#Microblog Mondays: Feeling Like a Failure

Oh, Maebe. It's been a rough go, and once again we find ourselves wondering about that point in time called Enough.

At this point, Maebe is on three medications (blood pressure, thyroid, Prozac), which now she is refusing to take. She isn't eating -- sometimes not nearly enough, sometimes not at all. She went back into confinement in the guest/craft room again after using my dirty laundry basket as a litterbox and actually peeing UP the wall of the closet in July. That's when the Prozac started, as well as the Feliway diffuser (it puts out "happy cat" pheromones and is supposed to help ease stress).

But the problem is, is that Maebe isn't really happy here. She and Lucky are both the same age, 12, but they have very different personalities (probably since they've had very different lives). Lucky is like barely reined-in playboy, like a George Clooney sort of cat, and Maebe...she's more of a dowager Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey type of crotchety duchess. So when Lucky wanted to play, she was not having it, and then she became a hunting game where he'll corner her under a dresser and just lie across the floor in front of it to nonchalantly block her exit. The laundry basket incident was at least in large part because she was hiding in the closet from Lucky, and she probably thought "well, this is a gray box, and it's a lot softer than my (special nontracking nondust corn litter) box in in the other room, so I'll just go here."

I am so sad, because we really just wanted to get a playmate for Lucky and save an older cat from the shelter, but I don't think she's feeling super "saved" right now. We have to find another home for her, and I don't know how to do that when she is so medically complex and has the dreaded litterbox issues (although, to be fair, since the Feliway and the Prozac, she's been consistently in the litterbox, no accidents, no near-misses in the washing machine tray her litterbox sits in).

It feels like a terrible failure, although I don't know what else we could possibly do. She still won't come downstairs, she hides, she's getting skinnier every day. She's a sweet cat, when not terrorized and on a hunger strike. It's not kind to keep her. It just sucks.

Mid July, before the Laundry Basket Incident and the food issues.

Want to read more #Microblog Mondays? Go here and enjoy!

Camp Day

This summer, we didn't do any traveling. Bryce has a new job and doesn't really have the opportunity to take a week off yet (as he's only been there for maybe two months), and the summer got surprisingly busy, even without a trip.

I went to visit my best friend in Poughkeepsie, and we had my niece-ish and nephew-ish from Canada stay with us for a night (my stepfather's brother is only 7 years older than me, so even though these awesome kids are technically cousins, I feel more aunty-like with them), and Bryce's dad and his wife are coming for a long weekend later in August. I have been gardening up a storm, and taking classes for school (real light things like Therapeutic Behavior Management with Physical Holds and Youth Mental Health First Aid).

But I've missed going away somewhere.

So, we had a Camp Day yesterday.

What is a Camp Day?

It is a day with no phones, no computers, no devices (other than the Google Home that runs our thermostat (although that was off because it was lovely and cool) and our music through the creepy Google wiretap devices we have all over), no work that you wouldn't do if you were away at a camp in Maine.

It was real weird to lock my phone away, for the first couple hours, and then it was lovely. We read, played ping pong, went for a walk, went out to lunch, took a nap, rearranged some bookshelves in Bryce's office (okay, that one was sort of cheating, because we wouldn't have had our shelves at camp, but Bryce made the point that it's something he's WANTED to do for a while and work and PhD obligations make it impossible to get to, so could we pretend we had a portal to his office? Um, sure.), cooked a completely delicious dinner of scallops and farm stand produce salad and potatoes gratin and dry aged ribeye and some fancy wine from the rack in the "basement" -- and then we went to bed, full and tipsy and relaxed.

It was a beautiful day. The weather was perfect (chilly, clear, and sunny), the food was perfect, the relaxation and enjoyment of our home was perfect. I realized how much I use my phone to waste time, and to take photos of what we're doing. I like having those photos to look back on, but it was oddly freeing to not be my own paparazzi.

I wish we could do a Camp Day once a month, a sort of technology detox retreat right here in our home. I feel so grateful to have the kind of life where a day with my husband in our house with nothing but books and music and food and wine (and ping pong) feels like a terrific vacation.

#Microblog Mondays: Seven Years Ago

I cannot believe that it's been seven years since I was pregnant. It was such a brief, lovely time, and it's crazy to me that it's so far in the past, that seven years ago today I was pregnant and hadn't started bleeding yet, hadn't had a crash in my numbers, didn't know that it would be the LAST day I would ever be pregnant and thinking we had a whole hopeful future ahead of us.

I don't think about it a lot, but I saw a post today that reminded me -- unfortunately there are events that happened around both my ill-fated pregnancies (the ectopic was sandwiched between two friends' weddings), and the seemingly-normal uterine one ended right at the same time a colleague at the school where I was teaching suffered a horrible death while biking thanks to reckless and impaired drivers. I was enjoying a lazy summer day, probably eating some ginger chews, and I saw the awful news and thought how suddenly everything could be ripped out from under you, and then I couldn't go to the calling hours or funeral because I was on bed rest starting the very next day, haplessly trying to keep the inevitable from occurring.

Today is the anniversary, and this teacher's best friend put up a post with her picture and disbelief that it's been seven years, and it sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole.

I feel a little irrationally guilty feeling so sad about my own smaller scale personal tragedy that happened at the same time, but it's crazy to me that seven years ago I was so happy, and had ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA that everything would come crashing down in the course of a day. That I would never have that exact feeling of joy and anticipation like I did on July 29th, 2012... that I'd be looking back on the last day I was ever pregnant and optimistic about it from a life that would have been so foreign to the woman I was then. 

When we were actively striving (and failing and failing and failing) to bring a child into our lives, this realization would have devastated me. I would have probably spent some time on the floor, crying, or staring at the space between my glasses and the wall, and it would have ruined my day.

Now I go down the rabbit hole, feel an edge of sadness to the day like the haze on the horizon when it's humid, and then look at where I am now and the wonderful life that we achieved despite not having children, acknowledge that I am sitting in a moment of grief, and continue on with my lazy summer day.

Want to read more #Microblog Mondays? Go here and enjoy! 

#Microblog Mondays: A Bad Dream

The other morning I woke up with a feeling of oppressive sadness. I'd had a vivid dream that thankfully I've forgotten much of, but it was one of those that haunt you into your waking hours.

What I do remember is being at some celebration for me and Bryce, and people put up a slideshow of our life, and every single picture was from our baby shower or the dismantling of our nursery. I remember watching the photos go by and thinking, "hey, this isn't quite right," and then the tone of the room changed and became almost hostile. I was crying and felt like we were being unnecessarily tortured, and I couldn't figure out why.

Then I woke up, and had this grief hangover that lingered for hours.

I have no idea what triggered this dream nightmare, but it felt irrationally like the Universe decided I needed to be taken down a notch or something, that I was feeling too at peace and well-adjusted lately.

It was not a good feeling. Just goes to show how deep the roots of grief and loss run. Fortunately, the horrid reopening of fresh pain was transient and didn't linger past the day after. Which goes to show that the further into resolution I get, the less these moments have (lasting) power over me.

Want to read more #Microblog Mondays? Go here and enjoy!

Oh, There's a NAME for That: Toxic Positivity

I was tooling around on Facebook the other day, and a friend of mine put up an article that made me feel so understood, so heard. It was an article by Sara Schuster, on Toxic Positivity from The Mighty (go read it!).

The piece had three things that snagged me -- a useful chart that caught my eye; a short animated video on empathy in the words (and voice of Brene Brown, who is fast becoming one of my heroes, although I guess I'm late to this party); and content that echoed something I've been irritated with for a long time.

Here is the chart:

Graphic from the above article, created by Whitney Hawkins Goodman, LMFT of the Collaborative Counseling Center

As I neared the end of our fertility journey, I became ever more aware and bothered by what I felt was "The Cult of Positivity." These are the (somewhat) well-meaning things said by people who typically have found success themselves, eventually, and who want to cheer you on in your quest. However. Nothing makes you feel lonelier than when you are honestly wondering what you did to warrant such utter horrible luck in every aspect of family building, if you can keep going, if people will understand if you CAN'T keep going... and you are faced with the following: 

• None of that negative talk! What you put out comes back to you! Keep it positive! 
• Just stay in the game and IT WILL HAPPEN! 
• Been there, done that...it's all worth it in the end! 
• Did you go dairy free/go sugar free/spend your every last dollar on whatever vile herbal concoctions are purported to work/make yourself an acupuncture pincushion several times per week/get massaged in just the right way/wear the right color underwear/keep the right kind of crystals about you? 
• If only you would pray more/go to church/put your trust in the Lord, it would all work out (if it's meant to)!

It doesn't feel helpful. It doesn't feel like you are being listened to. It definitely doesn't feel like empathy. And it often comes from people who have been successful their way, who feel they have the answer, who have the joy you are seeking and don't want you to miss out on the best experience of their life, who feel like if only you think or do as they did that you will have the same result. 

And if you don't? If you are feeling sad, or hopeless, or god forbid you are considering the possibility of resolving childfree, of leaving the merry-go-round from hell that is slamming your body into a wall hoping you'll make it through to "the other side," which is terrifying for them, but also for you because you've been conditioned to believe it's the worst possible alternative because it meant YOU GAVE UP HOPE? Then you feel like a failure. You feel like you let people down. You feel like if only you could have been POSITIVE enough, then maybe it would have worked out. If only you could have been more patient, or tried harder, or kept the faith, or, my favorite, opened your heart just a little more, you could have had the prize. But you went down the dark path, and so maybe it's even a little your fault that you didn't end up a parent. 

This is all total hogwash. I am a huge detractor of the idea of "thinking it true" (something at one point I was told to do), of this theory that you put thoughts out into the universe and that is what bounces back to you. I'm rubber, you're glue, that sort of thing. WHAT AMAZING POWER that assumes human beings have. Imagine, if all you had to do was put a highly focused thought out there into the Universe and it would come back to you, all shiny and gift-wrapped! Imagine, if all your worst fears, all the thoughts that EVERYONE HAS, could come true just by thinking them, by letting them out of the Pandora's Box of your mind? I would have been brutally murdered or in a terrible car accident probably about 1,000 times. At least.

Which brings me to the "at least" part of the discussion in the article, the bit by Brene Brown -- "at least" is one of the worst ways to start a sentence, maybe seconded by "You just have to..." It is something that says, "I am uncomfortable with your feelings, you aren't being positive, you're sitting in the muck and it makes me feel odd, so I'm going to remind you that THERE IS MORE BAD CRAP THAT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU, and you should be GRATEFUL for whatever it is you're dealing with, because it could ALWAYS BE WORSE." 

Yeah, no. 

I love the ideas presented in the article, that just acknowledging feelings and sitting with someone in pain, that THAT is what is most helpful. Not judging, not "but what if you" if you are talking about a decision you're making related to your difficulty (stepping off the striving machine, stopping treatment, leaving your marriage, NOT leaving your marriage), but just being there and listening to the pain. Sitting with the pain. Validating the pain without opinions or fix-it suggestions. 

It's hard. I'm trying to be better about this myself, to stop the impulse to offer suggestions and rather just listen, just say, "This sounds so hard. I'm sorry you're going through this. I'm here for you. Tell me all about it," or variations thereof. I love that Brene Brown says that human nature is to judge, to even take delight in judging someone else's choices or decisions. It makes it easier to acknowledge that you are only human if those thoughts come into your head. They just have to be stopped before they come out of your mouth. 

I fell victim to this a while ago, with a friend who had gone through a crisis in her marriage and worked through it, and was commenting on another friend who was gathering the courage to go through a divorce that started with the husband dropping a bomb and leaving in a pretty horrific way. The first friend was like, "Maybe she can fix it, maybe it will work out," and that probably stemmed a lot from her own experience. Someone else in the room and I were like, "Oh hell no, that sort of thing happens and there is no coming back from that, she deserves better, how could you stay in that situation? She needs to get out!" And both of us were speaking from our own experiences, for me, leaving someone who was not treating me with respect in any way and a result of leaving was the best marriage I could possibly ever imagine...so how could you do something different? This situation was different because the person in question wasn't in the room and we weren't offering this advice directly, but it was interesting to look back on it and think, all we were doing was offering up solutions that were based on our own experiences, things that had worked for us, and if someone disagreed, well then they had to be judging our own choices, no matter what side of the issue we were on.

What would have been more helpful, probably, would have been to listen to the person who was hurting, to resist the urge to put in gems from our own experiences, and just be a sounding board as she made her own decision, based on her own thoughts and experiences. I feel like if you're listened to and you can weigh out all options, and you've received support in a way that doesn't feel like being swayed into one option or another, then you typically will make a decision that works for you. 

It may sound weird to be so against the Cult of Positivity, to hate those "inspirational" farmhouse signs and trite soundbites that make you believe that you have far more control over outcomes than you truly do. Acceptance and empathy are far more valuable to me than the hollow positivity of the toxic kind. It's one of many reasons why I'm so, so grateful to have childfree resolution mentors in this space, people who made these decisions and choices earlier than me, and who can give the perspective of one for whom this resolution worked out. There are so many more voices out there urging you to keep going, to never ever ever give up, to keep the faith -- because they themselves "made it happen." Sometimes things work out, and sometimes they don't, and it would be awesome if there could be acceptance not just from me, but from others, that the choices I made and the path I traveled may not have gone how I'd hoped, but it was a perfectly fine way to take a corner. I know I am way happier now than I was a few years ago, at the end of the striving.

Or I could just try not to care what others think about my choices, which is far, far more easily said than done. 

#Microblog Mondays: Other People's Kids

We've had a great couple of weeks for getting to enjoy other people's kids.

It's funny, this falls under "things that used to make me unbearably sad after" -- I would go to a house full of kids and all I could see and feel was what I didn't have. I felt the contrast of other people's chaos and noise and sticky hands with the complete absence of all that in our home. When that was everything I wanted and I still felt it was possible, maybe, for us to have a little of that life for ourselves, it sent me into a spiral of sadness to return to our quiet.

But now, I love visiting the chaos, playing racecars and chasing and soaking in all the silliness and the giggles and sticky hugs. Sometimes parents are like, "oh you don't have to get on the floor or keep playing with her/him," because this is their reality all the time and frankly it is exhausting. For them. For us, it's a window into the life we once strove for, a way to get a glimpse of the chaos... And then go home to our quiet, peaceful life, snuggling with the cats and reading a book and having a glass of wine and going for two hour walks without having to worry about keeping to a bedtime or dinner schedule.

Which doesn't seem so empty and WITHOUT anymore, just different.  I guess that's one of the gifts of resolution.

Want to read more #Microblog Mondays? Go here and enjoy!

Use the Rocks

It's weird how much of a contrast there is between my old gardens and these new "gardens" that I am having to start from scratch -- my old house had lovely, loamy soil, in part because I'd amended it with composted goodies for years and mulched it into richness, and in part because it was shady and had thick tree coverage in the back. The new house? It's sandy (like Dust Bowl sandy) and where it's not sandy it's clay, and in between that is a thick layer of rocks. Big rocks, little rocks, most of them around cobble size.

In short, it's real shitty soil for planting things.

On top of that, we have voracious deer who have discerning palates -- tons of black raspberry and weedy things EVERYWHERE, but nooooooo, they have to eat flowers. Mostly ones that are on the "deer don't eat" lists. So I have to plant things and cross my fingers that they will actually take.

Oh yeah, and we have black walnut trees, which make the soil toxic. The roots, bark, dripline, nut hulls...they all give off this compound called juglone, and it basically asphyxiates plants that are intolerant.

Finding a list of plants that are both deer-resistant and walnut-friendly is a little challenging, and then you add in the rocks, and the crap soil, and the vigorously growing poison ivy... it's not exactly super hospitable. More like a Garden Of Poisonous Things than the amazing opportunity for planting my own personal botanical gardens that I'd thought it would be.

But, I am slowly trying to work with this difficult canvas and make things pretty.

This week, my project was creating a garden out of this incredibly weedy, very steep hill along our driveway.

Oddly, I don't have any pictures of it as a weedfest. This was after it was (mostly) weeded and de-poison-ivy'd by the gardener lady I hire to do the highly unpleasant work I don't want to do...

After I dug everything for soil conditioner amendment, roots, and rocks. 

SOOOOOO many rocks. 

It was unbelievable how many rocks were in there. My shovel is all scratched up as evidence. I was so frustrated -- WHY SO MANY ROCKS? They slowed me down. They jarred my shoulders when I hit them and they didn't budge. They interfered with my hole digging for all the plants I wanted to get in the ground. It pissed me off. 

But then, I realized... I can be mad at these rocks for existing, or I could USE them for something and give them a purpose. They didn't have to just be pains in my ass. They could serve a purpose, help me retain soil on the slope. 

I am no mason, but I made little rock walls to try to mini-terrace things where I planted the plants that supposedly can handle deer and walnuts.

There it is, planted up so far with shady plants on the left and sunny plants on the right, and tiny rock walls in between.

Rocks! (and porcupine grass, yarrow, echinacea, and wild bee balm)

Sunny side with rocks! (and strawberries & cream ribbon grass, astilbes, and coral bells)

I hope when I mulch it all that I can retain the rock "walls" as I really like them. I like them because they are functional, and decorative, but also because they were something frustrating and unpleasant that I was fighting, and I figured out how to use them in a way that gave them purpose and even made me appreciate them in a weird sort of way.

I'm better at doing this since the whole infertility experience -- having things be not the way you expected, and then using the unpleasant things to build something beautiful. In our life, we took our sorrow and our loss at not having children (which is still there, just like the rocks), and then found a way to build a new life where we look at how we can enjoy the things that are the flip side to having children. We are fortunate, and have our lovely house, and our jobs that we love (but that take up much of our time), and the ability to have a pretty peaceful, low-key existence that I did not think was possible when we were striving for a different sort of life. I felt like it would be a barren field of rocks, horrible and craggy. When the rocks just kept coming and I realized I was not going to have exactly the garden I'd hoped for, I found a way to coexist with them. And plant pretty flowers around them that I can enjoy.

I guess what I'm saying here is, I could let the rocks piss me off and put them in a pile somewhere like a weird burial ground and have it ruin my day and my gardening plans, or I could take the rocks and try to use them for good. I was still ticked to have to dig them all out, but once I figured out the border idea I actually looked forward to finding more for my "wall."

Now that I'm further out from the rawness of our experiences, I can appreciate the power of this perspective even more.