Della at 2

This I know

I began the day early. Della is NOT adjusting to the time change, so we are up at 4, and stay up too late (well into fussyland) and oh, it will be nice once we get it together and sleep enough again.

I walked downtown, through frosted everything, 19 degrees...
I voted.

I used to live in upstate New York, in an era that included old fashioned mechanical voting booths.  Little levers to swivel down for each candidate with a satisfying click, and a giant lever that whooshed and ca-changed, took the tally, zeroed the levers, and opened the curtain in a wildly dramatic way....

Today, I filled in circles like an old school standardized test but with a black felt tip, not a #2 pencil.
I fed my ballot into a machine.

And I walked back, sunshine just barely reaching the tops of the trees, and was home by 8am.

Today has been full of anxious buzz.  My mind doing me no favors by worrying worrying worrying.

Ok folks, so here's the truth.
I have a vested emotional and intellectual interest in the outcome of this election.
But...
But I also have the ability to do many things... I can make my voice heard. I can march on washington. I can lobby and rally, call and whine, take action, civilly disobey. I can vote.  And so can you.

I may not believe the same things you do
I may not think the same things you do
You may have voted differently than I did
But up until Della, I would have fought and died for your right to free speech, free expression.

Now I have Della, and I am not quite so quick to give up my life, however,
the point here is

anxious? yes,
but with perspective too

I walked into and out of my polling place in 5 minutes.
How lucky am I, that I CAN vote, and that I live in a town where, as far as I know, there is no bullying. There is no broken touch screen bullshit.  There is no line around the corner. I am so so so incredibly lucky. And luckier too, because I know it.

US *In which, I wax political*

Us.

No,
not US and THEM
Just:  Us.

Have you seen an image of earth from space? A little blue marble, in the middle of a whole lot of mystery. It's just US folks.  Us. We're all in this together.

The person we elect tomorrow has an immense and unbelievably difficult and challenging job. An extraordinary job.
A terrifying job.
A job with responsibility for caring for everyone: the sick, the old, the young, the rich, the poor.

As you make your choice, please, think about us, all of us.

Think about inclusivity rather than exclusivity.

We are all in the same boat, even if it rarely feels that way.

I wish we could trade divisiveness for togetherness, without the aid of foreign threat.
I wish somehow we could just see that we are all in this together.


As we stood in the cold, I stuck a pro choice sticker on my baby and my husband asked, so you are choosing for her? And I said, no.  Pro choice is all about maintaining choice, it allows her to choose whatever is right for her.

Inclusivity.

Please vote.

'nuff said.

Sacred

Today, perusing Pink Coyote's blog, I came across this title:
"Know That You Are Sacred"

which I immediately read as:

Know That You Are Scared.

Yes, I said.
Yes.
But not in the same ways I used to be.

wildness

rain against the window and blowing in from the north right now.
Here in NH we are due to have rain and wind, but nothing alarming.
But the news is very very scary, and
I'm holding hope for all of you for a safe few days, especially those out there in the more direct path, or those of you under the wide swath of collateral weather.

I remember when I was little, standing on some rocks while the remnants of a hurricane whipped up waves in Long Island Sound. That storm was just strong enough to create wild waves, and wild wind. I remember the taste of salt, and the strange warm push of air, and the feel of barnacled rock under my feet.

40 years later, I cannot imagine standing there...
even being this much bigger, and in some ways stronger
because now, in so many ways wiser
and in so many ways more aware of the bad things that could happen

crazy light, the transition from wanting to having

Mo's new miracle baby, and Della's upcoming 2 year birthday have had me really thinking hard again about the bizarre and oddly difficult transition from full-time IF struggle to parenting.

First, let me be clear:  "Difficult" does NOT mean bad.

Let me explain.
I got used to being in the midst of the struggle. Every day, every night, every waking moment. I got used to the ebb and flow of the process of cd1, baseline scan, follicle counts, cysts or stimulation drugs, ultrasounds, injections, prayers while watching those little voids tucked into clusters in the midst of my innards, praying for them to grow, not too fast! please, all at once, same pace, same size.  I got used to seeing a big one and worrying. Seeing too few and worrying. Living from ultrasound to ultrasound, blood work to blood work.  When when luck would have it, I even got used to egg retrieval. When luck would have it, waiting for counts. When luck would have it, fertilization reports. When luck would have it, transfer. Interminable 2 week waits. Progesterone. Pee sticks. Negatives. Failures.

I also got used to a life that revolved around early morning appointments, injections of refrigerated equivalent of liquid gold. Liquid hope.
I got used to the struggle.
I got used to the regimented and intensely private lifestyle of IF and IVFfing.
And on some level, I got used to the failure.

When I read of someone else's cycle resulting in a negative, or heartbreaking miscarriage, I never EVER think of them as having FAILED.  And yet, with every one of mine, I felt like it was me who was failing. I remember apologizing, as if I had made it not work.  I was the old one, afterall. I was the one who waited too long. I was the one whose body did not respond like so many other people's. I was the one whose ovaries kicked out tiny follicle counts, often just over the limit to stay on the IVF path. And it was my body, mine, that somehow could not get pregnant. I felt, somehow, that I was responsible.

I confess, I'm slightly shamed by my own hypocrisy. My own double standard. 

My first pregnancy, I was stunned. It was from a conversion from an IVF cycle to IUI, a lead follicle messing things up.  I had no hope of it working. Cried my way through the insemination.
And then, suddenly and miraculously pregnant.
And then, numbers of weeks later, belly already rounding and hard, just as suddenly, not.

As soon as I could, I was back in-- cycling however they would let us.
Cycling and failing. Cycling and failing.
Failing, in fact, enough, that our old clinic would not cycle with us any more.
With Della, it was our hail mary.
It was a new clinic.
It was going to be Our Last Cycle (or so I say, who knows what I would have done to try again, or again, or again).
New places to drive to.
New phlebotomists to get to know.
New ultrasound protocols.
New new new.
But at the heart of it, it was the same old dance of injections, blood work, ultrasounds, numbers...
The first pee stick read was negative.
That was familiar too.
Then, it was not the same old dance.
Hours and hours after I peed on that stick, the faintest of faint lines had emerged:I was pregnant.
Bucking all odds, moon shot, crazy lucky, statistically LOTTO-winning, lightning striking.

And now, I have this perfect little person in my life who calls me Momma.

I have not yet learned to trust this, the way I trusted that.
That process, IVFfing, was something I could not believe I was doing (over and over and over and over), but it became so familiar to me.
Me as Momma? Not so much.  Each day I wake amazed. I know I have said this, but I really mean it.
I wake and worry some day I will wake up and I will discover to my horror (but perhaps not to my surprise) that I have dreamed this whole thing. This is too good to be true (knock wood, salt over shoulder, run around under a ladder backwards carrying a black cat).

So, some part of me wants to write to Mo and say: hey sweet and lovely lady, for some of us, not all of us, the transition from TRYING (and failing and trying and failing and trying...) to HAVING is as surreal as if we woke up next to a unicorn.
Be gentle with yourself as you try to learn this new way of being.
The new way of NOT struggling.
This new way of holding something miraculous and precious and singular and magnificent, in the crazy light of the wee hours with no sleep and no desire to close your eyes, because you don't dare close them, just in case you wake up and find it was all a dream.
And don't be surprised if, two years down the line, you find yourself in the crazy light of the wee hours, with no where near enough sleep, staring at this miraculous and precious and singular and magnificent being, stretched out long across the bed,  and feeling you don't dare close your eyes, because you don't want to wake up and find it was all a dream.

sentence(s)

"That one? That pillow is Della's."

Nigh on 2 and holy moly, language explosion time.
And moody.
And specific.
And inflexible.
And delightful.
So much person packed into that tiny body, oh my.


I'm watching clouds gather in wild waves up there,
lumps and wings, undulations...
worried about the confluence of coming storms as we head into next week.

The sky was bluest blue this morning, and the oak trees, truly, are showing off now that the maples have done there thing, and only a few yellow ash? beech? are holding leaves on the hillsides.

We are down to evergreens and oaks, mostly.
And crimson sumac.
And suddenly the anatomy of the hills is visible again.