shifts

The sudden onset of CM this past week, the kind you dream of when trying to conceive in your 40s, is making me feel, well, like shit actually.

I have not had a period since Della, except what I thought was one right after she was born (about 6 weeks after).  Somehow, indications that it might be imminent made me feel so incredibly sad, not PMS blue, but existential sad... a mark of leaving this particular part of my journey maybe, very reluctantly leaving her babyhood, the specter of re-entering hormonal wackitude....

My periods have always been painfully intense and troublesome and I have not missed them one bit. But more than that, I have not missed the hyper awareness of The Cycle and my focus on where I was in my cycle at any given time and what it could possibly mean for our attempts at family building. I have not missed that perpetual obsessive awareness, that compulsive and acute awareness. That particular way of marking time, especially the cliff-drop connection of time passing to mid-40s infertility, well,

yeah.

I have not missed it at all.

So.

I've also been having trouble with my guts again, after a long stretch of miraculous calm.
The Miraculous Calm came about after quitting gluten and dairy.  I have had so few episodes of IBS in the past 3 years I could count them on two hands. But lately, things have shifted so I have been having more and more trouble.

This has knocked me down more a few pegs too-- nothing has impacted my life in a more limiting way than IBS. No, not my introversion. Not my fear of public speaking. But my IBS. It sucks rocks.

Of course, the return of the mucous, and the return of the IBS may be related-- hormonal shifts cause all sorts of collateral shifts in other body systems and functions.

But I immediately cut my diet back down to the bare minimum. Anything I suspected as a trigger is gone for now (except my one cup of pretty dilute tea). So no chicken, no turmeric, no carageenan. None of my beloved Udi gluten free bread (it has traces of corn in it, a known trigger for me).

Yes, things are *calmer*, but I am hungry.  Hungry mostly to be able to stand down, and to once again believe and trust that I am back into a remissiony stage of this thing.


In a further attempt at rebalancing, I got myself to my beloved acupuncturist this week for the first time since Della emerged.

Taking action like that made me feel that I was doing something to make a difference, to take back control. The IBS blues shifted ever so slightly, and I seem to be tolerating my new digestive enzyme supplement well (always a surprise; I suck at supplements).

But the CM blues, those are in full complicated swing, and differently symbolic, hugely messed up and tangled with IF and my age and.... so those I need to learn to be compassionate about, even while I want to kneel on it and force it to shift via the sheer force of intellectual override.

I'm starting to suspect that intellectual override  = unicorns
I'm just sayin'.