A few years back I read those words in a book. "Beware nostalgia", Jean Vanier said in reply to someone who was wondering if she had left her previous mission place too soon (Jean Vanier Essential Writings, page 56). I never really thought much about those words, though they stuck in my mind. The other day, though, the words really spoke to me personally.
Jean Vanier's words and the conversation I had with some friends helped me a great deal in dealing with my nostalgic feelings and angst. Suffice it to say that if friendship were an entity, I had been holding on to its dying body all these years because I couldn't yet let go of the nostalgia. I kept holding on to the good that we had had together, hoping that the body would function better if only I kept on trying to give it CPR. However, my efforts only made me more resentful, because an imbalanced friendship never works. I tried lowering down my expectations a few times, but apparently the CPR I kept on giving to the dying body only acted like a venom to my own psyche. The venom of unmet expectations. When one wants and longs to give more time and effort, but one needs to hold back because the other party cannot give as much anymore, it is a loss. It is devastating to turn a forever friendship into a no-strings-attached (acquaintance-like) friendship.
The body of friendship was dying, so I had to let it go completely. No more holding on to nostalgia to keep the body alive. This time I arranged a sea burial in my mind. I placed the dying body on a raft and set it to burn. The waves carried the burning raft away to the darkened horizon. After a while, my gaze turned to the sky, where the stars were twinkling away...and I feel lighter.
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You know how sometimes you only start realizing something after talking about a certain topic with someone else/other people? Well, the other day I was talking online about inner circle and I suddenly realized that my view of what I call my inner circle has changed.
In the past, before infertility, I used to have a specific group of people as my inner circle in my sacred chamber. I believed with all my heart and soul that they would be there forever. I believed that they were my chosen ones and that nobody else could take their places. Infertility shredded that view to pieces and now my inner circle consists of random empathetic people who enter that sacred spot and stay there for a while with me and my pain. I am thankful for and cherish those people and their presence in my sacred chamber and then let them go. I more than welcome them if they happen to drop by again, but if they don't, I'll cherish the moment that they spent there with me.
P.S. Here's a view of the gloriously pink sky outside today. It was -25'C when I took this photo.
I've been lately occupied with so many things in my life that I have been neglecting my blogs in a way, but here I am again! :-)
I've been thinking a lot lately about my healing journey in particular. You see, when infertility first knocked on my door, I felt like a bird with broken wings (and naturally it led me to have a broken heart/spirit). After all, all the other birds out there seem to be able to spread their wings and fly, but I couldn't anymore. I was desperate to join them in their community, but I just couldn't seem to do it no matter how much I tried. Then slowly but surely my healing journey started and as my wings started to heal bit by bit, I started thinking more about what I wanted from life. Then I met other birds like myself in online communities and they were like the wind beneath my wings. I literally started floating and flying again. And boy, the view from up here is great! No wonder people with problems may need support groups. In a working support group, the broken bird with the broken wings and spirit can fly again!
I've been thinking about how infertility has also helped me feel more connection with the world in general and today as I was browsing through some writings and quotes from Jean Vanier, I almost yelled "Eureka" because it felt uncanny to read something that had been brewing in your mind for a while.
“The longer we journey on the road to inner healing and wholeness, the
more the sense of belonging grows and deepens. The sense is not just one
of belonging to others and to a community. It is a sense of belonging
to the universe, to the earth, to the air, to the water, to everything
that lives, to all humanity.”
Source: here.
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Anyway, I'd also like to report that after more or less 10 months, I've finally got the hang of the new dynamics in my friendship with my friends (the closest friends that I had to downgrade - our mutual solution as I was the only one who had problems with my own expectations). The more I gave them, the more they felt bad about receiving as they knew they couldn't give more. It feels great to finally be able to adjust to this new setting, though it did take quite some time. :-D
Here's another quote from Jean Vanier:
Those who enter marriage believing that it will slake their thirst for communion and heal their wound will not find happiness. In the same way, those who enter community hoping that it will totally fulfill and heal them, will be disappointed. We will only find the true meaning of marriage or community when we have understood and accepted our wound. It is only when we stand up, with all our failings and sufferings, and try to support others rather than withdraw into ourselves, that we can fully live the life of marriage or community. It is only when we stop seeing others as a refuge that we will become, despite our wound, a source of life and comfort. It is only then that we will discover peace.”
- Jean Vanier (Community and Growth)
Source: here.
A few weeks ago our two adult nephews came over for a short holiday and during that time I saw the connection between them and my husband. They're all into online gaming and just last night they were talking about scheduling time to have an online gaming session together.
I think among the three brothers, my husband is the only one that spends the most time gaming (I think his dream profession would be to be in a team of creative people who create games). He babysat the two boys every now and then when they were young (before they moved away) and now they have this connection together and last night I was just thinking of the other side. That if we had a boy, they may be able to connect this way (though there's always the possibility that the boy wouldn't like games, but let me just daydream a bit). It brought a smile to my face. :-) I'm glad that he can have this bond with the boys, because they're the only heirs that we'll ever going to have.
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The other week I realized that I was finally released from the expectations I had towards a group of close friends. I knew already since the beginning of the year that I had to let go, but the process took long (I was kicking and screaming all the way). The bottom line was that I had to downgrade them in order to keep my sanity and our friendship intact.
FB gave me pretty good slaps on the face because even without trying to find any proof, it was clear as daylight how people tended to react more to baby/kiddo photos than any of my statuses/photos. In the real world when I share something directly with someone else, that person is bound to respond right away, but in a virtual world like FB, those things that aren't your priorities get swept away among all the overwhelming number of links and photos and statuses. Thus it creates an illusion that a life without kids is "less than" because the minute a baby photo is up (along with many other cute kiddo moments like the M-Day or F-Day's creations made by the kids), many would rush over to comment and/or share their own stories/moments. I get it. It's nothing personal. It's the bond that connects them, but during the time when I had too much expectation from a certain group of people, it still hurt. It stung.
I confronted my friends at one point because I felt that they weren't responding to any parts of my email (and they also didn't respond too much in my FB compared to the baby/kiddies' photos). Mind you, at that time they were busy talking about a pregnancy/birth story/parenting in their emails and I felt left out (almost no response to my emails during that period of time - my acute brain couldn't help detecting these details). Again I knew it was nothing personal, but it still hurt. From the confrontation, they said that they had given me everything they could, though they did admit that the pregnancy/birth story did get too much airing time at some point because of the freshness of it all, but the only possible option was for me to downgrade them.
I felt some resentment and anger for months. I thought it was sick that I had to be the one downgrading them, even though I still wanted to give them more time and energy, but if in the end it only made me feel resentful and it may make them feel guilty for not being able to give me more time, then what's the use?
Mind you, some of them did tell me that they sometimes felt guilty for not being able to give me more time because of life's busyness and their priorities and that really shocked my system, because I never intended to make anyone feel that way. I just wanted to give as much time and effort as I wanted because they were that important to me (and because I'm the only one who has the most free time - at some point I also cursed myself for having the most free time because then I got tempted to want to give more time and attention to them, which in retrospect only resulted in making my expectation go high). To put it simply, I had put my eggs in the wrong basket.
So I took a break from FB and focused more on my group of women who are childless-not-by-choice like myself and on my writing/photo challenges. I haven't written them an email in a long time, though we still communicate in bits and pieces via FB. All these things helped. Months passed by...the resentment gradually grew less and less and finally one day when I logged into FB again and saw some activities among them, I didn't feel any resentment anymore. That was the moment I realized I had succeeded in downgrading them.
I had never thought that I would have to do something like this, because they had always been my go-to group, core group of friends. We'd known each other for at least half of our age (I've known half of them even slightly longer than that), but there's no stopping it now. I've done it. This is for our own good. All of us. No more hard feelings. I feel relieved. Much lighter. :-)
A little while back the friend who's got a 2-month-old baby wrote in a group email about how her husband had been talking about visiting us here. Mind you, she did add something like this: "I'm not sure whether or not you're interested, because I know that travelling with a kid is different than travelling without a kid." Must admit reading it made me anxious, because I know I'm not ready to have them in our place, but before I replied to her, I wanted to find out what my husband had to say to that idea.
Ever since her second trimester, she had started sharing links about parenting and stuff like that and after the baby was born, she has been sharing her baby's photos and status updates about her parenting journey as well as parenting links and a few videos. I'm fine now when it comes to viewing the baby's cute photos (seeing the first few photos was TOUGH) and mostly fine with the status updates and parenting links, but what made me feel sure that I wasn't ready to be with them under the same roof was my reaction when I saw the video clip of her interacting with her baby. Listening to her cooing to her baby and seeing the baby's smile in response to her made me want to escape to my daydreams about my own interaction with my non-existent child and stay there for a LONG time.
My husband was apparently not ready to have them under the same roof, either, so I braced myself and decided to be honest with her in my reply. I told her that I wasn't sure how painful it would be to see her daily interaction with her baby in front of my face, under my own roof, but I was pretty sure I could handle it if they were willing to stay in a cabin or someplace else. Spending time with them for a few hours every day would be fine as long as I could have some rest (my safe haven) in between.
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I also explained to her why her baby made me react more strongly than my other friends' babies/children in our inner circle. It's because her baby is the first biracial baby in our group of friends, so the baby's the closest reminder of our loss. It's very hard not to see her baby's photos without wondering how our child may look like. It's probably similar to this: if you've lost a real person in life years and years ago and then you see someone that looks like her/him today, then you wonder how your loved one may look like right now. Something to that effect...oh, I'm getting sidetracked here...back to the topic...
I was prepared to lose this friendship (worst case scenario - which I think I took pretty calmly considering I would have wanted to keep this friendship with all my might and in whichever way I could in the past). I still disliked the fact that these ripples of infertility grief affected me this way (however, in the past I hated/loathed this side effect with a vengeance), because in another universe and situation, I would have wanted to reply, "That's a WONDERFUL idea! When are you coming? You're welcome in our place anytime. Ohhhhh...I can't wait for you all to come. How much fun it's going to be!" But I couldn't deny what I was feeling and I knew that it wasn't just about me anyway. I had to and wanted to protect my husband's feelings, as well.
Anyway, I heard nothing for a few days, but thankfully afterwards she said she appreciated my honesty and she understood why I wrote such a reply. She wasn't sure yet when they were going to come, but she mentioned it because she wanted to do it in the future. So we shall see how it's going to pan out later on. Just another story of infertility's ripples of grief, I suppose.
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Btw, check out this brilliant post on Friendship written by Mali.
P.S. I sent her an angel baby card the other day in remembrance of her miscarriage prior to having this child. I was SOOOOOO touched when she said that she had cried for me a few times during the past two months because after having the baby, she realized even more what I had lost.
1. The Important Letter.
I've sent my mom the letter via my brother (I asked him to print it out). It ended up being a 4-page MS Word document (plus a paragraph on the 5th page). Still no word from her via SMS to me. I imagine it's going to take time for her to bury the dream that she's been having for us. I hope the other half of my letter gave her comfort, because the first half talked about my honest feelings when it came to our infertility journey. It was REALLY hard to write the letter and I was on edge the whole day yesterday while waiting for the response.
In the end I contacted my brother via YM and asked him how it went. She said that mom had cried. I was so emotional during our chat in YM and I started crying, too. My bro helped explain to her that I wasn't blaming her and that I knew she meant well, but that I'd like to be supported not by her praying about a miracle pregnancy or by her telling me to keep on praying to get pregnant. I have given her more ideas on what to pray on in the letter, so hope that helps, too. My bro said that she must be sad when she read about our struggles and all the feelings that I had during the tough period of our infertility journey. I sent her an SMS yesterday, telling her that I'm thankful to have a mother who prays for me and that I love her and I ask her not to be too sad because we're doing fine.
2. Infertility and Relationships.
Sometimes I feel that infertility is a double-edged sword. When I was preparing to write the letter for my mom, I knew it would crush her, too. I don't want to crush her dream for us, but I felt that it must be done for the sake of our relationship. I began to feel our relationship cracking and I don't want to lose our relationship. I was struggling to try to find a way on how to crush her dream gently and I hope I have succeeded in doing so.
Other than that, here's also something I wrote weeks ago about infertility and friendship:
"Infertility is a tricky thing to deal
with when you have a pregnant close friend whose pregnancy reminds you of your losses. As much as you'd like your
friends to tell you as many parts of their joys and sorrows and as much
as you'd like to tell your friends about your joys and sorrows, it's not
that easy to figure out the fine line. The fine line where you don't
want to burst someone else's happy bubble by telling them that their
stories trigger very soft spots within yourself, but then again you
wonder if you should let them know about at least some of them because
you want them to understand your journey. The fine line where you wonder
how much stuff you should tell your friends about your feelings because you fear that they
are going to hold back sharing their joys because they don't want to hurt you, but on the
other hand you don't want to miss all the lovely moments even if those
moments trigger some pain within your deepest self."
It IS a shame that infertility is affecting those around me this way, but I welcome the lessons that it's giving me (and other lessons that it will give me in the future).
3. I found this article via an FB share and I LOVE LOVE LOVE it for so many different reasons so I'd share it here too: Confronting the Lie: God Won't Give You More Than You Can Handle.
4. A friend of mine gave me this challenge weeks ago and I've finally found my word for 2014.
My word of the year is “Disentangle”. I need to practise disentangling
myself from any emotional connection or baggage so that I can take a
step back and celebrate other people’s beautiful moments with them
without drowning in grief when their beautiful moments are the ones that
acutely remind me of what I will never have. I want to disentangle
myself from those heavy weights that make me want to crawl or drown in
my grief so that I can stand up and continue my healing journey.
Here's the challenge in case you want to participate: What Will You Choose For Your Word of 2014?
Last but not least, Happy New Year! Wishing you more peace, comfort, and healing throughout 2014!
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We had a peaceful Christmas with MIL as usual (no kids involved). BIL and SIL came over for a while, but then they left to go to the graveyards. We went to the graveyards already before they came for a visit to light some candles in front of hubby's grandparents' and FIL's graves. FIL's grave doesn't have a gravestone yet.
Before Christmas, I had a "pat my own back" moment. :-D The close friend who's pregnant posted a side view and front view baby bump pics in FB, so naturally the photos garnered lots of lovely comments. In the beginning I wanted nothing to do with it, but then I had an experiment with myself...I took some time to clear my mind, then suddenly a thought occurred, "Hey, what if it's some random acquaintance who's pregnant and it's the first time for her to post the baby bump pics like these for the whole world to celebrate? How would you deal with it?"
I took my time to step back mentally and it worked!!! YAAAAAAAAAAYYYYY!!!! It was like unlatching a mental connection with her so that I could respond in a more neutral fashion. It felt GOOD to be able to mentally step farther away as a way of emphasizing that her experience had nothing to do with mine. *pat on the back* I've shared this with the GW ladies and I received so much warmth from them. It feels nice to have people with whom I can celebrate this kind of victorious moment. :-D
I actually used the trick again just now (FYI I'm having my PMS now) as I almost felt a thump on my chest as she had just posted a photo of herself holding a tiny Christmas stocking with the writing "My first X-mas". For a second there I was thinking, "That could have been me" but then I forced myself to step away mentally again and I could comment on the photo to celebrate the moment with her. Mind you, I think this is easier done because it happens in the internet world***, not face-to-face. I don't know if this trick can be done IRL (in real life) or not, but I'll remember to try it out if I'll ever have the chance to do it IRL.
*** I'm further away in my healing journey, so I also think that's one reason why the trick worked. If we had tried having a baby at the same time and then she had gotten pregnant first whereas we ended up with infertility, I dread to think just how much devastation it could have done to our friendship.
Infertility, PMS, and friendship. Not a good combo, eh? Surely not. Especially when one of the friends is pregnant. Especially if the introvert in the group hasn't realized the important difference between herself and the rest of the group. It took several emails back and forth as well as a few days of pondering what went wrong before I finally felt a huge weight lifted off of me.
To cut the story short, my main problem (blown up by PMS) has been the fact that I'm the only one in my group of closest friends who relies on writing as the best/most fave kind of communication. Not writing SMS or short texts like in Twitter, mind you...but writing emails and blog posts. I just LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE writing in details about what I've been through and what I've been thinking about and I love finding out why I feel a certain way and in return I LOVE LOVE LOVE reading in details about other people's lives.
In the past, I noticed that I had a high expectation on this type of communication and when I found out that my friends couldn't cope with it, I tried to lower my expectations and I tried my best to shorten my emails (and leave the details to my blog posts). However, despite my best efforts, I still had too high an expectation it seems. My PMS brought it forth this time because one of us is pregnant and I FELT that she had received more responses (yep, jealousy attack being blown up by PMS!).
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After pondering on what the problem was, though, I realized that it was foolish of me to expect that people whose main form of communication wasn't writing to respond to me the way that I had tried to respond to them. It's like asking them to keep on watching horror movies with me and comment on those horror movies. As much as they love me and as much as they want to meet me halfway, the best thing I can expect from them is to watch a few of those movies and comment on a few of them, but I can't expect them to do more than that. Why? Because if the situation were reversed, I wouldn't be able to do the same.
Most of them prefer live chats or face-to-face interaction or phone calls. And I have been blindly thinking that because we all live in different cities and countries, emailing is the most preferable method of communication. How wrong I was! Lately they have preferred talking in WhatsApp or live chats because their lives are much busier than I am and I'm the one who can't cope with WhatsApp chats because they exhaust me so much (because I'm more of a detailed person and when- due to time difference - I'm left with hundreds of live chat messages, I'm overwhelmed and I don't know what to do because I tend to want to reply to every single one of them - or at least the important ones and it takes a LONG time to read through all the messages and figure out which ones need replying). This is why I prefer emailing, but for them, emailing takes more time and effort to reply, whereas during live chat when some of them are online at the same time, they can get responses ASAP.
Anyway, the second problem was infertility thrown in the mixture of all that. In my PMS-loaded brain which was already full of confusion because of my own expectation, I thought of the not-so-distant future when my pregnant friend's baby would be born and how there would be so many more bonding moments between the mothers in our group and this freaked me out because I could just imagine how many times in the future would I be reminded of my own losses (the birth story, the baby room, the first smile, the first word, etc.) when many of them would naturally be ooh-aahing all the lovely moments and sharing their own kids' moments. I know, I know, my overworked PMS-loaded brain couldn't stop thinking way too far ahead!
So all those feelings made me reach out to them, asking if it was too much to ask if I asked for a little bit more response (honestly, I felt like a cranky little child begging for attention when I wrote the email), but in the end the emails between us back and forth made me realize that the only possible way to sort this mess is for me to step back and let go of my expectation (all of it, not just a part of it). I need to remember that for them, emailing is tough to follow and that they've given all they can. I know that they'll be there for me when the going gets tough (they've always been there), but it's unhealthy for me to expect them to respond the way I have responded to them. You see, for years I've always tried to respond to as many little details of their emails as possible and I've just realized that they don't even expect me to do so!!! Talk about a shocking moment for me! In my mind, I was respecting their time in their busy lives by responding to as many points in their emails as possible, but it wasn't even necessary! Yep, major doh moment!
For all it's worth, though, I'm just glad that I've sorted through all the mess. Phew! Now I just hope that I haven't damaged this friendship too much by making them worried about what to write (esp. when it's about their kids), because I DO want to know about their kids, though I have told them that I can't deny that on bad days (PMS days), the stories remind me of my own losses, but on good days, I'm very happy to read about their kids. But anyway, after the stormy mess, here's what I feel now:
PMS mode here. Just read a post about a blogger friend's friend's demise and she wrote such a beautiful post on her that just made me ache inside. Life isn't as simple as ABC. There are so many people facing their own challenges or "crosses to bear" all around me and those challenges are made even more vivid whenever I get to hear some more details about them.
Lately I've been having lots of conversations related to children or actually pregnancies and babies with some friends.* One is pregnant and another one has started feeling the longing for motherhood. I was really happy when I heard about the pregnancy, but about half an hour afterwards the storm started within. I suddenly felt mellow and sad. I was uneasy 'coz I didn't know why I felt so sad (a different kind of sadness than what I experienced in the past). It wasn't that I started longing to have children again, mind you. Not that.
I actually just realized (while writing this post) that the news and the talk about pregnancy and the other friend's future TTC plan transported me face-to-face with my "dead/buried dreams". As if I were suddenly standing right in front of those rows and rows of buried dreams and I couldn't help shedding a few tears (literally just a few tears, not sobbing like crazy). I was again reminded of how many dead dreams that I had to let go of and I suppose the sight of it all kinda overwhelmed me: seeing not just the buried dream of achieving pregnancy, but also the opportunity to feel the morning sickness, to feel the baby kicking inside of me, to talk about hubby about the details of the baby room, to share the news with my friends and family, to hear their shrieks of delight upon hearing the news, to share preggy photos and USG photos, to give birth, to share baby photos, etc. etc. etc. And the list kept going on.
* Note: This is the kind of talk I want to be involved in 'coz I do care about them with all my heart. And I know they care about me with all that they've got as well.
And on another level, again I couldn't help but think how "easy" it seemed for some people to get preggy. The latest pregnancy news reminded me of my SIL's pregnancy. When I first found out about her second pregnancy, she told me that it was a surprise 'coz she said that "they weren't even so diligent in TTC" though they were trying to have one. Words like these came back to the surface every now and then. The more often I hear words like these, the closer I got to feeling that my body wasn't working the way it should have been (in the past I had not felt this at all, I think - at least I didn't really think that way).
Thankfully, though, the storm lasted only for about 6 hours (yeah, I'm slightly crazy about details LOL!). In the middle of it, I was screaming to God, "Help me, help me, help me focus on others' happiness instead of focusing on myself, pleaasssseeeeee." I also kept on remembering this verse: "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." (1 Corinthians 12:9)
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That helped, as well as saying this mantra over and over again, "It's NOT about me, NOT about me, NOT about me, NOT about me". I went to bed pretty easily that night, though I must admit that it's bloody hard to try to focus on their happiness without looking back on my own history. And I couldn't help feeling "left out" - because I DO want to share the happiness by sharing my own story, but I have no story to tell except my Mom's stories about her being pregnant with us and my own childhood stories.
But I think I've done a pretty decent job in trying to focus on them and their plans for the future instead of focusing on me (I may have slipped a few times but not too many times). Actually, writing all of this has made me feel SO much lighter. :-D
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When we began TTC, I was the only one amongst my close friends who was trying. Some of them had already had a child or two, some weren't trying yet. Because I was the only one who had experienced IF, my strong emotions shocked the whole group (including me at that time). I shared many things with them because I was so desperate for support and validation. I reacted strongly to some of their words and in the end one of them asked me what kind of support I needed. I told them that when it came to my IF grief, no words would be "safe enough" except for "I'm so sorry" and "I'll pray for you".
Once we sort of decided to surrender to life without kids, I asked them to pray the Serenity Prayer for me and I'm really thankful for them. However, back then none of us knew how deep the impact of the infertility battles that I had shared with them would leave. Anyway, time passed by and another one of us started TTC. Unfortunately she experienced a miscarriage and because I had sort of "silenced" them through my experience to say nothing more than those words above, my friend got quite angry at the lack of support at that time. She told me afterwards that she felt robbed of the sympathy.
And because of the many things I'd shared about my IF journey, she didn't want to share too much about her TTC journey 'coz she didn't want any comparison to happen. Another single friend didn't want to comment on my IF journey because she said that she didn't want to dwell on the fact that she may have been sort of "an infertile" in a way (because she has started thinking of life without a hubby and kids). I understand what they mean, but I sort of feel sad in a way because my
experiences have such impacts on our friendship - the kind of impacts
that none of us could have predicted.
For my friend who's experienced a miscarriage, I feel sorry that my experience made her feel that way. Sad that she felt that if she shared her TTC journey, there could be some comparison with mine. But anyway, all of this only makes this thought more profound: that I'm so VERY lucky to have my IF blogger friends, because all of you (even those who probably don't visit this blog of mine) have really helped me go through the darkest moments of my life like a shining beacon, showing me the way gently, making me feel not alone, making me feel validated. And for that I thank each and every one of you from the bottom of my heart...
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