Menopause and Infertility

So hey there loves.
Yesterday was menopause day, aka CD 366. One full year with no period.

The past year has been filled with chin pimples and fading hair, skin that is thinning everywhere, showing the impact of gravity and estrogen loss.

As someone who lived, it seemed, cycle to cycle for so many years.  A late cycle would bring hope then torment and sadness. The year before last was a year of long periods, of wondering more than once if maybe, just maybe........ but then a panic would set it, what if? and what if I had a loss? And I think that might have happened but I did not check with sticks or temping... just waited things out.

Once, my first long cycle, I was sure I was pregnant. And the mixture of emotions was profound.  Amazement.  Fury. Hope. Fear. and then, when the bleeding started, such immense loss.  And then, the next time, I mostly felt loss, that I was officially out of the zone of possibility, no way for a good outcome even if... and to feel my body changing, to see it changing.... well, some changes are easier than others.

So today marks perhaps the first day of not wondering.
A feeling of in between. No longer that.  Not yet wholly and fully this.

Maiden, mother, crone. and the middle one holy moly mo-cro.
I am both.

not a day goes by where I don't feel wonder, even if it is wonder and madness.

So here we are.  in the middle of the middle.

big love and gratitude

Time is a funny thing, isn't it? It goes too slowly or too quickly. And then suddenly it feels like I drop out of the maelstrom and months have passed.

There is no single day that passes when I don't think about this space. How it has held me, saved me, kept me from going insane. How you, the you that read back then, and those of you who stop by and say hello, the friends I have made, and the blogs I still visit from time to time to see if there is any new news... you are a family to me. A family that understands things that no one else really can, and I want to say thank you.

I am not going anywhere, just feeling very big gratitude right now.
For not having to go this alone.

THANK YOU
big love,
Kate

7

Somehow through miracles bigger than I will ever understand, Della is 7 today. She is immense and beautiful. Smart and funny. Snarky and tender and spirited. She is magical and complicated. Sensitive.
She is not yet independent or resilient or patient or empathetic. She is an only child who wants and believes she needs full immersion intensity, attention, interaction, responsiveness. School is hard, structure is not hard but noise is, and chaos, and no space for quiet. She arrives home tired and hungry. And needing to be internal. So in she goes, but near by.  barks out needs: Toast!  More toast! while her screen saves her with magical worlds the way mine once did with the original Star Trek and no I am not kidding.

I have rarely known anyone so often and deeply disappointed and disapppointable. Or someone with as lovely and contagious a smile and laugh and true silliness.  She knows we are here,  but aches for us to be closer. No longer wants kisses, will negotiate for hugs.

parenting in the time of consent is curious.  Yes it is your body but we NEED to wash it.

and me, oh I am missing the snuggles. I am missing being the throw pillow that held her weight even if not her attention. And as I try to reconnect with my own independence. My own patience. My own resilience. I am strung deep and hard into empathy and anxiousness, my desire to avoid discomfort a true pathology that gets in the way of joy and experience.  And I am navigating like a new driver with a standard transmission, too many pedals, too abrupt a change causes a lurch or a stall or a fearfilled rolling backwards as I forget all I know, emergency brake, flashers, ignition, my ability to walk or sit still or wait or think. there is a perpetual immediacy that I feel in parenting, and am learning (SLOWLY) to create gaps.  longer and longer.  between a thing and a response while still being responsive.  I can say, let me think about that. I can say, hm. I'm not sure.

Parenting means parenting me too.  this weirdness of finding out all the areas I've glosssed over with make do skills.  la la la avoidance. la la la.   well hello there unfinished business, guess I will scooch over and make some more room for you at this big ole table of other things I need to address.    learning and learning and relearning. not always comfortable.  no, that's a lie.  not comfortable nearly ever.   I reposted something on FB today, a great quote posted by someone who posts great quotes. 

Robert Kaplan

“You know, sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage. Just literally twenty seconds of just embarrassing bravery. And I promise you, something great will come of it.”
Benjamin Mee, We Bought a Zoo

 I cannot promise the same.  Something great may not come of it.  But as I am learning my tiny brave steps.  my tiny insane moments of courage.  I can say that they are their own tiny greatness.  Look, I can say, look. I am trying.  I am pushing beyond what I knew or know. I am thinking of things differently.  I am willing to try to change.   Panic still has fun with me. A recent Lyme diagnosis has not been resolved with doxy. I wonder as I move forward who I am and what will stay, what will go. and how I will adjust to what my body feels like whatever that turns out to be. the same way I wonder who I am and what will stay in the wake of so many years of struggling with panic. I know I am still here. but also ever evolving. ever changing.

Last night, I tucked a sleeping Della into bed after reading, and I felt teary.  A deep ache for time passed and passing.  the preciousness of it all. and the impossibility of the adage to treasure and remember every moment. Some moments suck and are not treasured. Many go unnoticed in the act of being and doing and folding and working. Almost none can be remembered for me.  I know I held that baby full time for nearly a year. And yet, my memory is nearly a dream. the curve of her cheek. her ear. Her eyebrows. the way her chin dimples. Now stretched into a strong 7 year old who cartwheels in the living room, dances, and cries every single time she needs a bath. That, at least, remains the same. A touchpoint that connects the beginning to the now.

 

My real books just came.

My books, my real books just came. Not the proofs. Not proof #2 or #3 or #4.
Holy shit people, my book is on Amazon.

This, for me, is beyond huge. Getting this work out into the world feels crucial, and yet, getting it out into the world means telling my story out loud.
Funny thing about this: folks say YAY! what's your book about?
and I choke.
I am happy. I am sad. I am complicated and complex. This is a heart wrenching and yet cathartic and healing thing to do, to offer, to expose.

So. I am being gentle with myself, and hoping that the book finds its way into the hands that need it, and that my words, my journey, somehow offer solace to someone else.


***

A Field Guide to Grief: If you’ve lost your partner to suicide

Available now in paperback, or Kindle
by Kate Johnson
Link:http://amzn.com/1511433442

 

Losing a partner or spouse to suicide is shattering. This small book speaks directly to the survivor, starting from the beginning of the grief journey. Offering compassion and acknowledgment, survival tools and suggestions, these are kind and wise words from someone who’s been there.

 “if you have lost a partner to suicide, you will find a new friend named kate in these pages. out of the hard-won wisdom of her own loss, she offers you this field guide. a field guide, truly, as the pages feel like a field… breathable, open, + paradoxically peaceful. the rhythm of it all works beautifully between the ebb of uncluttered white space + flow of helpful words… a needed + good book for anyone walking through this heart-rending loss.” –rachel awes, psychologist, author, + art playgroundist rachelawes.com

“…a lovely resource for folks who are fresh into big pain. I’ll be happy to recommend this [book] to my clients.” –Dr. Martha Jo Atkins honors the deeply spiritual experience of death by providing compassionate witness to the dying, and support for healing transformation to the bereaved. marthaatkins.com

My note to you: This is a difficult book. A sad book. A real book informed by love and understanding that in grief, there is no time to sift through case studies and anecdotes. I get right down to the core. It is about acute grief and navigating the immediate experience of loss. It is about living with grief and living with loss and the loss of identity. It is about self protection and permission. It is about survival. My own experience was one of breath-by-breath choices, to keep moving forward, to not lose myself, to choose to heal and go on, over and over and over again. If you need this book, I am so sorry. But if you need this book, I am so glad you have found your way here,  and I hope beyond hope that my words offer you solace.

 

If you are not in grief and want to support me by buying a book, please do (and thank you!). Please consider donating it to an organization or individual who works with folks in acute grief. A funeral home, for example… I could have used this book the second day if not the first. Someone else may too.

rose colored glasses

Hello world.
here we are in January, and I am sitting at my desk having just cleaned the living room as much as I could in one hour.
One hour to take the tree down and vacuum the billion needles from the carpet, to push back, pile up, drag, dust, and make a dent in the squalor that just happens, magically, when I am not constantly tending.

It is rather horrifying how fast things turn to shit, and also just what "clean" looks like now-- proving, truly, that everything is relative.

I was so wanting to "finish" the job, but the job, I think (I know), is unfinishable.

This is about progress, and then holding it or returning to it, or something. But this is not, apparently, about truly cleaning or truly finishing.

So, fueled by warmed up tea and honeyed up toast, here I am. Needing to return to workwork but after a truly aggravating day yesterday work-wise where I discovered that the website I am working on looks like shit too, not even in a living room way, well.
today will be about starting over.
But. Not quite yet.


I wanted to say that
Little miss Della is a fierce companion, and she is every bit the mini teenager with stubborn righteousness that is both fabulous and maddening and
oh
she is so tender.

I know my tenderness and am surprised by my fierceness.
I know her fierceness and am surprised by her tenderness.

this is about staying open to what is, not what I think I know, or what I want or wanted for me or for anyone... this is about this moment. this joy. this fierce tenderness and tender fierceness. this is about a million kinds of love. this is about taking notice of what is working with such intense gratitude. this is about taking notice of the ordinary moments that are truly extraordinary.  this is about reveling, it really is.

I posted the following images on facebook but realize that my incremental updates have been there of late... but I am pulling back from that particular soul sucking vortex, not completely because apparently I am addicted to seeing other people's lives through rose colored glasses... but pulling back, yes, to better appreciate and revel in my own fabulous imperfect reality.
So I will leave with you a few things that make me very very very very very happy-- no rose colored glasses necessary.

Best. dad. ever.

Journeys: buddha and ammo boxes

Driving up route 145 north out of colebrook, you'd pass Dostie's furniture on the right.  A long low building sided in vertical boards of a medium blue. Tune up shops, trailers and homes fall away quickly as the road heads uphill faster than you can downshift. 

The drive takes you up one of the most beautiful winding drives in New Hampshire, up and up and up. Up through Stewartstown to Clarksville toward Pittsburg.

For the past half hour, before I lost signal, I'd been listening to NPR, coming in tiny aggravating bits, a TED show on storytelling. I hear enough that affirms what I know, how stories inform us, connect us, express our humanness... and even though the sporadic signal is long since gone, an npr-ish narrator remains.

Driving up route 145 out of colebrook...

but it is me,

I am driving,

and I am driving to the cemetery.

This story was supposed to begin like this:

3 ammo boxes, a buddha and some bells.

An empty bag from Dunkin Donuts.

An empty car seat.

A baggie of stale cheerios.

A small painting of a winter sky.

A well-past prime brown eyed susan.

I am in good company I guess, confused company. Bit and pieces that express my life in this instant. This journey today has been a long one, and it has been a long one, and it will be a long one. I realized a while back that grief is a long term partner. It is patient enough to wait out any amount of denial and diversion. It comes up, coughs politely into its hand, just often enough to not forget. Occasionally it moves a doorway so you slam into a wall that was not there the day before, but that, these many years later, just happens sometimes.

I am here with two boxes of Jeff's things. Things I could not throw away but cannot keep. Things that were personal, intimate. Things that were his. I've added some symbolic things too, a fountain pen, an abacus, 3 fly fishing flies (a wooly bugger, blue winged olive and a royal wulff). I've added a knot of keys from an old truck. 3 stones. And a note I wrote with a very shaky hand the night before.

The things are in two ammo boxes, a momentary act of brilliance on my part, waterproof,  compact, and speaking directly to Jeff's love of old military equipment, and utilitarian design. He used to have one in his truck for change and the notebook where he fastidiously recorded every gallon of gas purchased, every oil change, every mile driven.

The third box came with my ebay purchase, and I will give it to Peter, the Sexton, whose history in the armed forces has just been revealed to me.

The buddha is in place of a marker I cannot afford.

And the bells, I am not sure what they are for. Movement maybe, movement. Change. 

And the flower, if all goes well, will come up again and again and again, spreading its pot bound roots deep into the nearly impenetrable soil that has been loosened, in this moment, by 2 and a half hours of Peter's patient digging.

Peter is a farmer and an angel. He has dug a million holes. Fence posts and grave markers. The hole where we stand is just one of those million, but the angel in him says that this is the only one that matters, the only one that matters this way, today.

We put the boxes in the bottom and slowly fill the hole with handfuls of soil and rocks while we fill the air with conversation that stretches nearly as far as the sky.

We talk of town politics and god and vietnam, of guns and hospitals, of his wife, and love, and hope.

We talk of things we agree on and things about which we disagree, but I can see how he sees it, if I were standing in his shoes.

He raises heritage chickens and I am raising a spirited child, and his kids are long grown.

We place the buddha and the plant. He places the carefully cut sod.  I arrange rocks to hold the bells which do not meet with my hopes for either clear ringing movement or of heavy-bottomed groundedness. Oh well. There are a million things, I know, that are better in theory than in practice.

And then, my nose fully burned, and my hair blown wild by a wind that has kept up with our conversation, we make our way back up the hill. He finds and hands me a turkey feather. We talk about skunks and the divots they've left everywhere in the grass.

With a hug, we part, and I walk to my car, stinking of the stale beer I spilled from a can I picked up as trash when I first arrived...my eyes seeking sign of cousins of the bees that flew in fast, as soon as my doors opened, and would not get out until ignored fully, with all the doors open, while I moved boxes and buddha and bells to the site.

It has been an hour and a half. And it has been much longer than that. And I am still 4 hours from home.

The light has changed, and now the hillsides show more glorious color-- the air has cleared maybe, and the wind is no longer tossing every leaf upside down.

145 is more beautiful north to south and I creep along, happy that no one is behind me, as I look out over acres of mountain sides, flush with fall color, and the black spears of some sort of evergreen.

I drive home through rain in franconia, hard enough to look like dark coming on.

The down and down and toward home.

Just as it is truly dark, I get out of the car to throw out my donut bag,  and my legs are wobbly from the journey.

It feels like so much longer than  a day.

I look up at the windows of our apartment, the twinkle lights strung perfectly imperfectly across the glass. It is like coming back from the moon, I imagine, welcoming and strange. And I am both lighter and heavier than I was when I left.

two years ago

then:

and now:

(dancing with tea)