http://iamvulnerable.wordpress.com

Please come over and say hello. I will probably keep this blog around but will password protect it sometime in the next while, so please add the new blog to your reader or subscriptions or what have you.

Because last Friday, I found a lump in my left breast.

And this morning, I found out it is a cyst, and nothing more.

In between, I have been terrified. My mind has travelled paths that nobody’s mind should ever have to travel, yet I know that many do. I am so humbled – I know that a number of you who are reading this have had to face the test results coming back the wrong way, the way everyone prays for them not to come back, and I am in awe of your courage and strength to keep going in spite of the fear. I’m not arrogant enough to think that I truly understand what it’s like, but I understand more than I did before.

I have been unable to talk about it. Unable to blog about it. Because the fear was so strong – it stole my voice for a while. It was so scary even to think my thoughts, the bad ones. They came anyway. I kept feeling my pulse because I kept having the sense that my heart was pounding. But it was just the fear, pounding.

Today, I finally shared with a friend. She told me about something from Tibetan Buddhism, meant to be pondered every day: “Life is short. Death can come at any moment. Now I must do something worthwhile.”

Now I must do something worthwhile.

It is all worthwhile, and it never looked so beautiful to me.

What to write about when so much has happened that I have left unrecorded? C is 9.5 months old. It is such a cliche, but I am boggled by how quickly the months go by. It really is stunning.

I am learning to feel settled into this part of life. I’ve realized how much my mind has changed; I no longer have the focus I once had. I can’t fully concentrate on anything anymore – my attention is always divided. Watching a movie or having a conversation, listening to music at the folk festival, trying to make lists of things I need to do – all of it must share space with the attention I’m paying to C, even if he’s upstairs having a sleep. It is a strange feeling in a way, being unable to get straight to a point in conversation because the tangents are irresistible or because I get distracted switching him to the other breast or laughing at him getting stuck under the couch because he can only move backwards right now, or not being quite able to lose myself in a film or even a book because he is always so very present in my mind. It’s a wonderful feeling, but strange. I can barely remember my mind before – it has been taken over so completely that all I know is that it used to be different, and I have a sort of nostalgia for how it used to be, but the warm, syrupy distractedness is so pervasive that I cannot muster frustration or even desire for a change. Probably there is some excellent illustration of this sort of thing in literature but, of course, I cannot retrieve it even if it is somewhere back in the musty stacks of my memory.

I am wondering what to do to earn some money once my maternity leave benefits run out. My last job was a contract which ended shortly before C was born, so I don’t have a job to go back to. And I am not at all interested in going to work full-time and leaving him in childcare for long stretches like that. Between what feels right for me and us as a family, the expense, the stress – it just doesn’t seem worth it. But I’ll need to figure out some way to make some money, since we can’t get by on Manny’s income alone without making some major changes, like moving to a different house. And I really love this house. In hindsight, it would have been wise to have chosen a slightly more affordable house for this very reason, but this house called to us and we answered. Frankly, the way the market has been here, we could easily spend nearly the same as what we spent on this house for something half the size and in no better condition. So for the long haul, this house is perfect for us. We just need to come up with some creative ways for me to contribute financially that won’t include shelling out nearly half of what I make on childcare.

I have some ideas of things to do, and I’m finding it hard to move beyond the idea stage and start making anything happen, though it has just now occurred to me that I don’t have to commit to anything, really. Like, I can do one or more of those things and stop doing any or all of them if they don’t work out. Whew! That is a relief! I tend to be fairly loose with making plans to find employment – generally, I go with the “the Universe will provide when the time is right” sort of approach, and this has worked much better for me in the past than sending my resume out to every conceivable employer. Naturally, I tend to freak out a bit when money gets tight, but in the end, everything works out ok. And of course, if I have to go back to work full-time and put C in daycare, I will. It’s just that without work that is meaningful for me to return to, everything is just a way to pay the bills and so it becomes a lot less interesting to me as a way to spend my days and C’s waking hours. I’m pretty sure I’d feel at least a bit differently if I had work that I loved or even cared about, but I don’t. So for now the plan is for me to find part-time work or ways to work from home so that I can continue to spend my days caring for our family and in the company of the wee creature I love the best in the whole wide world.

Pear Kuchen with Crystallized Ginger and Maple Syrup

I’ve got family visiting and it’s also pretty hot here, so I didn’t feel like turning on the oven, so I’m sharing a photo of this scrumptious thing I made a while back. It was delightful and I can’t wait for pear season to make it again, although it works equally well with peaches, plums, or the fruit of your choice.

But the point of the cake-sharing is not the deliciousness, but rather to celebrate the amazing community we have forged here in the blogosphere. This community has changed my life – and no, I do not exaggerate. I’ve gained strength and hope, I’ve been supported in the dark, raw moments, I’ve made a difference by sharing my own stories. It is amazing and humbling and sustaining to be part of the community, and I’m proud to know each and every one of you. Thank you for being a part of it. And as always, extra special thanks to Mel for being the crust that holds the delicious gingery maple custard of our community together.

Things continue to go well here. C is so wonderful and I am so, so in love with him. It is amazing how deeply in his thrall I am – that I notice every little new thing he does. I am not normally such an observant person, and so it just blows my mind that I can see these tiny little changes in him, in his dexterity, in his awareness. Attachment is so, so powerful.

I’m starting to think that part of my desire to make a fresh start with blogging is linked to my new-found desire for order generally. I used to be very comfortable with a certain amount of disorder, mess, open ended-ness. But something has changed now. I hesitate to call it hormonal, though it may well be – I prefer to think of it as some psychological component of evolution, an extension of the nesting instinct, something to do with keeping my den tidy for my cub. Though it’s not just the house where I seek order – it’s in plans, too. Perhaps the pressures of motherhood have awakened my latent organized self through sheer necessity. When I only have three hours, tops, between naps, I need to be efficient. However, though I crave order, I have yet to achieve it in any real sense. The counter is still covered with toys, bills, notebooks, groceries that have yet to find a home. The floor is perpetually in need of a sweep. And I always have a mental list of at least three things to do each day, but I rarely accomplish more than one.

I do feel like I am scrambling to keep up much of the time, but I am trying to change my thoughts about this. Because every day I have exactly the same amount of time, and it is an illusion and a silly habit to feel like I am constantly behind in everything.

I’ve been struggling, too, with what to do with this space. Obviously, I’m not writing much lately. And I’d like things to be a bit more private for a few reasons – for C’s sake, obviously, and also because I’d like to have an online identity that I can use to comment on blogs outside of the ALI blogosphere. I’m starting to want to stretch my wings a bit, but don’t want my different worlds to collide – e.g. I’m not at all keen on some of my mama friends/acquaintances stumbling upon this blog. Also, I started a Facebook page for my support group and have been posting links to good stuff in the blogosphere, and I realize I’m treading sort of dangerous ground there. Like, “Hey look, here’s the blogroll! It’s great! Oh, but geez, I sure hope you don’t read it too closely and find your way to my blog.”

So, yeah. I can’t really decide what to do. I could go password protected but I did that before and it just didn’t feel quite right. I like to be out in the open. I could unpublish certain posts and edit things like my profile to be more vague about my story. That seems like an awful lot of work. I could close this blog down or password protect it and start fresh somewhere else, which is what I’m leaning towards. I feel sad about not leaving this blog up for new people to read, especially about the DI stuff, cause I know I was voracious about reading other DI blogs when I first started. And then I’m just kind of attached to this blog, this little bit of my life I’ve recorded. It feels like my very own room, you know?

I’m definitely not going to make a decision about this tonight, but it’s been on my mind. I’ve also been thinking about how to come to some kind of balance here in blogland. I read way too many blogs to comment on all of them regularly – I used to be able to keep up with commenting, but no longer. So I don’t know what to do – drop some out of my reader (just feels wrong!) or commit to commenting more (um, impossible, most likely) or continue lurking and feeling guilty for not commenting more often (ugh, for obvious reasons). If I had a cook and a maid and a very devoted personal assistant, I might be able to keep up, but as it is, there seems to be no hope.

Ahh, the modern conundrums. Wish this were easier and we all lived on the same block. And I know this post was incredibly boring, but I welcome your thoughts on what to do with this space.

What if my son ends up hating me because he was conceived through DI? What if all we’ve gone through to have him and to bring us so much happiness ends up bringing him enormous pain? What if what I thought were issues we could work through as a family turn out to be unresolvable and agonizing questions of identity for him?

To be honest, I think about these things a lot less than I once feared I would. Yet they are there. They pop up at odd moments – during diaper changes, when he is sleeping next to me during a long afternoon nap. When people ask who he looks like. When I see kids who look like their dads. When I look at my husband sometimes, with love and awe at how gentle and open and thoughtful he is, and I wonder what might have been. And also when I have the moments of knowing that parenting a baby is really the easy bit, in a way – that it gets harder and more complicated as they grow and have questions and become the people they will become. I sometimes feel daunted by the vastness and possibility of what lies ahead.

A couple years ago, when we were making the decision to build our family through DI, I was consumed with the “what ifs?” – I would read blogs of donor-conceived people who were furious and deeply sad about the circumstances of their conceptions, because I felt I needed to be open to their experience in order to make this choice an informed and responsible one. I would torture myself with all the questions I could not possibly answer except by making choices and living them through. I lived in a space of complete uncertainty – no guarantees that I would become pregnant, that our child would not hate us for making this choice, that we would ever become parents and get to work through any of these issues outside of the neurotic brambles of my mind.

I noticed this past week, after reading through some old posts that had seen some activity recently, that my life has changed dramatically since that time. I no longer live in that tundra of uncertainty. Things are no longer wide open. There are still questions, yes. But many of them now have answers, at least partial answers. I have not left the “what ifs?” behind but I no longer feel that they rule my thoughts the way they once did. Part of that is because I have made the choices and now I must live them out, for better or worse. Part of it is because where there once was fear and anxiety, there is now fear and anxiety and faith.

And part of it is because the pervasive foggy worries of before have been burned away by the brilliant light of after.

What if the story of my son’s conception is just a tiny part of who he will become? What if he is always simply grateful to be living life on this earth, and cares not a fig about how he got here? What if he always knows exactly who he is and where he belongs? What if he is the child who was destined for me, for us? What if all of this is meant to be, in ways I can’t even begin to understand yet?

I wrote this post as part of National Infertility Awareness Week (NIAW) in the US – the Canadian week is later in May – and as part of Project IF over at the ever-brilliant and wonderful Stirrup Queens.

To learn more about infertility go here.