Mali has written a brilliant blog post again entitled "The Rest of My Life" and I've been wanting to write my own answer to that question posed in Lisa's blog, but I've been busy, so I only have time to type this down now. Before I start, let me also share loribeth's post on the same topic.
A few years back, after deciding on surrendering to life without children, I felt the need to find something "grand/noble" to fill my life as a result of not having children. I think this stemmed from the fact that many people would automatically say, "You can always adopt" whenever we said we couldn't have children and I have read many people who accused infertiles of being selfish for trying out treatments "when there are so many abandoned children out there". As if one needs to be like Mother Teresa if one wants to have children but can't. So I definitely felt the societal pressure to find something big to do with my life when the baby thing didn't work out, but I never really started searching.
In the first place, I was lost, grieving, sorrowful, and I had to deal with so many emotional storms that I couldn't think straight. We did make one rash decision during this journey because I was so angry with our empty arms and after learning that lesson, I decided not to make any decision when I'm angry. I had to take time to enter that place of pain and process my grief along with all the emotional storms inside. After all, the only way to handle grief is to grieve.
The first things I did in order to move on were probably these:
1. Finding small things that bring me joy and doing things that bring me joy.
2. Tapping into my inner child (in my case I try to build different kinds of snow creations in winter, the photos of which you can check out in my main blog).
3. Writing down the things I've been learning during my infertility journey and rebranding infertility as a guru instead of an enemy and truly believing in it.
Only after doing the above and after getting farther away from the rows and rows of buried dreams (after doing grief work for a longer time) did I start getting clues on what I wanted to do. It's not about finding big, grand dreams, but for me it's more about being more focused on what kind of woman I want to become now that I know I won't be a mother.
I owe Michelle Frost a HUGE thank you for her eloquent words in the comment section of one of my posts in this blog (for some reason I have a hard time trying to find that particular post to link here). In that post I was talking about leaving a legacy on earth and she said, "Amel, YOU are your own legacy." The words knocked me off my chair. I was wondering why on earth did I ever try to separate myself into different parts/roles because I was talking about leaving a legacy as a blogger. But in truth is that I am the sum of my parts and my legacy to the world should be the entirety of myself, the whole of me, everything that makes me who I am. Her words were like soothing balm to my soul at that time. THANK YOU for knocking me off my chair, M! :-D One's pain can truly blind one so much to one's full potentials.
Anyway, one thing I want to focus
on these days is being an encourager. A few years back a blogger friend of mine
told me that she said I excelled in encouraging her and her words stuck in my
head. Sure anyone can encourage anyone they meet, but I want to do it
with more awareness these days. I want to be more intentional in
becoming an encourager. Just finding this one task has made me more purposeful in life. Life is more exciting this way! :-D What other things do I want to focus on? I haven't figured them out yet, but I have time. :-) It's exciting to try to figure out what else I want to/can incorporate in my life. It's like a mini adventure. :-D
Other than that, our life continues just like before. I think I once wrote about how it feels like we're a couple of empty nesters because of the shift from wanting to have children/preparing to have children mentality to life with no children. The only difference is that we have no children. These days I no longer worry about making future plans that may clash with the possible pregnancy, so we're trying to live life to the fullest and enjoy life as a complete family of two.
Oh, and every now and then I try to educate people about infertility and its effects, but it doesn't come from a place of pain anymore. Meaning I share infertility links not because I need people to validate my pain (like what I did in the past when I was still hurting so much), but because I simply want to share awareness of the different shades of infertility. This is probably the biggest change compared to life pre-infertility. Infertility is now a part of my life and life has never been the same after that. These days I have an infertility survivor badge etched in my soul.
These days we're trying to save money for our old age, because we probably won't be able to rely on any relatives to take care of us if we ever live that long (considering the possibility of not being able to live on our own anymore), so ideally we should have some fund for our old age so that if we need to pay people to help us with something, we can still afford it. However, I also try not to think too much or plan too much because life is so full of surprises (but I still love saving money for rainy days LOL!). We would love to be able to pay off our house loan and also do some renovations in the future, but in the meantime I can say that life is good. It's beautiful. I'm content. And summer's coming. :-D
Last night before I went to bed, I started mulling over my previous post and this idea came. What else was different then and now? Back then I felt like a victim. Totally. Completely. Indisputably. I felt confused because of the many feelings that I was experiencing and when I confided them to my closest friends, they didn't understand. I needed to reach out to people who understood, who would help me validate my feelings, who could make me feel "sane" in all the insanity that I felt.
So during my search for sanity amidst the storms of IF, I started sharing infertility articles that validated my "plight", but I shared those as a victim. I shared those mostly because I wanted to understand myself and mostly because I felt like screaming out to others, "Look at me!!! I'm in pain. Great pain. Now I'm beginning to understand why. I have the right to feel all this and I am NOT crazy. I know you probably don't even know why I'm in pain. Look at me! Can't you see how many scars I have? Can't you see how much pain some of you have inflicted on me? Can't you??!?!?!?!?!?!?!"
I think the switch started happening gradually but surely after we decided to stop TTC and to surrender to life without kids. It didn't happen over a month or even a year...I think it took more or less two years before my victim mentality was finally taken over almost completely by my survivor mentality. I'm an IF survivor now, though every now and then the shadows of the victim mentality zig-zag in and out of my consciousness.
So nowadays when I share infertility articles, I share them as a survivor. I share them knowing that those who won't open their minds and hearts will probably not understand at all what an infertile may go through, but that those who are willing to listen and open their hearts may be enlightened and that even if only one soul is enlightened and one heart is opened up, then that's for the greater good of mankind.
A while ago a friend talked about writing a will in her FB page. She and her DH has an adopted child (mind you, she can't have her own children due to hysterectomy and for a long time Indo people and her relatives thought that she would never get married 'coz they thought that no Indo man would want a woman who couldn't bear children - and no, the hubby isn't Indonesian). Anyway, she said that she had written a will on what to do if she and her DH died for some reason. She wants to make sure that the relatives would know their wish concerning their child.
The discussion tugged some strings in my heart. Before TTC, even before we were planning to have kids, I had wanted to give away some family heirlooms to our children later on in the future. Once the TTC dream ended, though, I didn't really think about the heirlooms anymore.
glitter-graphics.com
The discussion triggered some soft spots in my heart, so I wrote in her FB page that if I died first, I would love for hubby to be able to give the family heirlooms to my brother so that he can pass on the family "inheritance" so to speak. I don't care what happens to my other belongings on earth or even my money if I should die first, but the jewelleries...They're not particularly expensive, but I know that my Mom had kept them safe for years and years and years because of their sentimental value. I still remember playing dress-up in my parents' bedroom and putting them on when I was a child.
Infertility is a very tricky thing. There are so many unexpected things that can turn my focus from someone else's life towards my grief, my infertility, the things that IF has robbed from me, the holes in my heart. And every time I experience that, I have to learn to forgive myself for doing that ...but I hope that by learning to forgive myself, I can learn to forgive others even better...and I sure do hope everybody along the way who's seen the ugly side effects of IF on myself would forgive me, too.
Note to self: What my other friend experienced that I wrote in the previous post (miscarriage) made me sentimental also because it reminded me of the days when we were still so hopeful, when we would do whatever it took to be able to get pregnant, when I was still paying so much attention to my body and my cycle and my fertile day, when every month I felt "This is the month!!!", when I let myself think about how the baby would look like, etc. etc. etc. It's bittersweet to look back on those days...because I know where we are now - happy and empty-armed.
1. Had a Skype convo with Mom today and again she "mentioned in passing" about this woman who had told her about some kind of herbs that had helped some other people to get preggy. I think many people know that we haven't had kids, so they volunteered in telling her things that they had heard may work. I have no trouble with that.
But today I finally told my Mom again that it was OK for us not to have kids and that we were becoming older and older anyway and she said she understood. I hope that would stop her from telling this kind of story to me anymore. :-)
glitter-graphics.com
2. Speaking of IF, lately I've been wondering about a cousin of mine who's never had kids. She's much older than me (at least 15 years older) and I can't imagine how it must have been like for her and hubby during those days - before she finally reached menopause. It must've taken a lot of patience to handle all the well-meaning words of other people. At least I'm SO far away from all the nosy Indo people, but she's always lived there all her life.
And I'm also wondering about another couple that I know (again a much older couple) that have never had kids. From what the guy's mother had told my Mom, it seemed as though they kept on trying to have a child, but now I don't know anymore if it's more HER wish rather than their wishes.
glitter-graphics.com
3. I feel REALLY THANKFUL for having experienced IF when I found out how much it's helped me connect with another friend of mine who's struggling with her little boy. How much she's misunderstood, unsupported, judged and how often other people offer "unsolicited assvice" to her. How much those unsolicited words can sting like hell when given at the wrong time...
It's interesting how much connection we can feel despite the obvious contrast between us. :-)
That's why today I am CELEBRATING my infertility because even if the only purpose of this is to be able to connect with her and be able to make her feel not alone, then it's WORTH IT!!! :-D
I'm an IF SURVIVOR and I'm gonna use this experience as best as I can!!! That's my promise to myself!
