Apologies for the delay. Momo has hand-foot-mouth virus and it's terrible. Poor gal. Anyway, it's set me back a little but I'm trying to push forward. The comments are REALLY helpful and I hope this process helps to connect us even more as a community as we see and notice the similar feelings and experiences shared.
Shame is a big topic. I hear ya. But before we even get to the point of shame or anger or panic or feeling cursed, I think there is a quiet lull of unease in just not knowing what's happening and being thrown off by things in our life not going as we thought-hoped-planned-expected.
Here's a short introduction that comes after the preface (going in order here), that gives a little background about Noah and me. It's kind of...just there and I'm not sure if I should do away with it completely or if it helps to get to know us and our history a little. I keep asking myself, 'what's the point' and then I think about the "take-away." And by "take-away" I mean what will a reader take away from this little intro, and what can I add to help it be more useful.
What I'm thinking of adding is a little section or little box at the beginning or end of each chapter/segment that can include things to think about, ways to expand our own perspective, coping tools etc. So the following is what I have written as it is, and the added "THINGS TO THINK ABOUT" are some ideas of questions that might help with the process. Thoughts and feedback are always helpful! I realize I'm a little disorganized but this is the storm of my brain that will hopefully, eventually, become calm and coherent.
Here goes:
When I first met Noah, I can’t say that I knew I wanted him to be the father of my children.
We met during my sophomore year of college at UC Berkeley. He was a junior. We had two classes together—The History of German Cinema and The History of Buddhism in America. He thought I was two different girls because I wore glasses in the Buddhism class. He liked the girl with the glasses better and had I known he was that confused by a simple pair of glasses I may have been able to save myself years of trying to figure him out.
Our first date consisted of going to a beach in Marin County so he could take photographs for a film project. We drove the long windy road in his beat-up blue Toyota Camry, listening to Bob Dylan and talking about all the places we wanted to travel. It was overcast when we got to the beach so we walked a while until he found a few spots where the light felt right to him. He took pictures while I set up camp on a little blanket, and neatly spread out all the snacks I had brought. As it began to get dark we went for a walk and climbed some rocks, where we sat looking out at the ocean and watching two older men play paddleball in the nude.
For our second date he brought over a six-pack of Pyramid Pumpkin Ale and the movie Bottle Rocket, which we watched on my futon until I passed out.
For our third date, we moved in together.
That’s not entirely true. I just can’t remember ever going out on a “real” date with him. We just kind of became friends and eventually moved up to friends with benefits. Noah was painfully shy, so moving forward with any kind of relationship scared him. I
had just broken up with my high school sweetheart, so I basically transferred my previous three-year relationship onto Noah, whose introversion I mistook for playing hard-to-get. No doubt I scared the crap out of him with all my emotion and analysis of everything, but I think he was too confused and terrified (but perhaps slightly intrigued) to know what to do. By the end of the school year we decided it made perfect sense to move in together. Not just the two of us, but with five other people.
My best friend Gabe and I had found this seventies shag-pad in the hills of Montclair, about a 10-minute drive from campus. It had carpeted walls in the bedrooms and multiple nooks and crannies that may or may not have once hidden murdered prostitutes. We had four roommates confirmed and needed three more people to fill the seven bedrooms, and Noah just happened to need a place to live with two of his friends. The math was easy, but the living arrangement was hard. We quickly learned you should never make a relationship decision based on a tight real estate market. We all moved into this house and it turned out to be complete chaos. One roommate began doing cocaine and made rent by stripping, another roommate had a bitchy girlfriend who basically moved in rent-free, then several people moved out and were replaced by even weirder people. The house always smelled of sweaty gym socks, ramen and pot. It was a nightmare.
One day I walked into the kitchen where one of our roommates had accidentally put dish soap into the dishwasher, which caused a huge overflow of bubbles all over the kitchen floor. Noah was standing in the middle of the mess, chewing a sandwich.
“What the hell happened here!?” I yelled, panicked.
“Ian put dish soap in the dishwasher,” Noah responded between bites, bubbles snaking up the calves of his pant legs.
“Why’d he do that?” I asked.
“He’s an idiot,” Noah said. He had some thick pieces of bread in his hand and was having a hard time swallowing each bite.
“What are you eating,” I said, more an accusation than a question. (I often ask questions the way a woodpecker drills into a tree.)
He looked at me blankly and shrugged. “Bread sandwich.”
That was the moment I knew I wanted him to be the father of my children. Not consciously, but in the core of my being I had a sense that he would be the voice of calm and ease to anchor my spinning anxious mind. He would make me smile and laugh when it seemed like the house was being flooded, or when it was actually flooding. He would take whatever life presented him in stride and wouldn’t worry about things unnecessarily.
“Bread sandwich?” I repeated, probably rolling my eyes, maybe smiling just a little.
He pulled apart the two slices of bread with nothing in between and smiled, both dimples puckering, and confirmed it was indeed a bread sandwich.
We walked away from the mess as good roommates do, deciding it was best for Ian to deal with it. He gave me a bite of his bread sandwich and I promptly made dinner for the both of us. This is how we learned to take care of each other. This was when we started learning the balance that we each needed. This is when I learned that Noah calls things exactly as they are, and he’s often right.
One wedding and sixteen plus years later, we are still doing the delicate act of balancing each other, and we’ve almost perfected the dance. My mind and emotions still spin at times, and he’s still there to be the calm and definitive sense of reason.
Plain and simple as a bread sandwich.
THINGS TO THINK ABOUT
One of the hardest things about being on a “journey to parenthood,” is that it isn’t what we expected. We all have ideas about how our life-career-family is going to play out, and when the scene starts to look drastically different from what we imagined, it can be distressing. If we are lucky enough to find our partner at a reasonable age, we often imagine our perfect offspring as a combination of each of our best features (highly unlikely) and we are thrown off by the concept that it might not be as easy as we thought to mush our parts together and create the family we always dreamed of. It’s important to take a little time to sit with the sadness of things not going how we want, that’s ok. That’s normal, that’s life. And then as we work to move forward, here are some things to think about:
1) Why do I want to be a parent?
2) Do I want a child in my image or a family, are those different things?
3) What is my fantasy and what is the reality of my situation and how can I look to reframe my thinking so I can lessen the gap?
4) How can I be more flexible and open about the process?
5) How have I coped with unexpected challenges in the past that can help me now?
OMG. Pamela. I'm so sorry. I hope you're doing ok. Thinking about you and sending love.
Posted by: Don't Count Your Eggs | February 09, 2017 at 02:52 PM
I really enjoyed the story you shared about you and Noah - it conveys so much about your relationship, your experience, and the bond that helps you weather the journey together. I also love the idea of reflection questions at the end. The only one I would suggest adding (and it is somewhat implied in your last question) is: Does it help you during challenging times to have a support system? If so, what does that look like for you?
Posted by: Heather | February 05, 2017 at 08:32 PM
I laughed out loud in a coffee shop at "bread sandwich." This stuff is gold.
And, hm, it's true you can blame a dishwashing disaster on someone else, and let them deal with it. But it's also true that you can't really blame anyone for fertility issues. Which means you can't pin it on Ian -- but you shouldn't pin it on yourself, either. It's really, truly no one's fault. So you might as well blame Ian. ;)
I just found out I'm having a second blighted ovum, this time with a donor embryo. Girding my loins to venture once more unto the breach. It's what you do. It's all you can do.
Posted by: Pamela | February 02, 2017 at 02:32 PM
I love this project and the way that you're getting feedback from us, your blog readers. I also really adore the personal details you share here. It takes the material way beyond the so-universal-it's almost unbearably-generic and meaningless level that most self-help books stay at. And it's just so sweet. It also is so important for introducing your tone and your and Noah's perspectives on yourselves and the world. We already see Noah as a realist who balances your more anxious impulses. Being surrounded by a flooding dishwasher is nearly the perfect metaphor for infertility, but the fact that this initial vignette you can blame on someone else makes it tellingly different. Anyway, I love where you're going with this so very much.
I love the question about whether you want someone to be an image of you or you'd rather have a family. It's so interesting, being the mom of an OE IVF-produced human, how I thought in therapy before deciding I wanted to have kids that children were narcissistic projections of oneself. Now I realize how much my kiddo doesn't reflect on me at all or seem like me at all or teach me anything about my inherent goodness or anything, which is what I expected a genetically-related-to-me kid to do. Instead, she's just so clearly her own damn being. Amazingly sui generis, if that's the right Latin phrase. I may have initially wanted to replicate myself or heal my own childhood wounds by trying again with a new me, but my daughter is a person who is just as independent, distinct, and unlike me in all of the significant ways as a daughter born of a donated egg or embryo. I not only believe that, but feel it 100% in my gut.
Posted by: Deb | February 01, 2017 at 08:29 PM
SUCH GREAT QUESTIONS and I think you should include this background. It helps build your story to have color around who you and Noah are (obviously adorable). My husband and I are both kind of like Noah which has made coping through the curve balls of procreating a bit easier but also being on it enough to pay our parking bills a bit harder.
Posted by: Jojo | February 01, 2017 at 01:50 PM