Noah and were talking the other night about how our world keeps getting rocked and what we can do to find balance again. Mind you, we haven't come up with much, but the conversation was important. It made me think about the different ways we as individuals and as a couple have to keep finding equilibrium.
Before we took up residency on IF Island, Noah and I were headed in a fairly typical life trajectory of work-life-friends-family etc. But when making a family wasn't working, we both got very thrown off. It's not that everything in ones life has to go smoothly in a specific direction, but perhaps that we didn't expect to get so thrown off course. The result of infertility was a serious lack of balance in our lives. All of our mental space, emotional reserves, and financial resources went directly to my ovaries and trying to figure out how we would build a family. As a result, a lot of things-- hobbies, travel, anything fun-- got thrown out the window. We tried to be "normal" and do "normal" things, but we were living in abnormal circumstances and it was exhausting and frustrating.
Then we finally got out and I got P. But my P was not the blissful experience I thought it would be. It was actually pretty isolating and scary. Because I was on my ass for much of the nine months, the day to day life we were used to was out of whack. I was totally dependent on Noah and my parents and friends and it just wasn't what I expected. But we got through it the way we got through the years of infertility-- we just did.
Then we finally became parents. Wow, I still can't believe I get to write that sentence. Momo is five months old now and is starting to teethe. She is chatty in the mornings and Noah and I happily wake up at 5am to play with her. Well, he's happy. I'm remotely human at 5am. But despite how exhausting and stressful it is to have a newborn we feel so lucky every day.
But we also feel-- not quite ourselves, and we couldn't figure out why. As we started talking about the last five years of our lives, we realized that we haven't yet found our equilibrium. We realized that we've been stressed out for a long time and that now we have to go back and find our balance as individuals, as a couple, and now as a family. There's a redefinition of the self that naturally comes when you become a parent, and there is also a shift that takes place for a couple for sure. But what Noah and I perhaps didn't take into account was how the years leading up to this moment might also be impacting us.
We haven't yet figured anything out. Much of our thoughts, like this post, are a bit all over the place. But I think step one seems to be recognizing that while we gained a lot from our experience over the past five years, we also lost some parts of ourselves. Step two is maybe deciding how we feel about those missing pieces and what we want to do about it. Step three is working to take the time-- or rather find the time to feel more settled in our role as parents and to work to let some of the past go.
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This perfectly sums up how I'm feeling at 9 weeks pregnant after 4 years of TTC, 3 years of treatment with repeated pregnancy loss along the way. I keep wondering when I get to return to feeling like myself. Instead, I keep reminding myself that I might have to rebuild slowly from the rubble. But, I do look forward to the day where I feel fully rooted in myself and my life again.
Posted by: Sara | August 30, 2015 at 11:17 AM