More expensive than wine, but cheaper than therapy

To say the last several months have been stressful is an understatement. I'm practically pooping diamonds, I'm in such a constant state of clench. In fact, on Saturday I finally succumbed to a nap (something I almost never do, for fear of missing something good), because after a week of looking after my mom and dad solo, I felt like I'd been hit by a truck then run over with a steam roller cartoon-style. My whole body ached. Slipping into blissful unconsciousness was such a welcome relief.

But since naps aren't always an option (really, I hate missing stuff), and vodka/wine/cocktails are (or should be) limited to happy hour, and I can't really afford therapy at the moment, I found something else...

First, there was Knitmap, a searchable yarn store directory I stumbled across one afternoon when I probably should have been doing something more productive.

And from there, Spun Fibre Arts, which is, incredibly, just minutes from home.

Minutes. From. Home. And I never knew.

My Beloved accompanied me on my maiden voyage to Spun a few weeks ago. He heard my contented sigh upon entering, and patiently followed me around the room while I touched everything I could put my little paws on, oohing and ahhing all the while.

I told him he could sit (there are couches in the middle of the store that are probably meant for knitting & crocheting class purposes, but certainly must frequently double as a man waiting area), but he said he wanted to watch me finger yarn.

Which sounds dirty, but really isn't. I swear.

I think it had just been that long since he'd seen me that content - lost in something that didn't involve old people on dialysis and my ever-present fear of the call.

I left the store with $40 worth of the most gorgeous baby llama yarn in soft lavender, and a buzz that I can only say rivaled a hit of Valium with a red wine chaser.

It was like they were pumping antidepressants in through the air system, the way they pump oxygen into casinos in Vegas.

I have simply not felt that relaxed in months. Months, people.

I have to think it actually had something to do with petting the yarns. It was almost meditative, moving slowly through the store from cubby to cubby, looking at all the delicious colours and touching each different flavour.

Yarn touch therapy. Is that a real thing?

If not, it should be.

Today I finally found a pattern worthy of my yarn, and started crocheting myself a rippled scarf. It's selfish to make something for myself out of the most gorgeous (and expensive) yarn I've ever bought, but it somehow feels right - like it's a continuation of the whole experience, which was so therapeutic, and so desperately needed.

So just for me.

Women don't do enough of this sort of thing. We're somehow biologically programed to look after others, and we spend an inordinate amount of time doing so, often at the expense of ourselves and our own precious peace.

So I'm telling you right now, go find your yarn store. Go find whatever it is that makes you feel the kind of contentment I felt that day at Spun, and do it - or eat it, or read it, or bake it, or sleep on it, or wear it. Whatever it is, just dooooo iiiiit.

Trust me.

The road less traveled

Does everyone need permission to feel the way they feel, or is it just me?

That familiar, slightly dull, knicker-binding sense of doom and gloom was bugging me last week. I couldn't shake it. It sat on my shoulders with its hands over my mouth trying to smother me for days.

I couldn't for the life of me figure out where it came from and how it snuck up on me so quickly and quietly.

On Friday, Therapist Lady pointed out that there is anxiety in reaching decisions. Silly me. All this time I thought indecision was my issue. But apparently I have the ability to stay freaked out even when decisions are actually made.

FANtastic.

She said that our decision not to have the surgery, even though it's still classified as a tentative one, means that we have decided to move in another direction. Which isn't a bad thing, but when you're not sure what that direction is - or what lies along the road you'll eventually end up choosing - it can be anxiety producing.

And I can attest to that.

The interesting thing is that as soon as she made this proclamation, the doom and gloom started to lift. Being given permission to feel anxious made a huge chunk of the anxiety simply vanish.

Because it's okay to feel unsure. It's okay to feel scared. It's okay to be confused. It's okay to need to think about the possibility that it's time to start mourning the loss of future biological children who may never come. Who will probably never come.

It looks like a lot of work ahead. Good God. When I see it laid out before me in print, it looks like a fucking shit-load of work.

But I'll get there. Eventually. With constant reminders that it really is okay to be overwhelmed by a life I never in a million years expected would be mine.

Peace

I've been thinking so much about my last post, specifically the last few lines.

Initially the whole idea of my children not needing me made me desperately sad. And then, as if the clouds parted and all the angels sang in a great massed choir as sunbeams poured down from the heavens, the idea freed me.

They don't need me to hold onto the sorrow. And doing so for their sakes helps no one - and hurts me.

I'm not saying I won't feel sorrow. I do. I always will. But knowing that all I have to feel is just my own simple sorrow - and that I'm not responsible for any additional obligatory, complicated grief - feels like I've been released from something I didn't even know I was ensnared in.

This probably doesn't make any sense. I just didn't realize that I was holding on to grief because I felt I needed to in some strange way. I think I felt that they needed me to. And of course, they don't.

All I need to feel is what I feel in my heart. My own sorrow is sorrow enough.

And realizing this has given me a kind of peace I haven't felt in years. Years.

I'm not done - I'm still a nut job, and I still need my therapist to help me find more clarity. But I think this was a huge breakthrough and I'm so grateful to her for helping me get to it.

The sunset tonight was beautiful. And I saw it. I really saw it.

My heart

I regurgitated most of yesterday's blog in my therapist's office today.

I think I'm beginning to understand how they work, these head doctors. She validates my feelings, but doesn't necessarily give me any answers. Either because she doesn't have any or because she wants me to come to my own conclusions as part of my healing journey.

I get that. I do. But I wouldn't mind a few concrete yes's and no's every now and then. I'm starting to wonder if anyone actually has any. Or if maybe I already have more answers than she does and just don't know it.

The only thing she'll come right out and give me an answer to is the, "Am I crazy?" query. So far it's always been a resounding NO. That's good. That's what I want to hear.

I suppose the idea is to get me to work through everything, with her as my travel guide. And yeah, I guess it wouldn't do any good to sit there and have someone tell me what to think and how to feel, particularly if I'm not thinking or feeling what that person thinks I should.

As she said, I'm grieving the way that's right for me, so how can that be wrong?

This just feels like such a long, daunting process. And I don't know where it ends.

She seems to want me to consider separating the love I have for my babies with the sorrow I feel at their loss.

It's a fabulous idea, but I might as well sit down and figure out the formula for cold fusion while I'm at it. I haven't got a clue where to begin.

It's easier to separate sorrow from love when you had time with the person you're mourning; when you have memories to comfort you. When all you know of someone is what they looked like on a home pregnancy test and how they felt kicking you from the inside out, it's a little harder to find that blessed comfort.

So much of my babies is sorrow. It just is. And yes, love too. Immeasurable love. But I just don't see how the two can ever be untangled. I don't see them as separate entities.

Therapist lady has her work cut out for her.

She asked me where I hold my sorrow. I said I carry it in my heart and wear it like a cloak. When she asked what would happen if I took it out of my heart, presumably to store it elsewhere, I felt a protective rush of panic and told her no, it had to stay there.

We both looked a little startled.

She asked why it needed to stay there, and I told her it's because it's mine. I held my hands over my actual heart and told her, "It's mine. It needs to stay here."

As though I was protecting my children. As though they physically need me to hold the sorrow of their loss that closely to me. As though their lives somehow depend upon it.

Maybe I'm just hanging on because the truth is they don't need me.

As a mother, there's nothing more heartbreaking than that.

Except knowing it.

Oh, she's gooooood

Although the inner guilt machine churns out an endless, "you should be ashamed for having to spend your money on this" loop in my head, I have to admit that my therapist is earning her money. Totally.

For the record, I don't think therapy of any kind is a waste of money. It's just that for some reason I have trouble reconciling spending this much money doing something I'm still really pissed I couldn't do on my own, which is sort out the layers of grief in my poor addled brain. I'm angry with myself for needing help when I thought I was doing so well for so long.

But, I'm told, trauma is cumulative. Losing the twins was just enough additional sorrow, confusion and anger to make all the grief of the past 5 years suddenly no longer manageable. At least by me alone, anyway.

Sometimes I find all the blathering I do while I'm sitting on my therpist's cracked blue leather couch (clearly I'm not the only person who sits there on a regular basis) kind of useless, but I think the fact that I'm talking virtually non-stop for 50 minutes every. time. I. go. probably means that it's not as useless as I think it is.

Someone with THIS much to say obviously needs to be heard.

But when she really earns her money is when she takes something I've said, turns is around and shows it to me in a completely different way.

I told her I'm completely overwhelmed by the reality that we might never had a child, biological or adopted. No doors have closed, but the possibility of a childless life for us is certainly increasingly more probable. Or possible, let's say.

I said I'm paralyzed by this. I don't know what to do - don't know who I am if I'm not a mother to a living child. I don't know where to go from that jumping off point.

She looked at me, thought for a second and said, "Well no wonder you're overwhelmed. You've spent the last 5 years with tunnel vision - on a single-minded mission to conceive. You've spent all that time and energy trying to get pregnant, being pregnant or dealing with loss, and now there's a real possibility that that door might close."

"And if it does," she went on, "a whole bunch of new doors will open - ones you've had shut for a long time while you've dealt with the business of trying to have a child, or ones you've never even considered opening. Suddenly there are a myriad choices for you to make, and you're just not used to it, as focused as you've been on that one, single, solitary goal. Of course you're overwhelmed."

Ohhhhhhhhh.

And I think that's exactly what I said, while I was busy sighing one of those blissful sighs of incredible, shoulder tension easing relief.

I know that I'm overwhelmed, but having someone explain why - and validate the way I've been feeling in the process - is invaluable.

So while I still feel guilty for having to fork over our hard earned dough, I know she's earning every single penny for every single knot in my head, heart and shoulders that her words manage to loosen.

Worth every penny indeed.

Wii, Wii, Wii all the way home

I sustained a Wii-related shoulder injury on the weekend.

You know you're either in very bad shape or very old when you hurt yourself playing imaginary bowling.

While explaining the intricacies of the set-up and play of the game, my brother-in-law (a much younger and injury-free man who owns the Wii), told My Beloved and I that you can "make people". By this he meant that you can make little cartoon caricatures of yourself to represent you on screen while you're playing.

But of course I took the opportunity to make a morbid joke of it all.

"You can make people with Wii? So THAT's The problem! We've been going about this all the wrong way. We just needed a Wii!"

There's nothing like a room full of nervous laughter and averted eyes to confirm the bombing of an ill-fated joke.

But I still think it was funny.

My therapist wonders if maybe I use humour to avoid dealing with some of my pain. I like her and all, and so far the sessions have helped quite a bit, but she's going to have to dig a little deeper than this, I think.

Because really, it doesn't get more obvious that that.

Of course I do.

Now getting me stop, there's the challenge.

I should have figured this out long ago...

You know what's interesting? After four years, five losses and secondary infertility thrown in for good measure, I needed a therapist to help me realize that not only is it okay for me to be uncomfortable doing baby-related things sometimes, it's okay for me to remove myself from whatever uncomfortable situation I'm in to preserve my sanity.

Holy crap. Why did it take so long? Why did it take this long for me to figure out that it's okay not to be comfortable all the time and it's okay to protect myself when I'm not - that I don't always have to protect everyone else's feelings at the expense of my own?

This woman is definitely earning her money. Definitely.