#Microblog Mondays: Many worlds

I'm no physicist (despite occasional appearances to the contrary), and so I can't speak to its plausibility, but I've always found the Many Worlds theory compelling stuff. In addition to seeking an explanation for the wonkiness of quantum mechanics, it suggests that with the existence of these alternate worlds that branch off from ours as time expands at different rates in different places, 'all possibilities are realized'.

Think about that for a second: do you realize what it means? It means (my social scientist brain is extrapolating here; allow me the poetic licence) that anything you've imagined as possible has actually occurred.

It means that someplace I'm still tramping through the island jungles of Oceania. Someplace I'm a CEO of something or other, wearing tailored suits and doing whatever it is CEOs do all day. Someplace I'm living out my fascination with carpentry, slowly turning wooden spindles to soft, delicate curves. Someplace I never set out to see the world at all. Someplace I'm a 40 year old woman who owns Hello Kitty soap she considers too adorable to actually use (Oh wait, that actually happened here...)

It also means someplace my 4.5 year old son is playing amiably with my one year old daughter. Someplace S is alive and growing and laughing in something other than the breeze that sways the trees.

Someplace, when people ask 'Is this your first?', I don't stutter, or meekly voice a 'yes' while silently thinking 'the fourth I've carried in my womb, the second I've birthed, but only the first I've held pink and screaming and alive'.

And then today, on a beautiful summer's day walking through the park, delighting in my daughter's discovery of bugs and bare feet in grass and the exploratory eating of said grass, I also realize that if this Many Worlds theory is true, there is someplace I never had life lessons that taught me not only how precious and fleeting these delights are, but that they, or the sight of a swollen belly, might pierce the heart of a passing stranger, someone less lucky than I. Someone who I was not so long ago. It's hard to know that in my very joy lies someone else's pain; for I too have felt that heartache.

And wearily, I wonder why it seems to be the inevitable way of the world that only with the painful, been-there-done-that knowledge of direct experience can we truly achieve such compassion and sensitivity for others. But then, maybe there's another world where that's different too.

Full of possibility

Written as part of Mel's Microblog Mondays. Check it out here to participate.
 

Twelve months, a thousand thoughts but few words

There is simply no way that mere words could adequately capture all the fear and joy and tumult and change that 2014 held for our family.

So I won't even try.

One thing's for sure though; if there were any confusion that existed between dreams and reality, if there existed a gap between the two, for all the hoping and dreaming that sustained us in the early, scary months of 2014, for all the transformations required of us and our expectations, for all the tortuous moments when it seemed our dreams were lost...For all of that, none of the dreams could come anywhere close to the rich and beautiful reality.

This is what I will remember of 2014.

I'll share a few little images of our holiday season. And so all that remains is for me to thank you for being there with us and to wish you beautiful things in 2015. I wish for you the fulfilment of dreams, but if they cannot be fulfilled, let the reality be beautiful and the change and growth bring joy.

#Microblog Mondays: Amateur hour

We're unpacking boxes, some of which, given our vagabond ways of days past, have been in storage forever.

She'll soon be into that, my mother - here for a week to help us settle in - says gleefully. (I suspect she's seeking karmic retribution for my hellian toddler ways.)

But she may have a point. Much as it, erm...made me feel stabby frustrated me when smugly pointed out by the rampantly fertile in days past, there's probably lots we don't yet appreciate about the tangible, hardcore realities of having a kid around the house. Not yet.

Before, we could casually, unthinkingly arrange our home with purely aesthetic considerations in mind; display the many treasured items from our travels and adults-only lifestyle of days past. Beautiful, breakable objets d'art. Books with thousands of fascinating, tear-able pages. A universe of off-limits delights for tiny, exploring hands and mouths...  

As first time parents, we slid in under the wire. We are old. But still, we're relative amateurs. We have so much still to learn, (a prospect that excites rather than daunts).

It's true; she'll be into everything and wreaking havoc before we know what hit us.

And that'll be the happiest loss of property I can possibly imagine.

Strictly upper shelf stuff from here on in.

Written as part of Mel's Microblog Mondays. Check it out here to participate.

#Microblog Mondays: Family of four

'How are the three of you doing?' 

'The three of you'; they say it so innocuously.

Or, 'Is this your first?'. An innocent query from a passerby. I stumble, pause for a second too long. Guilt. Sadness. Pride. Uncertainty. Love. So much love. How do you reply?

I have become resigned - after so long spent loudly and furiously grieving - to the fact that people can't won't don't acknowledge or remember our first born. Though to H and I, this is a family of four.

He is there in his sister’s sparkling eyes; in her secret dreaming smiles.

He is there in his parents’ impossible-to-realize determination to let no moment go unnoticed, unappreciated, uncelebrated. We want to stop and savour; to capture everything.

For babies grow so fast, you know. Except when they don’t. He never will.

And yet he is here. We are a family of four, but one of us - a son, a brother - will always be missing.

Written as part of Mel's Microblog Mondays. Check it out here to participate.

Four years, still like yesterday

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

                                                      

i fear no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

 

                           ~ E.E. Cummings 

 

 

Source.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You are loved and missed every day sweet boy, and woven into the tapestry of our days in innumerable, magical ways. We will always be grateful for you. We will never stop wishing you could have stayed. We wish you had the chance to meet your little sister. (Perhaps you have.) We wish she would grow to know you. (We will do our best to make sure she does.)

It's not me, it's you

I think I mentioned that the holidays, while largely beautiful and relaxing and contemplative, also brought some moments of bitterness. Courtesy of our own family, in fact.

By way of the briefest of summaries, we've struggled with how to maintain family relationships with some of our relatives over the last 3+ years, when their callous, indifferent or demanding reactions to our loss(es) and experiences of infertility have placed extra strain and hurt on us in a time when instead we should have been seeking support and compassion. I knew that a subsequent pregnancy would compound this tension in so many ways. I've alluded to it as one of the reasons why I was reticent about sharing our exciting (but still scary) news for so long.

The visits with H's family over the last three weeks were intended as a kind of olive branch, a renewed effort on our part to let things go and start afresh (albeit with reduced expectations: you don't always get the family you want, but they're still family. Aren't they?).

It kind of worked out that way, but also, not really very much at all. Two vignettes, brought to you from the suffocating depths of our loving extended family homefires:

1) During a reunion in which H and I were making genuine efforts to let bygones be bygones, on the cusp of a new year with all the symbolism that implied, my mother-in-law wanted to revisit the topic of why we had sent 'hurtful' emails to her, oh...two odd years ago? That's right, apparently we hurt her when (you're gonna love this) we sent an email indicating that while we understood their concern for us, some forms of..ahem, grief management advice (and I'm using this term loosely here) were not welcome. To whit: when, on the first anniversary of S's death, H shared his feelings with his mother, her directive was to 'put it in a drawer and forget about it'. Yes, she referred to my son as an it. Still though, who were we, in our naivety, to imagine that we knew what we needed or to have the audacity to ask for it? That was hurtful to her, and she insisted that new year's day was the time to clear the air. New year or not, I guess a bitch of a mother-in-law tiger doesn't change it's stripes.

2) Lest you think that my own side of the family is immune from such gaffs in grieving etiquette (is there a manual for this? Because there should be), I present my sister. Things have not been great between us since, among other things, she blandly stated, 'Why should I grieve for your son? I didn't know him'. Since, on my first meeting with her after my loss - when I also met her son born a mere few days after S should have been - she indicated that she saw no reason to be sensitive in proffering her new babe because 'My first priority is my baby, and if you can't deal with that it's your problem'. Yeah, she is sensitivity personified, that woman. I'm not actually sure what her deal is, given that she had the same happy childhood as I. Anyway, she wanted the holidays to be a time when to reach out to those she so evidently loves and cares for, with the message that 'Family is so important, and as a parent this becomes all the more true when you have kids of your own'. She is extremely family oriented. Obviously. Here's what I would do with her version of 'family values'. Take them and delete, delete, delete not suitable for some audiences!. Just wait 'til she finds out about the little seedling. She's the type who will suddenly have all the love in the world for us.

As I am sure you are all too aware - though I admit to being deeply envious of some of you who seem to have such warm, understanding support around you - dealing with other people, and with community life in general, can be one of the hardest things about being in this already crappy ALI club.

There have been some break ups. The stupidity, insensitivity or just plain careless, this-is-no-big-deal-at-least-it-wasn't-a-real-baby attitudes to my grief on the parts of some people were enough to make me re-evaluate a few 'friend'ships. (This is to say nothing of the people who dumped us, initially on the pretense of 'giving us space', but later because grief is fucking hard, ugly work and they weren't up to the task; or so I can assume. Most just sort of disappeared, never proffering even a lame excuse, and never to return.) I give people lots of chances. If you've hurt me, I always try to talk openly, honestly and calmly about how your behaviour makes me feel (hence the 'hurtful' email to my mother-in-law), leaving a chance to clear the air. However, if your response to those attempts proves even more self-absorbed, sometimes you gotta know when to throw in the towel, if only for self-preservation.

But these people are my relatives. Unfortunately, things aren't so simple here. I can't break up with them. So I come here to vent, to shake a raging fist at the universe for bestowing me with such a frankly useless support system, and to beg your patience with me as I do.

And I know what they say about relationships being hard work, and how it takes two, and yadda, yadda, yadda. That's all totally true. I've worked hard over the past few years.

But still, I'm pretty sure it's not me. It's them.

The ties that bind. Like, literally. Source.

If you've faced similar insensitivities, what do you do to manage? How do you learn to bite your tongue, turn the other cheek, and keep that pasted-on smile upturned?

Empathy for the seals (Or, how I narcissistically connect everything to my reproductive challenges)

So I'm back from my travels. I've missed and look forward to catching up on all your news, but I must say, it's been good to have time away from screens of any kind. Away from any thoughts related to my reproductive system, babies, or lack thereof. Well, almost any thoughts.

And just like that, it's now officially spring (and the start of another year in my life); but here in the UK we've been hit with a gust of glacial temperatures and snow the like of which I've not seen in all my years of association with these isles. Of course as a Canadian, I find all the hoopla faintly humorous, (it's really just a few inches people), but the fact is they are simply not equipped to deal with snow of any real quantity here.  

Anyway, the weather made for a very atmospheric experience of the beautiful and forlorn Northumberland coast, where we hiked the coastal path last week. It seemed to evoke the history of the peoples that built the magnificent castles and abbeys studded along the beaches, conjuring the mournful Gaelic tunes which lie deep within the heritage I inherit on my mother's side.

And speaking of my mother, the long walks in conditions not conducive to extended conversations provided other hidden benefit besides atmosphere.

Here's the thing: H and I spend so much time together, and even, because of the nature of our work, away from others, that it's easy for me to forget the casual way in which  patronizing and wildly unrealistic 'helpful' comments about the state of our childlessness, the things we should do to change (or my favourite, accept) that state, and even the ways we should grieve our son, can so easily be tossed around by those who don't understand the life-altering depth of the infertility and loss experience. As such, my skills at deflecting these comments, at placing protective boundaries, are not as finely honed as they might be. It's worth noting though how tiring it can be to stay 'up' all the time for the benefit of others who can't and don't understand, and who worry for you because they probably think your behaviour is well beyond the margins of normal coping. Because man, as much as I love my mother, is it tiring. And so isolating.

I know all mother/daughter relationships are fraught, with or without the challenges and uncertainties and feelings of inadequacy that come with infertility and loss. But in moments like those last week, I was reminded of the inevitable divide, the very natural inabilities to relate (on both sides), that have developed as the space between our respective journeys to motherhood widens.

But having said that, the time outdoors was wonderful and invigorating and calming, as it always is for me.

Aside from the gorgeous views, all the freshly caught crab we could eat in cosy pubs along the way, and the soothing sound of the waves, what did we encounter on our hiking expedition? While walking along the coastal path to one of the aforementioned castle ruins (pictured below), we came across a scene that nearly broke my heart. A beautiful seal pup, clearly not more than a few weeks old, had been washed ashore by the violent waves. He was deposited a very long way from the water's edge, his mother nowhere in sight, and had suffered an injury to his eye, which was heavily swollen shut and releasing a sickly looking fluid. He kept lifting his little flapper to shield and sooth the eye, while annoying hikers who I would have liked to beat chase away with a stick wanted to come and 'pet' him. Apparently, under severe weather conditions, this is not unheard of. I couldn't bear the thought of this little guy floundering, in need of care, so far from his natural habitat, or of his mother, out there in the waves, lamenting his loss. Big, fat missing-my-son, longing-for-a-living-baby tears threatened as I imagined this. Go on, tell me I'm anthropomorphizing creatures whose reality in the natural world is a brutal one. I already know.

As soon as we reached the nearest car park, we put a call in to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, who were listed as the contact point in case of discovery of a sick or injured seal. (Why no Parks Warden, I don't know). Five telephone calls - from the RSPCA (who said they couldn't help because by the time we finally got through to their call centre they couldn't be sure of the pup's exact location anymore - thank you RSPCA!), to the National Seal Rescue to the Scarborough Sealife Centre to British Sea Divers' Mammal Rescue - and many angst-ridden hours later, I finally got through to someone who agreed to send out a scout who would locate and treat the seal pup. So back in my flat and already re-packing for my urban idyll, I had only to hope this story ended as happily as other, reassuring but even more surprising cases of seal pup rescue. I hope they found that little guy and got him back to the water. I can even dream that he was reunited with his mother.

On reflection, I don't know what worried me more about this episode though: the thought of this lonesome baby seal suffering far from the care of its mother, or the fact that I sometimes now find it easier to empathize with and relate to the predicaments of a seal mama and baby than relate to my own (human) family.

A glimpse of H and I, pre-seal discovery

An out-of-step tradition

Here's a confession: we still have our Christmas tree up.  (I know it's a little late for a Christmas post, bear with me...). This is not a situation born of laziness or apathy; rather, it's become something of a family tradition, this happily being out of step with the ceaseless demands of a forward moving calendar.

It started in our first real Christmas together as a couple. (In the previous year, our relationship was only a few months old, and we hadn't ventured forth into the ultimate and life altering realization that we would become, totally, each other's family; and so we spent our respective holidays with our respective families of origin, in different countries and with one huge phone bill at the end). That second year, I had a guest position teaching in the US, and a perk of that role was accommodation in a beautiful - and huge - Arts and Crafts style home in a rather more wealthy suburb of the city than anything my upbringing had ever exposed me to. Despite all the luxuries integral to the building, such as a custom-made little bar and buffet area adjacent to the dining room and open brick fireplace, the university had furnished the house for the barest of our needs, and thus the place had a vacant, slightly forlorn, weirdly grandiose elegance about it. We moved in, newly man and wife, at the end of November, and thus Christmas decorating was a means for us not only to celebrate that first season together, but to fill some of that echoing vastness. In that house, the tree stayed up until sometime in February. And somehow, we just continued from there...

It also has something to do, I suppose, with the fact that we observe the tradition typical in Austria, which is to erect and decorate the tree on Christmas eve. I'm a big fan of the holiday season in all its kitschyness, baking of garish desserts, playing of music that would never get a passing glance on our otherwise more fashionable playlist, and generally decking halls to the hilt. So the wait 'til the 24th, when all around us trees are going up from late November onwards, is a test of my patience. I like to get the maximum of enjoyment from our tree for as long as possible after that.

S has had a strong connection to, and presence on our tree almost from the beginning. My mom has established a tradition, in the last two holidays, of gifting us a special ornament for him, and these always take pride of place.This year's ornament is a sweet little giraffe that we all three picked out together; we all felt sure it would be the sort of thing S, with his chubby two year old's hands, would have loved. It was purchased at St Paul's Cathedral, where my mother joined us for a particularly poignant service to remember lost babies, organised by this wonderful organisation. It was a very special afternoon for us. Here's a look at the ornament gracing the tree.

A special memory

The tree will, finally, have to come down this weekend. It's got a sort of sad, Charlie Brown look to it now, having lost a good portion of its needles. And besides, the string of cheapy lights that we bought from the pound shop (because we're never sure if we'll be in the same country, with the same voltage and power outlets from one year to the next, and it's not worth it to buy 'good' ones), gave out yesterday, so the tree's twinkliness is also diminished. Thus, as much pleasure as it brings us, he'll have to go. And forward we move. The giraffe may stay out of the boxes to be packed away though. He's just too cute.