has been shitt-ay. So to end the week with a bang, I’m not going to moan about the crap that the week has brought. I’m going to talk about the good stuff.

To start, today and tomorrow: I’m meeting a friend in a town between us (we live 7 or so hours from each other) and we’re getting a hotel. She’s pregnant and I’m missing her baby shower, so we’re having our own girls weekend/ baby shower. It will be nice to spend the time with her, because once that baby comes that will be a long while coming! I’m happy about seeing her though.

It is a good thing that the nice police officer who pulled me over for speeding only to discover my registration had expired in October 06 didn’t tow my car and revoke my license. *phew*

It was awesome to see my sister, mom, niece and nephew this week. It’s good to be with family. Caleb and Ellie are getting so big and anytime I ever think I miss California I only have to look at them and how big they are and how close they are to me and know that I made the right choice in coming home.

It’s good that the work stuff that made me cry all week is more or less sorted out. Work was horrible this week. One of my kids ended up losing her foster home and another one ended up losing the school he had been working for forever. Neither of those losses was their fault, and it was hard to help them sort it out when I was having a hard time sorting thast stuff out.

Khalil ended up having a good week with his goddaughter. She’s going through some really hard things right now. Wednesday was horrible but yesterday they were able to shop for a bookbag, go to the zoo, and enjoy the day. It was a nice way to end for them.

I didn’t need to eat crap this week to help me deal with my stress. This is the week I started back on the Diabetic Exchange, and I didn’t once feel the need to make poor decisions given my emotional state. What a freeing feeling- I can only hope it lasts. However, I’m just taking one day at a time. Like the alchies. ha.

I still have so, so, so much. My husband, my family, my cat, my health (mostly), a roof, clothes, my husband, my family, good friends. Sometimes I wonder how I dare ask for more?

friends.

husband.

family

life is good.

To give myself some credit, I haven’t pulled out the scale. This is in an effort to not define myself by my weight.

So instead of defining myself by the numbers on the scale, I keep thinking about how I feel. And how that I feel that I look.

The only word for it is fat. I hate mirrors right now, because I look fat. I feel fat.

The grocery shopping is done. I’m ready to be exercising. I’m ready to not feel fat every day. I hate it and am dangerously close to hating me.

Another thing I’m working on in therapy: Not viewing my value in terms of numbers. Pounds. Not letting the scale dictate my worth.

This sounds so little. Right??

Here’s the thing. I can tell you how much I weighed at any given point in my life. I also base how I feel about myself on how much I weigh. If I’m working out, and eating well, and losing weight I feel great about myself. I’m worth something, I’m good at things, my mood is better. If I feel fat, I feel worthless.

Fat does not equal worthless, as it turns out. But I apparently think that it does. My therapist asked me to work on loving myself no matter what I weigh. I didn’t- and still don’t, to be honest- totally understand this concept. Because if you work on loving yourself no matter what you weigh, how do you get yourself to lose weight? Don’t you have to hate yourself at a certain weight so that you can motivate yourself in order to lose weight? Don’t you??

No. In fact, you don’t. I’ve talked before about loving myself (no, I can’t find the post. sorry.) and I think I was working hard at doing that. I do know on some level that part of losing weight is about taking care of yourself, which you have to love yourself in order to do. Another words- hating myself = not caring if I take care of myself = not exercising and eating like crap = weight gain. On the other hand loving myself = taking care of me = eating well and exercising = losing weight.

huh. It sounds so simple. Why then is it so hard??

Sucks.

Need I say more? I tried for a minute to use another blog to write about it. Then I more or less “came out” with most of my friends about my/ our infertility. So I figured I may as well just “come out” here with it:

Khalil and I are struggling with infertility. Real, live, bonafide infertility.

And in the way that my weight loss posts don’t typically talk about calories and pounds (although I know some do) but the emotional and mental aspects of weight loss, my infertility posts are not going to talk about MD visits, medicines, diagnoses, or other such details. I find them boring (to myself, I’m not at all talking down about others who want to keep that kind of record, it’s just not me) and so I don’t want to share them with you guys.

I will tell you this, though: infertility sucks.

It’s weird thinking that you can’t just have sex and BAM! there’s a baby. It’s kind of sad and very frustrating knowing that it’s going to take more than just the two of us and a magical moment and all of a sudden there will be a new addition to our family. It’s hard knowing that it will take us, lots of not-so-magical moments, and a team of doctors to get us pregnant.

The first thing that I have to grieve about? Is the way we get to tell people we’re pregnant. I didn’t tell many people that we were even trying or considering pregnancy. When people asked, I was very vague. “Sometime!” or “We’ll see” or I’d go so far as to make things up “We’re waiting until Khalil gets through grad school”, “My career’s going so well right now, we want to wait”, “We’re waiting for a house”, “We’re trying to get our debt paid down”- all of those have come out of my mouth. I really, really wanted it to be a surprise. There was a place in my heart every month while I waited that planned out when I’d be seeing family next and how we’d tell them. The month before Thanksgiving I wondered if Thanksgiving would be too soon to tell everyone. Ditto Christmas, Memorial Day, Easter, etc. (Not Valentines Day. I was in Pittsburgh for Valentines day, dealing with my dying father. I wasn’t planning pregnancy news.)

When I told my mom, she asked why I waited so long to tell her. And I told her the truth- because I had wanted it to be a surprise.

It still breaks my heart that when we get pregnant, it will likely be planned. There are still some steps in the meantime, but right now the all-knowing doctors are saying that IVF will probably be our best bet (for those of you not familiar with infertility vernacular/ acronyms, IVF stands for In-vitro fertilization, and it’s when they take my egg(s) and his sperm, fertilize my eggs in a petri dish, and a few days later (hopefully) transplant embryos back into me. Fun, no?). This is just about the most intrusive and expensive way of getting pregnant. Again, fun, no?

Infertility, much like death and dying, is a grieving process. The difference is that there are sparkles of hope along the way, that keep getting run over. You have a test, or a doctor’s appointment, or something. And you have a hope that this one will be fine, this one will show something different. And then it doesn’t. You have each month of hoping that you’ve happened upon a miraculous surprise- naturally-achieved pregnancy- and then you don’t.

The idea is to keep up the hope. But this infertility? Not only does it suck, it’s also a hope sucker. You have to work to keep it from sucking all the hope right on out of you.

In my 27 years, I have moved something between 10 and 15 times. The first was when I was little, and I don’t remember it. My parents moved from Wyoming back to Connecticut. They did it via cross country road trip (the first of three times I would move across country). I moved from our home when my parents got divorced.

I have dreams about that house sometimes. For all intents and purposes, it holds all of my childhood memories. The woods in the back where my mom put a salt like one year for the deer. Where I could wander for hours and my parents didn’t need to worry anything would happen to me. There was a small pond (giant puddle?) in the back that would dry up in the summer but that I could “ice skate” on in the winter. We were surrounded on three sides by woods that I spent hours upon hours exploring. I lived in two bedrooms in that home. I have happy and sad memories from that home- happy memories of us living as a family, and sad memories of the things that ripped our family apart in the end.

The home that started out red and was gray by the time we moved out holds my memories. I could go on and on about all the things I remember about growing up in that home. If I think hard enough about them, I remember, but I know that if I ever walked back into that home memories would come flooding back.

No home has ever felt like that one. I have lived in many places I called home since them- condos with my mother, apartments with girlfriends, in a room in my father’s house, and apartments with Khalil. None has quite the nostalgia that the home I grew up in holds.

This week we packed up my husband’s childhood home and helped my mother-in-law move into a new home. This move came closest to that move out of my childhood home. Most of Khalil and I’s first memories are from that house. First time hanging out, first kiss, first realization that I was with the man I was going to marry. Some other firsts. But none of my memories compared to the memories my mother in law and husband packed up on Monday.

Our memories come with us. They do not get stuck in homes, or on beaches, or in any specific place. They may feel like that, but they don’t. They live in our hearts, in our skin, in the spaces inside us built for them. They come when we want them to and sometimes when we don’t. Memories are slippery, but precious.

I had my own moments of saying goodbye to the house. It was a home. There were reasons why this move was so hard for everyone- but especially Khalil and his mom. In a way, this was the final close on the chapter of their lives that included his dad and favorite aunt. They had to say goodbye to that time, because the new house will not hold any of those memories.

My heart breaks for them. I know that they will carry their memories with them forever, but I know it is hard to say goodbye to the physical, tangible connections to those memories.