Now that the lemonade has worn off...

Mental health update: I'm fine. The hard lemonade, the vent, the sobbing and the many kind words of encouragement and understanding from blogland and beyond helped immeasurably.

And here I am, two days later, still plugging along. Yeah, also still worried that I'm a little dull, but resigned to that fact because right now this is my life. Maybe in 5 years I'll have a fabulously interesting and wonderfully glamorous story to tell, but right now this is my story. And if I don't embrace it (what with it being my life and all) how on earth can I accept it and live it to the fullest?

So I'm back. And I'm okay.

Another thing that helped was having lunch with one of my oldest and, at the risk of sounding sappy which she'd hate, dearest friends yesterday. She's known me for, let's see, something like 30 years now. We were inseparable in grade two and we've stayed friends ever since.

She ran away to Halifax 10 years ago, but she comes home every so often, and when she does we have a standing date to go eat Greek food and talk until the restaurant kicks us out by way of repeated exasperated, dirty looks. Or until we suck all the oxygen out of the place and are forced to retreat to the outside world so we can breath again.

Which is exactly what we did yesterday.

There's something very soul-saving about being with friends who knew you when. She knows the old me. She knows the pre-tragedy, pre-sorrow, pre-infertility, pre-confused-about-God-and-life-and-my-place-in-the-world, Kristin. And she still gets me. Good God, after all that she still gets me.

While she hasn't lost a child, she has had more than her fair share of devastating tragedy to endure. Maybe that helps her deal with me, I don't know. Or maybe she's just one of those rare people who would be able to deal with me as beautifully and kindly as she does regardless of what she herself had been through.

We'll never know. All I know is that we can talk (and talk, and talk, and talk), and when we do it feels like coming home.

Interesting segue...

She's the one who wrote this (which you should TOTALLY buy, by the way. You can order it directly from the publisher (Invisible Publishing) easy as pie.)

Mmm. Pie. Order the book and read it with pie. There you go!

Thanks Stephanie. Thanks blogland friends. Thanks friends. Thanks Sandy. Thank you all.