izzyblog

I have so many conflicts over working and parenting. As I sit typing, I feel the scratch in my throat, a nagging reminder of a major problem of the arrangement -- the fact of ongoing sickness.  Everything seems to blow through here -- every snatch of cold, flu or related virus.  Earaches, vomiting, sluggishness -- all unwelcomed but constantly visiting guests.

But that's not the only problem.  Deeper than that irritation, which is no minor problem when fevers rise or sleep is thoroughly interrupted, is the fact of my feeling torn.  I don't at all feel integrated, but schizophrenic instead.  I am living two lives.  In one life, I find myself caught up in the pleasures of work -- relating to students, teaching my material with enthusiasm, then alternating between pleasure and boredom when grading seasons hit.  But always at the back of my mind is the reminder -- Finn is waiting for me! -- which brings about a sudden anxiety, a surge of guilt, not a pleasant anticipation that I will see him soon.  I don't think he dislikes the arrangement, though.  He is rarely upset when I see him at daycare, which is often, considering that I still nurse him frequently at 8 months.  But I feel that I have somehow abandoned him there, tended less by loving hands than by quick hands.  He is one of 6 little lovelies, but the lovelies don't inspire the heave in the bosom of his caretakers.  They treat him fine, but they don't love him.  Does that hurt him at this age?  

Granted, Finn only spends a few hours of each day in their care.  On good days, I can finish my work in about 3 hours and complete the rest at home.  Other days, i am on campus for 6 hours, and those days I feel terrible guilt over my absence from him.  But the guilt doesn't only apply to him.  I simultaneously feel guilty for being divided toward my students as well.  I form relationships with them, but not with the free abandon that characterized my relationships in years past.  I guard my time much more now; I hurry home.  That is different for me, and I'm sure it's not an attitude that my superiors would approve of.  Yet I cannot seem to help myself.  It is a strange place in which I find myself this year.  In the classroom, I lose myself in the work and enjoy it.  When it ends though, the vision of Finn appears before me, and I am gripped; it's time to get to him. 

I cannot seem to reconcile the issue.  If I were to take some years off to spend Finn's early childhood with him, we would lose some of the income that helps to make our lives pleasurable.  I might also lose my connections to Loyola, which is my safety net as well as a good gig (a topic for another meditation), and I might miss the intellectual activity of the day.  But I would solve the problem of feeling so divided, which creates so much anxiety within me -- the feeling that I cannot give 100% of myself either to my job or to my child.  

I wonder what other women in my position feel about the issue.  I wish I didn't feel quite so beholden to my work environment.  But teaching has always been more than simply a job for me.  It's more like a duty, though I don't think the word resonates easily with the meaning I wish to infuse in it.  When I describe it as a duty, I mean that teaching inspires a deep sense of commitment for me.  It entails a promise made to the students that I will guide them toward a new understanding of the materials or even also of themselves.  High orders, yes -- but I also have high standards.  I know that teaching works best for me when I connect fully with my students.  Yet these connections take time, and that time spent with them is less time devoted to Finn, who is merely a babe -- soft, tender and vulnerable.  My responsibility, my dearest delight.  

I imagine that as Finn grows older, he will need me less and less.  In time, I will be free to spend more time at work, burrowing myself deep into whatever projects or relationships beckon.  If I step out of the working world next year, will I sever my chances of going back at a later date to a good job?  I consider Loyola the best gig in town.  Will I regret losing the money?  And if I stay on and continue teaching, will I forever regret not having been able to devote myself fully to Finn's baby years, to wading in an undivided love?  It is such an unpleasant issue to debate, one that I cannot seem to make heads or tales over.  All I can seem to do is to pray for clarity of vision, to see myself and my desires more clearly so that I choose to act in a way that aligns with my deepest desires.

I've always been in love with the idea of being in love.  I have measured my life by my loves and have imagined a kinship with others -- artists, writers -- whom I think have also wandered shamelessly and often, open-mouthed, into the wake of love.  My loves have taken many forms -- have been cruel, kind, tempestuous, vicious, even distant and diffident.  I believe I have made the greatest and most unforgettable mistakes in my life in the pursuit of love.  Yet even  those most painful moments have been some of my most vivid memories.  Like the summer I lived in Cooke City, Montana.  Although I got myself there, it was the pursuit of a love that made the summer so dreamy.  The love sharpened up the edges a bit because I had a partner to push me past my own edge of comfortable adventure.  I wouldn't have camped on the side of the mountain, taken the backcountry geyser hike, sneaked into an abandoned mineshaft, walked without a flashlight up the mountain in the dark... any of it had I been alone.  The affair ended miserably, but the experiences it brought were phenomenal and even carved out the direction my next steps would take, planting deeper in me the seed for adventure.

Life changes though, and now I have a new love.  The tenderest moments with my baby are some of my favorite.  Hurrying to the crib in the dark, where Finn is on his belly, propped on his elbows, wailing with his eyes closed in the moonlight.  His head is velvety soft, and I stroke it gently, hoping to calm him, but the cry only intensifies as he searches to be picked up.  In my arms, he latches quickly on my breast, and I study him in the low light, notice how much he has grown in these 5 months.  He spreads easily across my lap now, and he feeds so quickly.  His cheeks are so soft, and I would stroke or kiss them, but it makes him stir.  He is unfathomably soft in my arms, pure in his shameless greed for milk and nurturing.  I cannot help but stare at him, despite the fact that the dimness reveals very little to me.  Yet there it is -- the outline of the cheek, and then I breathe in the weight of him relaxing into my arms.  The moment is intoxicating.  It happens every night.  And while I could complain, and sometimes do, that Finn keeps me from sleeping properly, he also offers me these tenderest minutes that easily compare to any night walk through the woods. 

The relationship between the two, though -- why are they simultaneously on my mind tonight?  What chord do they form, when played together?  Me, becoming more of myself in the woods, finding a new form inside me that explores, sees wildly new things, expands.  Me, nursing a child in my arms, pulled toward a unyielding passion for the tenderest being. 

Sometimes there's God, so quickly.

As Finn quietly enters Round 1 of tonight's Great Battle for Sleep, I think about how much our nights with him have changed in these 5 short months.  We've been through several sleep routines in his short lifetime, each feeling so heavily weighted with significance that I want to give it the name "routine," even if it only lasted a few weeks.  Each of those sleep habits with him has felt so significant, because they've determined my own ability or inability to sleep, so perhaps that's why I ascribe so much importance to them.  We're currently in a new evolution of the sleep-in-crib with-a-lead-in-bedtime-routine routine, this one getting him down for sleep between 7:30 and 8 pm.  So far, I'm winning, but Finn could easily arouse after his first 45 minute cycle and call lustily for the boob to come back to quiet him.

This is our best routine yet, for me at least, because I'm able to get a decent amount of sleep these days.  We have a little routine that includes bath time, massage and song time, then boob time and down to sleep.  Finn seems to respond well to all of this.  I am of course indoctrinating him in yoga  during the song time.  Our nightly lullaby sessions consistently lead off with the chant "lokah somastah sukinoh bhavantu."  Loosely translated:  "May all beings everywhere be happy and free."  Our translation, included in our sing-a-long: "May all babies everywhere be happy and free."

Our previous routines, thank God, have come to an end, as endless and endlessly sleep-depriving as they seemed at the time.  One of these routines, which we adopted early on after discovering that new babies don't just sleep in their cribs at night like all the ads and movies would suggest, involved one of us, usually me, sleeping on the couch with Finn.  Nervously, I would wedge myself up into the corner of our sofa, a big couch pillow supporting me at a 45 degree angle and boppy pillow around my waist.  Finn would lie in my arms, which were supported by the boppy so that they couldn't slip when sleep finally relaxed them.  We lived like this for perhaps a month of his life.  How miserable!  But how fond this memory is -- in retrospect!

I also remember swing sleep.  Finn won't sleep in his swing anymore, but as an itty bitty baby he'd fall asleep in the swing, and some nights I'd keep him in it for 2 or 3 hours at a time so that I could doze on the couch.  We also tried sleeping together on the futon in the back room some nights, so as not to wake Jesse.

What strikes me as interesting in touring through these memories is not only the fact that our lives have shifted dramatically and decisively in the 5 months we've had Finn.  But also, the mini-routines we've created, which seemed so solid at the time, have shifted dramatically and decisively as well.  These little routines, which gave definition to our days and nights, which marked our evolving understanding of how-to-be-parents, at the time manifested in seeming solidity, punctuating our days and nights with meaning and importance.  They allowed us a semblance of control over this new life, a way of forming the chaos of life-with-baby into something understandable.  They still do.  My lullabies, my massage routines, my games -- all are little routines that shape out our time together into something I can describe, can repeat.  And the repetition feels good, assuming familiarity quickly.  Yet the routine changes quickly too, and again settles quickly into a new solidity.  I don't quite know what to make of this strange marriage of change and solidity.  How they work together so seamlessly baffles me, but there it is.

They grow up so fast...

Since I'm new to parenthood (5 months today), I wonder what it means, exactly, when people sigh and tell you that children "grow up so fast."  Of course, there's the literal meaning of the phrase.  Time does seem to beat a quick pace after a certain period of life.  Once we hit 25, we stop feeling much older.  The years gain momentum, and we have little sense of having changed a great deal, character-wise, after that point.  Perhaps, then, the line about children simply fits into this model.  Just as time passes quickly in other areas of our lives, so does it continue into the childbearing years.

But there's more to the expression than its literal meaning.  It includes a sense of nostalgia too, a melancholy remembrance of something than has been lost.  But what, exactly?  Is it a loss of innocence as one's children move deeper into self-discovery?  The end of the beaming-eyed baby smiles reserved only for her mom & dad?  The broadening of the child's world to include more than the nuclear family?  The introduction of outside influences?  The emergence of a non-parent based sense of self?  Simply, the introduction of separation and personal development?

I'm not sure.  I can imagine that the end of Finn's open-hearted little gummy smiles will be heartbreaking in a way, because my little beloved will change and development into someone I cannot yet anticipate knowing. 

Some stages of child development look rather ugly from this vantage point.  I see my sister-in-law, for example, experiencing the beginnings of the period in which her oldest son feels embarrassed by her.  They're both on Facebook, and she wrote, "Hi, buddy" on his wall this week.  He had a fit about it.  His reaction was probably calculated for his audience -- namely, me.  In other words, I doubt it bothered him as much as he let on, but he seemed to have a need to prove that it bothered him.  It's sad, his posturing, largely because it indicates to me his own lack of comfort with himself and his emotions.  His teen years won't be very easy -- especially for his parents -- if he's always working to prove himself by talking himself up to be tougher than he really is.  Trouble trouble.  To say that he has grown up too fast is, for me, a way of expressing sadness at these new developments in him that I do consider unfortunate and unnecessary.  They're developments of a form of self-hood, but an unsteady articulation of it that makes me worry for him.  He has plenty enough going for him without this added baggage of trying to be "cool." 

But is that what the expression is about?  The development of undesired traits in little people? 

 

Finnspiration...

...is what I'm calling this decision to revisit my blog after the birth of my son.  In fact, Finn is sitting next to me now, watching me type, fascinated, apparently, by the movements of my fingers.  He's supposed to be playing with one of his light-up toys -- the kind that makes noises too when pressed -- but somehow I've won out over technology as the more interesting thing to discover for now.  For now.   

Duncan's watching us too, his head sandwiched between my thigh and the Bumbo -- the plastic contraption that allows Finn to sit up as a 4.5 month old baby  There hasn't been too much interaction between the two just yet.  A few tepid sniffs on Duncan's part, and some fur-grasping on Finn's part, as well as some interested gazes.  But a budding friendship?  Doubtful just yet. 

What we'll do for the afternoon is anyone's guess.  The primary learning curve in my life these days is my never-ending quest to figure out how to entertain a baby.  One month, I'm learning how to entertain a 3-month old.  This month, a 4-month old.  Since he keeps developing, the gig keeps shifting.  Things that made him laugh last month are old news now, yet my continuing lack of sleep challenges my creativity in figuring out best baby practices.  Today, he even put a stop to our walks in the park.  While every other mother I passed was strolling her baby contentedly in the stroller, my baby was in arms, due to a small revolt against the stroller that he managed about halfway around the track.  I got a number of knowing smirks and more disapproving glances as I pushed an empty stroller along and carried Finn.  Of course, today was also the day that I decided to depart from the counterclockwise direction taken by ninety percent of the walkers.  Going clockwise, Finn and I, as we played out the fussy little drama of getting into and out of the stroller, were quite public.  A minor comedy on the trail.

Despite the challenges and the lack of sleep, the great shift in my life has been amazing.  I know that's a bland choice of word, but I don't quite know how to describe this new phase without resorting to cliches and tired adjectives.  My best comparison for having Finn in my life is to say that it's similar to a rush of love in youth.  The newness, the sense of obsession over every detail of the beloved, the replaying of scenes in the mind, the starry eyed belief in the beloved's absolute perfection....  All of these things play out again in relationship with my child, but with a stability, a groundedness and sacredness that wasn't there in those first loves.  I can see why people talk about their kids to the exclusion of other topics; in fact, I've sinned as much around other cat lovers in discussing Duncan, so that particular habit isn't totally new.  But I also understand now why people default to pictures of their kids instead of themselves when they post their Facebook profiles.  I hated that habit for a long time since it hid the person I wanted to reconnect with.  But the thing is, the love for your child is so big that you feel defined by it.  The love is like a loudly played symphony, richly composed and able to mute out many other aspects of your life.  You can't separate yourself from or imagine yourself outside of that love.  Or at least, that's how it seems to work with me, and I get the feeling that I'm part of a standard majority.  I mean, that's basic biology, right?  To love your child with such intensity?  From my limited experience, this feels like such a perfect love, and when I first tasted it, I got to thinking about the fact that someone must have loved me like this once too.  Someone must have slipped into that creamy, no-holds-barred adoration that makes women breathily stop me to ask, "Do you just sit there and stare at him sometimes?"  But somewhere in the journey of parenthood, that feeling must mature into another sort of love, because I don't find my mother still gazing helplessly into my eyes.  Sure, she still spoils me rotten -- she baked cookies for me just last week -- but I wonder what happens to that love.  I mean, in its own infancy, it's so big that it just cracks your heart open, and you wonder where the capacity to love like that emerged in you.  But it evolves too, I know.  It's dynamic.  I just wonder how that process works.

I wonder, too, if it's possible to learn to bring that love to bear on the world.  Can I let this feast of love become instructive?  Granted, the innocence of a baby allows for that love to fan itself into great flames.  I think we see babies as the sum of their potential and the best of our own parts.  They inherit the dreams we haven't quite fulfilled.  They are ideals.  They have no grasp of language with which to contradict our misgivings about them, and so we can go on foolishly, helplessly in love with all that they represent.  And the pull of those feelings is hard to resist, not simply for the baby's parents, but for many humans.  So many people, I've found out, love a baby.  But if those are the conditions that drive us to love love love a baby, then how can we extend that love toward others in our lives?  Others whose agendas are mature and recognizable?  Others who have hurt us?  Others who don't beam back our unadulterated (note the word "adult" there) love, allowing it to deepen even further?  The gift of loving a baby is a gift of grace.  I'd like to learn to incorporate that grace more fully into my life.  But I see the challenge of doing so all too clearly.  What's possible in this regard?

My angel wakes!  Writing is done!

 

There's nothing like having female friends who like to cook.  Tonight Heather Bell (who goes by both names since we also have a good friend named Heather Graves -- you just have to pronounce it quickly like it's one name, and it'll make sense) cooked up a yummy stir-fry of various veggies and hosted us in her teeny apartment.  She's amazing at maximizing space.  She manages to fit an oversized sofa and loveseat, a keyboard on a stand, a bookcase, several lamps and fountains, a coffee table, her laptop and entire DVD collection in one very small apartment-sized living room.  It never feels cramped, just cozy.  I don't know how she does it.  She's absolutely gifted, with a great sense of spatial design.  I think she's European at heart.

I brought over a chocolate mousse from one of my Nigella cookbooks.  I love Nigella's recipes, and this is one of the few that doesn't rely on bacon.  But it does rely on an overdose of sugar-laden foods, so she makes up for her usual meat-based decadence in other ways.

On the workfront, I've got very good news.  I've been tapped to take over the summer Paris program beginning this upcoming academic year.  I really hope it comes to fruition.  It's such a random inheritance but also very much what I've wanted all along through academia.  This means I'll be doing admin and going to Paris for 4 weeks at a stretch during the summers.  In other news, Loyola is also opening a new line of hire, tenure track, that I'm encouraged to apply for this coming academic year.  Now my big hurdle is to finish my diss.  So I'm writing, writing away -- but it's so scary all the while!

Jesse and I finally made it to visit his sister in Chicago. Damn, was it cold! Ridiculously cold, as in... there's no need for that sort of cold on the planet unless you're living in an ice field! I can't quite recall why Missoula seemed so temperate at the time, but it did. The cold there was completely manageable, whereas this Chicago cold was simply depressing.

But it seemed like a great city otherwise. If I were making a chronicle of my life through pictures, the next set would include Jesse and me at the Crescent City Classic this past Saturday. I of course didn't run the whole 10K, but I did run much more of it than I anticipated, and I even beat Jesse by a full minute. Ha! While I'm not rescinding any of my earlier complaints about New Orleans, I'll also say that the morning was one of those magical moments in NOLA when I was really proud to live here. So many people turned out for such a gorgeous morning, and bands followed the crowd through the whole route. We ran under a canopy of live oaks, and some folks came out in costume. Others just strolled along pulling kegs of beer in little red wagons. All in all, it just felt so good to be moving so much so early in the morning. Makes me want to finish up this coffee and enjoy the lovely morning budding just beyond my door. To the park, I believe....

Things that crack me up... or is this a fear-induced hysteria??

I was commenting on a student's short response paper and trying to connect with him by using a specific example to make my point. Knowing he's kind of an edgy music student who works at our local independent theater, I used the band Jane's Addiction in my example. So after he read my commentary, he approached me after class and asked if I liked the band. I of course responded in the affirmative, having been quite a Jane's Addiction fan in my day, and he asked if I had seen Perry Farrell when he came to NOLA a few months back. "No," I said, "But I did see him with Porno for Pyros awhile back. Let's see... I think that was 1996. So yeah, I saw him, but 12 years ago." I don't think my student even paused at this remark, but sheesh, he must have been... what, 6 years old at the time? He did proceed to tell me that his first concert was an Aerosmith concert when he was 4, but I just found myself derailed by the notion that I was going to concerts while these guys were in Little League. Ah, the gulf widens between us every year.

I wanted to pull a quote from my friend Wendy's blog. She's quoting Loren Eiseley here:
"In some of us a child--lost, strayed off the beaten path--goes wandering to the end of time while we, in another garb, grow up, marry or seduce, have children, hold jobs, or sit in movies, and refuse to answer our mail. Or, by contrast, we haunt our mailboxes, impelled by some strange anticipation of a message that will never come. 'A man,' Thoreau has commented, 'needs only to be turned around once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost.'

"...We cling to a time and a place because without them man is lost...it brings stray cats running over endless miles, and birds homing from the ends of the earth...I once saw, on a flower pot in my own living room, the efforts of a field mouse to build a remembered field..."

Ah, I thought these were beautiful, found myself taken with the sweetness of these lines, the very truth of them. Why do I haunt my mailbox -- why have I always haunted my mailbox? In search of an answer to a question I haven't yet asked? In search of a message that recognizes and summons my own uniqueness and directs the course of my life? That haunt is such a familiar routine that email has only worsened. I've found peace in the days when for some reason or other I've been forced to limit my endless checking. And even though there's no great cosmic game involved, I must feel on some level as though there is, or else I wouldn't keep returning so often with hopeful anticipation. Like I'm looking for a compass from the divine.

Then the clinging to a time and place -- also a familiar idea, but in a hazier way. My problem with NOLA perhaps arises from an opposite perspective. I can recall another city that I knew before this one, but the architecture is of a theatrical sort that I won't restore. I'll explain: I used to ride down Magazine Street on the back of my then-boyfriend's bike on afternoons, holding up a broomstick like it was a lance, and we would sing together one of those militaristic ditties that ends in "Charge!" Or I recall being with the same boyfriend on a crowded streetcar once, when he stood up and gave the oxygen-mask soliloquy that stewardesses give before take-off. Most folks just rolled their eyes or looked out the window, waiting for their stop, but I was folded over laughing. I also remember interviewing a local voodoo priestess and her husband for a school essay and going back to visit just for the sake of pleasantries. The priestess made me pancakes one Sunday morning, and her husband told me stories about his own initiation into voodoo in the Caribbean as a young man. A local priest made him a drink once that turned him invisible, or so he said. These were the days when I would meet the same boyfriend in a bar on Bourbon Street each night when he got off work. One night, I was stopped by the bouncer of a strip club who asked if I wanted a job. I considered the offer seriously but eventually turned it down. That's a New Orleans I recall, but it's worlds away from here, from me. The New Orleans I live in now is a heavier place, still humming with the percussion of insect wings and steaming up with heat just like it always did. I can see the remembered city shifting about in this New Orleans where I now live, but it's a city I won't revisit. It's not a pre-K city or a post-K city. It's a much more personal landscape than that, and it's a dream that NOLA can still facilitate, but it would be the work of other bohemian visionaries to create.

Maybe that's the problem. My NOLA today is still so saturated with the vivid dream of the old that any new life pales in comparison. How can a neighborhood association meeting dare to compete with climbing high into Louisiana live oaks by moonlight? And the new life, the pale life, isn't well facilitated by New Orleans today. This city facilitates well the other, dreamier, riskier adventure, but it isn't like Austin, say. There aren't public pools or other civic recreation opportunities. No good public schools, no midwife on every corner. No bike lanes, no vegetarian restaurants. No food co-ops, no recycling. It's not a city so much for progressive-minded adults. It may have been a fantastic jungle playground for my younger self, but it no longer nurtures the person I want to become.

I have no qualms with my old self or the city I once lived in. I like to flip through the mental photographs of it and remember the lightheartedness, the adventures, and the stranger, darker nooks of the city I sometimes occupied. But as for what to build now, goodness. Let's say I were a bird. I might feel that there weren't enough sticks for me to gather to build a sound nest. My nest would be floppy, risky and unstable, held together by lesser materials. I live a pressboard life, and I'd like to gain more solid footing!

Well, perhaps I'll work through it. But I wonder, is it possible to carve out an adult life in the city of one's youth? A fulfilling life, especially if your city is New Orleans? I feel enough nostalgia for the place, certainly, but that's not enough! What's enough is solid footing. Can I gain that here?

The worst of the hormones have finally passed, and the sadness has taken on a much duller edge now. Thank God! This sort of sadness is much easier to handle. I'm truly amazed at what the body does to prepare itself for childbirth. I see the process having happened in myself twice now. Like I said earlier, giving birth seems to me a biological imperative; my body responds to pregnancy by creating an emotional environment in which I feel a sense of dire urgency to have that baby. What a wild, wild ride -- one that's both unexpected and overwhelming. In the couple of days following the d&c, the hormones continued to rage, and then they subsided. I could track the progress through my own stages of grief dulling to sadness. So strange. What will probably happen now is that I'll carry a manageable sadness that flares up into something uglier during my next period. That was the process last time too.

Watching yourself deflate makes you question your commitment to the idea. Was I indeed ready to be a parent? I think so. I certainly felt like it at the time, though I'm now resolved to whatever outcome life eventually brings. What I dread most is the surge and crash of another miscarriage. The hormonal ride is truly exhausting, and the bursting of that dream affects everyone who wanted to invest in the life of the child -- my husband, my parents, and our families and friends.

But as I said, things are moving on. Jesse and I are starting to look at boats for the summer. With his new job, he doesn't have much time for travel, but we could easily take weekends to explore the waterways of Louisiana. More on that fantasy next time, as the plot develops.

I didn't meant for this blog to become a confessional when I picked it up again, though that seems to have happened anyway. The d&c went fine on Tuesday, better actually than I expected. I'm not in any pain, and bleeding is minimal. This is a better experience than the Cytotec-induced procedure that I had to undergo in September to expel the contents of the last miscarriage.

Emotionally, the miscarriage process is much harder than I expected. I was always pretty ambivalent about having kids till I found out that I was pregnant last summer. There's really nothing to rev up the hormones, though, like... well... like the biological process of pregnancy! It's like I took off at 90mph into the land of wanting a baby, thanks to all those hormones. And I'm still there. After the last miscarriage, I felt like I eventually settled back down into my normal ambivalence, even though grieving the loss shook me to the core. It hurt much more than I ever would have thought, but once I had moved on, I had moved on. And then boom. Without even trying, we were pregnant again. And then came all the hormones and the strange surging, overwhelming desire to have a child. I can't explain that desire other than that it must be a sort of biological imperative. It's a sense of urgency that I never would have expected to feel. And when that urgency goes unmet, well... that's where I am now. In recovery, you might say.

It's a weird place. Now that I've found out that my body isn't so good at doing something fairly crucial, from a biological perspective, it seems that my self-esteem has been shaken. I mean, how can you suck at having babies? Anybody, it seems, any body can have a baby. But not my body. Why not? This is the part that's akin to yelling at God, and it doesn't do any good to rant about the unfairness of who does and does not get to bear children. But I indulge myself a little anyway. I have friends who've had abortions, and I think about that, and it sucks that their bodies are apparently quite capable of producing babies that they didn't want, while my body can't produce a baby that I do want. Of course, none of us has approached that point aloud, nor do I think it will ever come up, though I imagine the thought has crossed their minds as well. Such a strange and divisive secret... Anyway, I know that everyone has their own share of trauma to bear, but I'm just not doing well with this one. On a deep, irrational level that only time will talk me out of, I feel like a failure as a human. There's no comforting that wound. It'll just take time. And perhaps eventually my body can make a child, but I don't trust that to happen right now.

There's more. I know the root of my own ambivalence. It's that I long for a life of adventure that I don't think children will afford me. But what adventures have I even had here in NOLA? Not many, just the dull, slow comeback of living in a post-K city. I'm simply lost here. There's no baby. Jesse is more interesting in managing our funds for things beyond travel, and looking at the numbers, I know he's right to be responsible toward our goals of retirement and getting our house fixed. The budget is limited. But egads, my life feels so... empty. Empty womb, empty calendar. Nothing to dream about. No little person, no big adventure. There's a way out of this muck, and it's got something to do with changing my perspective, I'm sure of it. But I don't know what needs changing -- empowerment? Something that leads to me making fulfilling decisions... but what?