Marathon

I've been thinking a lot about the past six years lately. To be clear, I don't regret a single thing we did. Not one single choice. We made the decisions we made very seriously and with a lot of thought and soul searching. And under great stress - and a shroud of sorrow too.

And I don't - and never will - regret Thomas or our other wee babies. They are my children. My heart and soul. They made me a mother, and they have helped to make me the person I am today, scars and all.

But there's something about coming out the other side of an emotionally traumatic period in your life that makes you turn around and stare back at it in awe. It knocks the breath out of me when I think that I've spent six years focused on just one singular goal. I've lost almost all of my 30s to my quest for a living child.

It's like I've opened my eyes up to the world around me for the first time in years.

My parents are old. Old. They need so much help now. They have aged so much since I first stuck my head up my uterus in the summer of 2003.

And me - I've aged too. I'm limping towards 40 with a stagnating writing career, a basement full of unused baby things, and a drawer full of condolence cards.

And I don't really know what to do now. All that keeps bouncing around my head is, "What now?"

I have some creative irons in the fire, as it were. Some ideas that I'm moving on. And freelance work continues to dribble in here and there. But essentially, I'm standing on the threshold of...something. And the wide openness of it all is scary.

Mostly.

My mind flickers back to high school when I still believed that anything was possible and the world was at my fingertips; full of ripe, juicy apples of opportunity just waiting for me to pluck them from the trees.

And I'm warming up to those feelings of excitement and possibility.

But I'm still scared. I'm worried that I'm damaged. Maybe irreparably. And too old. Too old for so many things now.

I dream of winning the lottery. I would buy a lifetime supply of yarn, a house full of books and a nursery full of plants and shut myself away in a happy cocoon of crochet, reading and gardening.

But odds never seem to be in my favour. Well, unless you count bad odds.

I get the feeling that nothing is meant to be easy. And I'm meant to keep walking towards whatever is waiting for me, regardless of how broken and old I might feel. Regardless of how useless I worry I am.

So I'm walking. One step at a time.