The force and the flow
About the other C-word and finding yourself in an unexpected headspace
It’s 4 A.M. and I’m on Reddit, not even trying to pretend that I’ll try to go back to sleep.
I’m scouring a channel called /ttc_pcos, which stands for “trying to conceive_polycystic ovarian syndrome.” If you knew that already, I’m sorry. Not for re-explaining it, but because if you know those acronyms, it means you’ve likely been where I’ve been, and I haven’t much enjoyed where I’ve been.
Like on Reddit at 4 A.M.
I am not the woman who scours “ttc” channels, deciphering acronyms. I am not the woman who “ttc’s.” I was on the fence about having kids. Sure I chose a side, but that shouldn’t suddenly make me a person who flips through internet forums, figuring out how to track unpredictable menstrual cycles or what to do if I can’t. I am supposed to be cool. The essence of chill. The epitome of laissez faire. I honestly don’t even want to be writing this, because now I’ve outed myself. Now you know:
I am not cool or chill or laissez faire. Now you know that I’m the on-the-fence girl who got her IUD out two months ago and…cares whether or not she has a baby.
ICK. EW. SHUDDER. CRINGE.
This has been an unwelcome surprise. I thought being on the fence for so long would buy me some level of…detachment from the whole process. Casual is the word I used, in fact. “I want to be casual about this baby-making process.” That’s a real thing I said to my therapist. The other C word.
This is hilarious in retrospect. No decision on earth is less cool or chill or laissez faire than deciding to make and raise a human. (I should know – I’ve spent the last three years deciding if it’s something I want to do.) And after a lengthy pause, an eyebrow raise, and a slightly pitying smile, my therapist said the same thing.
“The baby-making process is not a casual undertaking, Renee. I have never known anyone to go through it and ‘not care.’”
I don’t remember this at 4 A.M. on Reddit two weeks after getting my IUD out, though. Lying in bed, letting the blue light from my phone wash over me as my husband and dogs slept peacefully on, the thought on loop in my mind was:
What if this never happens for me? What if I am never able to have another baby?
And then, as anxiety does, questions transitioned to absolutes:
I’ll never have a baby as a stable adult in a loving relationship. I’ll never make the best, most incredible person I’ve ever known a dad. I’ll never feel kicks from the inside and think “I can’t wait to meet you” instead of “I’m not ready to lose you.” Nick and I won’t have the bonding experience that making a human together can forge between two people who are deeply in love.
No, I’ll only have my teenage pregnancy where we were too young to sustain a stable, loving relationship. Only my teenage pregnancy where I was depressed and lonely and a novice in both self-love and self-knowing. Only my teenage pregnancy where I left the hospital in a flood of tears, carrying a broken heart instead of my baby.
I’ll just hover around the edges of motherhood forever, my fingers weaving through the fringes, feeling the warmth but never wearing it on my skin. Only those experiences. Only that.
These thoughts were harsh and surprisingly powerful, almost feverish. They also did not make sense, simply because it is too early for them to make sense. We knew my body would need time to re-learn itself, and that's where we are now – giving it time to settle and adjust after 14 years on birth control. I have no concrete reasons or medical results to believe any of the above will be true yet. Which made these obsessive thoughts not only unwelcome, but also confusing; adding to the cocktail of chaos.
Yet my despair was impressive and overwhelming and lasted a good long while. I’m not sure where I’d been keeping it, but it awoke and arose and swallowed me whole that night, and for weeks after. A leftover box of grief perhaps; one that was waiting for me on this side of the fence and launched an ambush the moment I landed, like some bizarre, emotional rite of initiation.
And then there was me: shell-shocked by the combustion of unexpected anguish, attempting to find my center amongst the rubble of my disjointed and runaway negative thoughts…all of which are very unlike me. It’s been messy and imperfect. I’m allowed to be those things, I’ve been told. But I never remember that at 4 A.M. either.
Among my least favorite things on earth, being submerged in an anxiety cocktail concerning matters I cannot control and/or do not understand is near the top of the list.
Normally, I am good at recognizing these spirals when I am in them. At taking deep breaths and grounding myself, at reminding myself of what I can control, at accessing my gratitude and my presence to settle the whirring gears of my mind.
But for a few weeks, my adjusting hormones put my brain through a blender and sent my heart burrowing for cover. I could almost hear my internal army organizing the barricade to protect all parts of me from another (though very different) heartbreak involving my ability to have a child.
The first child I conceived and birthed, but did not raise. Now that I think I’d like to raise one, there is no telling whether I will be able to conceive and birth again. I have always known this. But now it is no longer theoretical, to be discovered at a later date. “Trying” has been this ephemeral, will-they-or-won’t-they, cross-that-bridge-when-we-get-to-it type of milestone for months, years. But it is a later date. I am in it now.
I am in it now; a transformation.
This is a transformation. The puzzle piece I’d been missing, the reason why my big feelings caught me off guard and didn’t make sense: I did not expect my transformation to take place now. It didn’t occur when I thought it would; like the day I get a positive pregnancy test or give birth to a baby. Those are transformations. Those things change your life. I forgot for a moment that decisions do that too – that deciding to do the thing is just as monumental as doing it. Maybe more so.
You’ve turned a corner, Renee. And now it just is what it is, and that’s perfectly okay. That’s what my therapist said to me in June when the inevitable chaos of transition felt overpowering and I felt like a stranger to myself.
But it didn’t feel perfectly okay. It felt like my worst fear about this process coming to life: that trying to conceive would absorb my identity, consume my attention, and crush my spirit.
No one in the Reddit forums was talking about what a great time they were having trying to make a baby. They weren’t talking about having a great time in any aspect of their lives. They were all stressed, worried, desperately seeking reassurance. They were confused and sad and lost. They talked about their medicated cycles, their Letrozole and Metformin and Clomid, their failed IUIs, the stress and cost of IVF. Their tears and their depression. Their hopeful symptoms that turned into periods that turned into sobbing alone in the bathroom for the 8th or 17th or 33rd month in a row. They were heartbroken. Miserable. I could feel the ache of their longing through the screen.
And as I read through their experiences, I feared that version of myself — depressed, uncertain, unsure, wanting, missing, hurting. Obsessed, absorbed, frantic, crushed, unable to find my joy; unable to view the abundance in my life through anything other than a cloudy film of what I do not have.
All of the things I never wanted this to be. All of the things I never want to be.
It takes an exceptional amount of humanness and vulnerability to venture down the path toward parenthood. It feels counterintuitive, how tender you must be towards an unpredictable journey that may not be gentle with you. And everyone who tries to conceive experiences it differently, copes differently, feels differently. There is no right or wrong way.
Fighting it as hard as I could felt like the wrong way to me, though. I didn’t feel like I was “reclaiming” myself by resisting the parts of me that felt scared. I just felt like I was sinking deeper into a rut. Tightening the spiral.
And now, the magical part of the essay where I tell you I figured out what worked – where I discovered The Answer that has since allowed me to find peace and thrive on this new journey, in the midst of this new transformation. But…I have and I haven’t.
I have because I’ve discovered something that works for me for now – putting the black-and-white mindset aside, where caring must mean obsessed and casual must mean indifferent. Instead, allowing all feelings Guest House-style like Rumi suggested; the hope, the confusion, the excitement, even the “crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture” - all allowed, all welcome to pass through as I figure out how this new version of me finds her peace, her center. (I also put some boundaries around my use of Reddit.)
I haven’t because what works for me now might not always; such is the nature of journeys and transformations. Always changing on us, always changing us.
On a rough morning last month, when my brain was in the midst of a particularly flustered spiral, I emptied my stream of consciousness onto my daily morning pages (a practice that has helped me immensely) and it ended like this:
Trying to have a baby feels like it’s ruined my life. It feels like it’s ruined who I am, ruined things I loved about myself - my love for my body, my trust in my ability to find peace + be steady + be grounded. I’m not loving who I am these days, and that ruins everything because self-love is everything to me. Self-love is my god. Self-love is my belief system. And either it’s failing me or I’m failing it, but regardless…something feels like it’s failing. I want to fix this I want to fix this I want to fix this. I want a solution, I want to solve it, I want to be anywhere but where I am in this. Help me.
“Help me,” I asked to no one in particular. It may have been the first time I surrendered to any part of this journey since I started it.
Afterwards, I closed my morning pages and returned to a newsletter by Anna Fusco on “fugitive hope” and ritualism and vulnerability that I’d started the night before but hadn’t finished. As I read the last few paragraphs, I came upon her final line:
“Our work here is belief; belief in the process rather than the outcome. Without belief, there is no love. And what is love but the transmutation of fear and doubt into faithful gesture? What are we doing, if not dreaming together? How can we have hope if we are not dreaming together?”
I closed my eyes and smiled. The serendipity of the moment not lost, reveling in the quiet connectedness you feel to every part of the universe when life humbles you enough to ask for help, and you are so quickly gifted with it.
And I realized I do believe in this process, and who I’m becoming while I’m in it - very much so. It just doesn’t necessarily make me “good” at going through it. There are no awards for She Who Adapts The Most Quickly and Flawlessly, especially when I am my only competition. I am no stranger to growth (I’m a bit of an addict, really), but each opportunity for it is different and it almost always takes me a while to recognize when I’m in it.
Giving myself grace on the days when I spiral instead of breathe is my faithful gesture. Putting one foot in front of the other as I tentatively explore this side of the fence is my faithful gesture. Continually finding ways for the parts of me that want a baby and the parts of me that will be happy without one to coexist is my faithful gesture. And my retelling of this very personal experience thus far is one of my faithful gestures.
Because what are we doing, if we are not sharing authentically and vulnerably with one another?
How can we have hope if we do not remind each other how very normal and beautiful it is to struggle during growth, to stumble through change?
Turning corners is so much easier when we’re not alone.
No, you are not alone....