When I was a child, dreams were things of happiness and one of the most intensely experienced elements of my imagination. Such was the power of my good dreams that I had been known to wake up with a smile on my face, without a wake up call and on a school morning. Dreams defied logic and reality and that was the fun of them to the usually concrete thought processes of my young mind.
As I’ve gotten older, I have day dreams instead. The outlet for my imagination no longer occurs as I sleep but in those quiet moments of the day when I’ve some time to take a few deep breaths, sit down and be in the moment. My day dreams are ‘reality but better’. Reworked scripts of things that have happened or photo shopped snaps of how I imagine various perfect moments of my life will look.
The problem I have with my day dreams is knowing which to keep and which to bin. It’s an extension of the intensive declutter of the house this month that has seen me try to re-evaluate just how hard I should cling to and work towards some of my more … futile dreams.
No prizes for guessing which specific dream I’m referring to here. Many of you would be familiar with the debacle that has been my journey to motherhood. The back to back pregnancy losses last year and this current miscarriage that still isn’t over after 3 months. It was having so much fun ruining ruling my life it’s carried over with me into 2012, doing its darnedest to impede any progress I have made in ‘moving on’ and ‘looking forward’ and ‘trying again’. I have plenty more hopeful euphemisms but 3 is plenty for a single sentence.
I know that there may be a few of you reading the blog who have the misfortune of being in my situation (or much worse) and that you may be following my rocky path as you endure your own so I’m going to be up front in these ‘pregnancy’ posts about what’s happening to me because it would be misleading otherwise.
I mean what if we suddenly find an outfit post on this blog featuring my bump? What if I were to suddenly devote whole posts to fake complaining about cankles / the pregnant brain / intense morning sickness / food cravings or how fat I look? Or if the shopping posts featured baby outfits and maternity wear? The bigger issue will not be your trying not to vomit at the thought of reading the offending posts but how the baby happened in the first place given my history. You have been so honest to me with your comments, tweets and emails, how could I not be the same in return?
There are some parts of the blog that will be firmly reality based and theses posts fall under that category. So let’s put the facts on the table. I’m 36 years old and will need surgery at the end of the month. After that I will have to wait 2 cycles before trying to conceive (and waiting to miscarry again) and at that point I will be being proactive and paying for the privilege and undergoing IVF. It has been said in the past that I don’t come cheap and my desire to be a mother does little to dispel this observation.
The upshot of all of this is that there will be no baby SSG in 2012, no Christmas with baby SSG unwillingly dressed as a snowflake (don’t ask). The best I can hope for is a sober festive season spent dressed in clothes with comfort inserts at the waist. I have no choice to accept this. It angers and frustrates and saddens me but there is nothing I can do to change any of it. Which makes it all the worse.
When I began writing this post, I had the intention of ending it by saying that I was going to announce my retirement from the pregnancy game and that I would stick to doing what I did best – buying gifts for other people’s newborns but I have found new resolve. I will heed the advice of a wise and good friend of this blog, KB and give my current grief and anger its place and not try to give it more importance in my life than it deserves by ditching my dreams.