Crashing, Burning & Getting Back Up.

So…hmm.

The problem I’ve been having is that I still can’t let go of the hope. Oh, and the guilt.

The guilt that I didn’t try harder and I didn’t try long enough. That I quit long before stronger women ever do. That I had all of the resources available to me that many women long for and wasn’t willing to risk a little bit of pain and anguish to get there.

Mostly, I am just afraid of another miscarriage. Horribly, horribly afraid.

The thing is, that fear doesn’t seem like enough to stop trying.

I realize it’s my choice as to what I do with regards to building my family. The problem is that there are so many other points of pressure – from my old ideas of the family I had hoped for, from examples set by fore(mother’s?) of the ART community, from my own mother, but mostly from ghostly 80′s movie plot characters of my future children.

What if my future children from another dimension (the one in which I choose to keep trying) come back and realize where I’m heading? Would they be angry at me? Would they be involved in a hilarious ‘Back to the Future’ style plot to get me to inject more drugs into my ass? Or, worst of all, would they be horrified to realize that I didn’t think they were worth hurting for?

It’s been one year and six days since I lost Rocket.

Here is how to reinvent your image. Feel that you’ve been typecast in a static personality? Want to break out of your routine and develop a new persona? Kill your loved ones. It worked for Dr. Horrible, and it can work for you too.

When a loved one dies, you gain a freedom. All of the restrictions you followed no longer hold – you don’t have to set a good example. You don’t have to portray yourself as something worthy of their love. You don’t have to care what they think because they just don’t think anymore.

Kill your lovers, your children and your friends. Be free.

There’s more – a life empty of your lovers is a life full of possibility. Check in the floating ashes of misery and grief and you’ll find something turned molten then cooled – find, in that smooth new piece of glass – fearlessness.

Your worst nightmare has come true. Everything you held precious has been ripped away. There is nothing worse in the future lurking, waiting for you. You’ve got nothing to lose.

It gets addictive. Once you let go of one love, you’ll itch to get rid of them all.

Steal candy from babies. Kick puppies. It doesn’t matter because you don’t have to be a good person anymore. You can be pure chaos and anarchy. The possibilities are wide and intoxicating.

Plus, all of these activities are distracting. And really, isn’t that what you need right now? Let’s get distracted. Exercise your new lack of morality and ethics, your new impulsive nature. Mix it with a constant need for distraction. Let your mayhem ring.

Here is the burden – finding something long term to keep living for. You don’t need to strive to make that special person happy. Your responsibilities are gone and you’re officially retired. What keeps your heart beating and what makes you get out of bed in the morning? After the distractions wear out – and they do – you’ll find all of that loss and sorrow rushes back with crushing speed and impact.

I’ve been good at finding distractions. I’ve been dipping my toe into the possibilities I now have – new opportunities to act irresponsible and stupid. I’m allowed to…well, not ‘be myself’ but I do get to try being someone less than that ideal image I hoped Rocket would see me as.

But I still haven’t found something else to live for. There just isn’t anything out there that seems worthy of effort or striving. Nothing will ever replace him, or the role I hoped to play in his life. Nothing comes close.

Two months and 26 days ago, I decided to try living child-free. I gave myself three months off from trying to conceive and maintain a pregnancy.

On the interwebs, the short-hand code is ‘ttc’ – trying to conceive. I find the abbreviation obnoxious and cutesy. It’s also necessary. That short set of letters lets the community know exactly where you stand in the quest to complete your family. Those three letters translate the waiting, the hope, the frustration, and for most of us, the pain that accompany the work of conception. That frustration, that pain, is what motivates women with infertility to seek advice, camaraderie and an outlet. So when you’re typing a question, a rant, or support for a friend, the letters ‘ttc’ in your signature speak volumes about you – where you’ve been, what you are going through, and where you hope, one day, to be.

The idea is that I would try living child-free for three months as a trial. If I could get used to the idea of living my life without ever becoming a mother, if I found the conveniences outweighed the curiosity, then living child-free might be for me. If I couldn’t live with the idea, then it certainly wasn’t.

For three months, I would make decisions without a giant “What if…?” hanging over my head. It was a vacation from the past three years of living in flux. Without knowing what would happen in the next nine months, every action I took had to work for a range of futures. For three months, I could make choices without having to keep every option open. I could buy pants that fit, knowing that my body wouldn’t drastically change shape any time soon. I could get a job. I could eat sushi. It’s been nice.

There is a fine line between living child-free and simply putting off trying to conceive. I had to make every decision as if I knew for certain that I would not be a mother – ever. It made life simpler. It made decisions easier. It took out the frustrations of having to balance all possible outcomes. It felt like a delicious freedom.

Four more days until the end of the three months. I spent the first month crying. I spent the next month stating as many positive aphorisms as possible to try and convince myself that a life without my children was worth living. I spent the last month not thinking about it. I’m not miserable, I’m not sobbing anymore. But no matter how many times I say “Thank god we don’t have children, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to do this,” it still sounds hollow, and I know I’d trade every freedom of a single 20-something for Rocket.

Four days and I still have no idea what to do. It’s something that can’t be put off. The clock is ticking, and my traitorous ovaries are getting older and weaker every month. A decision must be made. I still have four days.

I am kind of flipping out.

I’ll attribute it to a bad caffeine trip. Caffeine is my unhealthy drug of choice – I drink it too frequently, I depend on it to get through the day, and I do and say really, really stupid things when I’m on it.

It is embarrassing. I am weak.

Ever have one of those moments when you just wanted to crawl under a pile of blankets and hide in the darkness until all of time passes by, everything you know turns to dust, and all of your actions are rendered insignificant? Yeah, I’m having one of those right now. If I could just cozy into a flannel comforter while the earth rotated a few billion times, humans went extinct, and the oceans swallowed the planet, that would be A-OK with me. It’s like crawling under a rock, but comfier.

My ‘sode is not induced by anything in particular. I get fits of unbearable embarrassment and horrible feelings of shame fairly often. Low-key panic attacks. The only thing that gets me through them is the knowledge that the feeling is likely baseless and will pass. But oh gosh, how awful it feels. It’s difficult to explain, but if I ever wanted to re-create this feeling, I think I would strip naked, put on an ill-fitting thong, walk into a large room full of my peers, and do jumping jacks while reciting the very worst inner thoughts I’ve ever had about each person as they looked on in disgust. It feels like I’ve done something really awful and everyone knows about it.

No, wait, I lied. This particular incidence was triggered by an fairly embarrassing situation. It was brought to light that a past reprehensible transgression of mine has had long-term consequences. I freaking hate long term consequences! This and a confluence of other events has transpired to stir up a tornado of icky feelings.

The weather outside is rather gray and chilly. This always puts me in a slow, tired mood. Yesterday I worked out a little too hard and I’m having trouble moving around without shuffling like an arthritic elephant. The result of all this is that I feel kind of like I’m moving underwater – very slowly and with great resistance. So I drank that latte, and things sped up a little, but no easy fix is ever without consequence. The latte physically enabled me to move at regular speed, but my mouth has decided to run just a little too loud and a little too much for my liking. I don’t think I’ve said anything too awful today, but it always gives me a general feel of unease when I realize that I’ve been speaking thoughtlessly for the last couple of hours.

Right before work, I asked a co-worker how she manages to get another co-worker to hang out with her outside of work. To save face for everyone involved, let’s call her Lola, let’s call him Patrick, and let’s call me Nancy*. There is back story to this, but all you need to know right now is that I’ve been trying to hang out with him outside of work in an attempt to make amends for some previously mentioned past reprehensible act. I just want to prove that I can…not…be…crazy. But he keeps turning me down. Which gets me to keep asking him to hang out. Which makes me look crazier. It’s a vicious cycle.

* (There is no reason to call me Nancy, but it seems like things would be just ever so less complicated if I were the kind of person who was named Nancy.)

Lola’s response was that Patrick is kind of, well, afraid of me. Rightly so, sadly. But having it said out loud is not what I want to hear in my fragile arthritic-elephant-underwater-on-meth state. Goddammit, I just want a chance to redeem myself!

And so, for lack of an adequately heavy blanket to cocoon myself in, I’m blathering. You can have the back story later. For now, I’m going to hunker down in as many pounds of cotton as I can pull out of the linen closet.

Today is Day 1 of a year-long experiment.

oooo

In my early teens, I read the Tao of Pooh and the Te of Piglet. Until I read that book, I had never taken a particular position on any philosophy – or anything really. There were movies I particularly liked, nothing I particularly disliked. I had favorite books, but none that I considered bad. Up until that time period, I was simply a sponge. I soaked up information and concepts without passing much judgment on them.

I happened to read these two introductions to Taoism at a curious pivot point of adolescence. I was going through the process of becoming an independent adult. Everything I absorbed was now filtered through the play-doh stencils of my past absorbants.

As I passed this formal introduction to Taoism through my newly formed filters, I determined that I utterly loathed it.

Something about it set my mind aflutter with spite. At first it was a trickle, then a dust cloud of annoyance, steadily developing into a sawdust pile of pure and unpleasant disagreement. Maybe if it had been written without all of those damn capital letters, maybe if it didn’t purloin innocent cartoons from my childhood story books to preach dogma, it wouldn’t have rubbed me so severely the wrong way. I’m inclined to believe, as you are about to find, that I would have hated Taoism anyway.

I understood that this philosophy could be appealing to some people. I understood the virtue in it and how it really could work to just relax and go with things. Just not…me.

I detested the simpering meekness of Piglet and the quiet, stoic certainty of Pooh. I hated the idea of something other than conscious thought having control over me. Disgusted by the idea that my will would have only the mildest influence on my own fate, my entire being rallied against every word. The most revolting part was that it rang true despite how much I abhor the idea of sitting passive while the current takes me away.

oooo

Until my brush-in with Taoism, I had a vague concept of something I later labeled ‘The Grain’. It was a theory that had developed over time – a mishmash of fate, coincidence and fractal tendencies that led me to believe that while there wasn’t a higher power at work, there was a pattern to things that led the whole universe in a particular direction.

The basic concept is the opposite of the butterfly effect – everything we do, everything that happens, has very little – or rather, no, effect over time. The only acts that really matter are those that are frequent and boisterous, and even these explosions of sound and fury have minor and temporary effects before time heals itself and things go on as they were.

The reasoning behind this theory is that all things have a general inclination toward a particular direction. All things follow a theme of actions and persuasions. Everything becomes a fractal of tendencies when you pare it down to its simplest form. As humans, our personalities are reflections of these fractals – a short interaction with me would belie some basic tenets of my personality. In general, it would be safe to assume that our short meeting could provide you with some good signifiers of my character as a whole. If I made some infrequent action not in keeping with my general demeanor, it’s likely to be overlooked, or, at the very least, it would occur in so few of my interactions with new strangers that it would be of no consequence. Those strangers bound to be my friends would eventually befriend me despite an occasional blip. Those bound to become enemies would be so disturbed by my general temperment that a single comment wouldn’t win them over.

At the very least, it’s reassuring on first dates. No single action or odd remark makes much of a difference. You know that one stupid thing you did, the one that led to some giant catastrophe? Don’t blame yourself. If you hadn’t pushed the giant red button that killed a school full of orphans at 3:00, you were likely to have hit it at 3:15 anyway. And if you hadn’t, those orphans would most likely have died of something else, as orphans are wont to do. You, as a fractal of habits, are clumsy. And the orphans have a propensity for being destroyed. It was bound to happen, one way or another.

The grain the thing that pulls me along in my path through the universe – it is a tree, or a plank of wood or something. If I hit a knot, my path diverges slightly. In general, however, I always find myself back on my original path. While the knots change the path itself, it has very little influence on where I end up. I am repeatedly frustrated with how many of my major life decisions have had no impact on where I end up years later. As I grow older, I keep finding myself exactly where I would have been had I taken another route.

Something about the stance that Piglet and Pooh took following along with the grain – or to use the metaphor from the books – the river’s current – bothered me. They seemed to believe that we shouldn’t waste energy fighting where we are bound to go anyway.

I, however, agreed with Tigger – let’s bounce the through the woods and rip this shit up with a table saw. To release control over my fate and let the universe run its course seems like a supreme waste of time. Why even bother living if I can’t take control, take responsibility for my actions and fight for what I want? Piglet and Pooh saw Tigger as naive and chaotic, wasting energy chasing impossibilities.

On the Taoist river, I am a motorboat rushing upstream.

I am a ripsaw. I am a blurry mess of fists and scrabbling. I believe in the fight.

But I also believe in the grain. This conflict of my beliefs and my temperament causes me much consternation. I want to fight so things don’t just end up all the same. But I know they do, eventually, anyway. Whether I like it or not. The truth is – I am naïve and chaotic. But at least I’m not lazy and boring.

oooo

I’ve waffled back and forth on whether to give up and follow the grain or to fight against it.

Sometimes I fight, leaving me drained and discouraged to find it’s made things worse.

Sometimes I follow along the path of least resistance, leaving me bored, anxious and older with nothing to show for it.

I find myself today in a unique quagmire of my own wading. I am to blame for being both lazy and full of hubris. I am tired. I am resigned. I am willing to go ahead and throw myself head long into a previously unconsidered path.

oooo

Today is Day 1 of a year-long experiment to go along with the path. I decided this at 9:00 PM. It seemed like both a plausible and logical idea. It’s 1:30 AM, four and a half hours later and already my bones are aching to bounce as far and fast and sideways and upside down as they can to get out of it.

On April 25, 2010, I decided to live a life child-free.

The thing that might keep me sane is, I have to remind myself that patience is a virtue worth learning.

Go with the grain. 364 days, 19.5 hours left.

Child-free. Years, years and years and years left.

Odds are, you’re as lost as I am.

But you, dear imaginary reader, have a good excuse. You’ve stumbled here from the far reaches of the interweb, pausing here aside a quest for macaroni and cheese recipes, infertility support forums, tips on how to bathe a cat.

But me, I’ve been here a long time. I’ve had time to analyze. Synthesize. Ruminate. I’ve got myself all tangled up in a messy mire of self-pity and I’m floating in a viscous pool of thoughtstuff. Lost indeed.

So here is the background, because every death in quicksand starts with a single step.

The beginning: I had a plan.

And by the beginning, I mean early – real early. Let’s say, age 7, second grade. Maybe November 4th. Of course, we’re just saying that. I have no idea when the plan started. But the plan had been there for a very, very long time, and it had time to grow a life of its own, solid and unshakable.

Well, the plan was unshakable. The execution, not so much.

The plan was not inflexible. It allowed for straying years, some unforeseen circumstances, unpredictable people. Contingency plans B, C1, C2, D, E and so on.

The plan was a series of steps, deceptively simple. All pretty much based on the theory that the morals you learn on Nick at Night episodes are postulates for the human experience.

Do your homework. To get good grades. To go to college. To get a high paying job. To afford children.

It was multifaceted.

Eat your broccoli. To build strong bones. To be healthy. To bear and raise healthy children.

It was logical.

Spend lots of money, time and energy visiting people you don’t particularly like. To build strong family relationships. To give those loved children a healthy support network to thrive in.

It was just a wee bit cold and calculated.

Investigate what makes a good father. To make a weighted list of useful fatherly attributes. To create an equation evaluating a young man’s fatherability. To choose who to date. To choose who to mate with. To get married, if that is required. To have happy kids.

The premise of good intentions, moral action, karma and hard work.

The problem is that I had no idea it was a plan until it fell to pieces. This was a constant certainty that I was on a path toward an end goal: Happy children. I could take side trips – develop a career, a personality, take lovers – but only within the confines of that destination. No single action was ever allowed to inhibit or create hiccups. No quarter was given to relationships or opportunities that could come in the way of the plan. The food I ate, the time I woke up in the morning, the skills I developed – all of them were actions that would bring me, eventually, to the result of happy, (ideally) flawless children.

This is not a journal, for one thing.

A journal is a record. A journal is linear through time, each entry etched permanent. A journal’s content is unchanging, except for growth. A journal can be a trusted archive – something to be referenced or nostalgia’d over.

You can’t trust this thing here at all. It could be edited at whim. It could dissipate into the ether of the interweb with no notice. It could explode into a cacophony of lights, whizz-bangs and foul language.

What this is, it’s an attempt to find a foothold. It’s another attempt to find a semblance of structure after my world got picked up, shaken about, and deposited back down 37 degrees off from where it started.

Whatever this is – it’s not for reading, it’s for writing.

It’s to find some sanity.

It’s a distraction.

It’s to get these events out of my head, so I can dust them off, line them up on a clean table, and pack them back into my skull in an efficient arrangement so they take up less space.