My Body

Instead of a New Year's Resolution (which, if you are like most people, is already a fading memory), I'm going for a mindset change this year. I'm not going to lose 10 pounds, get more sleep or eat healthier. This year, I resolve to love my body.

Sounds simple enough, right?

Uh-uh. It will not be easy. My body has let me down time after time the past 5 years. We have quite a history.

I think yoga and running have both guided me down this path recently. They've helped me to focus on what my body CAN do rather than what it can't. For as long as I can remember, I've had a bad relationship with my body. Throw infertility in there and we had become mortal enemies.

I think a lot of women struggle with their body images. And who can blame us - we're going along minding our own business as girls and then BLAM - hips. WHAP - boobs (well, not so much for me on this one...). WHAM - cramps, moodiness, etc. Our bodies change right before our eyes and during a time in our lives when we feel like everyone is staring at us anyways. I remember in high school, a guy dumped me for another girl and then sent me diet pills C.O.D. Yeah. THAT helped.*

The changes that our bodies go through are to prepare us to have children. So when my body couldn't do that as an adult, it just added insult to injury. After all, wasn't a woman's body MADE to have children? If it couldn't do that, what good was it? It had let me down, cycle after cycle. In fact, I look back on my early runs and realize I was trying to punish my body for not being able to conceive. I was angry. Through all the treatments, I had rested, and thought positively, and made deals with it (and God). Why wasn't my body holding up its end of the bargain?

I don't know what light bulb went off in my head recently, but this is the only body I have. And I have limited time with it, so I should make the most of it. Maybe my particular model can't bear children. So what? It gets me where I want to go. It works hard. It has fun. So from now on, I'm going to try to love my body and be kind to it. To rejoice when it learns something new. To recognize and appreciate its strength. To challenge it to push farther.

Yet even as I write this, gritting my teeth through cramps, my body has played a horrible trick on me this week. My period is 6 days late - and I am NEVER late. But rather than berate it for torturing me, I am cheering my body on. My cycles are only 24 days, so 6 days late is much closer to "normal" than I've ever been. Don't get me wrong. I've been through a week of "no - it couldn't be", "do you think?", "what are the chances...". Even though I know the chances. Less than 1%. The doctors told me. But my old friend hope seems to sneak back in. Especially when my body plays a trick like this one! I even had a dream last night that we were at the doctor's to find out if I was pregnant. Turns out, I had been pregnant for awhile without knowing it and was ready to deliver. However, the doctor said that my body thought it was past that stage in life and didn't know how to deliver a baby, so they'd have to operate and weren't sure how it would go. Hmmmm.... guess I have a ways to go with my subconscious loving my body as well. ;-)

Does it look the way I want it to? Not really. Could it give me a baby? No. But how long can I dwell on that? How much does it matter? My body is good enough. And it's healthy and it does what I need it to do on a day to day basis, which is a pretty amazing thing. So wish me luck on this journey. I'm sure I'll stumble back into my old ways of self-flagellation every now and then. In the meantime, I plan to continue to use yoga and running to see what else this ol' body can do.



* To be fair, my sister and I had a free sample of "Depends" sent to him anonymously first for breaking my heart, but come on - that's just funny. Diet pills took it below the belt. (No pun intended...)

What's Next?

I wrote this right after Christmas, but didn't hit "publish" because I wasn't sure it was what I wanted to say. But the point of all this is to help me think things through, not to be perfect and articulate, so I said screw it and just hit "publish". (Look at me - all throwing caution to the wind and such...)

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I think this may have been the first year that I ever felt really and truly sad at Christmas. I mean, in years past, I have been sad about not having a child. But the sadness in those years was always interlaced with hope. Hope that this would be the year that we would become parents. Someway, somehow.

This year, I woke up Christmas morning and looked at our bedroom door. I realized that there would never be the sound of little giggles as the door opened and our children bounded in to wake us. We’d never get to see the joy on their faces as they scurried downstairs to see what Santa brought them. You see, before I would always replace those thoughts of childlessness with hope for the future. I would remind myself that one day, I would be a mother. And just like that – sadness would become hope and anticipation. But not this year. This year it all seemed so... final.

Don’t get me wrong. We had a wonderful Christmas – sitting by the tree opening our gifts to each other, spending time with my family, playing with my niece, playing with our new Wii (super fun, by the way!). But previously in life there’s always been something to look forward to – another stage in life. When I was a kid, there was always the next grade in school, then going off to college, getting my first job, getting married, having kids, raising kids, becoming a grandparent. I feel like my trajectory into adulthood got sent off track there in the middle. And I don’t know what to do with that. I have spent so long thinking that was how my life would go, that I don’t know what to look forward to now. And I feel like I’ve spent the last 5 years of my life on hold as we waited for the birth of our child…and waited…and waited.

I don’t want my life to be on hold anymore, but I’m afraid I don’t know any different. What does it mean to NOT have your life on hold? Does it mean traveling? Does it mean relishing the mornings we get to sleep in? Does it mean spending our money rather than constantly trying to scrape together enough to have savings? Does it mean being selfish? One of my friends recently was telling a story about a woman who was completely selfish and irresponsible. To illustrate that fact, she pointed out that she was 40 and never had kids. Is that what I have to look forward to? Being selfish and irresponsible? Doesn’t sound so appealing, I have to be honest.

Maybe this is just a reminder to live in the present – to enjoy my life for what it is rather than to bemoan what it isn’t. The holidays also had me thinking about my friend who lost her husband and her father suddenly in the span of a few months this year. Christmas morning, after looking wistfully at our closed bedroom door, I looked at my husband sleeping and was incredibly thankful for what I have. I need to remember that more often. Why does it always seem to be the misfortune of others that gives me the most perspective?

The Unsung Lullabies book talks about “rewriting your reproductive story”. To be perfectly honest, in all these years, I’ve never read that section. It’s about changing that story you always had in your head – grow up, get married, have kids. I didn’t ever want to face the fact that I’d HAVE to rewrite my story. I thought eventually, I’d have a baby and it would all be moot. I didn’t want to even entertain the alternative. (I also didn’t read the chapter on parenting after infertility because I didn’t want to jinx anything. And to think – I never considered myself superstitious!) It might be time to break that book out again…

P.S. I still haven’t worked out my post on adoption. And I haven’t touched any of the materials I got at that adoption seminar. I consciously put them in our guest room and not our office/junk room/would-have-been nursery because that just seemed like a bad omen. I do however realize that the longer we put off making a decision, the more that becomes a decision in and of itself. Yep, I’m waaaaay too aware of that.