Random Ramblings

Somehow, lately, I find it hard to come up with posts. I guess I feel like I'm in a holding pattern. I have nothing to "report". We can't do anything more until my cough gets better and I can go in for my immune tests. So I'm trying to fill my days in other ways. Not that I'm succeeding very well. I'm still spending a lot of time on-line, reading other people's blogs, but then I have nothing to say, no comments to add. I try to make myself at least say, "Hi, I was here, I'm thinking of you," because I want people to know I stopped by, but I have nothing spectacular to add to the conversation . . .

I've been thinking a lot, though, about the things I've read. It's just hard to organize my thoughts into a post. I read about someone taking her life back, and I think I want to do that but I don't know how. I've been trying to imagine taking my life back, not letting my miscarriages rule my life, but I can't see any way to do it without becoming a very different person. I think it would involve going back to school and finding a career I could pour my energy into. I think it will be hard for me to move beyond recurrent pregnancy loss without either becoming a mother or making a conscious decision to live child free. I'm not ready to stop pursuing motherhood, and I don't know how to take my life back while continuing to focus on that goal.

I do small things. My teaching as a Music Docent and at Sunday School gives me a secondary focus. It really helps me feel good about myself when a lesson goes well. My latest music lesson went quite well. I planned plenty of activities and was able to keep the kids attention by keeping things moving. I even got them to shut their mouths and focus on rhythm patterns for nearly 5 minutes! I was surprised and pleased at how much they enjoyed that. It made me feel much more confident about the possibility of introducing some rhythm instruments soon.

I've stopped going to the community garden I was working at, and I both miss it and don't miss it. I miss the active work, the healthy food, the contact with nature and growing things. I don't miss being surrounded by parents of toddlers. I don't miss feeling jealous and bitter and out-of-place. I was telling a friend about this, and she suggested I look into a different community garden, one that is less focused on families. Although they don't post a minimum age, they only actively encourage families to come once a month. I think I would be more likely to work with adults and adolescents there. It sounds like it's worth a try.

Another thing that has been on my mind is alternate paths to parenthood. I'm percolating a lot of swirling ideas around the various paths and possibilities open to us. Immunology probably offers our best hope of biological, genetically related offspring. Adoption might be a faster path to parenthood. Surrogacy would maintain the genetic link. There are other choices as well, each with its own advantages and drawbacks. Perhaps there's a post in there, when I've thought things through a bit more. For now, I'm trying to puzzle things out in my head, and not quite ready to publish my thoughts. Some of them seem very controversial.

Still another thing on my mind is activism and raising awareness. How do you raise awareness in people who don't want to take the time to listen? How do you educate people who can't or won't learn? I know that for me, the thing that changed how I viewed pregnancy loss was experience. Before my miscarriages, I heard stories about stillbirth with different ears than I do now. Somehow, I never heard the part about how devastating it was. I only heard that it is rare and that people went on to have subsequent, living children. I didn't hear the part about how fear creeps into your heart. I didn't hear the part about how the pain and grief never goes away. I did recognize that the fact that it happened wasn't forgotten, but I didn't understand that the baby was real to his or her parents. Were these things not spoken? Or did I simply fail to hear or remember or identify?

I want to share my story, to raise awareness about recurrent pregnancy loss, but I want to wait to share until my story has a happy ending. I think that waiting until I have a living child to share my story will make it easier for me to let people's ignorance and lack of understanding roll off me. Then I wonder if waiting to tell my story will, in some ways, defeat the purpose. If I tell my story now, it is one of pain and fear and hopelessness. Will those emotions even show up in a story that has a happy ending? What do I want to raise awareness about? Do I want to share RPL as a fact, or do I want to help people understand the painful emotions connected with the experience of living through multiple pregnancy losses? If I want to raise awareness about the emotional aspect of RPL, would it not be more effective to share my experience now, while the emotions are fresh and raw? If people see me happy and enjoying a living child, will it be hard for them to give any weight to my assertions that going through multiple losses is painful? How do I balance my desire to raise awareness against my need to protect myself?

I thought I had nothing to say, but actually, I have so much to say it is simply hard to know where to begin or what to focus on.