megfowler.com

Perspective, perspective, perspective.

I’m a girl who just came back from a two-week vacation.

My family is incredible… very few people have such a solid foundation, and I’ve always had them on my side.

I have a great, stimulating job — AND my co-workers make me laugh.

I love my apartment. I love my roommate.

I love my friends to bits.

Hell, it’s even a sunny day today.

I haven’t had coffee yet, but it’s out there.

I listened to music on the way to work that made me want to get up and dance, and Attractive Bald Guy smelled like lemons when I passed him by on the way to my seat.

So what in the hell could I possibly have to complain about?

Really, life is pretty perfect.

Or it would be if life were simply the sum of these factors. On paper.

I hate to seem ungrateful for what I have. I hate to seem like I don’t see the blessings. Because I do… I do. Every time I turn on the news or walk down the street, I’m made aware that I have so much — through no action or merit of my own — that so many people would love to have.

(I’m a pathological comparer. Have you noticed?)

I feel guilty about being frustrated if someone else ISN’T frustrated under those same circumstances. I feel guilty if I complain more than someone else does. I feel guilty if I ask more of one of my friends than the other people in their life might happen to ask. I feel guilty if I feel sorry for myself when someone else is going through something worse.

This is where my mom and I? We join firmly at the hip.

My mother gets genuinely, bluntly angry maybe twice a year.

I think she probably actually gets frustrated far more than that, but she feels so responsible for so many people and so many situations that she doesn’t allow herself the “luxury” of giving in to her mood. Sure, there will be the momentary bursts of “what the hell?” — say, when my dad is doing his classic traffic rant, or her sewing machine tries to eat someone’s wedding gown or my grandfather’s doctors play fast and loose with his care — but she returns to a peaceful state pretty quickly.

She feels she has to. After all, if she drops the ball, who exactly is going to pick it up?

She listens to her friends more than she complains to them. She brings the most stuff to the potluck dinners. She has patiently put up with more annoying, gossipy, controlling people as a pastor’s wife than have found their way into all the seasons of Survivor combined. She is a born problem solver. She is an organizational wunderkind.

She’s hard core, frankly.

Granted, it seems a bit of a martyr thing at times — how does anyone put up with all of that without slugging someone? — but honestly, truly… that’s not why she does it. She doesn’t call attention to her sacrifices. She just does it because she feels like anything else would be ignoring the provision and blessing in her world.

And while I’m not nearly so good and thoughtful — you know that! you’ve read my blog! — I know that this mentality informs much of how I walk through life.

Or it did.

Because I’ve finally bumped up against something that makes me so genuinely angry and hurt and frustrated that I can’t seem to make it go away with lists of good things and cheerful song lyrics and 10 cups of coffee per day and bleaching my bathtub.

And I’ve spent a ton of time trying to ignore it and minimize it, even as I have written about it and mourned it on some level.

It’s actually hard to blog about it, especially when my non-blogging friends often decry web writing as perspectiveless whining. As one of my guy friends once emailed me after I set up this site, “It’s like people finally get a chance to bitch without anyone interrupting them, and you finally get to see how selfish and clueless and isolated they really are.”

I don’t agree with him, but I don’t want him to think that of me, either.

He might today. Because I have to get a few things out of my system in order to remember all those blessings again.

This is really, really hard. This adjusting. This grieving. This letting go.

I read a study — in some crazy ass women’s magazine, maybe even in a waiting room! — about a month after I was diagnosed with everything from an autoimmune disorder to perimenopause to no-recourse infertility. It was a survey polling women about their response to health problems.

Women with children — and still in their childbearing years — were asked whether they would prefer to be diagnosed with cancer or infertility by their doctor. Now, that’s a fairly horrible question. Why the heck would you even compare the two things? They’re utterly and completely different!

But the people hosting the study said that they were comparing the two states because they stood out as the two health issues that women routinely mention above all others as experientially traumatic.

Fair enough.

The results? 70% of women said they would rather be diagnosed with cancer.

I boggled. And boggled even more when the numbers shot up to 80%, among women without children.

Why? Many of the recipients stated that “cancer was often treated successfully nowadays.”

Mind you, people still DIE of it, ladies! I couldn’t believe it. Especially when I remembered how terrified I’d been waiting for results on tests for breast cancer last year. Especially when I’d had so many people lose loved ones to the disease. Especially when my own grandfather was struggling through it.

Then I read another quote from a mother of one: “Part of me feels like infertility is a sort of death sentence anyhow.”

Are you kidding? When you can adopt? When you already have a child you love?

And this from a woman who’d HAD cancer: “Cancer I knew I could fight, and if I lost the fight, there was nothing undignified about it. But infertility comes with this shame. Like you’re not a real woman.”

“We all know we’re going to die someday — no one lives forever. You wouldn’t expect eternal life. But you do expect that you can conceive. That just seems like part of being a woman. If you take that away, what else do you have?”

I was completely and utterly shocked.

But.

It all goes toward evidence of something I already know. Something I’ve had to face in the last few months. Something I wouldn’t have been able to understand unless I’d experienced it. And I feel guilty about writing all of this. I certainly don’t think anything I’m going through is anything like receiving a death sentence or a cancer diagnosis, so please don’t think I’m aggrandizing my experiences.

But.

As someone who worked with kids all her life and someone who had always wanted children of her own, I’d taken it for granted that I would be able to have them when the right time came. Maybe that’s a silly assumption, but I sure as hell assumed it. Losing that ability in the space of a ten minute discussion with my doctor — though I’d lost it, she told me, likely years and years before — was the single most unbalancing moment in my life.

It was horrible. I was breathless and speechless and wanting to scream or wail on the bus back to work. I couldn’t even stay at work, either. I was on the edge of crazy, unstoppable tears. I mean, I don’t leave work. I don’t take sick days. But I had to go. I had to go.

And telling people about it? Oh, the awkwardness. Telling people about the cancer tests was easier. People know how to respond to that — it’s BAD. Clearly bad. They can worry about you. They can say it sucks. They can share their own experiences. They know other people who have been through it. They’ve been through it.

But so many people had no clue what to say about my news.

I mean, if they said something negative, would they be adding to my frustration? Was it best to chirp at me with cheerful thoughts about adopting? Was it best to minimize the problem so I wouldn’t feel like a freak? “You can always adopt.” “Well, it’s not like you were ready to have a kid yet anyhow.” “Hey, you can babysit my kid anytime you like. That will make you feel lucky!”

The people that chose the other route — shock and awe — spoke out of their own fears: “Do you think you’ll still get married?” “Are you totally depressed now?” “I can’t imagine not having my experience giving birth to .” “Do you feel worthless?” “Do you think God has a reason for it?” “Oh, YOU of ALL people!”

Argh.

I was also (am also) going through perimenopause. Did you know that part? Awesome. Have you talked with menopausal women about how much they enjoy that experience? The ups and downs? The changes in your body? In your skin? The whole nine yards? I sure hadn’t thought about it yet, other than joking with my mom about hot flashes when she’d get overheated from gardening or something (not from hot flashes.)

But in my case — at 32 — the whole idea is horrifying to women and mystifying to men, to the point where I just have to joke about that part to make it less awkward. What else can you do?

And I don’t even know how to deal with autoimmune stuff. It’s so vague, the physicality of that. Is that why all the headaches? Is that why all the insomnia? Is that why I would get sick all the time? Is that why I was more prone to broken bones? Well, yes.

Because of socialized medicine, my turn for a bone scan hasn’t even come up yet. But what’s that going to tell me? That I have the frame of someone much older and weaker?

I am a person who always had serious pride (ooh! comes before a fall!) about three things: I have always looked younger than I was (as does my mom), I was going to be a great mom (as is my mom), and I was strong and resilient as hell, health wise (ditto).

Now I’m old before I’m old, childless before I’ve even had a chance to try for it, and weak through no fault of my own in ways I don’t even understand yet.

Holy shit.

My doctor warned me it would be “hard”, but who the hell knows what that means? Hard is so relative. There are so many worse things than this, and I couldn’t quite figure out how “hard” to take it. How badly to feel about it.

My “autocompare” tool broke.

It’s still broken.

I still don’t have a clue how I’m supposed to be reacting. I don’t even know how I AM reacting.

I know I’ve annoyed myself when I bitch to my friends. I’m annoyed at myself when I’m erratic or emotional, which I know I have been. I know that I’ve pulled back from a lot of people to avoid gushing at them about how I feel. I’m terrified of losing my friends because I can’t get perspective. I know I’ve shoved it down deep into my system a lot. And half the time, I’ve wished I was doing that MORE.

I have a morbid fear of disappearing too much into this pain. Which, as anyone who thought longer than ten seconds about the whole thing might conclude, only makes it worse.

So here it is, the truth, so I can say I said it all at once. To get it out.
Yes, I forget about it momentarily all the time — when I watch women in labour on TV, or hear about one of my friends having gone through labour — and say things like, “I wonder if I can do it without drugs?” or “I’m fully going to slug someone when I have contractions!” Well, no I won’t. No, I won’t. And that moment of realization? So awkward. My friends have actually flinched when I’ve done it, because they don’t forget. The realization stings.

Yes, I think about it when I see babies. Yes, I think about it when I talk about babies. Yes, I consider it because so many people I know are having/have had babies. Yes, there is now a newborn living above my head at my apartment. And I love those sounds, I do. More than I can say. I can’t wait to babysit. But it also aches a little.

Yes, I think about it when I consider relationships. All of it — the perimeno, the infertility, the illness — makes me feel less attractive, less worthy… whether that is rational or not. I know some men see me differently as a result. But I know this isn’t my only relationship flaw, so. I probably have a lot about me I could change. I don’t know if I will.

Yes, I’ve drawn close to depression, but no… I don’t think I’m depressed. I am quite certain I am grieving. I am quite certain I am anxious more often than I was before, but that’s something I’m prone to regardless, because of the OCD.

Yes, it is something I experience physically. Pain, overheating, increased migraine activity, blood sugar issues, iron issues… etc.

And yes, I’m figuring out how to handle it. And how to be open about it. And how to deal with it.

I really don’t like it. It’s mine now, though, so I better learn to walk through it gracefully.

But maybe not yet.

This isn’t well-written, and I don’t know how to end it, but… yeah.