the road to nowhere is paved with good intentions

Really, truly, my friends – I do have the best of intentions when it comes to writing more. It’s just that it’s summer here, and our Prairie summers are short and must therefore be savoured and absorbed with great gusto. And then there’s, you know, life. I’m trying to get back to the blissful unscheduled existence I had a while back, but it’s tricky, cause I really do like doing everything I have scheduled. I think I just need support staff – someone to handle the grocery shopping and house cleaning and garden weeding and planning and organizing – and then I will be liberated to catch up on blog posts and emails and the like.

Yes, that sounds awfully good right about now.

My sister’s FIL did pass away, and while it has been hard on everyone, I think they are doing as well as can be expected. My nephew is doing ok with it although like all grieving people, he will be going through a process for quite a while yet. I was able to spend the day with him and his little brother the day that his grandpa died, and it feels good to know that I could help in some way, even if it did just involve playing in the yard and going on a shopping expedition for sidewalk chalk, washable markers and popsicles.

I am starting to look pregnant. For reals. I have to say that I get completely humbled and amazed at least once a day at it all, and Manny is no doubt becoming quite sick of me exclaiming, “Dude! I look PREGNANT!” in a tone of complete awe. I am 22 weeks today and seem to have hit the stage where I cannot possibly eat enough. I need to eat around the clock, like I was on antibiotics or something. Last night when I was going to bed I was just about to turn off the light when I realized I needed to eat. How sad that a homemade wheat-free banana muffin with a thick slab of cream cheese on it has become a sort of a chore.

I have a feeling I’m going to have to start watching myself a bit with my food intake – my ass and belly are the only things that have really gotten bigger, but that could all change in a couple weeks if I keep downing the calorie-rich snacks the way I have been. On the other hand, I have also been eating really well overall – I made a fabulous quinoa-black bean salad last week that provided a number of tasty lunches. If you want the recipe, you can find it here – it is definitely worth making. I skipped their crazy quinoa cooking instructions because I am too lazy – I just used less water, fluffed it with a fork and then chilled it overnight in the fridge before making the salad and it turned out fine. I also omitted the jalapenos because while they would be very delicious, heartburn is currently my mortal enemy and I fear excessive spice. Mild green chilies might have made a good substitute, though. Will try that next time.

Um, boring much, Anna? Here’s even more:

I have been wanting to cut my hair short for the past couple weeks since it got hot. My last haircut wasn’t with my usual person and she left it way too thick, and then I haven’t gotten it cut in about 3 months, so it’s feeling pretty heavy right now. Every week at flamenco class I turn pink like a lobster and fantasize about chopping it all of so it doesn’t make my neck all sweaty, but then I hesitate. Partly because everyone tell me not to cut it (why I even ask is beyond me since I know I look good with short hair and most people I ask have only seen me with a bob or longer hair) and also because I always had it in my mind that I would cut my hair really short when I have my baby. I do like to change my hair as part of big life changes and for some reason I just want to have a super short and cute haircut when I have a new baby. But my sister correctly pointed out that short hair is a lot more work – you can’t just ignore it like you can with my trusty current bob. So I am going to cut it fairly short now and over the summer, and then probably let it return to the bob into the fall and once the baby is born. I am going to get it cut on Thursday and promise pictures unless it’s a total trainwreck. Or maybe especially if it’s a total trainwreck. Although I rarely get truly bad haircuts – the worst one of my life was circa 1989 when the gal spent about 15 minutes cutting and 45 minutes crimping it with a huge crimping iron and hairspraying and teasing it into oblivion, and even that wasn’t so bad once I washed it. I was heavily into The Cure at that point, but had no desire to actually resemble Robert Smith.

I am dying to go swimming but I am loathe to spend big money on a maternity bathing suit. In an attempt to find a bargain that might work, I tried on some bikinis the other day and not only was the sight of my pale white belly not exactly attractive, I also had trouble with the tops providing adequate coverage for my veiny, swollen boobs. Going up sizes didn’t help either because the band around the chest was too loose, so I don’t really know what to do. Manny might find it sexy to see me displaying ample boobage but I would prefer to avoid the very real possibility of flashing my browner-by-the-day areolas to the world at large.

I have had some deep thoughts lately but need to work harder on formulating them into coherent blog posts. One of the big things has been around identity, and one of the other big things that has been plaguing me is how weird I find it that once I started to feel the wee bit moving around, my anxiety actually increased. Like when I haven’t felt any kicks in a while, I just sit still and start jiggling my belly until I feel a thump. Or I eat something or drink a glass of juice. It occurred to me this morning that I’m starting to get into this pattern where I am deliberately bugging my baby to make myself feel better, and that seems a bit wrong to me. So I am going to work on finding other ways to manage my anxiety when it comes rather than just harassing this little being. Not all the time, but at least some of the time.

Manny and I hit a garage sale on Saturday that was all baby and kid stuff, and we scored some pretty sweet deals. We picked up a glider rocker for $20 – it is oak and in really good shape and its only flaw is a fairly ugly cushion. Fortunately, said cushion just velcroes onto the chair and will be very easy to re-cover. I also got 6 sleepers, 5 very sweet onesies, a couple blankets and a little fleece bunting thing that my oldest nephew had but my sister has since gotten rid of – for some reason, I found myself getting almost weepy that I was going to get to put my own baby into something I had lugged my nephew around in. It is really sinking in that there is a baby coming to us.

no, really. what do YOU think?

A while ago I mentioned that I was invited to write an article about blogging for IAAC’s quarterly magazine, Creating Families. And because I am lazy totally value your opinion, I want to hear from you about your experience in the ALI (adoption, loss, infertility) blogosphere. I may work some of your responses into the article, but I will totally ask you individually for permission before doing that.

For me, blogging has partly been a way to do something I’ve always wanted to do, but never could do consistently: keep a journal. I have probably half a dozen diaries dating back to elementary school (my first one was a Judy Blume diary filled with quotes from her books and photos of cool 70s kids emoting various things ranging from self-esteem-filled to sexually confused to hurt-and-perplexed-by-the-way-girls-gang-up-on-each-other-at-a-certain-age), but not a single one of them is even close to half filled. Of course, most entries are about despair of one sort or another – boy-related, mostly, though lots of stuff that would now fall under my handy, catch-all “my process” tag. When I take the time to read through some of the stuff I’ve written over the years, I’m struck most often by how incomplete it is – how much of the time I have no idea what I was prattling on about and what was causing me such profound distress. And I think that a big part of why I could never maintain a regular practice of writing down my experiences and my emotions was that, somehow, it was a bit hollow for me. It helped to get it out, but then once it was out, I just moved on.

Blogging, on the other hand, offers me a chance to let it out AND have my ego gratified by people reading and commenting. I’m being flip, of course, but it’s true. But more true is that blogging is a way for me to get out of my own head. I can wrestle with the language and figure out my feelings as I write them down, but what comes back in the comments is not just praise or hollow words of comfort. So often, the responses I get from you all challenge me to look at my own situation differently, to get out of whatever trench I’ve just dug for myself and seem determined to wallow in. Pieces of advice or words of reassurance stay with me, and I find myself passing them on to others when I recognize my own experience in their writing.

The blogosphere, at least our little corner of it, is a place where all the journals and diaries have sprung to life, and started talking to each other, trading secrets and insights. They’ve taken to the moonlit streets in the lovely painting you can see on the header of Stirrup Queens, gathering in large and small groups, offering words of comfort, silent abiding hugs, the darkest gallows humour. They’re celebrating and grieving and planning and acting and making friends. And I often feel like I’ve stumbled out of my house in my pyjamas, rubbing my sleepy eyes, amazed by my luck at being able to find such a wonderful place to belong.

The community that exists here in the ALI blogosphere continues to amaze and astound me – every time I click over to the LFCA, or see a new photo of Cali’s sweet boy, or find myself on the receiving end of wishes of love and support after writing a difficult post, I am both humbled and proud of what we are all creating here. We’re forging a new world, sisters, and most of the time it’s a world I desperately wish more closely resembled the real world.

So I invite anyone reading this to chime in about why you blog, about what it means to be part of this community, about risks or drawbacks of blogging – anything. What would you like to say to fellow infertiles who haven’t discovered the blogosphere, particularly those who are feeling isolated either emotionally or geographically?

I’m also taking this chance to invite you to delurk, if you are indeed lurking. Even if you don’t have a blog and just read, please use this as a chance to introduce yourself and tell me why you read.

new order

Well, internets, it seems things are finally starting to shake down in the mind of annacyclopedia. I’ve had a few realizations about why it’s been hard for me to write since getting knocked up, and I’m really hoping that this will help shake loose a flood or even a steady trickle of words from my brain.  I realized the other day that I was holding back from writing about the pregnancy partly because I don’t think it’s that interesting – I’m no different from any other pregnant woman out there who feels tired, nauseous, incredulous, freaked out, bloated, awe-struck, whatever. But also partly because I was having a blog-dentity crisis.

When I started blogging, I was desperate to find others whose stories were just like mine. I combed the blogrolls, searching for my own story told by someone else. The more similar, the better, I thought. And surprise, surprise – there weren’t very many. I found other DI blogs, which was so great, but nobody had gone through a failed vasectomy reversal and gone straight to DI. To this day I don’t think I’ve found anyone whose story matches mine on those points. But I don’t care anymore, because I very quickly realized that it truly doesn’t matter – that the sense of community and belonging I found here in the blogosphere has little, if anything, to do with how similar someone’s story is to mine. Instead, it’s about something way harder to describe – it’s the heart connections that happen the same way they happen in real life. Mysteriously, instinctively, spontaneously –  through the little jokes that I tell that someone actually gets, or the casual mention by a blogger I already read that they love a particular band, or share a particular interest of mine, or the way a woman I admire to the point of being intimidated gives me a shout-out or sends me a sweet, supportive email out of the blue.  The way some of you have taken the time to tell me that my words have made a difference for you, in some small way. The way the guts of our experience – spiritual, emotional, physical, political, intellectual – get shared either through brilliant, detailed exposition or revealing little aphoristic posts so crammed with truth they leave me breathless for minutes or hours or days. 

If all of this sounds incredibly self-centred, it is. For me, blogging has been about finding a place where I belong, where I can tell my own story and be heard and understood. I do it because it is about me.  And in some way, I think that’s true of all of us. At the very least, that’s what draws me in – the appeal of women all over the world, trying to understand themselves and their lives by writing their own stories and releasing them like a cage of doves. 

Somehow, getting knocked up and trying to write about it, I forgot all that. I got caught in the belief that my blog is for other people who might need it, and I feared hurting those women who were like me at the beginning – desperate for a mirror of their own experiences. I didn’t want to have the story someone needed to hear, only to have them show up on my blog and be faced with a post about about stretch marks and the alarming growth of my ass. I didn’t want to let that woman down.

How’s that for wanky and delusional and self-aggrandizing?

I’ve realized that my blog is for telling my story. Plain and simple. That my story now includes being pregnant and hopefully becoming a mother to a healthy and adorable baby. And while I don’t have an obligation to tell it, I do have a desire to tell it, as much for myself as for anyone else. My blog archives are some of the most precious things in my life – it is so powerful being able to look back at a record of who I have been, of what I’ve come through, of what has healed and what remains to be healed.

I realized, too, that while I don’t struggle with feelings of guilt about being pregnant, I was wrestling with some weird stuff about talking about being pregnant. I know that everyone who doesn’t get or stay pregnant easily has their moments of anger and sadness over others’ pregnancies; I’ve had plenty of such moments myself. For some reason, I was taking that on, and trying to protect those of you who are still waiting and trying and hoping. Again with the self-aggrandizing.  I finally remembered that even though I’ve had times when hearing someone else’s good news has been painful, there are lots of times when it’s brought me joy and hope, and that my reactions are largely random, i.e. that sometimes I’m able to be thrilled for a virtual stranger and yet am plunged into despair over my own sister’s pregnancy announcement. And also that all of you dear readers have free will and can click away anytime you want, with my blessing and support. 

So this post is to declare a new order here on my blog. That although I probably will never talk about pregnancy symptoms in great detail, I will no longer be holding back. I’m claiming this space as my own even though it always was. I just forgot. 

Blog-dentity crisis over.

travel plans

First off, all is well. I’ve been quiet lately cause I don’t know what to write anymore. I don’t know how to write about what’s going on with me (email or comment if you haven’t read it yet and want the password) without being really, really boring. And since it’s still top-secret, I don’t want to let it all hang out here. I’m also working on setting up a separate blog, but I haven’t yet decided if it will be completely open to people I know in real life or if it will be invite-only, or what. Basically, I’m still letting it sink in, and it’s hard to write while so much energy is going towards digesting the current state of affairs. Kind of like how going for a walk when you are absolutely stuffed with turkey and gravy and potatoes and pie is a really bad idea. You need to give it some time to settle.  So that’s what I’m doing. 

An excellent distraction and yet another excuse for minimal blogging is my upcoming trip out to BC’s Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island. I get out to the Lower Mainland March 11 and probably will be there until the 17 or 18, when we’ll head over to Victoria. So, bloggy peeps, if you are in the area and are so inclined, I’d love to meet you! Ideally, I’d like to arrange a big get together of bloggers – partly because my time is precious and I’d like to see as many of you as I can, and partly because I practically swoon with envy everytime I see a photo of big gatherings of bloggy girls.  I imagine us taking over an awesome cafe somewhere and totally bonding over lattes and chocolate croissants. Can you dig it?

Let me know if you’re interested and we’ll try to find a time that works. I’m still up for doing some individual visits, but since I’ll be visiting family, I need to guard my time with them to some extent. My mom can get a bit pouty if I don’t smother her with my presence during her available hours.

in the spotlight

How do you know you’ve become a lazy blogger? When you miss your own blogoversary. It was on Valentine’s Day, and I had thought a lot about it before it came and then last Saturday I just completely blanked on it. The last year of blogging has been amazing, and I’m so grateful for all of you. I promise I’ll have a real kumbaya session on this sometime soon, really. But for the moment, it seems I’ve prefered to keep a low profile rather than face my glum mood over the state of my life at the moment. Nothing earth shattering by any stretch, but just the profound weariness of keeping body and soul together. And marriage and family and dog and work and support group and yoga and dancing and friendships.  Despite my best intentions, I’ve become sort of busy lately, and when I’m not busy, I’m exhausted from the emotional work of waiting and of life in general. 

I’ve said it before, and no doubt I’ll say it again. Being an adult kind of blows. 

I’ve sort of tipped over into the state of doing too much and not wanting to just be with myself and my true feelings. The quietness and the fuzzy brain I talked about in the last post seem to be precursors to depression and despair for me, and hopefully next time I’ll pay more attention to that. It’s just that it’s so nice to get a break from anxiety or worry or obsession that it’s hard to catch myself as I start slipping into the funk that inevitably follows those times where my brain is turned off.  And I’ve been so aware lately of how much my life has been taken over by my single mindedness – being unable to plan anything more than a month in advance, our finances, my ability to have a conversation.

In many ways, I’ve been feeling a lot like I did when I returned from Japan. Having lived overseas for three years, coming back was really hard. Much, much harder than leaving. Because when I first went to Japan, I expected to feel out of place – I knew who I was, more or less, but naturally it takes time to figure out how to fit in to a new workplace, new culture, new language. But I was bringing myself into that situation, offering myself to the experience, and extending myself compassion when I didn’t know what to do.  Returning was, in so many ways, the exact opposite. Here I was, in my hometown, surrounded by people I’d known for years, in familiar territory. The problem was that I didn’t know who I was anymore. I felt like who I thought I was had been eclipsed by my experience, by my story, by my circumstances.  I felt like I didn’t exist anymore. 

Lately, I feel like I don’t exist anymore. Like all I am is my desire to have a baby and the path I’ve chosen to try to make that happen. Like all I am is this cycle, and then the next one, and the next one. I feel like I’m in a spotlight, unable to see beyond the little puddle of light around me, consisting of acupuncture appointments and cycle days and morning temperatures and the creased foreheads of worried people around me, checking in to see that I’m ok. But beyond that it’s just darkness. Impenetrable and perplexing darkness. 

I don’t mean to say that I’m in the depths of despair. In some ways, that might be easier. Emotions come and go, I know that. But what about my life? What about me? Will I feel whole again?

i’ll take ‘hodge podge’ for $200, please, Alex

Just stumbled across this today – it’s an interesting take on the isolation that comes when people don’t know what to say and therefore say the wrong thing. The author is talking about her experience of breast cancer, but it really resonated with me and my experience of infertility. 

Our darling Mel from Stirrup Queens is a finalist for the Weblog Awards under best medical/health blog. Voting goes from now until the 13th (next Tuesday) and you can vote daily by clicking here and then clicking on Stirrup Queens. Please go everyday until voting ends and let the world know how much we love Mel and her amazing powers of genius, compassion, and insight. 

I’m down slightly off my high of earlier this week, but still feeling pretty good. I have been walking to and from work everyday despite it being tit-numbingly cold here for the past month, plus occasional dog walks, plus flamenco started up again last night, plus I start a new yoga class tonight. So I’m getting lots of exercise and have done fairly well with eating better. I’m trying to be good but not perfect, which is actually harder for me than being perfect, cause I tend to lose control once I have a small amount of something I’m not supposed to have, but I’m happier, it’s easier and in the long term much more sustainable if I can just learn to have  a spoonful of sour cream in my borscht and not use that as an excuse to eat a whole bag of Doritos and a brick of cheese.  We shall see. 

My work is absurdly slow right now – if I wasn’t on a one-year contract, I’d probably get laid off. It doesn’t bode overly well for becoming permanent at the end of the contract, but this work is very seasonal and so far I’m being told to be cautiously optimistic. Fine by me – I’m not in love with this job, but the benefits are amazing and it’s very manageable in terms of work-life balance, and I could actually see myself returning to work with a small child and being able to hack it. Ultimately, I’d like to stay home, but if I go back to work after the first one and get pregnant fairly soon thereafter, I’ll be able to get a second year of maternity leave and then quit after that. Not to get too entitled, but we all support the system and it would be great to be able to take advantage of it when it’s my turn.  Assuming my turn will indeed come. 

The upside of the slow work is that I’m blogging more and answering comments and emails. So you can expect to see more of me around these parts for the next while.  And stay tuned for an exciting event – my 100th post is coming up soon, and I’ll be throwing myself a bit of a party. 

disappointment is too much a part of me

To the person who arrived at my blog by searching the title of this post, I say only this:

Me, too.

where to even begin?

Yeah, I know. I’m a bad, bad blogger. I linger around, commenting on the details of everyone else’s life, but with me, it’s only borscht and surface details once or twice a month. Pathetic. 

Well, it’s not for lack of interesting things going on. I’m not quite sure why I haven’t been posting lately – partly that things were going pretty well for a while and I was busy and distracted and therefore less in need of pouring my guts out, and partly that I had procrastinated for so long and felt so guilty and ashamed and at a loss as to where to jump back in again that it was just too daunting to start writing again. 

Lucky for you, internets, the craptacular-ness has returned. Nothing really serious, just feeling blue and vulnerable and scared and all that.  So let’s bullet, shall we?  There are lots of little things I need to catch you up on. 

• Got my period today and start Clomid tomorrow. Am freaked and excited. Am also dreading possible hormonal nightmare during our first joint family Thanksgiving – Manny’s parents, sister, and BIL and my grandparents, uncle, cousin and her boyfriend. Could be good, could be ugly – 2 old ladies with dementia! Yay! As long as I don’t have a hot flash or crying jag in the middle of it, it will be bearable. I think. 
• Got my period today after a week of hormonal weepiness. Feeling so raw and sad all the time sucks. Especially when I was expecting my period last weekend and kept having crazy pregnant fantasies.”Maybe just one sperm jumped the turnstiles and made it to my egg the one time in the past month we actually had sex! It’s possible, right? Right? RIGHT??????????????”
• Fuck, I hate my mind and her stupid tricks. 
• Read some blog by a donor conceived guy in Australia who used to be totally fine with being donor conceived until he had his own child and now he’s totally against it. Fucking great. Why do I read those things? I have this idea that I need to be compassionate and open my heart to all possibilities and try to hold them all with love and tenderness, but all it really does it make me circle the bowl of doubt and freak out that I might be dooming my future child to a life of torment and anguish. Ugh.
• Support group has first meeting next Tuesday and is going AWESOMELY! I’ve talked to 3 women now and everyone is so happy I’ve made this happen. It’s so good to get that kind of validation from others who are in or have been through the trenches, hearing that they need it and are grateful for the work I’ve done so far. I still haven’t found anyone to facilitate the group, but I’m still trying. I think it’ll be ok either way, but will take a lot of pressure off me if I’m not the one doing it. Must remember to take care of self…
• Women’s circle is also coming together. I met with two women who have been involved in another circle for many years, and they are going to help me create a new one. I’m excited about this and am feeling way more at peace with the uncertainty of it all. It’s all very wide open, which is not something I really excel at, but I’m learning to trust the process. Slowly, though. 
• It’s really fall here – leaves are mostly off the trees, it’s getting colder and colder every day. We might even get snow over the weekend. I like fall but the fact that it precedes a long and miserably cold winter seriously puts a damper on my enjoyment of it. 
• We have tickets to see Neil Young in a couple weeks, and I might go see Feist the night after that, too. There is an absurd amount of good music coming these next few weeks – Bob Dylan is coming in November, I think, but we were planning to be away for that weekend. Too many choices…
• All I want to do right now is drink tea, cuddle my dog, and weep. But I’ll probably get up soon and start cleaning up my house and also hiding all the copies of “Creating Families” and IF books I have lying around. The last thing I need during Thanksgiving dinner is a slightly batty old lady asking me what’s up with that. 

I heart you all. Thank you for not abaondoning me completely. My blog stats are oddly busy considering my totaly flakiness in posting. Will seriously attempt more regular posting in near future. Truly. 

ETA: One more thing – it’s my wedding anniversary today. Four years ago today, Manny and I got married to each other for the second time. The first time was seven years ago last Sunday. Go us! Although I am super lame and can’t find any wedding photos in this computer…

getting real

Well, I didn’t mean to wait a whole week before posting again, but I guess that’s become my habit of late. First off, thank you to everyone who commented on my last post. Your comments have helped me find a bit of balance this last week and touched my heart so much. If I said nothing but “thank you” for the rest of my life, it would be insufficient. You are amazing and have so much wisdom – I’m so grateful that you take the time to share it with me.

I had acupuncture on Tuesday and again on Saturday, and she worked on some emotional points which really helped a huge amount. When she did it on Tuesday, I was still very much in turmoil, and when those needles went into my wrists and between my eyes, it really hurt. But I let some more tears come while I was lying there, and when it was done, I felt so much better. I started to see that some space is a good thing right now, like Shinejil said, and that it is good to be able to work on accepting this path even more before I go any further. Every time there’s a bump in the road, my anger comes back – my anger about why I have to do this, why I can’t be like everyone else. I don’t feel like I need to resolve that anger forever before I get pregnant, but it’s good (she says, with a sigh) to have another go ’round with it. Maybe find a new level of peace with all this.

I have other news, about my support group, and how I have made a lot of progress on it, but have been advised by a very wise woman to slow it down a bit and wait until I sort out what I’m really doing, what my intentions are, and what kind of group I want to create for me.  I’m still working this through – I’m set to have the first meeting September 9, but if I keep going the way I’m going, it will be less than what I haven’t yet allowed myself to dream it could be. And as my friend pointed out, that might prove to be exhausting for me. I kind of think she’s right, and yet I kind of feel called to do something for the community that is more accessible than what she and I briefly discussed. I think there’s a way to do both, either by doing the group as it’s currently conceived and working more slowly to come up with another group, a true women’s circle, which would be more spiritual, more intimate, or by just taking my time and trying to make the group open to everyone, but with a very clear mission, purpose, and boundaries. I think both are possible, although the latter is probably the better option. I can get really caught up in trying to make things right for others that I lose sight of what feels right for me (co-dependent much?) and I think I’ve already started doing that with this group, as it exists in my brain. Just watering things down too much to try not to alienate anyone.

But what my friend is proposing is nothing short of revolutionary. Not to say it hasn’t been done before – it has, by lots of women – but it’s never really been done before by me. I’ve never set out with a clear vision, guided by my heart, and stayed true to that while trying to build something that includes other people. I tend to muddle my way through and adapt, or I tend to do things completely on my own. Taking on the kind of group building she talked about means not only will I need to get right with myself, but I’ll need to be willing to share leadership and ideas and true vulnerability. I’ll need to be honest, truly honest, with myself and with others.

I realized that I have a lot of fear about doing this – what she described as “calling out for my clan” – because you can’t fake it with you clan. They can see through the bullshit anyway, so what’s the point? And as much as I like to think deep thoughts and question the universe and try to grow and evolve spiritually and emotionally, I’m also pretty fond of denial, laziness, and avoidance. And the prospect of being real all the time is pretty daunting right now.

But as my best friend pointed out last night, this is who I am. My spirit has been asking for this, begging, pleading – for years. Even though my ego might be telling me I have a choice, that I can just go back to where things are bland and comfortable, I really don’t. I have to go forward and go through this. And I’m grateful, if a bit begrudgingly.

*WordPress seems to be acting up today, so if this post appears twice, sorry.

Grandmama and Grandpapa

I’ve been stirred up all day by this beautiful post of Mel’s. I tend to read blogs first thing in the morning after I get up, and I’ve just been sitting with all the feelings her post brought up for me. The idea that what we create here can be a lasting imprint of a person’s life and presence – it just went straight to my heart this morning. If you haven’t read Mel’s post, I really encourage you to click over and immerse yourself in her wisdom and her gorgeous words. You know how nice it feels when you can read a post and think, “She said this better than anybody ever could” and feel only resonance and admiration and comfort, and no envy? That’s how I felt reading that post.

The people I want to create an impression of here are my maternal grandparents – my Grandmama and Grandpapa. And I want to create an impression of them as much for myself as for them or for anyone else. Both of them were alcoholics. My mom had a somewhat difficult relationship with them, and we lived in a different city, so I didn’t know them very well. My Grandmama died when I was 2, and my Grandpapa when I was 8.

My mom’s whole side of the family is like a black hole for me – it’s mysterious and seems kind of dangerous. I think pretty much everyone – all her grandparents and aunts and uncles - was alcoholic, and how my mom managed to avoid becoming alcoholic herself is something I can only attribute to her own strength and to grace. Part of the way she dealt with it was distance, both physical and emotional, and to this day, she rarely talks about her family at all.

In contrast is my dad’s family, who pretty much all lived in the same neighbourhood where they grew up, and when I was a kid, we spent a fair bit of time with them, seeing them often and spending all major holidays with them. My grandparents only moved out of their house a few years ago, but until then had lived about 10 blocks from where my grandma grew up. My aunt still lives about halfway between those two spots. And I’m somewhat horrified to report that I find myself not too far away, either. My dad’s family is about as “normal” as it gets – if by normal you mean pretty repressed and WASP-y. My mom says when she first met my dad’s parents it was like she had landed in some kind of Cleaver-ish paradise, where nobody ever got mad, or drunk, or mean. For her, it was wonderful, at least at the start.

For me, growing up and still to this day, it wasn’t so wonderful. I struggle with my grandparents – I have always longed for a true closeness with them. I’ve tried and tried in the past few years to cultivate this, and as far as my grandma goes, I’m working on accepting that it just won’t happen, partly because she herself is just too wounded and can’t open up, and partly because dementia is encroaching on her mind and changing her personality. My grandad has had an amazing blossoming and he and I have become closer than I ever could have imagined would be possible. But my whole relationship with them both will likely always be coloured by my childhood longing for intimacy.

I raise this because this contrast between the two families is a huge part of the sense I have of my Grandmama and Grandpapa. I have few memories of my Grandpapa, and fewer still of my Grandmama. But my mom has said that they would have been different from my other grandparents, if they had lived. That they would have been proud of me, that they would have loved me with enthusiasm and joy, that they would have taken pleasure in me and my sisters. I believe that they would have told me secrets, told jokes, told stories about their own lives in quiet, unguarded moments. I believe they would have been able to be themselves with me, and that I could have been myself with them. I believe we would have been close.

I don’t think they would have been perfect, and in some ways, I’m grateful for having been spared the confusion and sadness of negotiating a relationship with two active alcoholics. Part of the pain of the black hole is just having everything so open. I don’t know what it would have been like to know them now, as an adult with my own sadness and failures and triumphs and joys. I just really have no idea. 

Here’s what I do know: I remember my Grandmama as having a sense of drama, of flamboyance, of fabulousness. In pictures, she’s often wearing dresses with enormous, bright paisleys and flowers on them, smiling gorgeously and holding a drink and a cigarette. I have only faint memories of her, but I have a sense of her voice. A musical voice. In my mind, she’s the kind of grandmother who might have taught me to shave my legs (which my strangely hairless, hippie mother never did) or told me the story of her first love, with all the sexy bits left in.

I remember my Grandpapa, quiet and wry, with a glass of scotch. I remember some sadness about him, that the sadness was closer to the surface for him. I remember him mostly when he was dying of cirrhosis of the liver, the desperation and regret seeping out of him like tears. I remember his brush cut, which always fascinated me. In my mind, he might have been the kind of grandfather who was tough on my boyfriends, the kind of grandfather who slipped me five bucks when my parents weren’t looking and told me to go have fun. (He probably would have been the kind of grandfather who made me go buy smokes for him when I was just barely old enough to walk to the store by myself, but even that kind of makes me happy.) He might have taught me to drive.

All I really know in all this is that I love them, and I miss them. I’m angry that I never got the chance to find out who they were and that they never got the same chance with me. The loss of them is somehow unreal, and I hope, now that IF has taught me how to grieve for lost possibilities, I will find a way to make it real. This post feels like a good start.

Thanks for listening, friends.