Betwixt

musings from the last days of a semi-hellish year

There aren’t many perks to working in public education, but my favorite has always been this — each year I am guaranteed the luxury of losing track of the days between Christmas and the new year. This year, for the first time in my adult life, I have started to dismantle the holiday decorations before the end of December. Because, in nearly all ways, I am desperate to leave this year behind.

In so many ways, this felt like the hardest one yet. At the very least, it was the most challenging summer. We’d spent the spring talking and planning with my doctors but then there was bad news in May, and worse news in July. In August I told them that I needed a break and I took it — stealing away to North Carolina with my daughter. I breathed in the salt and stared at the river and took long walks through my parents’ neighborhood. I started readjusting my expectations for the sort of life and family we might have. All the while, I was losing track of patience and myself. The last six months cracked me wide open, sharpened all of my edges.

The entirety of the story of how my children came down to us from the stars will belong to them, and I have yet to find the words to fully describe the experience. Infertility was (is) incredibly hard on my body and my mind and I am indelibly changed by it. As we’ve moved into our fifth year of parenting, I’ve found myself in the position of giving gentle reminders to those who suggest I pay attention to the ticking of an imaginary clock — reminders that the time, money, and interventions required for my body to grow a person are a bit more intensive, that the anxiety that accompanied my first pregnancy felt like it might drown me, that I held my breath for all those months and exhaled only after I left the operating room where she was born.

I wonder often, what kind of mother I might be without all that happened before — the months and months of medicine and injections and blood draws before sunrise, the number of times I stepped out of meetings to hear a nurse on the other end of the phone say, again, “I’m afraid I don’t have good news.” It could’ve ended any number of ways, but it happened like this.

My hopes for the next year ahead — to spend more time writing, less time clenching my jaw. To breath softness into the most stuck parts. To sleep early and stretch often. To release, if only just a little.

(images found via Pinterest)