Laughter and Forgetting

Wednesday Night TV

Wednesday night is the only TV night of the week that I care about. I don't know what airs on all the other nights of the week. I certainly coudn't tell you what time any of those other programs air, except for shows like The Daily Show, because they are on every day. But on Wednesday's at 10pm, on Bravo, I watch Project Runway. I plan around Project Runway. I look forward to it.

Sometimes I grab my cup of tea and watch the 9pm rerun of Oprah, and then switch over to Bravo at ten. I love that, it's my definition of "me" time.
Last Wednesday Elizabeth Edwards was on Oprah. Here's her new book: http://www.amazon.com/Saving-Graces-Finding-Strength-Strangers/dp/0767925378/sr=8-1/qid=1159562755/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-1185054-6436110?ie=UTF8&s=books. I see it's number three on the amazon best seller list, so I guess a few of you know about. In brief, it's about the death of her son, who was killed in an auto accident when he was sixteen, about her breast cancer, and about loss. Ultimately the book is about how we cannot survive these things alone. It's about how we need to reach out to others, and to those that have been through similar experiences to help us heal. Since I bawled during half the show, I probably won't be reading it. But a lot of what she talked about, I feel like I have already been through. No, I haven't lost a child (if I was religious, this is where I would be fervently crossing myself), but recurrent miscarriage is it's own major grief. When she talked about finding support groups on the internet, I sure related to that. I used to think blogs were silly. I thought "Really? These Bloggers really write about all the details of their personal life? REALLY?" And then, in my big ol' sea of grief, I found lifeboats in Getup Grrl, Julie and Tertia. I needed so desperately to connect with another human being that understood what I was going through, and through the internet, I found a bunch of them. The relief was visceral. It was the beginning of healing for me.

Elizabeth also talked about how so many people say the wrong thing when such devastating things happen, and how a friend said to her "Remember, people will say the wrong thing, but they really are trying to say the right thing." This is an excellent thing to remember. It is worth noting, however, that there are occasional cases when people act like they are trying to say something nice, but underneath they are passive aggressively telling you to "quit your bitching." it can be a very fine line. I suppose in the end, it is not really worth out energy to get worked up about it though, which is maybe the best thing of all to remember.

She talked about how people are scared to mention the name of her dead son, when in fact most parents (and she qualifies that not everyone feels the same way) who lose a child long to hear the name of that child on other peoples' lips. They do not want their child to become invisible, just because she or he is no longer living. Much as my aunt, twenty years after my cousin's death, was anxious to hear anything I might remember about her son, Peter. My miscarriages did not have names. But I honestly am filled with a sense of gladness when people are not scared to mention my losses. In doing so they acknowledge my pain, and also make it clear that they do not pity me, but rather have some empathy for my grief. I do not want to have gone through all that I have, only to have my miscarraiges be something dark and secret that can only be mentioned shamefully. I don't want to pretend like they never happened

I felt like Eizabeth's husband, John Edwards, was speaking through me when Oprah asked him why they decided to have more children. He said " We knew couldn't replace our son, we never would have tried, but we also knew that children had brought us great joy, and we wanted more of that. Our daughter was going to leave home in a few years, and we didn't want it to end." Um, yeah. Bingo. Couldn't have said better myself.

There was one niggling thing about Elizabeth though. She had her third and fourth children at 48 and 50. If she's going to talk about tapping into the community and reaching out to one another, lightly mentioning the fact that she learned to "never give up hope" when it came to conceiving is vastly misleading. Of course we all know that there is virtually 100% chance that those babies did not come from her eggs. And it's none of our business how she came by her children. But if she's putting herself out there as someone who is trying to help others learn how to process their grief, and glossing over the hell of assisted reproductive techniques, simply saying "don't give up hope!" is pretty fucking alienating to those who have been through it. I'm just sayin'. But of course she's recovering from breast cancer too, so I should probably just give her a break.*

So after wiping my eyes dry, I moved on to Project Runway for completely tear free entertainment. I was so relieved that they kept all four designers for fashion week! I was worried about Michael's dress, it's not that it was bad, it just kind of looked like something compagnie express would knock off as an inappropriately sexy prom dress. I loved Laura's dress, and even though I wanted to rip an internal organ out of her when she announced her pregancy and said that she would throw her sixth child "on the pile, with the others" (She's 43 years old, people), I basically like her. Uli pulled it out in the end, I loved her dress. Jeffrey tanked on the "romantic" dress. Romantic my ass, he's as romantic as soppy french kiss with way too much tongue. What an asshole. I feel sorry for his girlfriend, who also happens to be the mother of his kid. The neck tattoo makes me want to puke. Can you imagine having to put your face in that? Can you tell I don't like him? BUT...You've got to admit, the guy has some talent. There is no fairness in life, as any infertile knows. That yellow haute couture dress was fabulous, and that recycled paper dress probably should have won. His jet setter outfit was good, but again, if made me nauseated, because it was so...Him.

Michael is the opposite of course, delightful in every way. I don't think he's said one bad thing about anyone during the whole show. You know he is going to be the audience favorite, how could he not be? Is he gay? Is the answer to that question old news? As much as I love that show, I don't follow much of the outside gossip. I think I have just wanted to believe he is the sweetest straight man ever. I hope he can pull off something good for the finale.

*Here is much better discussion of the topic: http://www.slate.com/id/2108863/

Purgatory

When I stopped trying to get pregnant, and when, in fact, my husband said he didn't want to have any more kids in any way shape or form, I tried to move away from talking about infertility on this blog. I tried to expand my horizons. And yet, after all this time, I still find that the majority of my posts relate to infertility or adoption in some way.

I don't write as often. And I certainly talk about that part of my life much less in my daily life. But the after effects of infertility, and the desire to have another child through adoption are still the issues that I most often need to get off my chest. And sometimes I hate that. I hate that it is still on my chest like a big, black bowling ball. A weight that I can't quite get out from under. Most of the time I have adapted to the extra weight, but every once in a while I feel like it sucks the breath right out of me again; constricting my lungs and chest and making me feel panicky.

I hate that of the twenty or thirty blogs that I read regularly when I started writing my own, are mostly blogs that now contain babies. I hated being in the less than 3% of women under forty that have had three or more miscarriages in a row. But even then, I never thought I would be in the minority of infertiles that do not go to having a child after infertility, either by birth or adoption. Lest anyone misunderstand, I do not hate those women in the tiniest bit, I still read many of their blogs. I just hate being a poster child for the not so happy ending. Or at least the ending that is wrapped up in a neat little story line.

Get up Grrrl, Julie, Tertia, Brooklyn Girl, Bindweed Heights, Cecily, Lost and Finding, Beaver Girl, Dead Bug, Menita, Barely Tenured, Horkin Ramblings, the Rabbit Lived, Missed Conceptions, Bermuda Triangle of Embryos, Marla, Just another Jen, Fertility Now!, the Infertile Gourmet, Uterine Wars (Soper), Pazel and of course Karen at the Naked Ovary are all new or not so new mothers. These are all blogs that I started reading a little over three years ago, or in several cases, some time later. (For fuck's sake, when I write it all out like that, it makes me feel even more pathetic.) There are several more bloggers that are currently pregnant, even some hard timers whom I shall not name so as to not call attention to them (and therefore affect their luck?), but they know who they are. Only Danae, Emily, Barren Mare, Donna and Julianna come to mind as co-bloggers that I read regularly that have not had a child since I've been around. Danae and Emily weren't really interested in being on the sad side of the statistics any more, and left the blog world, or at least this little corner of the blog world.

There is one thing that separates me from the latter women. I am a mother. And don't think there is a day that goes by that I am grateful for that. There is one other detail that separates me from a couple of them: It was not my choice to stop. (Barren Mare had similar but different issues.) I could have kept trying to get pregnant. It doesn't mean I ever would have carried a goddamn pregnancy to term, but maybe. Right? In my case, it was as a part of marital negotiations that I agreed to stop. I know many of you felt that was unfair. I certainly did at the time. How dare he?

But here's the thing about my husband: I knew when I met him that he was not going to bend to my will. He is independent. He does not like to be manipulated. He is opinionated. He is strong-willed. I made an intentional decision to not marry someone who would let me control him. I do not buy his clothes, I do not arrange our social agenda. I do not clean up after him (most of the time.) I am not his "mommy," in any way, shape or form. While there is lots of upside to that kind of personality, The downside is that I don't always get what I want, no matter how badly I want it.

And think about reversing the situation. If I had said to my husband, after the fourth (possibly fifth) miscarriage, "I cannot take this anymore, I'm tired, I'm depressed, I am insane, I do not want to try anymore," would anyone have judged me? One can always say, "Well the woman is the one that needs to deal with the pregnancy." Well, yeah...physically, that's true. But anyone that thinks that men don't get beaten up mentally by miscarriage and infertility are just plain fooling themselves. Yes, my husband didn't experience the losses in the same; he was not as attached. He doesn't remember any of their due dates. But trying so many times and failing again and again was inexpressibly taxing for him. He is a "can do" kind of guy. After the first miscarriage he got right back on the frequent fornication babymaking bandwagon. He thought he could fix it. If you can get pregnant, you can have a baby, right? The other thing that was even worse for him is that he lost his wife. Where did she go? Even though I experienced it, I can't even describe it, In my mind, It is just a black place, and it sucked the life blood out of me and anyone else that joined me there. It was filled with mean nurses, disappointing ultrasounds, condescending advice, and very, very dark moods. I didn't really have the stamina for infertility, and my husband even less so.

I don't really know where I am going with this post. I wanted to say that I feel like a loser sometimes. I wanted to say that I understand more every day where my husband was coming from. And I also wanted to say something else that I can't put my finger on. Maybe it's that something has to give here. I've got to be okay with one kid, or move towards "getting" another one. I can't seem to accomplish either task.

Sometimes I wonder if I am just innately an dissatisfied person. If one child is "not enough," will anything ever be enough? Will I always think that the grass is greener? But I don't think the question is whether it's enough. I hover between the two worlds of accepting one child and the desire to adopt because my heart was so clearly broken by infertility. That broken heart is having a really, really extended and arduous recovery period. I never knew that healing could take so long.

secrets

I was very moved and also had my thoughts quite provoked by Julia's (Hippogriffs) long post of last week. She has edited it to take out the part that I am going to talk about, so it's not worth going over there to take a look.

At the time she was feeling very dark. She was worried about another miscarriage and proceeded to talk why she and her husband have not investigated adoption. She talked about her husband's issues around his adoption, which was far from ideal.

I will not get too into what she said, because clearly she doesn't want everyone to read about it at this point. Everything looks much brighter this week for her and here's hoping that things will remain that way.

But what touched me about that post is that we all have secret dark thoughts that we bury inside of ourselves and protectively guard from the outside world. There are things that happened in all of our childhoods that become our Achilles Heels in adult life. Those sensitive spots in our personal history affect all kinds of decisions and become completely integrated into our grown-up personality. Consequently, there are decisions that we make and viewpoints that we have, that make sense to us but don't make sense to other people.

There is the adult woman who's father abandoned the family as a child, and she is now so fearful of being left that she sets substandard goals for the men in her life. She marries a man not because she knows he is the best partner for her but because she is convinced he will never, ever leave her. There is the man that was so smothered by his mother when he was young that he constantly pushes away the women in his life, which in the end is only detrimental to himself. Even the most emotionally healthy among us has something that has happened in our life that causes us to have odd opinions or behave irrationally later in life.

After all, we only have our own lives to live. We can't compare what it would feel like to have lived someone elses life. We are very myopic, and we think if something happened a certain way when we were six years old, it will always happen the same way.

One of my secrets, which I have touched on here, but never confessed outright, is that my brother, whom I am completely unrelated to biologically, does not feel like a brother. When we were young we played together a lot. We functioned as siblings, but I cannot say that we were ever particularly close. He was always an irritant to me. As an adult he has only become more frustrating. When my mom was off her rocker and my brother and I would go visit her, it was great that he was there with me. At least he was sane. When my mother started rambling about how the house was bugged with microphones, at least my brother and I could share that secret look that was half laughter and half fear. We were not alone. So I am thankful for that. But as an adult, my brother is a burden. He is a born again Christian that is not very bright or thoughtful. He is stubborn and overly literal. He drives me up the fucking wall. And I resent that I feel responsible for him. He is not unkind, he's just different. And I know a lot of the reason that he's different is genetics.

For a very long time I didn't want to adopt a child. I didn't want to replay my own life. I didn't want my son to have a sibling who he could never relate to, a sibling that he would never talk to in his adult life, if he could help it. I figured that with a biological sibling I could avoid that pitfall.

Ha.

Over a few years my perspective changed. I started to open my eyes up to a different possibility.

•I lost a baby with Down's Syndrome. If that baby had lived it never could have had a peer relationship with her brother. I'm not saying my son couldn't have benefited from having a sister with Down's, I'm just saying that it was not the relationship I was trying to engineer by having a second biological child.

•One of my best friends has two nephews, one Korean and one biological. There are 18 months apart and the best of friends.

•My husband said to me "Your brother is not just different from you, he is different from everyone."

I started to realize, when I truly listened, that there are plenty of biological siblings that can't stand each other. There are plent of siblings that are indifferent to one another. They love their sister "but only in small doses." I know of families where both siblings are adopted and they are extremely close or not close at all, and everything in the middle. I have an adopted friend that has two biological siblings and three adopted siblings and nobody would ever know which was which and they are all incredibly close. Within every family there is a large and nuanced spectrum of closeness and connectedness between each member of the family. Mothers may be close to sons, or vice versa, the oldest brother may be closest to the youngest brother - shutting out the middle sister. There are a million permutations, and you just can't predesign how someone is going to fit into your family.

I realized reading Julia's post that her husband worries about bonding with an adopted child because of his painful experience, and I worry about sibling relationships because of mine. I never did bond with my mother either, but I never took that personally because she was so mentally ill, I knew it was never about me. And I was so absolutely bonded with my father that I knew I could always love a child that came to me. I just wanted to have the best possible chance of a good family chemistry.

And I still worry about chemistry. If we were to adopt, would it be a huge mistake? Would it be divisive? Would it be lonely for the adopted chid? Would my son resent it? I don't know. Maybe. But I also know that a biological child carries the same risks. The negative possibilities are endless if you let your mind go there, autism, ADD, birth defects, or just a plain old super high maintenance child. It's always a huge gamble.

But here is another dark secret that I haven't talked about much here. As much as I believe in adoption, and as much as I find it entirely offensive when people dismiss it as something they could " never do" or say things like "blood is thicker than water," I also understand the power of a blood tie.
When I met my mother and my sister, I was blown away, really knocked down flat, by how much I looked like them, how much I talked like them, how much I was just like them. For a few weeks I wondered whether there was such thing as "nurture." We all three seem to have a similar rhythm in our brains. It was uncanny. And to this day, there is part of me that understands both of them innately.

But time passed, and I started to have some revelations. My bio sister can drive me nuts. She's over sensitive and lacks a sense of humor about herself. I understand her, but that doesn't make me like her all the time. My bio mother is cool and interesting but also emotionally repressed. My bio father, when I met him, was incredibly self absorbed and I really did not connect with him at all. No mind meld there. I haven't talked to my bio mom in four or five years. If I were to talk to her, I'm sure we would have a perfectly nice conversation. We don't have animosity, we just don't have history. I saw my sister for the first time in five years last December and haven't talked to her since. I really should send her an email one of these days. When I met my mother, I was a little angry, because my sister got a mom, and I just got this crazy woman who wore strange things strapped to her head to keep the voices out. There is a big fat loss there for me. And adoption is always partially about that loss. But in the end I can say with every bit of honesty I can muster that now I never wish that my life was different. I never wish that I grew up with that sister and that mother and father in Venice, CA.

I have absolute empathy of for where Julia's husband comes from. I am battling my protective reactions all the time. My childhood experience set up parameters and concepts for me that I keep trying to question. The more time passes, I realize they don't really help me that much as a grown-up person.