I've been thinking about memories for the past few days. The memories that we have with those who've left us. Those sweet memories that we can hold on to when we miss someone we love that has passed away. Like my dad, for example. Every now and then I remember something that he did...the quirky things that he did...what he said...how much he loved singing (even when he didn't know the lyrics - he'd made up the lyrics himself)...and I cried. Whenever I miss him, I've been very comforted by the fact that I have those sweet memories to hold on to. And I can always share those memories with my brother and mother and those people who knew him and they can even tell me some of the memories that I may even forget or don't know about him. Those memories that create the tapestry of dad's life.
But when I miss the non existent children in my life? I have nothing to hold on to. Maybe that's one reason why I feel the pangs every now and then. The pangs** may not be pure jealousy (we don't want their children, but our own), but the fact that there are no real memories to hold on to. And on top of that, there's no chance to talk about those memories with other people, either. If someone shares stories of their dads, I can always tell them my own memories of my dad. If they tell stories of their children, all I can share is the stories that my mom has told me about me and my brother when we were young.
** Some pangs may be jealousy, but I think the pangs that make me feel hollow inside are different. Like the kind that I felt the other day.
The other day I had a funny experience that was actually the inspiration of this post. This is what I wrote in my draft folder a few days ago:
glitter-graphics.com
"Close friend (the new mother) has posted more photos
of herself and the new baby again and I did feel some pangs...She was walking out with baby and husband, enjoying the sun, looking so happy and beautiful.
And
I couldn't help thinking about the alternate universe again
(self-defense much?). In my alternate universe, I'm walking around with a
stroller with my baby and my stroller is filled with bright patches of
colours with small cute cat photos in each patch ha ha ha ha ha ha ha...And it's the kind of flexible stroller where I can just easily switch the colour and design according to my mood.
Boy,
it's SO MUCH FUN trying to think of myself in an alternate universe (my
childlike self is loving it). Oh, and let's not forget that in my
alternate universe, I have a very loving cat and my husband has plenty
of hair (not because I mind, but because I know he'd love to have more
hair on his head) HE HE HE HE HE HE HE HE HE HEHHHH...
Where
would our cat be? Sitting on top of the cover of the stroller perhaps.
Hey, I can do anything I want. It's my story LOL!!!"
The text ended there, though I'd like to add some other things that crossed my mind that day:
"For the life of me, though, I couldn't even figure out the look on our child's face. I tried to peep into the stroller but the baby's face was blurry. Probably because it's always been a mystery. Will the child look more Finnish or Asian? I don't know and obviously I still can't decide yet.
But then my wild imagination took over again and guess what happened? We took off, flying with the baby stroller...like Mary Poppins with her umbrella ha ha ha ha ha ha ha..."
Ahem. Yeah, so that's the extent of it. I'll tell you one thing, though...thinking about this cartoon version of our alternate universe took my mind off my close friend's baby and parenthood. So much so that I was even surprised at its effect. Maybe next time I should do this trick again he he he he he...After all, the imaginary world is always much more interesting. :-D Maybe in the real world, if I could ever have a baby, I'd be cranky and the baby would be a difficult one, but in my imaginary world, I can fly away to the sky with my baby, husband, and the stroller. Nothing can beat that, not even reality! :-D :-D :-D
P.S. This is how I looked like after having fun creating my imaginary world:
glitter-graphics.com
The close friend's baby that prompted me to write these posts Mellow Mood and Funeral of a Dream has been born. It helped to know that she gave us proper hints (she had been active in FB and then all of a sudden one day there was nothing) and then told us (her inner circle) first in a group email along with some photos of her baby before she announced the birth in FB.
I was HAPPY for her, but also couldn't help feeling a bit jealous. After all, this is the first biracial baby in my inner circle and it was DIFFICULT not to have any thought of "this could have been ours". I couldn't help staring at the cute baby photos on the first day. More than three times a day. On purpose. Maybe I'm masochistic (a part of me is suspicious that I did that to gauge just how much I'd react) he he he he...that day I was also thinking of the fact that maybe my jealousy had more to do with the illusion that "some people just seem to have it all - and seemingly so easily" instead of being jealous directly at her and her baby.
What truly helped me that day of the announcement was when another mother in my inner circle sent me a private email, asking me how I was doing. She was truly concerned about my well being after reading the easy birth story as well as seeing the cute baby photos. That really made my day! She's the BEST mommy friend I've ever had and I thanked her profusely because I was just so touched. :-)
Anyway, it's already a week ago when the baby was born and my feelings are more stable. If this had happened three years ago, I probably would have deactivated my FB account (or at least hide her posts and I had a feeling I may even have asked her not to tell me details about the baby or anything) because I was still bleeding inside. So I still believe in this theory.
I'm further away in my healing now that I am able to read and see her photos without wanting to hide them, though that doesn't mean I want to see/hold the baby in real life yet (thankfully they live far away from here). If I had been invited to the baby shower, I'm not sure I would have been strong enough to come, but then again I wouldn't know for sure because I've never been to a baby shower in my entire life (it's not a common thing to do in Indo). Usually in Indo people just storm to the hospital soon after the baby's born to bring presents. But anyway, glad that the option was taken off my hand (the inability to attend the baby shower), though I have seen the baby shower photos.
I started looking for a baby gift a few days ago. Our inner circle of friends have this habit of giving something for the firstborn. There are only two of us who have a second child and due to circumstances only the firstborns got something from all of us together as a group. After getting some idea on what to give this baby, it hit me that maybe the others in my inner circle want to join in and they did, though one of us will probably send a different gift for her, but the rest of us is going to join me. I've already sent them two choices and they've already finished voting. Now all I have to do is order it sometime this week. :-)
I felt excited whilst browsing for a baby gift. The only thing I had to focus on was thinking that I'd love to get a baby gift myself if this had been my firstborn baby. This thought really helps me focus on this baby instead of my infertility (plus my word of the year "disentangle" has been helpful, too).
I won't deny the fact that there may be tender moments later on during the course of this baby's life (and I won't deny my need to grieve whenever it appears or to limit myself to her posts/photos in the future if I need to), but I'm gonna give myself a pat on the back for being able to give a space for her happiness in my heart. It's like a twisted way of giving myself a space for this kind of happiness if I were able to have a child. Or maybe a better way of saying it is that I'm giving my alternate self a space for this kind of happiness in an alternate universe.
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!).
glitter-graphics.com
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:
I forgot to mention here that a few
months ago I finally got rid of the English pregnancy and parenting
books I bought second-hand from online shops years ago when we first
started TTC. I'd started reading one of them during TTC, but the other
three were parenting books, so I hadn't really started reading them yet
and they'd been gathering dust in my book shelf, so off they went to
this "exchange book corner" in our local library. Btw, I felt nothing when I left the books there.
In
the past there was no such a thing, but these days they've put this
"exchange book corner" in which people can grab any book(s) they want
with the hope that they'll trade them with other book(s) that they own.
The empty space has been put to good use as I've been piling up new
books that I haven't read yet (chuckle). I'm a bad reader. I tend to
switch from one book to another and who knows when I'll finish reading
them all LOL!!! Some of them are unread, though. I LOVE collecting books
even though that means I may not read them yet LOL!!!
I'm
still PMSing and still feeling a bit conflicted inside every now and
then (esp. when I read news about my friend's morning sickness issues
and the other mommy friends got to share their own morning sickness
experiences - felt like being left out when a group of friends were playing together). Just now I received an email with the title "27 weeks" and
I felt a jolt inside. I thought, "Another pregnant woman?" Turned out
that no, it wasn't the case. It was a false alarm. Phew!
Yep.
The green eyed-monster of jealousy has arisen, though thankfully it's
not blinding me. It's just a tiny little monster, but I know it's out
there. One thing I tried to do the other day is to turn each jealous
thought into a ball and then I (the superhero in my imagination) got to
kick the ball into outer space, where it was swallowed by this giant
black hole (I had to do this whenever the ball came out to play). Is this helping? I think so. :-)
Another thing that helped was exercising and doing punching and kicking movements with all my might (release all the negative energy, Amel!!!)...and feeling the lovely endorphins afterwards. :-) And yes, I looked like this fellow below when I was doing the exercise:
Let's just see how well I fare in this friend's pregnancy journey (and maybe in the future other close friends' pregnancies) where I get to read a lot of details and where I get to see lots of pics. I'll take it one day at a time. May God help me!!!
P.S. I know I'll feel better when my PMS is over. :-) In the meantime, though, I'll continue the imaginary battle and exercise regime.
glitter-graphics.com
