Quirkiness

Pillar of Salt
Thursday, Jun. 05, 2003�12:50 a.m.

I've looked at some old photos today, and there's one of my grandfather and I , when I was about 4, sitting on a little bridge in the village they lived in back then. I looked at this photo for a while and suddenly this overwhelming wave of sorrow came over me, that was almost unbearable. In the photo my grandfather looks so young and wonderful, smiling like a magician. I was suddenly aware of how young he was. To me, he was always grandpa, an old man. I never told him how much I love him, how much he means to me.

Then at the bottom of the pile, another childhood photo. My sister and I, age 5 and 3. Our Cousins, age 4 and 3 and my friend, Effy, who died when we were about 12. We're all standing on a truck, utterly dilirious, ecstatic, clapping hands. A truck ! no commentary here. I look at my nephews and see how enthralled they are at the site of a truck and I remember.

I suppose it's also the academic year that's nearing its end. I can't understand how that happened. It feels as though only yesterday I was frantically looking for a parking space for the first time. Well, bad example, since I was indeed frantically looking for a parking place yesterday, but you know what I mean. I find that only chliche`s work here: How time flies.

Then there's the issue, that issue, of wanting a child . Ever since the last ivf I've been in some sort of denial, afraid to think about it. I've told myself that it's very strange, how I've dived into my school work, started liking my body again because it's gone back to it's previous slim shape. I wear my old jeans and I'm happy. I look at the mirror and I say to myself that I'd like to stay this way forever, thin, boyish. Then I think that maybe I will .

It's an overwhelming thought. Maybe I'll never have children of my own.

I don't think I can cope with it right now, especially when M's away. I want to be a mother so badly, although I can't understand when this had happened, when did I become this woman who desperately wants a child?

At some point, life as a carefree woman stopped being enough. Suddenly M, the dogs and cats and I were not a family, but a childless couple .

All our friends have children now, most of them more than one. Friends that I've refered to my doctor are already parents .

Some days it's almost completely out of my mind. At univeristy I don't carry my responsible- adult persona, but am instead transformed back into the young woman that I was just a little while ago. I smoke a cigarette during the break and speak to my classmates, whose hearts are being broken, who move back to live with their parents to save rent, who have been up late partying , but look fresh and unspoiled and I feel only slightly older than they. I don't feel like the woman sitting here crying because on someone's blog there was a picture of orphans in Romania.

Tomorrow morning I'll wake up and everything will be alright. I'll take a long shower and tea and sit at the kitchen table with books and notes scattered around in a pleanantly chaotic fashion. Then later I'll feed the dogs and drive up to my sister for the day. On my way back, I'll visit a friend.

Everything will be fine tomorrow, I'm sure. It's not pitty I'm looking for, there's just some comfort in writing it down.

Talking about it makes me self conscious . It's like passing the ball onwards, to whomever I'm talking to, burdening them. They then have to react, to respond. They have to be sympathetic, supportive, encouraging, or at least that's how they think they should be, which is awkward. Instead of finding solace, I'm then forced to provide solace, reassure them, exactly like I'm doing now, that everything will be alright tomorrow.

Almost everything i.v.f/fertility related is like that. Ambivalent and complicated. There are rate moments in which you can truely be yourself and they usually happen when you're alone. Most of the time you have to be strong and assertive for your partner, family, friends because if you let yourself break down, even just a little, all the fragile structure compiling it will break down with you.

Before that��And then...

Present

Past