Feb-Aug(ish) 2011

I know I haven’t posted on here in ages, but I thought it appropriate to document this particular part of my life as without a doubt it will be one that I reflect upon and talk about for the remainder of my days.  That kind of gravity calls for a blog entry.

It was just over a year ago that I posted last.  I was working through all of the emotional and physical hurts pertaining to my miscarriage.  It was a really hard time for me, for my husband, and for my dog.  Really.  He’s super empathetic, but it was a wonderful thing having him to help me heal, along with the rest of my substantial support system.

Things got better.  On the Mae-be baby’s due date (I will admit to the world now that I named that baby) I threw a party.  It was great to celebrate life.  And great to have so many people who came to my celebration and were not too weirded out by the morbidity of the event!

I was surprised by my continued desire to get pregnant again.  Not in a creepy way like I read on numerous miscarriage message boards, but in a realistic way: I wanted to try again.  When we felt like we had healed enough to try again. 

So we did.  I continued to go to my Reiki healer.  I was introduced to her friend, an acupuncturist.  We met with a midwife.  Everyone said “When you get pregnant…”  It made me feel like it was possible.

I went by myself to Walgreens to buy pregnancy tests.  The young man checking me out said “Good luck.”  I thought that was a kind thing to say.

 Like the first time around, getting pregnant was NOT a difficult hurdle (thank you, years of birth control for preventing me from learning this earlier in life!).  I called the midwife group to make an appointment.  The woman on the phone encouraged me to make appointments for the next 3 appointments following.  I told her that was very optimistic, and thank you.  I made all the appointments. 

I ate a lot.  I was nervous.  I didn’t want to lose this one.  I resisted the urge to tell anyone outside of my husband about our pregnancy and I resisted the urge to imagine the possibilities of having a child. 

But, pregnancy felt different this time around.  Like before, I threw up every day, but instead of feeling like it was from a weakness somewhere in my body, I threw up with gusto.  It felt healthy and strong in a very strange way.

As the first trimester progressed well, I began to hope!  I told my family.  I told my friends.  I told my staff. 

Then, on the weekend of my last week of the first trimester, I bled just the littlest bit.  I lost it.  I cried.  And cried.  And exclaimed to my husband that I absolutely did not want to go through another miscarriage.  I talked to the midwives.  They reassured me that this was not out of the norm.  I went and saw the midwives.  The heartbeat was normal.  All was okay.  I was out of the woods. 

I was shopping at Target.  A woman with two small children were in the same aisle.  The young girl pointed to me, turned to her mom and said, “Is she a mom?”  I immediately teared up.  Soon, I let myself hope…soon.

My Body is a Temple. But it is MY Temple.

Ever since my miscarriage, the ways I have treated my body have been erratic and strange.  For instance, I instantly began Weight Watchers, but also started smoking more.  It’s as if I was attempting to reclaim what was rightly mine – my body.  Being pregnant, even for a brief period, did make me feel as if an alien had taken me over, and everything I did was ruled by those alien needs.  Sleep.  Eat.  Take a break.  Go the bathroom to urinate – OFTEN.  Don’t forget to take your vitamins.  Get off your fattening ass and exercise.

Post-miscarriage, I took back control of my body, and not always in the most healthy ways.  After years of professional dance, I know full well that weight loss does not equate to eating healthily.  I quickly learned that one can do Weight Watchers successfully by eating fast food.  Still loosing weight!  Eating like shit. 

Also, I smoked more than I have in years.  Why not?  I was stressed, sad, and it made me take regular breaks for self-reflection. 

I hid away the pre-natal vitamins, and said, “Fuck you, folic acid.”

Cigales were forgotten instantaneously. 

Then, I moved in another direction.  After the quick-fix of xanex stopped its quick-fixing, I looked for another solution.  I found Reiki Energy Healing.  And, I went back to the Bikram yoga. I know.  The old title of this blog: “Self-Deprecating Yuppie” comes to mind.  Small dog, urban professional, yoga, and energy healing.  Groan.  One time, I told someone about the energy healing, and she said, “That’s so Lincoln Square of you.”  I found this embarrassing.

Now, I’m somewhere in the middle of the two.  Less brutal on my body, but less supportive of it too, mainly due to working every single freaking day of the week.  (Pika has a significantly less room in her heart and life for a baby with a company and a dog to take care of!) 

In the end, it is all a process.  A long, brutal, wonderful, amazing, tiring, exhilarating process.

I Have a Secret…

…when my bosses aren’t doing the work that they need to be, it makes me not want to work at all. 

Also, warm weather and the promise of March Maddness…that doesn’t help me focus either.

Too Soon?

I’ve truly gotten to the point where I can have a sense of humor about my miscarriage, although “too soon” may still encapsulate the response if I were to voice this humor in an everyday setting to those around me. 

So many of the miscarriage conversations I’ve had or things I’ve read talk about, “After you expreince a miscarriage, it may seem like everyone around you is having babies.”  Okay.  It does seem that way.  Because it is absolutely TRUE! 

All around me friends, co-workers, ex-co-workers, people I somewhat know and are Facebook friends with who write all about their pregnancies and their new perfect babies all over the internet…people are FLAUNTING their healthy wombs all OVER the place!   Sometimes I think they should keep it all to themselves, and then I feel as if I’m becoming a babyphob.

I’ve been extremely tempted to comment to a number of people, “Congrats on your new baby.  I’m jealous of your womb,” but I fear people wouldn’t see the intended humor behind it.  They probably just be sad.  Or confused.  Or I’d be opening up the door to people who don’t know about my miscarriage to say, “Get on the baby-making, already!”  I’ve experienced that joke in person – it didn’t go well.  My response of “I sure tried!” was met with awkwardness and teary eyes – from the jokester, not from me.  The jokester, for the record, just had a baby!  See!  Everyone!!

I’ve resigned myself to the fact that the combination of humor and miscarriages is best handled by Seth McFarlane and Family Guy.  (Geez.  Didn’t realize how many dead baby jokes they had going on until I had a reason to pay attention!)  You guys go for it.  I’ll resign myself to the fact that the people around me care about me too much to indulge me in laughing about my sad occurance and that perhaps for them, it will always be “too soon”, and that is okay by me.

Reflection

It’s amazing what one can discover when one pays attention to themselves.  One of the upshots of our semi-recent tragedy is that it made taking time for self-reflection absolutely necessary.  I have to admit, this was the first time in my life that I really dug deep into me.  Not to say I’m not a reflective person, but to say that in general, I am a reflective person, in the fact that often when I see myself, I attempt to see myself through others’ eyes, or if I’m looking at me, I’m looking at how I am reacting to something outside of myself.

In the last few months, I’ve had the unique personal experience of concentrating within myself, in so many different ways.  It’s amazing what I’ve found.  Most importantly, and hopefully something that will improve life moving forward is that I think I’ve discovered that I have a mild anxiety disorder.  And as I look back at patterns, likely, I’ve had it since puberty.  There have been so many excuses attached to it for decades: Sports induced athsma. Hormones. Stress.

For the past decade, it has basically been an accepted part of who I am and has become a part of the rhythm of my life, so much so that my husband lovingly calls them my quarterly breakdowns.  The most increadible realization I’ve made is that it is possible that other people don’t do this, and that perhaps I don’t have to either!  After decades of accepting, and just waiting for the next attack around the corner, this feels pretty freaking great.

Anyway, I have more to say about what I’ve learned about taking time for yourself in a real and true way, and other realizations about how much work it takes to stay happy.  But, that’s for another day.

Healing is Happening!

Now that I opened a big can of worms here, I feel as if I should make sure I’m communicating the good days as well as the not so good. 

Just now on my Pandora Radio, Michael Buble’s song, “Just Haven’t Met You Yet” played.  While pregnant, I became convinced this was a song about an unborn child, thus any time it came on the radio after the miscarriage, I would quickly turn the channel because it made me sad.

Well guess what.  I just found myself singing along, and once I realized what was happening, I was pleasantly surprised. 

It’s nice not to be a basket case all the time.

Random Thought

No one who is poor and unfamous is ever described as “down to Earth”.

2011 – A Year of Living

The older I get, the larger my net of loved ones gets, the more I am concious of how much living is going on around me.  “Living”, as I am coming to learn, means many things, both good and bad.  I’ve never been one to shy away from big changes or new things, but as I learn that new things bring with them big risks, I find myself becoming more afraid of life.  The “what ifs” have never deturred me, and it will be my mission this year to continue to live that way. 

I continue to learn the lesson that I am not in control of everything.  At work, I control most things, and although not being able to control the outcomes, the control I have here at my desk far exceeds that I have over my personal life.  This is difficult for me to come to terms with. 

Also difficult, quieting the competitive nature that comes to light once in a while.  Unfortunately, of late, this competitive nature comes from a place I have absolutely no control over.  Mainly, it has presented itself in why other people are having babies all over the place and I am not.  It gets harder when people exactly in my point in life, those who have waited for the “right” time to get pregnant, are due around the same time that I was. 

For those of you who do not know that I had an unsuccessful pregnancy, now you know. It’s been something I have been dealing with and continue to deal with!  It is frustrating to continually be sidetracked from living by this feeling of failure, which is what the miscarriage feels like to me today.  Thus, the competitive nature being awakened.  I don’t fail at much…when I set out to do something, I do it, and at this, I was not successful. 

Back to the topic at hand.  Living.  Yes.  People are creating new life all over the place.  People are losing parents/dealing with major illnesses in their families.  People are going through the everyday drama, happy and sad, that happens all over the place all the time.  Living is what we do, and so far I’ve done a pretty bang up job, I must say.  I’ve been successful at living.  I have so many people to love and so many people to love me.  I’ve made it through rough patches and came out on the other side scathed but, basically, sane.  Now, if I could convince myself that having made it through a miscarriage was a success in life and not a failure, I will truly be a success.

This is a reminder to myself to not be afraid of living, in whatever form it may present itself.  I have an amazing friend who tells me I’m one of the strongest women she knows.  I have a husband who tells me he’s proud of me and how I’ve handled this whole ordeal.  I have to trust that sometimes others see me more clearly than I see myself.  I have to trust that the ups are worth the downs.  That my body is strong and serves me well.  That I surround myself with the most amazing people in the world in order to ensure that any trip in the road doesn’t last too long before any of us are caught and put back on our feet.

Things I can say to you that I can’t say to other social networking sites

Here are a number of weird things about facebook that I cannot express on facebook.

1) My ex-boyfriend’s dad friended me. And I think once he posted on my page drunk. And then forgot, and posted again. Haven’t heard from him since.

2) A number of people from high school have found me, friended me, sent me a couple emails, and then that’s it.  Most correspondences seem to end when I say, “That’s great you have kids.  I don’t because I like my life.  I haven’t seen you since I was 18.  Stop inquiring about my reproductive activities.”  Or something to that effect.

3) I know one of my “friends” is a rapist.  I don’t know why I haven’t un “friended” him.

4) Come to think of it, there are a lot of people who are my “friends” who I would absolutely never talk to in real life.  It seems mean and uncouth to unfriend these people.  Also, I must admit I somewhat like the window into their world…

5) Scariest contact from facebook from ex-boyfriend: “I FINALLY found you.  I see that you’re married.”

What a weird world we live in now with all this stuff.  Remember when there was no internet?  No email?  No texting?  What the fuck did we waste our time and fake friendships on then?

Hahaha! You thought I forgot about you forever.

You were wrong!  I even remembered my user name and password.  Take THAT wordpress!  So, short synopsis, got a new job which is awesome, it took over my life, and now I’m trying to get back to it.  It has been kind of like finding a new boyfriend who you spend every second of your time with for the first three months, and then you remember your friends and start spending time with them again.  I was the girl who couldn’t stop talking to all her friends about how amazing her boyfriend is, and how cute he is when he chews his food, or something ridiculous like that.  Except the boyfriend was a job, and the friends are actually my husband, who you know, I pledged to spend my life with.

So, anyway, trying to go back to the middle (thank you IndadotArie).   

Today, I got up super duper early to get to an 8:30am meeting downtown, that I discoverd once getting downtown is NEXT Thursday.  Oops.  Yet, I had decided before to spend the entire day downtown since I have a meeting here at 5pm – that is actually happening.  It has given me some much needed time away from the 3/4 walls of my office (and our overly-exhuberant neighbors) and renewed my appreciation for this wonderful city we live in.  It helps that it is 30+ degrees out.

Fun things today: went to the Chicago Cultural Center, bought a really terrible latte, and hung out in the main room on my laptop with a bunch of homeless men until I was asked to stop using the Cultural Center’s electricity.  Then I ventured out to find somewhere I could set up shop.  First, Intelligencia, where I sat next to male/female friends meeting for coffee.  He was taking ballroom classes.  She was looking to switch from the private banking sector to nonprofit management, because apparently, they don’t know nothin about no finances (thanks, Chicago ED making $630,000 and tons of orgs depleting their net assets).  Then Starbucks (who doesn’t like a change of scenery) where a barista kindly but forcefully fought off the physical advances of a customer.  Train stations had a number of musicians today – one playing an electric guitar and playing “This is Halloween” from The Nightmare Before Christmas, and a woman with a booming voice and a stroller, which may or may not have had a fake baby in it. 

Things that I’ve been frustrated by: how much heavier a pc laptop is than a mac laptop.  Ouch.  How I can’t go to the bathroom without having to pack everything out.  I have to pee. 

Things I’ve wondered about: when I have headphones in and let out a fart I think is silent, is it?