Soup not Cake

I haven't gotten around to buying more pregnancy tests. I felt so depressed Friday morning, I sat in front of daytime television – the Food Network, my weakness – for two hours. There have been times in my life when this wouldn't be so unusual, but these days, it's a bad bad sign. But I got through it, thanks to back-to-back episodes of Ace of Cakes, a show following the crazy custom cake makers of Baltimore's Charm City Cakes. Good medicine, and I'll tell you why.

First of all, I am yet to be made hungry by images of cakes shaped like trucks, or buildings, or helmets, or a great big meat ball, or by icing applied in green leafy patterns with a paint brush, or in metallic gloss with an airbrush... I could go on, but the point is, depression and artificially-induced hunger are not a good idea for me, and novelty cakes don't induce anything but amusement. Thank goodness.

Reason number two: The people of Charm City are quirky and imperfect and cute and clearly care about each other. Again, I could go on, but the point is: the show is heartwarming. It reminds me that you don't have to be perfect to be loved. And that I am, indeed, loved. So I turned off the TV and got back to life.

And by life, I mean weeding the garden. Emailing clients. Scanning artwork and planning for a commissioned piece. Cooking for my weekend guests (soup, not cake). Making plans for a Saturday morning bike ride. Getting my period...

Life goes on.

Hope Springs Eternal

I couldn't get to sleep last night, and I needed to go to the bathroom, so I did a test. It was negative. Ten days past ovulation, so that doesn't necessarily mean anything. But in the morning, there was the thinnest thread of a second line. I know, I know, you're not supposed to even look at the test after ten minutes, but I got excited just the same. J~ got excited too. I did another test this morning, a different brand, and this one was flat out negative. And then I searched the web and read about evap lines and realized I'm probably not pregnant after all.

Here's an excerpt from PeeOnAStick.com:

"Question: The line appeared after the 10-minute time limit. Is it still positive?
Answer: No. You can't rely on any test results that appear after the time limit... HPT's are rapid assay diagnostics, which means any results appearing after the "rapid" time limit of 10 minutes are invalid-- after this time, natural changes in the chemicals may cause lines to appear. (Please don't e-mail me to say this happened to you and you really were pregnant. The odds of having this occur and still end up pregnant are the same as the odds of having any false negative and later detecting pregnancy. In other words, the test is still considered negative... )"

Here's the ridiculous thing: I keep looking at this morning's test, hoping a second late, meaningless line will appear.

Of course J~ and I will probably buy more tests in the coming days. Of course more negative results will not completely deter me from the fantasy. I know the pattern by now: I will wait at the edge of my seat until the day after tomorrow, when I will likely begin to bleed.

Or maybe I won't bleed! See, there it is already, hope springing eternal. Any seeds of doubt are muffled by more rosy scenarios rolling though my mind. In case I do bleed, I'm already turning over the motor on next month's fantasy-engine. This must be what compulsive gambling feels like. Yes, it's good to be hopeful. But it's also exhausting.

I Admit It

Sometimes I feel extremely foolish having any hope at all, after so many failures. But here it is, I admit it: I have my hopes up this month.

I could potentially test tomorrow...

Why am I hopeful? No good reason, actually. I haven't had any telltale symptoms. My breasts are sore, but that's typical of this time of the month. We did put in a good effort this time around, however. And it is spring. Birds and bees and flowers and all. Plus, Megan/Henrietta was in the yard yesterday afternoon, neatly nibbling wild violets, leaves and flowers both. She also ate a big yellow dandelion. Now that has to count for something.

A Song of Double Poison

Last week began with debilitating menstrual cramps and heavy bleeding which kept me tethered to a hot water bottle for two days, making frequent trips to the bathroom. When the cramps and flow finally subsided, I sunk a shovel into a long-abandoned garden bed in the backyard. It was warm and I was restless, wearing shorts for the first time this season. Before long I was sweating and up to my forearms in dirt, excavating subterranean boulders, ripping out snarl after snarl of tenacious mystery roots.

Tuesday night, cramps were easing away, nausea was easing in, and my eyelids were beginning to itch. By Wednesday it was obvious that I was suffering from a stomach bug or a bout of food poisoning. It was also becoming undeniable that the mystery roots I'd battled so heartily were not so mysterious after all: they were poison ivy. My face, my arms, my entire torso, my inner thighs, all erupted into angry itchy rash. My eyes were swollen almost shut, the very follicles of my eyelashes itched furiously. My wrists and my fingers, and in between my fingers, were a mass of red oozing blisters.

When J~ came home from work, I vomited into a soup pot. I slathered my erupting skin with cold oatmeal, calamine lotion, the clear gooey flesh of my aloe plant. He looked at me with a pained expression, brought me tea and bath solutions, shook his head, wondered if there was anything more he could do for me. Mostly, there was not.

And now, another week is beginning. Menstrual cramps are ancient history. Thankfully, the nausea is behind me too. And the rash is gradually subsiding—I can tolerate clothing again, even underwear, for hours at a stretch.

I will continue to heal. I'll work in the garden again (but not THAT bed). In a few days I will ovulate yet again. Who knows what else might happen.

Life's rhythms are so predictable, but the melody is always changing.

The Naked Truth

"Oh, so are you in graduate school now?"

The question came from J~, a new friend, prompted by a passing remark about my application process. I had met her for the first time that afternoon at K~'s house, where she and I and M~, another mutual girlfriend, had gathered. After traveling to Northampton together to see a band (the Wailin' Jennys at the Iron Horse) we were making the long drive back. J~ had her neck craned around in the front passenger seat, and in the slanty headlight beams of the car behind us, her expression seemed bright and eager.

Instead of a straightforward response, I blabbed on and on about my tortured decision to apply, and to which and how many schools, about the pregnancy and miscarriage in the midst of it all, and how I felt okay, actually, about being waitlisted, even though my chances are extremely slim. I've been holding my life open for a child for four years, I said, and hearing this from my own mouth, it felt suddenly weighty and true. Memories flicked through my mind, all the branches of my life's path I did not explore for fear of losing my chance at motherhood. Suddenly the underlying emptiness felt undeniable, unconcealable.

I'm considering being an abortion counselor again, I went on, but I'm not sure that would be good for me, psychologically speaking — or a doula, or a miscarriage doula, if such a thing is possible, but I have internal arguments against those, too...

When I finally stopped talking, there was silence. Nothing but dark highway and a collective, carefully controlled deep breath. J~ unscrewed her neck and said to K~, our driver, "Speaking of babies, [Jane Smith] had her baby."

"Oh she did? What was it?" K~ asked.

"A human," J~ quipped, and the two laughed and bantered about this friend I don't know and her humanoid boy-or-girl offspring. M~ joined in as the topic shifted to more people I don't know. I sunk into my seat, feeling awful.

It was a simple yes or no question. I don't know why I answered the way I did. Maybe it was the novelty of having such animated, genuine attention from someone who didn't yet know my story. Maybe it was shame about the anticlimactic truth. Or maybe it was all the gorgeous mournful music we'd been listening to, loosening the drawstrings around my heart.

I keep insisting that I'm happy. I keep siting all the blessings in my life. But in a moment of weakness, the floodgates had opened and I was as surprised as my captive and unwitting audience at the stinking slurry of sadness and confusion that issued forth. I felt like I owed them all an apology, not for the truth of my feelings, but for subjecting them to it without ascertaining consent, or at least giving fair warning. But it didn't feel right to claim more group attention, so I did my best to let it go.

Here it is, people, the naked truth: as much as I'd like to think that I can root my engagement firmly in the myriad blessings of this present moment, cordoning off the wounded areas of my heart like a crime scene, sometimes I trip over the police tape and fall flat on my face.

But eventually I always get up and stumble around again, and inevitably I remember my belief that the key to emotional resilience is robust, honest emotional process. In other words: grieve to make room for joy.

It occurs to me now that perhaps the opposite is also true: If you take in enough joy, you crowd out the sadness and grieving becomes inevitable.

After saying thank yous and goodbyes in K~'s driveway, I climbed into my car and cried all the way home.

For the time being, anyway, I felt much better.

Stepping It Up

Long time readers of this blog may recall my affection for Thich Nhat Hahn's advice to tend one's inner garden. (See this post, for a refresher). Well, people, I am stepping it up, at least figuratively speaking, by tending my real-life backyard garden.

Thus far, my garden has been little more than a snack-stop for deer and a grand litter box for my neighbor's cat. I've become discouraged. No more! It's time to make my boundaries clear.

I've resisted the idea of putting up fences - so ugly, so expensive, so much work! But I want more greens, more tomatoes, more beans and squash and basil. (Well, maybe not more squash). And I realized that the also-ugly decrepit old swing set we've been meaning to take down could be repurposed, at least in part, as fence posts.

In the last couple weeks, I've gone happily crazy, cutting gargantuan brambles and pernicious maple saplings out of the previous owner's raspberry beds, grapevines, lilacs, and hardy kiwi. (Oh, hardy kiwi, how I love thee!) I've plotted out a fencing plan, squared up my previously vaguely heart-shaped plot into tidy raised beds, and begun a massive garden expansion. I've enlisted J~'s help knocking down the old swing set, and begun repainting the posts. Oh, yeah, and I also pruned the apple tree.

Here's a glimpse from a day's work, two beds so far:



And from another day, six beds in various stages, five more to go:



All this craziness has even spilled indoors, where I've been cooking and prepping vegetables for yet more cooking, cleaning like a mad housemaid/laundress, and decluttering like there's no tomorrow.

What does all of this have to do with Babies or Not? Only this: I've often felt like a creature caught up in an instinctive nesting compulsion, preparing for babies that never come. I prepare and prepare and despair and despair. It's pitiful and depressing. But then it dawned on me: to enjoy this moment, I have to live this moment. So I might as well embrace this seemingly ceaseless nesting energy, enjoy it, see what might come of it. If you build it, he will come, right? (If you don't know that reference, then you missed a really good movie. Go out and see Field of Dreams immediately. I insist) And then get busy embracing life. This is your moment.

Possibility

We saw her for the first time on a rainy day two weekends back. Having just completed a conversation in which we mourned our reproductive failures and recommitted ourselves to the cause, J~ and I looked out the window and there she was, white as snow, big as a cat, and snacking happily on our sodden lawn. J~ smiled at me. "A fertility sign," he said, but I was already smiling and thinking the same thing.

And then we went to bed.

When we got up after an hour or so, the rabbit was still in the yard. We declared it female, and dubbed her Henrietta.

She came back a few days later. Thrilled, I ran for my camera.

Later, a neighbor stopped by. Our fertility symbol, she informed me, is her escaped pet. Female, yes, not Henrietta but Megan, and—get this—pregnant. For rabbits, gestation takes only twenty-eight days. There will be babies very soon.

It made me very optimistic to hear all this.

So much so that I did two pregnancy tests this month, holding my breath for the good news. Where a second blue line should have appeared, no matter how intently I stared, no matter how good the light, there was nothing but the snowiest Henrietta/Megan-white.

And then I got my period.

By the way, the experimental (ivy league, no less) graduate program I applied to admits one student, just one, each year. I got my letter on Monday: I am not the one. But I am one of four on an unranked list of alternates, in case that one lucky candidate declines. I'll know in a month.

I'm happy to be waitlisted, especially since I've been on the fence about school. (Lately, all I want to do is work, clean my house, plant my garden, brew herbal teas, write in my journal, and take long walks with friends. Hell, I'm actually looking forward to doing my taxes!) Besides, I can handle waiting. I know all about limbo. I can appreciate a "maybe next month." I know that drill.

It is so much preferable to an unequivocal No. Not ever. Never gonna happen.

The waiting list is a blessing. Menstruation is a blessing. Neither will last for ever.

Today I embrace the gift of possibility.