NOPE

Enter into Club Denial

Denial is such a luxe place.

All the comfiest furniture. All the top shelf liquors.

You are not going to want to leave.

By you, I mean, me.

I’ve been chillin’ in the Lounge of Denial for years — having been battered by back-to-back traumas.

What to do when shit gets real

These traumas have “titles” — like ladies-in-waiting.

Marriage is one (don’t let anyone tell you that marriage isn’t trauma, even if it is a good one. Attaching another person wholesale to your life is hard work).

Miscarriage, the much-ignored female experience of being pregnant hooray! (for me, hooray) only to soon have terror cramps, bleeding, emergency appointment, an empty space inside a sonogram, grave faces, silence, pain and more blood.

Infertility is another — whereby a woman who has finally fucking plundered the forest of dating / marriage, and climbed the Mountains of Expectation to decide for herself whether she wants to have children or not, only to have the Acid of Infertility thrown on her.

Then there’s fertility treatments, in which a woman turns herself into a shit-storm chemistry experiment, while also trying to go to work and smile.

Children is a fun trauma — in which a subset of adult people opt to exit regular life for an alternate reality in which hopelessly adorable (but only to you) creatures consume your every thought and scrap of energy without any regard for you or your needs (like bathing or eating).

This new reality is void of any societal safety net of support, other than whatever your immediate family is willing to provide (often not much) and the scraps you get from a cobbled-together network of equally exhausted and shellshocked fellow parents.

Adoption trauma (in this case, via foster care) is a side-effect (sometimes knee-jerk) of infertility trauma multiplied by blind pressures of wanting children. This “selfless” dreamworld comes chockablock with all kinds of brutal surprises — too many to name.

That Being Said…

There’s the glass is half full side of everything that I am continually reminded: gratitude matters. Count my blessings everyday. See all the good in my life. Think positive and to BE HAPPY.

Children really are beautiful and marriage to Colin is terrific. Infertility is a passing phase. Miscarriage is common. We are not the only people to have adopted. Support is out there. We are LOVED.

And yet…

The practice is to train in not following the thoughts, not in getting rid of thought altogether. That would be impossible.
—Pema Chödrön

Do Not Go Gently

It has taken courage to allow myself to sit with it — to experience my feelings and to be with them. To NOT cover them up. To allow myself to feel.

Because pushing them down doesn’t make them go away.

Those feelings ferment into resentment. Discouragement. Anger. Bullying. And a coldness that leads to detachment.

Self-protection that backfires.

Right on the spot, through practice, we can get very familiar with the barriers that we put up around our hearts and around our whole being.

We can become intimate with just how we hide out, doze off, freeze up. And that intimacy, coming to know these barriers so well, is what begins to dismantle them.

Amazingly, when we give them our full attention they start to fall apart.

—Pema Chödrön

I try to forgive myself, these days, if I can.

For years, denial became my only protection as I got up each morning to face the day.

It wasn’t about pretending.

It was about setting things aside in order to be able to just keep up, and keep going.

---