#singlefeminist

[unlikelywallflower]

letter to a new mama: on the first six months

This is (some of) the advice I actually wish I’d gotten in the first six months, or did get and feel like is worth passing on:

1. Put your own oxygen mask on first.

You will feel guilty doing this, because you have been socialized and told to believe that you must sacrifice your entire being to this tiny, wailing creature whom you have just met. Obviously, you should meet your baby’s needs as much as you’re able. Please remember, though, that you not only count, too, but that your well-being is integral to your baby’s. I had to remind myself of this dozens of times a day, every time I wanted to do anything for myself (including going to the bathroom).

2. People will tell you to enjoy every moment. You won’t.

You will also feel guilty about this, because some Instagram mommy influencer told you life with your baby should be all sunshine and rainbows and cooing and cuddles. Maybe you are somehow a magical unicorn who can enjoy existing on a total of 3 hours of fractured sleep, and alternating between being sucked on and spit up on all day, but probably you are not. Have compassion for yourself.

3. It’s okay if it’s hard.

I’ll say it again: IT’S OKAY IF IT’S HARD. It’s okay to say it’s hard. It is hard. See: enjoying every moment.

4. It really will get better.

People will look at you with your vacant expression and bleary eyes and tell you that it will get better, that it did for them around five, or six, or seven months. In your severely sleep-deprived state, you will not believe them, but it will. It really will. Caveat: my little one is just shy of a year old as I write this. It has been and will be hard again since the first six months, but in different ways. 

5. No dogmatic way of doing anything is worth your well-being.

This could go for anything to do with feeding, sleeping, playing, etc. The world is chock-full of dogmas to buy into. I was extremely attached to breastfeeding exclusively, for a few reasons: first, I honestly think breastfeeding is a mundane miracle. I often had (and still do have) the thought that I cannot believe how cool it is that my body makes food for my baby. Second, we’re still in a pandemic and I wanted to pump her full of as many antibodies as I could possibly provide. Third, even though I am a fierce supporter of the idea that “fed is best”, underneath that, I’d still bought into the well-meaning promotion of breastfeeding as the ultimate pinnacle of motherhood that the dogma of being a “natural mama” promotes. All of this combined to mean that I pushed real hard to keep exclusively breastfeeding, when combo feeding likely would have saved me a lot of heartache. Feed your baby in whatever way works for you. Do what you need to in order to maximize sleep quantity and quality for everyone. Do what you need to do to survive.

6. Every tiny thing will seem monumentally important. It isn’t.

You will not realize these things are not actually important until much later, even if you tell yourself now. Real-life example I bought into (momentarily): having to have a sparkling clean bathtub before I bathed my baby in it, every time. This is absolute nonsense. Nonsense!

7. If your love for your newborn isn’t there right away, it will come.

It does not make you any less of a mother/parent if your love for your baby is not instantaneous and all-consuming. I spent a lot of time in therapy discussing how afraid I was that I wouldn’t explode with love the second I laid eyes on my newborn, and in the end, came to terms with the fact that I might not, and it would be perfectly normal if I didn’t. When the time came, I didn’t, and I was a bit sad about it, but the love did come and grow over time. Interestingly, even if my mind hadn’t caught up, my body did love her from the start; I instinctually showered her with kisses and cuddles and sang to her and did all the things I’d imagined.

8. Read Precious Little Sleep. 

I’m like a walking infomercial for this book. Seriously. There are many books about baby sleep out there, and most of them will have you believing that you will ruin (ruin!) your child’s entire life if you do not do things exactly as they say (see: dogma). Thank God for my friend who told me to read this book, which is not only not dogmatic, it’s hilarious, and it lays out a bunch of different options for how to teach your child to sleep, so you can choose based on what feels right for you and your parenting values. Also, I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that despite all my pre-baby reading, I didn’t really know that newborns should only be awake around 45mins at a time, and need a lot of help to fall asleep. If I’d read this book earlier, it would have saved me a lot of time, frustration, and sleep.

9. Learn how to ask for and accept help.

I am particularly bad at this (see: Strong Independent Woman™), to the point that neighbours would see me struggling with large heavy loads of things while I was pregnant and say with exasperation “let us help you!”. It’s still hard for me to ask for and accept help, but I’m getting better at it, because there is literally no other way to function as a new parent, let alone a single one in a pandemic.

10. Some people will show up in the way you’d hoped, some won’t. Have compassion.

Almost every parent I’ve met had the realization after they had their first baby that they wished they’d been able to do so much more for their new parent friends than they had. I was no exception. You simply can’t know how vulnerable a time it is, how much every little check-in and meal drop-off matters, until you’ve been through it yourself. Have compassion for yourself for the people in your life for not having known. Everyone is dealing with their own shit and doing the best they can.

[unlikelywallflower]

catching up part 3: on the bubble bursting and the beginning of the end

[This is part 3 in a multi-part catch-up of events from December 2019 to March 2020. If you want to catch up on previous catch-up posts first, you can find part 1 here and part 2 here.]

Backing up a bit for those who are not aware, because it will become pertinent to the story: my community of close friends is…unusual. We are incredibly loving and affectionate with each other. Maybe it comes from having a mostly queer circle of friends; maybe it comes from having built community intentionally over the course of a year and a half of weekly dinners together; maybe we’re just all super-affectionate weirdos. Whatever it is, we love each other a lot, and we love that we love each other. Also, several of my friends are in polyamorous relationships with each other. They do so freely, consensually, lovingly, respectfully, and joyfully; it works for them, and it works beautifully. And, one of these people who is in the middle of all this polyamorous loveliness is one of my closest friends, and she is also the one woman I have ever dated, briefly, about 15 years ago. She is the emotional hub of our community, and she is openly and unabashedly loving with everyone.

Back to our story: the morning after the symphony, shortly after I woke up, NTU exploded with rage at how “inappropriate” my friends had been at our engagement party, flaunting and “performing” their polyamorous life. I was perplexed, angry, hurt, and tearful; we had fought about monogamy before, and I had clearly maintained, as I had from our second date onward, that what I was looking for was to build a solid, trusting foundation in a monogamous relationship, after which we could talk about opening up to something like “monogamish”. At the time, he had agreed that that sounded great. Despite my repeated reassurances that I was not looking for anything like the polyamorous relationships my friends enjoy, NTU could not believe, in his insecurity, that I was doing anything other than biding my time waiting to get to be with other people. He was also incredibly judgmental about my friends’ openness about their relationships. As we had in our previous fight about it, we managed to find a place to settle in the argument, a common ground about what we both wanted, now and in the future. Yes, I was angry about the fight, and, I was also petulantly upset that he had burst the bubble of our blissful weekend. This fight started off the week that became the shit-storm to end all shit-storms (and eventually, it turns out, our relationship).

A few days after our engagement, NTU had his surgery. Despite the fact that it was a planned, routine day surgery—one that he’d already had once before, no less—I was terrified of something going wrong, and of losing him. I felt awful that my fear took over our preparations, given that he was the one actually having surgery, but he was understanding and loving about it. The surgery went perfectly smoothly, and when I walked into the recovery ward and saw his face, I was flooded with relief and the most intense love I’ve ever felt in my life. We went home, got him settled on the couch, and had one day of peace and recovery. The following day, the fertility clinic called and we got news that was, to put it mildly, bad. And that was the beginning of the end.

NTU took The News very badly, which was completely understandable. A big part of what had drawn us together was the clarity that we both very much wanted, and were very much ready for, a family, and now, it seemed, we might not be able to fulfill that dream. This earth-shattering news was enough to take what was moderate and mostly managed anxiety and blow it up in to a full-on crisis. Add in a few weeks of recovery during which he was off work and had nothing to occupy his mind but his own dark thoughts, and during which he couldn’t work out (which was his main mode of self-regulation), and this crisis was intensified a hundredfold.

When two people like NTU and I put ourselves together in a relationship on hyper-speed and in the aforementioned relatively small space, you get a container not only for growth, but for all the issues to crop up on hyper-speed too. So there we were, dealing with my independence and reluctance to make space, his insecurity and need for reassurance, and the holy mess that those two patterns make when you mix them together, with an added dash of crisis just to spice things up. And it was not pretty.

NTU’s way of responding to this was to yell, to nitpick, to blame me for his insecurities, and to try to control my behaviour. My response to this was to shut down, cry, and push back, hard. At first, it seemed like we were just in a really hard shit-storm of events, and we could make it through, especially with the help of our amazing couples therapist. We did some great work in those therapy sessions. I tried to open up about my anger at how he was behaving—an emotion that is incredibly difficult for me to feel and express, and the hiding of which made things a thousand times worse for him. He tried to see my view, tried to see me, and fought to have his own pain seen and his own needs met. Despite this work, things between us were devolving, and his efforts to control my behaviour were ramping up.

Looking back now, I can see that, over time, bit by bit, I began to contort myself into a human pretzel in order to pacify him, make him more comfortable, not arouse his insecurities or his ire. You’re uncomfortable with my level of affection with my friend I dated for three months 15 years ago? Let me take it down a few notches and just not spend as much time with her. You’re uncomfortable with me using terms of endearment with anyone other than you? Let me try to edit myself. You’re uncomfortable with me saying “I love you” to anyone but you? Let me try to edit myself a little more. You wake up at 5:30am and spend an hour scrolling on your brightly lit phone in our shared bed? Let me put on a sleep mask so I can try to get a little more sleep. You’re terrified I no longer want to marry you? Let me consider taking you to City Hall just to appease you, even though marrying you right now is the last thing I want to do. You want to spend all of our time together, because you’re tired and you need reassurance? Let me put aside my friends and my creativity to make that happen.

I am not proud of any of this. In the aftermath of our breakup (about which I will say more later), I was—and still sometimes am—incredibly angry. I was angry at NTU for even trying to control any of my behaviour, for even thinking that he could try. But mostly, I was angry with myself for feeling like I let go of who I am. I was angry at myself for not stopping us in our tracks at the first red flag to have a real conversation about it. For not putting my foot down to have my needs met while I worked my ass off to try to meet his, however unsuccessfully. For forgetting that what I was ultimately committed to in finding a partner was finding a partner—a full partner who could and would love and respect my power, who would have power I could love and respect, and with whom I could create a loving, interdependent, adventure of a life. For letting myself get wrapped up in the fantasy, and like every other fool in love since the beginning of time, blinding myself to things that might best not have gone overlooked. And mostly, for ignoring my intuition long enough for it to get as far as it did.

[unlikelywallflower]

on tumbling deeper into uncertainty

My second date with Mr. Gigantic Blue Eyeballs happened in that anticipatory window of not knowing yet whether I was pregnant or not. The Open Roof Film Fest’s closing night film (Booksmart) and the conversation were both great, and, similar to our first date, I wasn’t sure how he was feeling about things. I tried flirting in small ways (a hand on the arm here, a look there), to no response, but again, the date kept going, so...On our way to get a drink afterward, I shared with him what I’m up to in terms of baby-making, and he was unfazed; he had even agreed to be a donor himself for a couple he’s friends with. After drinks, he walked me home, and it was the most friendly but perfunctory, unromantic goodbye I’ve maybe ever had. A couple of days later, I put my cards on the table, messaging him to be clear that I was interested, but didn’t want to make any assumptions about how he felt, and he let me know that he, despite wishing it were otherwise so, did not feel a romantic connection. So I thanked the universe and my matchmakers for bringing me the closest I feel like I’ve ever come to what I’m looking for in a match, and continued on my way.

The second miscarriage a few weeks later was, in many ways, easier than the first. It was earlier, at only 5.5 weeks, which meant I’d had less time to get used to the idea, less time to get attached, and hadn’t gotten far enough along to see a heartbeat on that first ultrasound. Though it was harder to allow myself to get excited when I saw that positive pregnancy test again at the end of August, I willed myself to do it, knowing that that joy was under the detachment somewhere anyhow, and that it wouldn’t make it any easier if I remained detached and the outcome I feared came to pass, again. And then, it did.

It was also harder the second time around. To have my hopes dashed, again; to be suffering through physical pain along with the heartbreak; to live with the fear that now, it wasn’t necessarily just some fluke, but a pattern. I rallied the troops of my support network, but also downplayed it, telling myself that it was easier and that I would make it back to being okay faster this time.

Just over a week after it happened again, I had my first appointment with the second of the two specialists to whom I’d been referred. The first one had declared me “exceedingly normal”, at least from a hematological point of view. The rheumatologist spit rapid-fire questions at me for half an hour until my nerves were fried and overwhelmed, then sent me out to get an X-ray and have blood drawn for a plethora of tests. My grief then mutated into fear: what if one of these tests was positive and I had a serious, lifelong auto-immune disease? What if I had to take major drugs, like prednisone, which basically made me too agitated to function the last time I was on it? What if I had a complicated, risky pregnancy that required intense medical follow-up? What if I had no choice but to give birth in a hospital, surrounded by stranger doctors? What if this all took months to figure out and I had to wait to try to conceive again? It took a considerable amount of willpower to remember that a healthy baby is the goal, and that regardless of whether it was my original desire or intention, I would do anything I needed to in order to get there, including way more medical intervention than I’d ever wanted.

And then the results came back, all of them negative save for the same imprecise umbrella test that had given us reason to believe there was an issue in the first place, meaning I don’t have an auto-immune disease that could impact pregnancy, they have no idea what is causing the miscarriages, and I’m free to try again. The relief was palpable and sweet, but not immediate; it was the sheer helplessness I felt at the lack of answers that welled up first. I hadn’t really wished for a positive result, but it would have given me something concrete to treat, to manage, to do something about. And that, truly, is all I want right now—just something I can do, something I can control, something that will help stave off this feeling of helplessness. Once the relief had surfaced, then subsided, the grief I’d pushed down came back up to be released. So I am back, now, to finding pockets of joy whenever/wherever I can, and controlling the only thing I can—taking gentle, compassionate care of myself, and allowing others to do the same.

[unlikelywallflower]

on the magic of asking and allowing people to show up

The day the second miscarriage started, as I sat on the floor of my bedroom, weeping and waiting to head to my fertility clinic for an ultrasound, hoping that somehow the bleeding would resolve itself like it had the previous week, but knowing in my core that it was already too far gone, one of my closest friends called me. She was actually calling me for support with an issue she was dealing with, but she dropped it immediately when she heard me crying. When she asked who was bringing me to the clinic, I answered that I knew my brother would if I asked, but that he’s not really the person I lean on for these kinds of things. My brother and I are close in that we would do absolutely anything for each other, but we are not super close emotionally. 

My friend gave me a gift that day, though. She said that maybe, if I gave him a chance, he would show up in exactly the way I needed. And so I did: I called him, and he dropped everything to bring me to the clinic, to hug me, to listen to me cry, to wait with me for the interminable half hour between the ultrasound and seeing the doctor to confirm that the worst had happened again, to drive me to pick up gluten-free vegan pizza and ice cream, and to hang out with me while I ate it. There was no question for him that he would do this for me, and while I never really questioned that he would, I hadn’t yet made space for him to be able to show up for me in this way, until my friend gave me the blessing of that gentle challenge. I would say I’m better than average at asking for help, given the work I’ve done and the community I have the privilege to be surrounded by, but it still isn’t easy. Sometimes, though, people are just waiting to be asked, and are happy to have the opportunity.

In the intervening weeks, I tended my wounds, protected my heart by only bingeing happy/comedic TV and movies, and tried to move forward. I was stuck, though. Even the relief of the negative auto-immune test results did not unstick me from the gloom—the pall I felt had come over me of being, now, someone who had had not one unlucky miscarriage, but two. When I travelled to Montreal to see my guru and receive blessings, I thought it would be a moment of joy amidst the near-constant feeling of trudging through my daily life. But when I stood in front of her, all I could do was weep. All of the grief that I had stuffed down to deal with the anxiety of the tests, the fear of the future, all came to the surface. It was a magnificent release, and incomplete.

The following week, I screwed up the courage to make a request of three close friends. I knew that something more than putting one step in front of the other was required to lift the pall, and I knew that like before, I wanted to mark my period with ritual symbolizing release of the old and making space for the new. Unlike the ritual I marked alone after the first miscarriage, this time I asked my three closest spiritually-minded/witchy femme friends to engage in ritual with me. It felt scary to ask, even though I knew they would be happy to show up for me in this way. And it felt even scarier to ask that they come up with contributions to the ritual so that I wouldn’t have to plan it all myself.

When my period did start, it was simultaneous grief and joy: grief at what was lost, and that I was having to have a period at all; joy that I was being given this literally fresh start. And then my friends did show up, magically and in full femme force. It was one of the most transformative rituals I’ve experienced; to be surrounded by friends, not to mention the fierce women in my lineage that we’d called in, to allow myself to completely let go in their presence, to say goodbye and invite in the new. It felt like a literal weight lifted, and a week later, I find myself smiling and laughing and bouncing now, in a natural way that has none of the compulsion I’d been feeling before.

A friend of mine who had two miscarriages before her first baby (and another later on) once told me, after my first miscarriage, that she felt like having miscarriages makes you, in a weird, fucked up way, a deeper person. I think that is true, likely, of anyone who has experienced loss; our hearts break, and they consequently open wider to both the pain and the joy. I am laughing more now, and I am still crying. When I can allow this to happen without getting freaked out that it means I’m not okay, instead knowing that it simply means I am living as I promised myself I would—open-heartedly—it is then that I know I really am, and will be, okay.

[unlikelywallflower]

catching up again part 5b: on surrendering, again, and a new arrival

(This is a continued catchup of events from July 2020 to today. Click to read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5a.)

We packed up and went for what felt like the longest ride of my life, with contractions coming on and nowhere to go. As we entered the hospital, I was hit with the hustle and bustle of it all, the people in scrubs, the industrialness of it: it was everything I hadn’t wanted. I turned, sobbing once again, to my friend, and melted down, blubbering “I don’t want to be here”. She held me while I cried, hanging onto her in my bathrobe and flip flops in the hospital lobby, until I could surrender to what was happening, what I’d chosen as my next right step, and we went upstairs.

After my my midwife broke my waters and they came out clean, active labour came on pretty quickly. I tried and failed to get comfortable in the beautiful but poorly designed tub in my room. The next contraction that came as I was making my way back to bed was enough to put a look in my eyes that made it pretty clear to both me and my midwife that the next right step was an epidural. I really hadn’t wanted one, but there was simply no option left: my tank was empty, and I needed sleep if I was going to make it through active labour.

Sitting on the edge of a hospital bed, hunched over and clutching my friend’s elbows for dear life, riding out intense contractions while trying to sit perfectly still, was one of the hardest physical things I’ve done in my life, but 20 minutes later, when the anesthetist came back, his prediction had come true: he was my new best friend. Epidurals are FUCKING MAGIC. I was under the mistaken impression that I was going to be numb from the waist down, but instead it was the most curious sensation of being able to feel pressure but not pain. In “natural” circles, epidurals get a bad rap, and I had bought into this with my desperate dreams of a fully “natural” birth, but I am so, so grateful I had the option. (The idealization of a “natural” birth is so problematic that it’s hard to swallow now how deeply I was invested in it, but that's a whole other post…)

I slept through most of active labour, waking only when my fetal heart monitor needed to be adjusted. Sometime in the early morning hours, my midwife and student midwife had to leave after having been awake for 24 hours, and a new midwife arrived. The next few hours were a blur: I spiked a fever from the epidural, kicking off the Covid protocol and a round of antibiotics; they gave me oxytocin to get me from nine to ten centimetres; I slept some more; then, the time finally came. I was ready to push. My friend put on some Beyoncé and I got ready to meet my daughter.

Many birthing parents describe pushing as their favourite part of labour, and I was no exception. I am an athlete and a yogi, and I know how to isolate specific muscles to get a job done. Finally, I had something active to do that I had some control over, and after having slept a few hours with the blessed relief from pain, I had energy. At some point during a break between pushes, I turned to my friend and said, “this is awesome!” The midwife kept telling me to hold my breath while I pushed, but my conditioning to be compliant was so strong even in this most fierce moment that I couldn’t tell her I had zero intention of doing that. Instead, I did as I’d intended, which was to use my breath, but I exhaled quietly so she wouldn’t hear me, which my friend thought was hilarious. Regardless, I managed to push quickly enough that my daughter came before the backup midwife even had time to arrive.

I wish I could say that when they laid her on my chest, I was filled with a love greater than I ever thought possible. I wish I could say that I was fully present and drinking in this new life I had literally grown inside me and birthed into the world. I wish a lot of things, but mostly, I felt numb. I don’t remember much about this time, other than trying to still myself amidst the bustling of my midwife stitching me up, the respiratory therapist wiping my baby’s face to clear the meconium, birthing the placenta, the backup midwife arriving and taking her to be examined across the room. But I held her, I breathed her in, I felt her sucking on my cheek and knew it was time to feed her. I stared at her in relief and awe and numbness and thought, “holy shit. You’re here.”

A few hours later, we were out and home with my parents; bruised, battered, bloody, exhausted beyond belief, and ready to start the next chapter.

[unlikelywallflower]

catching up again part 5a: on surrendering, again, and a new arrival

(This is a continued catchup of events from July 2020 to today. Click to read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.)

Here is how I visualized my labour and birth going (don’t laugh): after a restful night’s sleep, I would wake up in the morning a few days before my due date to the first twinges of early labour. I would excitedly call my friend and birth partner and let her know things were starting. I would go for a long walk in the forest to help my body ease into active labour. I would then go home, bake a gluten-free vegan “groaning loaf”, and set up my bedroom for the birth. Then, my friend would arrive and fill my birth tub for me, and I would alternate between the tub, walking, yoga, and resting on the couch as labour progressed. Active labour would come on within a matter of hours, I would call my primary midwife, and she and her student would come over. My friend would support me through contractions by rubbing my back, having me hold on to her, and cheering me on, and I would be primal, powerful, and moving naturally into whatever position my body needed in each moment. We would all enjoy the groaning loaf together (me in between contractions), and when the time came (which it would fairly rapidly), I would transition to the bed and give birth on hands and knees to a beautiful, healthy baby girl. Very little of reality matched this vision. 

Here’s how it actually went down: six days past my due date, I got my first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, ate a few too many cookies with eggs in them (which I normally avoid), saw my acupuncturist, and saw my midwife for a stretch and sweep (which, given I was only about half a centimetre dilated, was more like just irritating my cervix). When I laid down for bed that night, I started having what felt like intense gas pains, which I attributed to the cookies. They came and went and the little sleep I got was fitful. The next day when I got up, the pains were thankfully gone, and I enjoyed a long walk around the neighbourhood with my mom, chuckling at the stares my gigantic belly was getting. I also had another ultrasound; at this point I’d had so many (“advanced maternal age” + overdue = a million ultrasounds) that the techs were joking that they hoped they would never see me again. That night when I laid down, I had what felt like menstrual cramps, on and off all night, again enough to keep me from sleeping. The next night, those cramps progressed to pain beyond what I’ve felt before (and I’ve been on prescription muscle relaxants for cramps). At some point, I asked for another stretch and sweep to get things moving faster, but my backup midwife explained that all the babies were being born and no one would be available to be with me if I went into active labour at that point. I mostly had been able to avoid feeling sorry for myself for being single throughout this process, but I cannot describe the loneliness of being awake and alone for the third night in a row, in pain, anxious, and exhausted. Nothing my friend and I had talked about in terms of her being my birth partner had included what might happen if I was in prodromal (“false”) labour for days, and there was no sense in her being as exhausted as I was when things finally ramped up.

After the third night of little to no sleep, my friend came and set up and filled the birthing pool. Being in the pool felt heavenly; I was able to rest a little in between the contractions, which were picking up, albeit not very steadily. At one point we went for my envisioned forest walk, which had the opposite effect I had intended: my contractions stopped completely. At that point, given it looked like things were going to take a while yet, my friend went home for a bit to get some rest in her own bed and see her family. Every time I tried to rest, even with Tylenol and Gravol and propping myself up on pillows, the contractions would come on even more intensely. 

Around midnight that fourth night, the contractions had intensified enough in duration and frequency that I called my backup midwife (my primary midwife was off call). We spoke for a while, with her listening to me during my contractions. She didn’t think I was in active labour yet, so she recommended I try to get more rest, which after three nights and countless unsuccessful attempted naps, was incredibly frustrating. I called my friend, realizing at this point that I could no longer be by myself, but she didn’t pick up. Panicking, dialing her number over and over, feeling helpless and alone, I started to think I would maybe have to call my mom, but eventually, my friend did pick up and she came over. I alternated between being in the pool, which was soothing to the point of slowing my contractions, and getting out so they would pick up again. In between contractions when I was out of the pool, we played Quirkle and I read. No one felt like baking a groaning loaf. By the time my midwife’s student called and said I could come to the clinic if I wanted, it felt like there was no longer a point. They said my backup midwife would call to make a plan for the evening a little later.

In thinking about what I would want that plan to look like, I realized I’d hit a wall: I’d then gone four days and nights without any real sleep, and while I could handle the pain of the contractions easily enough, I had absolutely no juice left. I was truly and utterly exhausted. I knew, without a doubt, that even if I went into active labour that very minute, I wouldn’t have the energy to make it through and deliver my baby safely. I turned to my friend, sobbing, and just said, “I’m so tired. I think we have to go to the hospital.” (to be continued)

#singlefeminist #choicemom #singlemombychoice #infertility

[unlikelywallflower]

catching up again part 4: on stretch marks and liminal spaces

(This is a continued catchup of events from July 2020 to today. Click to read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.)

Sometime around 35 weeks I got my long-awaited, albeit brief “golden period”: a few weeks where the insomnia eased, I slept better than I had since before I’d conceived, and was feeling good (if heavy) in my body. 

By this time, my belly was huge, and I had the stretch marks to show for it. I vacillated between hating these glaring marks stretching themselves across my abdomen like I’d been clawed by an angry tiger, and being immensely proud of them and what they signified: I—and my baby—had made it this far. I had a couple of friends help me with a pregnancy photo shoot, and while I did cry at the vulnerability of having someone see my tiger marks, and had a hard time looking at the photos of them after, I couldn’t stop myself from staring at the photos in which I was clothed, radiant, caressing my belly full of a baby I had wished for, longed for, cried for, and prayed for for years. I framed one of them and hung it in our bathroom to commemorate this slice of my life full of possibility and trepidation.

I didn’t have a car and wasn’t taking public transit at this point (see: pandemic), so I was walking everywhere, and the belly garnered me quite a bit of kindness from lovely strangers. There was the lady who, upon seeing me trudging down the street lugging my grocery-laden granny cart behind me, said “you got this, mama!”; the man who saw me resting on a post at a street corner (after a looong walk uphill) and asked if I was okay, leading me to burst into grateful tears; the countless times neighbours saw me struggling (because asking for help is something I was/am still definitely working on) and came to my rescue. There were, of course, also the times when there were no neighbours or kind strangers around to witness the moments of loneliness and exhaustion, when having lugged the groceries home once again, I would think to myself, “if I had a partner, they’d be doing this for me.” If the Land of Infertility was an isolating place, being single and pregnant in a pandemic was even more so.

As I got closer and closer to my due date, I began to feel this strange sense of existing in several places at once. I was in the liminal space of waiting: one toe into (at least the idea of) motherhood, one foot in the “before”. Life hadn’t really felt like “before” for over a year, and this pandemic pause made the sense of liminality all the more poignant.

One way or another, I was going to get to meet this baby in the next few weeks. Amidst all of my walking (endlessly around my neighbourhood, up and down stairs, or with one foot on the street, one on the curb—whatever people said could help get my body ready and bring on labour), I had this grand idea of spending a day in meditation, communing with Cupcake and declaring my sense of readiness. knew I would never feel truly ready—no one can ever be ready—but I was, and felt, as ready as I would ever be. I’d done all the things that felt necessary, and I was feeling good. I had read the childbirth books, had made a birth “preferences” list (which if you know me, you know was obviously quite extensive and detailed), had visualized my ideal birth. There were moments of terror at what could go wrong, but they were more and more dominated by visions of holding my newborn babe to my chest—weeping, in bliss, both, or something else entirely; of actual excitement at welcoming this being into the world; of awe at seeing God in the form of this baby I’d grown; of thanking my baby for choosing me as her mother.

I told myself (literally wrote it in my journal) that whatever came in labour and birth, I would ride the waves, surrender to the power of my body, and go with whatever was needed. “I’ve got this”, I wrote. In the end, though almost nothing about my labour and birth turned out how I imagined it, all of that was true.

[unlikelywallflower]

catching up again part 3: on the fallacy of the “golden” trimester

(This is a continued catchup of events from July 2020 to today. Click to read Part 1 and Part 2.)

Many people refer to the second trimester as “the golden period” of pregnancy when the “morning” sickness has gone down and you have energy again, before the exhaustion of the third trimester hits. Having freshly gone off the extra progesterone and gained somewhat of an emotional equilibrium, I was very much looking forward to this respite. At 12 weeks, I somehow managed to make it through leading four straight full days of an online executive leadership development program, feeling bone tired and just sick enough to feel like throwing up but not be able to, and couldn’t wait for relief. Then I got the call and the floor fell out from under me: my mom had been diagnosed with breast cancer.

This was my mom’s second cancer. When I was a teenager, she survived non-Hodgkins lymphoma, and I effectively shut down emotionally and threw myself into extra-curricular activities to avoid dealing with my  fear. This time, I was alone and pregnant in a pandemic, and terrified all over again: that I couldn’t be there for her through this in the way I wanted to, given the pandemic; that she wouldn’t be able to be there for me throughout my pregnancy; and most terrifying of all, that I would lose my mom before she’d even get a chance to meet her granddaughter. 

Reassured that they’d caught it early, I focused on what I didn’t have the capacity to do the first time around: being there for my mom, in whatever limited ways I could. This was hard to do from a distance, and it was hard to know what support I could provide that would actually feel helpful for my mom. Eventually, as a way of feeling connected, we landed on watching TV “together”: eschewing the fancy “watch party” apps, we would text “3, 2, 1, play” and start the same show at the same time and text each other throughout—something we still do to this day. It was a way of feeling connected without actually being physically together, and without putting any pressure on my mom to talk about anything she didn’t feel like she could.

Not entirely unrelated, I’m sure, the other less-than-fun (to say the least) thing that re-announced itself in my second trimester was insomnia. Almost as soon as the first trimester can’t-keep-my-eyes-open exhaustion wore off, I started waking up in the middle of the night and just staying awake, for hours. It felt like a cruel twist of fate that at this critical time when I was gearing up for the most exhausted I’d be in my life, when everyone was oh-so-helpfully telling me to “sleep while you can!”, my body was saying “nope!”. So I (mostly) learned to cope, got a lot of reading done, and napped as much as I could. Many, many people joked to me during this time that the insomnia was “practice” for when I would have a newborn, which made my weary brain want to punch them in the face (sorry, if that was you; I know you meant well).

My anxiety over whether this pregnancy would “stick” continued to fade, and after my Pregnant Chicken newsletter told me at 14 weeks that my baby was the size of a cupcake, Cupcake the baby became. While the anxiety never really went away, once I could feel Cupcake kicking inside me, things got markedly easier. They were like reassuring little reminders that the baby was there, alive, growing and thriving. As second trimester passed into third and the baby grew, Cupcake would have what we lovingly referred to as “dance parties” on a regular basis, which delighted me to no end. Hearing about them secondhand also delighted my mom, who after an agonizing ordeal of medical errors and multiple surgeries, had made it through and been given the all clear, without even having to go through chemo or radiation. There were so many reasons I was excited to have this baby, but high among them was fulfilling the dream of giving my parents a grandchild. 

[unlikelywallflower]

catching up again part 2: on the third time hopefully being the charm

(This is a continued catch-up from August 2020. You can read “catching up again part 1″ here.)

I was convinced, on the second round after starting to try again, that I could not get pregnant. I was certain that any symptoms I was feeling were, as usual, side effects of the progesterone. So when the first stick I peed on showed an extremely faint but decidedly discernible second line, I spent the day mostly in disbelief, looking at it over and over, my heart skipping a beat, assuming I was imagining things. On the second day, the line grew a tiny bit darker, and I let myself feel a tiny bit excited, told SD1, and told my family by sending a text asking “who wants to see the cutest photo ever?”. My brother and dad answered, obviously expecting another photo of my cat and not a photo of a positive pregnancy test. My mom, who at any given moment is usually within arms’ reach of her Macbook, iPad, Apple watch, and iPhone, was out of the house and the last to answer, so she chimed into the chorus of “OMG! Congratulations!” with “what’s going on?” (“scroll up, Mom”). The next day, I told two of my closest friends. And on the fourth day, I woke up with anxiety worse than anything I’d felt in a long time, convinced that I had already had a miscarriage.

Being pregnant again on the 14th attempt and after two miscarriages was very, very strange. It was clinging desperately to my nausea, hoping against hope that it was in fact the pregnancy hormones rising, and not just some ingredient in the prenatal vitamins causing it. It was practically demanding a relatively unnecessary second blood test just for the tiny bit of reassurance that the hormones were doubling as they should be, even though the hormones did that in the first two pregnancies and those still didn’t end well. It was being elated one second and terrified the next. It was compulsively checking my heart rate on my FitBit to ensure it was still slightly elevated. It was buying a home baby Doppler and setting self-imposed limitations on how often I was allowed to listen to the baby’s heartbeat to reassure myself (side-note 1: the first few times I did this, I mistook my own heartbeat, which the machine was picking up through the veins around the placenta, for the baby’s). It was telling more people than I normally would, because those were all people I would want to know if I had another miscarriage, and what was even the point of going through this alone? It was reading poetry to my little blastocyst (then embryo, then fetus) every night, and waking up at least once every night with anxiety that could keep me up for hours. It was checking the toilet paper every single time I peed, convinced that I would see blood. (Side-note 2: apparently it’s not just anxious pregnant people who’ve had miscarriages who do this; I know at least one friend who did this too.) 

It was sending screenshots from the Bump app of what foodstuff my embryo was the size of that week to SD1 and my mom, then wondering if it was actually even still growing inside of me. It was rejoicing when my nipples start to get sore, because hooray! Another symptom! Of course, for others, it may be none of these things or all of those things and more. For me, it was all of it and then some.

It was hard to distinguish, while on the progesterone, what was emotional side effects, what was simply heightened anxiety, and what was pregnancy hormones. Crying multiple times a day was normal during that time, as was going from zero to 100 over something relatively insignificant a colleague would say or do. Once I stopped the extra hormones at 10 weeks in (when the placenta had formed enough to produce its own progesterone), however, it became very clear: it was the drugs. Holy shit, y’all. The jump from hot mess to (relatively) stable was swift and merciful.

Once I passed my “balloon date” (this is apparently what it’s called when one pregnancy surpasses the length of previous pregnancies), and especially once I passed the magical holy 12-week mark (when the chance of miscarriage goes down precipitously), I began to feel like maybe, just maybe, this one might work out. Connection with my little fetus still felt somewhat fleeting, and most of my pregnancy-related attention was focused on anxiety about the potential for another loss, anxiety about what it might be like to give birth and live through my fourth trimester in a pandemic, and clinging to any markers of progress (ultrasound photos, hearing the baby’s heartbeat, and produce comparison baby size updates included). All I could do was take it one day (/hour/breath) at a time, and surrender to the process as much as possible.

[unlikelywallflower]

catching up again part 1: on getting back on the starting block

It was wild to even think about trying to conceive a human being in the middle of a global pandemic, but I was sick of waiting and none of us knew when this might end, so when my fertility clinic opened again, I (cautiously) jumped at the chance.

SD1 was a gracious godsend of a human being throughout the NTU ordeal (a reminder, since it’s been a while: NTU=Not The Unicorn). When NTU and I fell in love and I told SD1 that I wanted to pause our baby-making activities and focus on my relationship and trying with NTU, SD1 was nothing but supportive and happy for me. When NTU and I fell apart and I told SD1 what had happened, he was nothing but supportive (and appropriately aghast). And when I went back to SD1 to say that I was ready to try again, there he was, affable and open as always, and more than okay with resuming our non-traditional baby-making activities.

Starting again meant going back on several meds, including progesterone, which has the intention of preventing another miscarriage, and fun side effects that include but are not limited to randomly bursting into tears at the drop of a hat and being irritable AF. If you were ever under the illusion that you had any control over your emotions whatsoever, I recommend adding some extra hormones to the mix and seeing what happens.

Starting to try again felt like the first time all over again. I was hopeful beyond reason, convinced that after so much pain in the last year, maybe this would actually be easy. By easy, I don’t mean that being on that many medications is easy, or trying to conceive for the 13th time after two miscarriages is easy, but easy like maybe it would happen right away. Easy like given it’s a pandemic and my fertility clinic was operating under much more restrictive safety guidelines, I was subjected to way less invasive medicalization: instead of between 5 - 8 days of daily blood draws and transvaginal ultrasounds, and an injection to make me ovulate when I was going to anyhow, I did a few ultrasounds at a community clinic the month before to ensure the results lined up with my at-home ovulation tests, then I was left to my own devices (along with the medications) for the next cycle. So once we’d tried again, riding on this hope of “easy”, I scrutinized every symptom, convinced that they meant I was pregnant, instead of just feeling side effects of the progesterone.

When the millionth stick I’d peed on still stubbornly refused to produce a second pink line, I was devastated. It felt like such a punch to the gut that my story of an easy pregnancy after all I’d been through hadn’t come true, and the extra hormones didn’t help. I began to feel, for the first time on this whole journey, like maybe I was getting close to being done. I’d been through so much pain, and while I am resilient and I always get through it, l felt like a boxer who’d been through round after round, still hanging on despite having been repeatedly beaten to a pulp. In the Land of Infertility, my journey, interminable though it  has seemed at certain junctures, has been a relatively short and inexpensive one; inexpensive both in terms of the actual monetary costs, and in terms of what it has cost me emotionally and physically. That said, I’d been through almost two years of focusing an inordinate amount of time, money, and energy on getting pregnant, at the expense of a lot of the rest of my life. Maybe instead of framing it as giving up, I could give myself the gift of allowing myself to think of it as stepping out of the ring and moving on with my life. What would it be like to date without the insistent and deafening ticking of my biological clock in my ear? What could I devote my energy to if it wasn’t mostly taken up by managing the emotional side effects of fertility meds and the rollercoaster I’d been on for so long? 

While some people might find that thought depressing, or at least sad, I found it incredibly freeing. I was giving myself permission to say that at some point, I could choose to put myself first. I wasn’t saying I was ready to do it right away, or even after a definitive number of future attempts, but I was saying it was a possibility. I did, however, admit to myself that I had maybe one more attempt at “natural” conception in me before I seriously started thinking about IVF. As much as I didn’t want to go through IVF, I had already done the harder part (growing and having the eggs extracted) years ago, and at least it would give me a higher likelihood of both getting pregnant and being pregnant with a genetically normal embryo.

The next round of trying involved even higher doses of medication, tipping the experience from bad to awful. I went home to visit my parents for the first time since the pandemic started during this super-fun time, which was beautiful and overwhelming and wonderful. It also ended in me sobbing hysterically, after my mom innocently raved about the Snoo that my brother’s friend had gotten for their newborn. In her more optimistic world, it was only a matter of time until I would get (and stay) pregnant, but all my drug- and exhaustion-fuelled brain could make of that was the desperate thought that “I should be so lucky as to get to worry what kind of contraption my infant gets to sleep in”. It was not pretty, and it fuelled my thoughts of giving myself an out; I was just so damned sick of putting myself through this.

[unlikelywallflower]

on wrapping up the NTU saga and other pandemic adventures

The first few months of the pandemic were, for me (like for most), a wild ride, made immensely more tolerable by mood-stabilizing supplements and weekly therapy. This therapy that I started in order to help me cope when NTU and I began falling off the rails was (and still is) a godsend as I went through the grief of losing all human touch, of getting to see people unmediated by screens, of the imposed pause in my fertility journey, of the broader terror and loss that hit all of us in our own ways.

As the initial shock of the pandemic wore off and I began to stabilize, I was finally able to grieve the end of my relationship with NTU properly. In other words, I was finally able to feel beyond the anger over how it devolved and ended, beyond the gripping fear of the virus and of lockdown, to the sheer sadness of losing something that had once seemed infinite. We were so happy and so in love, before we weren’t. It was like there were two NTUs: one, the Dr. Jekyll with whom I fell in love, who was incredibly sweet and thoughtful and romantic; and the other, the Mr. Hyde he became. I should be clear: I don’t think NTU is or was evil; the duality just seemed so stark. In the aftermath of my anger at Mr. Hyde, I was left able to finally grieve the love we had and the man I fell in love with, and to realize that despite the seemingly stark duality, the man who ultimately ended our relationship was still a good one. He was just one who was in an immense amount of pain, one whom I couldn’t love the way he needed, and who couldn’t love me the way I was.

I still wonder sometimes if there is anything else for which to take responsibility. Not responsibility like taking the blame or fault for him treating me the way he did, but responsibility like “how could I have responded differently?”. Obviously, everything I did at the time was what I could do in the moment given the tools I had. Looking in retrospect, though, as is typical, I can see some things that I couldn’t see when I was in it. Ironically, I think that if, instead of walking on eggshells and trying to cater to his every mood, I had been able to tell him straight up that he couldn’t treat me like that, had spoken up more forcefully for my needs, things might have gone down differently. I know from the one time I exploded in anger-fuelled truth bombs (“of course I don’t want to marry you right now!!!”), he was hurt but actually appreciated the honesty. Perhaps, if I had done more of that, the difference would simply have been that our relationship would have ended sooner, which might have been a blessing for us both.

Now that the perverse urge to scroll endlessly through my Instagram discovery feed in hopes of seeing a photo of him has abated (having been able to resist just going directly to his open account), the memory of the experience has faded to a kind of surreal quality. Less than six months ago, I still had a diamond ring on my finger, a gift from a man I thought was my person; now, he seems like a stranger I had a passing (if rude) conversation with once upon a time.

And so, I moved through the paces of the pandemic post-breakup, taking walks and petting my newly adopted rescue cat to keep myself relatively sane. In April, two of my closest friends had their second baby. I was supposed to have been a support person at the birth, but given the risks, that obviously ended up not happening. When I saw the photo of my friend with her newborn pop up on my phone, in the middle of leading an online executive leadership development course, I held back tears as long as possible until I could explain that I needed to leave the call for a moment to talk to them. It was an explosion of joy and relief like I have seldom felt in my life. The birth had gone smoothly, and everyone was well.

The sadness and grief came afterward in intense waves mixed in with the joy: sadness that I couldn’t be there to support them, to have that experience, to hold him in my arms on the day of his birth like I had his older brother; sadness that I didn’t know when I would get to meet him in person, when I would get to hold him, or how to support his moms from afar. And so many memories, so much grief from my own fertility journey that I had thought were behind me, but as grief does, got re-surfaced and stirred up by the circumstances. It is a curious thing to feel that much intense emotion ranging from joy to grief at the same time, but all there was to do was to feel it.

This pandemic has driven up so much uncertainty, or rather, highlighted the ubiquitous uncertainty of life and the absurdity of our illusion that we can be certain of anything, ever. Like everyone, and despite the privilege of my condo and my relatively secure job that could easily move online, I was anxious about the uncertainty surrounding the virus: how it spread, how bad it might get, how long we might have to keep the safety measures in place, the safety of my loved ones. Amidst all of this, the uncertainty surrounding when I might be able to start trying to conceive again was pretty high on the list. My clinic was shut down entirely and indefinitely, and I could feel the clock ticking away. I decided at some point, as much as I could, to enjoy the time off the rollercoaster of emotions and hormones that would come with trying again. And I did enjoy that time, as much as is possible during a shut-down, at least enough that when my clinic began seeing patients again in June, I was ready to try again.

[unlikelywallflower]

catching up part 5: the aftermath

[This is part 5 (of 5!) in a multi-part catch-up of events from December 2019 to March 2020. If you want to catch up on previous catch-up posts first, you can find part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here, and part 4 here. Back to real-time regular programming after this!]

The weeks after the breakup involved riding a lot of intense waves: crying so intense there was nothing to do but sit down on the floor and surrender; rage so fierce I thought I would crawl out of my skin; relief so palpable I almost wept with joy; exhaustion so deep I couldn’t crawl into bed fast enough; shame so untouchable I buried it deep under everything else. There was also joy, at waking up after my first full night’s rest in what felt like months, star-fished across my queen-sized bed.

As I slowly began to come to terms with what had happened, I let my anger well up in a way I can’t remember ever having done before. Spurred on by encouragement from friends who knew how justified it was, who wanted me to feel the cleansing burn of rage, I surrendered to it. When I finally felt able to sit down and write—which had felt scary, because, you know, facing feelings—what poured out of me at first was a long string of “FUCK you”s. After a few lines of this, I went on to type a two-single-spaced-page list of “fuck you for…”. It was gloriously cathartic, and people were proud of me for having written it. (And no, I will not be publishing this list, even though it’s SO good. At least not for now. Maybe in the book version...)

I focused on this rage because it felt good, because it felt right (and righteous), and because it was easier than feeling the less glamorous feelings I was feeling—the feelings of embarrassment, and most of all, the feelings of shame. It was at lunch one day that a friend first named it: NTU’s behaviour had been not just not okay, not just manipulative AF, but emotionally abusive. This hit me, hard, because it felt right, and it felt true, and it also felt so disempowering.

When I was finally able to let myself admit these convoluted feelings in therapy, I coughed up what felt the most shameful piece of all: the thought that if he had been emotionally abusive, then I had let him. And if I had let him do that to me, what did that say about me? The judgmental part of me said that meant I was weak. Some higher-order but still judgmental part was horribly ashamed for even letting that thought enter my head—I, a woman who has worked with survivors, who would never ever say that to or about any woman, who would be horrified if a friend said that about herself. My lovely therapist spent a long time unpacking this thought and the accompanying shame, but the truth was, it mostly just needed to be said out loud so that I could see it in the light of day (or the warmly lit glow of my therapist’s office) and return to what I knew to be true—his behaviour was unacceptable, and weakness had nothing to do with it.

I loved this man. I fell in love with his intelligence, his excitement about life, his seeming ability not only to keep up with me, but to handle me. I have big feelings, a big life, and a big heart. I have been looking for a man who could handle and love all of me for a very long time, and I thought I had found him. When he went into crisis and we began fighting, I did what I do best (to varying degrees of effectiveness): I showed up, and I worked hard. I worked my butt off to try to make that relationship work, to get him and us back to a place of stability where we could address some of the fundamental things that weren’t working. I did not do this work perfectly; certainly, many of the ways I found to cope and to relate to him were likely the opposite of what he actually needed. But my god, did I try.

It turns out he couldn’t handle all of me, and we were never going to be the right people for each other. I was never going to be the partner and woman he wanted me to be, because I was never really going to make myself or my love or my life smaller to make him comfortable.

I did feel like I had lost my compass, myself, and my sense of reality at some points during this process, but I never did lose sight of what felt true and okay, and what didn’t. I did what anyone madly in love does: I saw the red flags and I justified them; I told myself that we would address the unworkable behaviours when we were okay again; I kept trying to get us back to what had felt so right, before it didn’t. I have compassion for that woman. I have deep respect for the desire to have it work out. I have so much admiration for the sky-high hope that comes from falling in love after having kept the possibility of love alive for so long. And I know that I always have been okay, and always will be, because I am resilient as fuck, and am held up by family and community.

[unlikelywallflower]

catching up part 4: on the end of the end

[This is part 4 in a multi-part catch-up of events from December 2019 to March 2020. If you want to catch up on previous catch-up posts first, you can find part 1 here, part 2 here, and part 3 here. We’re almost there, folks!]

As we were unraveling, and NTU was demanding that I appease his insecurity by editing my behaviour, telling me that my friends and my actions were inappropriate for the relationship we were building, I began to question my sanity. My mother and two of my closest friends were my lifeline to reality throughout this. They tried—so hard—to help me navigate the balance between accommodating reasonable requests from a partner who was going through a really hard time and had some legitimate concerns, and losing touch with myself and what’s truly important to me. I didn’t fully realize how bad things had gotten until one of those friends, after having seen me in person and realized the state I was in, put her foot down and said, “I’m really worried about you”.

Who knows how long it would have taken me to wake all the way up and understand that I no longer had the capacity or the desire to keep going. I was certainly getting close, and had voiced that very concern with people. I was exhausted, both by the relationship and the sleepless nights it was causing both of us. But NTU ended up engineering his own exit, which, as dramatic as it was, was a blessing in disguise.

I had long ago made peace, in my own way, with the fact that NTU was not going to do the Landmark Forum. Yes, it had been important to me, but as long as he was doing his own work in his own way, that was what was far more important. It took me a few fights and working through being ungraciously attached before I got there, but I did get there. Then, at a point when things were temporarily feeling okay between us, NTU decided to dive deep into an internet rabbit hole about Landmark and all the worst things the fringe elements of the internet have ever said about it. He didn't tell me at first that he’d done this, but he did tell me that he was scared and concerned, and we agreed to talk about it in our next therapy session.

We had a few days before that session, which included my birthday. The night we came home from my birthday party, in the midst of his anger at the affection I’d shown my friends, he blurted out that he wasn’t sure we would survive our next therapy session after I heard what he had to say. I knew, in that moment, that it was over. The next day—my actual birthday—I alternated between sheer exhaustion, naps, crying with anticipatory grief, and private thoughts of relief as I catalogued all the ways in which I’d be grateful to have my life back when we were done.

In our session the following day, he fulfilled his own prophecy. I won’t go into everything he said about Landmark (mostly because, despite his protestations about it, I don’t believe it actually had anything to do with our demise). The short version is this: He spilled the beans on his internet deep dive, and essentially laid down a decree that if I didn’t stop doing a whole lot of things and stop seeing a whole lot of people, we were done.

I was heartbroken that he didn’t trust or respect me enough to believe my direct experience of incredible benefit—the experience of the woman he was purportedly in love with—over fringe internet elements he’d never met. I also knew in that moment, to my core, that while he was completely entitled to his view, I was so done with being told what I could or couldn’t do, and what I should or shouldn’t be doing with my life. I tried as calmly as I could to explain that I understood his view, that I simply didn’t share it, and that I was not willing to isolate myself in the way he was asking.

So there I was, sitting on the couch in our therapist’s office, having finally let someone fully into my heart and my life, feeling like both were being rejected. This feeling was dramatically underscored when he handed me back the wooden heart I had given him—the one that I had held onto for a decade until I met the person I thought would be my life partner. He had brought it to therapy expressly so he could hand it back at this ending point he knew was coming, because he knew, deep down, that the line he was trying to draw would be his last with me.

And this, I think, is what it came down to: he didn’t have the tools to handle what was happening in his life or in our relationship, couldn’t handle me or the way I live my life, so he tried to control what he could, and when that didn’t work, he found his out. I was shattered that it had all gone so wrong, but relieved that the nightmare was over.

I said I would sleep elsewhere for a few days while he figured himself out and found another place to go, but he ended up packing and moving out that evening. At the urging of another worried friend, I changed the locks a few days later.

The following week was filled with wave upon wave of all the feelings: sadness, grief, anger, and relief. The first wave of relief was perhaps the strongest, when I walked back in to my condo the morning after our breakup to see the den that had previously been piled high with his un-integrated belongings mostly empty. My friend who was graciously supporting me said my relief in that moment was palpable, and she was right; not only was I so relieved he was gone, I was so thankful that we had never gotten married, never purchased a home together, and (thank God) never gotten pregnant.

Of all the emotions, the anger was the one I had to deliberately allow myself to feel. It has never been an easy emotion for me to access, because I typically am so afraid of it that I stuff it down and it comes out only as tears or in pent-up (and still teary) explosions. But this time, I allowed it all (more on this in the next post).

Beyond the waves of feeling, the weeks following our breakup also involved a process of slow and steady de-programming from the conditioning of his insecurities. The voice that he had programmed into my head that piped up “that’s not okay!” when I would say “I love you” to my friends or use a term of endearment began to quiet. The voice that said “that’s not allowed” when I showed them physical affection began to fade away. The bedtime anxiety simply at the thought of going to bed and facing another disrupted night softened; my body slowly re-learned to sleep through the night and ride the remaining waves of sadness, anger, and relief.

I was embarrassed at how this fairytale had gone sour, and at who I became in the face of its denouement, but most of all, I was happy to be regaining my strength, my space, and my power.

up next: catching up part 5: the aftermath (final catch-up instalment!).

[unlikelywallflower]

catching up part 2: on perfect fairytale engagements

[This is part 2 in a multi-part catch-up of events from December 2019 to March 2020. If you want to catch up on part 1 first, you can find it here.]

The joy and relief at having made the commitment (telling NTU I was ready for him to propose) did not remove all of my uncertainty, but it absolutely put me in a new place. I had made my choice, and I had made it freely. I had put my trust in this man and this love. Yes, this was moving incredibly quickly, but we came to realize after sharing our story with a lot of people, and hearing their stories in turn, that a LOT of love stories move really quickly. Some work out, some don’t, and we only tend to look aghast at the pace of the ones that don’t work out.

The next week or so became a rollercoaster of joking about when/how he would propose and both of us getting anxious the closer we got to it. The plans that he jokingly shared with me alternately included a mariachi band, a marching band, the top of Mt. Everest, doing it the next day and doing it six months later. I knew that with his upcoming surgery, it was either going to be soon, or a month or two down the road, and given he’d said he needed some time to put his plans in place, I figured it was further away.

As the anxiety swelled and crested New Year’s Day, our worst habits of testing each other and our love came out in full force, and we had our first big, tearful fight. We were, fortunately, able to move back toward each other with some tenderness before I got on a plane to Alaska the next day for work. Part of this was coming to a place we felt like we could rest in the conversation; part of it was recognizing and granting compassion for the fact that while both of us would have loved to be in the fantasy of an easy, fairytale love, we are complicated, anxious, intense people who don’t make much of anything about life easy for ourselves. Another part of it, at least for me, was recognizing that there was a purely chemical aspect to this unbalance; having not had a truly restful night’s sleep for weeks, I was beginning to unravel at the seams. When I got home from Alaska, I was so happy to be home in his arms (and to eat the delicious roast chicken he’d made us). And, for the week or so after, I still felt somewhat unsettled and disconnected. It turns out, that was me unwittingly absorbing and protecting myself from his anxiety, which he was feeling but couldn’t tell me about just yet, because he was busy planning the biggest surprise of my life.

Because he was having surgery just a few days before his birthday, NTU told me one day that he’d booked us a reservation for the week before his birthday at Union, the beautiful restaurant where we’d had our second date (during which I’d told him about my baby-making plans). He said he’d done it so that we could go out and have a fun night before he was in recovery for his actual birthday. He’d also bought us tickets to the symphony for the following night. I thought it was a little weird that someone would plan his own birthday (especially with me, the Queen of Celebration, for a partner), but I rolled with it. That is, until it began to dawn on me that maybe there was a very real reason we were having two super-fancy back-to-back dates in one weekend. Can you blame a girl for thinking that one of those might not be “just” a pre-surgery early birthday celebration? I was simultaneously in excited overdrive, and replaying every scene in every romcom where the female lead builds up what she thinks is going to be a proposal in her head, only to get very different news. (To be clear, I wasn’t actually afraid NTU was going to break up with me instead of proposing, à la Warner and Elle in Legally Blonde. I just thought that there was a real possibility that I was setting myself up for ridiculous and ungrateful disappointment if it really was “just” a pre-surgery early birthday celebration.) I still went out and bought two fancy new outfits and filed my nails, though; it couldn’t hurt to be prepared and looking fabulous.

For the next part of the story, I need to backtrack a bit. The day after we met, when NTU told me how little sleep he regularly got, I teased him about it, wishing him a long, restful night. The next morning, he texted me the single number 7.5. Confused, I asked him about it, and he told me it was how many hours of sleep he’d gotten the night before. Abashed, I assured him that I hadn’t intended that he report his sleep hours to me every day, but I was glad at the increase. He replied, “So it wasn’t just a phenomenally transparent excuse to say hello?”. Laughing, I told him if he needed an excuse, he could just text me a random number every morning. From the next morning onward, NTU texted me a number every single day. Sometimes the number had to do with something we’d done together, or talked about, or something one or both of us was into. A game developed wherein I had to guess what it meant; after a while, I got very good at this game, falling into a pattern of first asking, “animal, vegetable, or mineral?”, and then deciphering from there. NTU kept a spreadsheet of all the numbers, my guesses, and the correct answers.

On the morning of his early birthday dinner, I woke up, for the first time in almost two months, to no text message, no number. Disappointed, my heart fell. I’d known it would have to happen sometime; we’d talked about how it couldn’t go on forever. Gathering myself, I walked out of the bedroom and found a handwritten note on the coffee table with the number ‘55’ written on it. I broke into a grin and immediately texted NTU, beginning our morning guessing ritual. But that morning, he said there were to be no guesses, and that at some point in the day, it would all fall into place. My certainty that he was going to propose that evening mounted, but I was also driven nuts by the fact that I wasn’t allowed to guess. At some point, a thought occurred to me and I pulled out a calendar; that day was 55 days from the day we’d met. Ignoring his “no guessing” decree, I texted NTU, and he told me that I was wrong, and not allowed to guess anyhow. So I chilled out on the guessing for the remainder of the day (well, I stopped guessing; chill would be a stretch).

After having gotten all gussied up, and running a little late, we made it to Union for our dinner reservation. The host said “right this way” and began to lead us to heated, walled-in patio at the back of the restaurant. In my head, all I could think was “It’s cold back there! Couldn’t we ask for a table up front?”, but I bit my tongue. And when I walked through that door to the patio, it was filled with loved ones: most of my closest friends, my brother, a couple of NTU’s friends. My heart and my eyes filled, and I knew that it was happening.

NTU made a beautiful, nervous speech about the numbers, our guessing game, the handwritten note that morning, and about how it had been 55 days (and 3 hours, to be exact) between the moment we’d met to the moment he was now asking me to join him in the adventure of a lifetime. My life was a fairytale, and this beautiful man was down on one knee, asking me to marry him. After an answer of “yes, a thousand times yes”, he stood up, slid the ring on, and kissed me. We turned to our people, and I realized that my brother’s phone wasn’t just recording the moment; my parents (one of whom was at home in Sarnia, one of whom was on vacation with friends in Mexico) were on FaceTime. We spent the rest of the blissful evening canoodling, talking with our loved ones, and eating the absolutely incredible meal that NTU had worked out with the restaurant to cater to our very wide selection of dietary needs.

It was everything I’d dreamed of, and more. He’d fulfilled everything I’d asked, and made it so incredibly special by having my people there to celebrate with us. We went home deliriously happy and tired, and kept floating in that bubble through the next evening at the symphony.

In the next catch-up instalment: on the bubble bursting and the beginning of the end.

[unlikelywallflower]

catching up part 1: on buying engagement rings at three weeks in

I promised after the last post that I would go back and fill in the pieces between falling madly in love and the dramatic breakup. It’ll take a few instalments, of which this is the first. Some of this was written in real-time as (or just after) it was happening; some of it is in retrospect; all of it now has had the benefit of hindsight added. We go back now to mid-December, which, even though it was only five months ago, feels (as the pandemic-time-is-like-dog-years cliche goes) like five years ago. Obviously, at the time this was all taking place, he was still “The Unicorn” to me. That said, now that we’re all clear he’s definitely not a unicorn, and also Not The Unicorn, we shall henceforth refer to him as NTU.

It turns out that when you take two very intelligent, intense, opinionated, and anxious people, and you confine them to a relatively small (i.e. 722 square feet) space for the better part of a few weeks, and add in the busyness of the holiday season, what you get is a lovely, loving, and very messy time. On the way back from our trip to Ottawa, before I’d even met his family, but after I’d made him swear that we wouldn’t talk about moving in together until January 1 (which was only a few weeks away), we pretty much decided that he would move into my condo and give notice on his apartment. We didn’t so much decide when the moving part would happen, but over the next few weeks, it started happening. He would make trips back to his old place, pick up a few things, and bring them home. I, sleep-deprived from my only semi-successful adaptation to sharing a bed with a man who wakes up at 5:30am every morning, would see said things piling up in the den and try not to freak out (another endeavour that was only semi-successful).

I very much wanted NTU here. I very much wanted him to feel at home and like it was his place too. And, I had lived alone for a very long time. The best word I can use to capture the feeling of this time, other than blissful love, is uncomfortable. I was just so freaking uncomfortable with shifting my ways, making space for another body in this relatively small space I had carved out for myself, seeing things that felt like clutter but were really his relatively few belongings, which the poor guy needed to even begin to feel at home. Mostly, I was uncomfortable with having another person around all the time. I was used to a lot of alone time, and then, suddenly, I was getting what felt like almost none. My first fumbling attempts at sharing my concerns about this with NTU were just as messy as my feelings, given his own completely understandable feelings of being unmoored and unwanted in a new space. We kept working through this, with him granting me all the loving patience he could muster as I learned to actively make space for him.

Three weeks of holidays went by incredibly quickly, between that trip to Ottawa, visits with both of our families (a somewhat non-traditional Jewish Christmas of sushi and euchre with my family, and a few days after that with his family), catching up with friends, and our first trip to Ikea together, through which we miraculously and rather easily managed to maintain both our like and our love for each other.

Never mind that I’d dictated that we couldn’t even discuss moving in together until January 1 and then almost immediately overturned that decree; while we were in Ottawa, we went from getting my ring finger sized (which was both overwhelming and hilarious when the Spence sales associate asked me how long my partner and I had been looking for a ring, literally the day after our “3 week-aversary”), to mulling over potential ring designs together, to NTU rolling over in bed the next morning and showing me the order confirmation on the ring. On the one hand, this did feel super-rushed; on the other hand, we were madly in love and clear about our future together, so why wait?

Leading up to this sequence of events, as we’d been discussing getting engaged, I had “offered” the following “guidelines”: 1) I wanted to be proposed to, and I wanted it to feel special; 2) This proposal could fall anywhere on the spectrum between (but excluding) rolling over in bed one morning and throwing the ring at me, and organizing a 200-person flash mob; and 3) You may not propose before I tell you explicitly that I am ready.

I knew that that last one was ridiculous, given the conversations we were having. I knew I wanted to marry this man, and relatively soon, but somehow the idea of actually having that ring on my finger was terrifying. Before heading back to my parents’ place for Chanukah/Christmas, we picked the ring up from the FedEx depot, and for the rest of the vacation, the box was never far from sight. This was both exhilarating (okay, okay, there are some parts of me that are still traditional/tied to gender tropes of lusting after gorgeous diamond rings) and scary. We had already said to each other that there was no back door in this relationship, no out, none of the re-calibration one normally does in the early days of a new relationship when it feels like you could just leave if too many small things fell on the “negative” side of the scale. We were, to use the catchphrase made popular by the Bachelor, “all in”. Now, there was a (lab-grown) diamond ring around to cement that. It was getting even more real, really quickly.

We had said that weren’t going to get each other presents for the holidays, but I decided a few days before we left that I was going to bring what I needed to tell him I was ready, just in case. I could always wait and give him the present I’d come up with a few weeks later for his birthday instead if I was too freaked out about it. Christmas Eve, driven by the pressure I’d put on myself to get myself ready, I had a little freak-out, which I shared with NTU; he was, as usual, steady and loving. That gave me what I needed to decide to go for it the next morning. I was still scared, but I also knew that making the choice would be incredibly freeing. So Christmas morning, wrapped in a felt box in his favourite colour that I had handmade with a heart on the cover, I gave him a simple, somewhat beat-up little wooden heart. This little heart had a history: about a decade ago, by the cash of a random little cafe in downtown Toronto, I’d noticed these beautiful, smooth, flat wooden hearts. In that moment, I decided that that token was what I would give to the person with whom I would spend my life when I found them. I bought the heart, and held onto it through several moves and several relationships. Sometimes, I would find it in the back of a drawer while I was in a relationship and think, “maybe, but not yet”. Those maybes had never turned into a “yes”, but I knew, even before I decided I was ready to give it to him, that this heart was NTU’s. The tear-jerking card that came with it shared this story with him, concluding with the words: “I’m ready. Your move, my love.” On the next catch-up instalment: the perfect fairytale engagement.

[unlikelywallflower]

on dramatic breakups and global pandemics

I will rewind later and fill in those of you not already in the know on everything that happened between my last post in December and today. I’ve written most of it already. For now, let’s just say it was…dramatic. At one point in January, I felt like my life had become an honest-to-goodness fairytale: we were madly in love, we were engaged, we were trying to conceive a baby. And then, just as quickly as it had started, the fairy tale went sour, and it was over.

Fifty-five days from when we met to when he proposed.

Less than two days between our engagement and our next big fight.

Six days between our engagement and The News.

Fifty-two days between our engagement and The End.

It turns out The Unicorn wasn’t so much a unicorn as…well, Not The Unicorn (and yes, for the grammar freaks among you, I capitalized ‘The’ on purpose, because he’s not just Not a Unicorn, he’s not capital-T ‘The’ Unicorn for me).

This dramatic breakup happened nine days before COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic—the week before the world as we know it shifted on its axis and my elbows quickly became the most useful part of my body. This was both inconvenient and divinely perfect in many ways. A global pandemic is extremely useful for eclipsing personal problems such as the end of a relationship with the person you thought was the love of your life. Fear and grief of that scope go far, far beyond the sadness, relief, and even the hot rage that all followed in the wake of the breakup. On the other hand, eclipsing doesn’t mean I escaped feeling those things altogether. Dramatic break-up + global pandemic = all the feels, all at once.

It also means that I went from being touched almost constantly, even when things were tough, to absolutely zero human touch, in the span of a week. I didn’t even have time to adopt a cat, much to my regret (which is probably for the best, because, you know, potential toxoplasmosis is still a thing when I still plan on trying to have a baby when the world returns to some semblance of normal). I have one stuffed toy in my household: an Ugly Doll™ that is bright yellow and is oddly phallic-shaped with little hands and feet. I bought it over a decade ago on a whim, when a friend, trying to shake me out of the mire of a different dramatic breakup, bopped me over the head with it and dubbed it the Ugly Stick. Since then, I have kept it and taken it out when I need a good bop on the head, and now, in the absence of a human or feline companion, I have taken to cuddling it at night.

The absence of human touch has left me feeling completely unmoored and deeply lonely, but when I think about the alternative, of being isolated with Not The Unicorn during this madness, I am nothing but relieved that we split when we did. The situation in our home and in our relationship had become almost untenable near the end, and I shudder to think what the added pressure of a global pandemic would have done to us. Now I look around my empty, safe haven of a condo, and know I can cope however I damn well please; for that, I am eternally grateful. I deal with my loneliness by spending an inordinate amount of time on FaceTime and Zoom, and going for walks in the park during which I hug trees and tear up at the feeling of holding and being pressed up against something alive. I deal with the excess of anxious energy coursing through my body by moving it as much as I can, pouring it into volunteer efforts, and spending way more time on social media than normal. And I deal with the grief of uncertainty and the grief of the breakup in tandem, riding the waves like I always have, holding on for dear life and being held in love by family, friends, and community.

I know as lonely as I am, I am in an incredibly privileged situation in which to ride this thing out. And, like all of us, I am feeling it to my core. We can do hard things, my loves. We have, we can, and we will.