One November morning in 2011, at age forty-six I rolled over and began to reach for the thermometer and froze. The futility of all the paces I’d been putting myself through flooded me. I realized I felt like the mayor of crazy-town.
“I’m a high-functioning mess,” I said to my alarm clock. “I’m so busy trying to do whatever I can to keep my itsy-bitsy-ever-waning shred of fertility hope alive, and I’m ignoring reality.”
That morning, I stopped tracking my temperature. The thermometer and little notebook now hidden under a royal blue raw silk Estee Lauder cosmetic travel bag in my nightstand drawer. When I removed the travel bag for a trip, I unconsciously-consciously ignored what was under it.
I didn’t finish the last batch of Chinese medicine herbs. I dumped them in the trash instead, recycled the bottle, and haven’t been back to the herbalist.
Reality and Truth
I chose “Live in your truth,” as my 2012 mantra. The truth howled, whistled, and moaned like a tree branch breaking in the wind. Or perhaps it was the sound of the past, present and future colliding in my heart. As is often the case during such times, at first I didn’t know I was crashing and burning. What I did know was that I continued to melt into pools of hot flash sweat every time I thought about anything having to do with fertility, babies, and my lack of cycles.
More truth roared at me three months later when I looked in the mirror and thought, “Who the heck are you?” Two years after my ovarian growth crisis, I was wearing my grief, physically. My pants were about as tight as they could be without splitting a seam. I knew my body was saying, “You are wearing your grief as weight because you aren’t acknowledging it in the light of day.”
Grieving a child that was never conceived doesn’t have a place in our society. How do you mourn something that never existed? Dreams don’t get buried in coffins and people don’t gather round to hold you as you mourn. So, I kept my grief to myself. I felt absurd for feeling such profound loss. All that visualizing, all that imagining holding my baby, made it all feel so real. I could still feel a “connection” if you will, to a soul on the other side of “the veil” who really wanted to come through me. Which made me feel even more forlorn, if not a little nutty.
Truth and Hope
I’ve been a coach for 25-plus years, and I’m about to say something wildly under-spoken in the circles of positivity and vision I run in. Not every dream comes true, no matter how many times you visualize the reality you desire, or how many smart things you do just right, or how much action you take.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t dream, visualize, or take actions to support our dreams. New dreams are born out of the funeral pyres of old dreams. New life force energy is released when the burden of grief and shame is lightened. New worlds open when old worlds whither. No, it didn’t turn out quite as I dreamt or envisioned it. I assure you, though, we all have plenty of adventures to come no matter the results of our prior dreams. What dream calls you now?