I'm Okay, You're Okay

For as long as I can remember, I've been in the business of convincing other people that I'm fine. Sure, my life has its ups and downs, and there may be difficult moments, but on the whole, I'm a-okay. Don't worry about me. This is a useful skill to have, as I'm generally good at deflecting others' concern, at making them laugh and feel at ease, lest my darker feelings make them uncomfortable. But in addition to being useful, it's also been taken at times to the level of the ridiculous. I've spent a lot of energy (and money, if I'm being honest) trying to convince various therapist types over the years that everything was copacetic, and often succeeded--shame on both of us!--when the fact that I was so invested in giving off this appearance was probably what we needed to be working on.

I'm making it sound as though putting a positive spin on everything and a happy face on myself is some Mother-Teresa undertaking, designed to spare other people worry, but it's also very much about preserving myself. I don't like to sit in the dark places, for fear that I won't ever see light again. I find that prospect very, very scary. I always felt, back in my single days, that the best cure for a painful breakup was another guy to focus on. And I realize that that's how some people cope, by letting their unconscious parts process the gloom while their conscious parts move forward, but I don't know that said processing always fully takes place. And so, for at least this one post, I'm just going to lay out how I feel, without worrying about entertaining you or making you laugh or posting a cute picture to sum it all up. Yes, I already have a list of reasons I'm glad not to be pregnant on the back burner, but as most of me is so very not-glad, I'm going to go with that for today.

Because of how quickly this starter journey toward parenthood ended, and how even more quickly it started to seem in-doubt, I feel less as though I've lost a baby, and more as though the pregnancy is what was lost. There was this highly exclusive club, from which my exclusion was beyond my understanding, and the door had finally, magically, swung open. Membership privileges included feeling special and important, as though I needed to be protected because my cargo was so precious. And then that same door slammed in my face. As I think about it, it reminds me a little of the transition from 6th to 7th grade, when I went from being popular to being shunned by the social powers that were. I didn't know what I had done to no longer merit favored status, but I wanted so desperately to claw my way back in. Losing this pregnancy, and this baby, also feels sort of like being stood up by a blind date--a sort of anonymous rejection that you can't really pin on anyone in particular, because you wouldn't know the guy if you saw him.

The other thing is that, without even trying, I started to form little attachments to various pregnancy milestones. So I'll be just over 10 weeks along by the time we leave Paris, which means I can tell people a couple weeks after. I'll be this pregnant at Thanksgiving, this pregnant at Christmas, our baby will most likely be a Pisces, and this many months younger than my brother's little boy and these friends' babies. I was finally going to be a part of this, had a map laid out for the months ahead. And the naming? Forget about it; N had to ask me to slow down the barrage of suggestions. I should know better than to think anything's for sure in a pregnancy (or a life), but I'm a planner, and I was starting to put down roots.

And now, I'm left back where we started, feeling both empty and a little more optimistic that we'll eventually get pregnant and stay that way. But not yet.