Only on the Eves

From Christmas Eve to New Year's Eve. With lots of nothing in between (save the busyness and feasting of Christmas day, of course).

But since then it's been long stretches in our jammies, chocolate in hand and endless hours of Mad Men on the tube. We blew through all 13 episodes of the first season in three days.

Heaven, I tell you. Heaven.

If, of course, you don't count what's missing. Which I do, naturally. But I'm also paying close attention to what isn't, and enjoying all that very much.

As for 2009 knocking furiously on my front door, I just don't know. I'll answer it at midnight. But I'm wary of the new guest blustering in with such universal fanfare and promise. And so I have no expectations.

I have only a plea for a kinder year. For peace. For direction. For guidance.

And for happiness that I once feared would elude me forever, and which I have worked very hard to cut and paste back into my life in a patchwork of moments and memories. I've papered over some of the badness. Replaced some of the sorrow with quiet peace. And my plan is to keep on going. To keep adding and building.

The little house of my soul might, to some eyes, always look like it's in tatters; bits torn out, patches taped over top, small cracks letting the cold in now and then. But it's still standing. And this is what it looks like as I work at the job of repairing it piece by piece.

Eventually, I hope, turning it into a mosaic.

Because even things that are broken can be beautiful again.

They can.

Good things about today

Because I've been dwelling entirely too much on the bad things lately...

1. My Beloved searching for something to make me smile and finding a bloopers show on TV. For an hour I sat and laughed. Laughed, if you can believe it.
2. Playing Ping Pong for the first time in months and getting soundly beaten. Twice. (Okay, so that part wasn't so good, but it wasn't unexpected either and consistency is good, right?)
3. A tall glass of iced tea when I was hot and thirsty after coming home with a thousand bags of groceries.
4. The ice-cold beer store (A perfect place to browse through when the mercury climbs into the high 20s).
5. The boxes (and you know who you are).
6. Looking at my angel garden and watching Thomas' tree sway in the breeze.
7. Homemade rhubarb pie.
8. Filing several months worth of bank statements and bills (I really need to file more often...).
9. Not ironing.
10. Chocolate.
11. Perfectly BBQ'd salmon.
12. The fact that three of the things on this list are food and I don't care.
13. Warm kitty snuggles.
14. Internet access.
15. Neighbours.
16. Hope. Not because I happen to have any at the moment, but because I know that there's still time to find some. We're not beaten yet. We have time - we have months to go. And so we also have hope.

A bigger update

So long story short, I was riddled with scar tissue. Enough that Dr. S. believes it's probably the sole reason we've been trying and failing for as long as we have.

In just a half an hour he freed up my fallopian tubes (which were adhered to their respective ovaries with said scar tissue) burst a little ovarian cyst ("while I was in there", which seems like a perfectly good reason to pop an ovarian cyst to me) and gave us back some hope, which I've definitely been in short supply of lately.

Except now, of course, I'm kind of scared that we really will get pregnant.

I suppose this is a common side effect of infertility, that "HOLY SHIT - WHAT IF I ACTUALLY GET PREGNANT????" panic. Because all I've done for nearly two years is focus on conceiving. I haven't really given much thought to being pregnant, staying pregnant, surviving being pregnant, giving birth, surviving giving birth, and having a take-home baby at the end of it all.

It's all been too abstract. Too hard to fathom after Thomas came and went. Live babies are what other people have. Getting pregnant is what other people do. I just try and fail. And try and fail. And try and fail.

So now that some hope has been restored and my fallopian tubes are the free-flowing, octopus-like structures they should be (seriously, who knew they were octopus-like in their movement??) I guess maybe I can (and possibly should) think beyond conception to pregnancy.

Or maybe I should just wait until I see two pink lines. Because even though I'm allegedly in working order, I still can't quite picture any of this just yet. I'm hopeful, but the scars no doctor can ever get rid of are always going to be in my way.

I know I probably don't sound as grateful and excited as I should. But we're not there yet, and I have no idea what it's going to take to get there. I am grateful that the surgery was a success (except that one tube still appears to be blocked for no apparent reason and there's nothing more to be done for it) and I am grateful to have been given renewed hope.

But I'm also scared.

And I truly am scarred - not just from losing Thomas, but from feeling broken and useless for so long. And from dealing with the sorrow and those awful feelings of guilt over the fact that my body has so steadfastly refused to produce and/or protect a healthy child during the four years we've been trying to get it to do just that.

You can't turn that off like a light switch. You just can't.

The glimmer of hope is there, but right now it's just a tiny pin prick of light.

Give me time. I'll get there.