Sunday night, in my dreams, I had four children. Four of them. Three boys and one girl. I was in a parking garage and I was trying to leave to go to Igor’s. My kids were coming out of a door into the garage. I was running late. I had to get to Igor’s. He-weasel was trying to help me back up to get out of the garage and onto the street. The exit was VERY narrow and surrounded by two glass doors. I had to be perfectly precise in order to get out of this place and get going to Igor’s. I got out of the space and was on my way to Igor’s. I decided to call Igor and tell him that my daughter’s eye was cut and that I had to take her to urgent care and that’s why I was late. I was trying to find the favorites in my iPhone(where I keep Igor’s number) and I couldn’t. Some applications were eclipsing my favorites and I couldn’t find his number. It was 12:47. In three minutes my session would be over. Next thing I knew I was at Igor’s office and he was gone. Some glamazon receptionist( like a woman in a 007 film) let me into his office. I was going to show her a picture of my daughter’s eye only the only picture I could find in my phone was of a woman that reminded of an image one might see on the show Dexter. I wondered why I was looking for the photo as I knew the story about my daughter was a lie. The receptionist was trying to find another time that Igor could see me. The dream ended.
Continue reading ‘Dreaming of my children’
Tag Archive for ‘Infertility’
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Once I was telling Old Yeller about how I was sure some event(which I have completely forgot) had changed who I was as a person. He, in his Old Yeller way, told me that I would never change who I really was . He told me that I would fundamentally be who I was always. He was wrong. Change is possible.
1. For all of my life I have hated gin. Now I like gin. How did that happen? Did gin change or did I?
2. I don’t have red hair anymore. I am really and truly a blond. It has been a slow progression but I am now 100% blond. I am still a Belette Rouge, in spirit if not in fact. It is sort of strange. Having red hair has been a part of my identity and a way to express individuality. I don’t have that anymore. I am a blond and there are lots of blonds and I am okay with that—-and I am still feeling like an individual. I can’t imagine I will ever be red again. The only time I think about is when my in-laws tell me to ‘”never-ever-ever-ever go back to red” and then I immediately think about making an appointment at the nearest salon and going for a Lucille Ball/Bozo the Clown red, only louder. Oui, je suis une passive-aggressive Belette. Continue reading ‘Change is Possible: The Extreme Makeover Edition’
When we last met we were talking about the book and publishing and what all that means to me, as you know if you read Friday’s post. But on Friday I didn’t get to the part in the session in which I was telling Igor my personal myth and how this myth seems to run in my mind like a kind of fatal error that I don’t know the html code to reprogram.
“So here is my myth,” I said it like some grand pronouncement. I left space after I said it with full awareness that what I had just said had been an incomplete sentence. Yet I knew that there needed to be space between the introduction and the actual content and that if I rushed it and didn’t leave my listener hanging for a bit that the importance of what was to follow might be missed. I know enough about comic timing to wait for the laugh, only I suppose this myth isn’t really very funny.
“It goes like this: I am loaded with potential. I am the one in the class who was told she would publish in the New Yorker. I was told by professors that I was the one they were sure would “make-it” and I was told by my infertility doctors that I had fantastic eggs and had an excellent response to the stimulating drugs and that our embryos were all grade-A and that they were very hopeful and then nothing happened—no baby. I am the girl who has loads of potential and no fulfillment. I am all promise and no completion. That is my myth.”
“And what I worry that the same is true with my writing. I have lots of potential and yet I will never publish a book.” I said that much more ebulliently than was fitting for what I had just said. Therapists are always on the look out for times when clients say things that should be loaded with emotion and are said flatly or for times when there is a dissonance between message and meaning. This was one of those times.
I went on, “This thought is always there in the background whenever I think about my writing and the better things are going the more that the myth seems to pop up like an unwelcome weasel. It is there in the back of my mind, running like the text scrawl on the bottom of the screen on CNN, even as everything is going great and the big picture looks really-really good—the myth is there reminding me that all this potential and promise is nothing but a set up for a cosmic joke. Only I am not at all sure who has set up the joke and who is finding my failure to fulfill my potential as so fantastically funny.”
“So what if you gave up?” Igor asked.
“Huh?”
“What if you told yourself whatever I create goes into the void? What if you embraced that? What if you told yourself that your myth was true and you embraced it”
Igor might as well have asked me to jump from the ledge of his fourth-floor window, “Are you kidding me? It would kill me. Are you saying to live without the goal of publishing? I couldn’t.” I got antsy and sweaty and I took off my cardigan. I was reacting like an addict who had just been asked to get off of his/her drug of choice.
“No, seriously. I couldn’t. If I gave up hope on giving up on publishing it would kill me.”
I could see in Igor’s face that he didn’t believe it would and so I reminded him of times in our work together when I had lost hope and how depressed I had been and how much despair I felt—and how horrible those times have been.
“Yes, I know that it feels that way. But every time you have let go of the goal something has happened.”
I didn’t have the presence of mind to ask him for examples. I want examples. I want them written down and alphabetized and notarized. I want a document that proves that what he is saying is true. As for today I am still completely unsold on his suggestion. In the session I ignored his assertion and moved on to what I have already given up on. “I gave up on having kids. Isn’t that enough? Should I give up on hoping to publish too? No, I couldn’t. Really, it would kill me not to have a goal.”
“Would it really kill you? How would your life be if you gave up on the goal of publishing this book? How would it be different?”
My thoughts raced and I wasn’t able to answer his question directly, I only knew that I felt like he was asking me to give up my life preserver and that my life-instinct was feeling particularly strong and that I had no intention of giving up on hoping to publish. Only he wasn’t really asking me to give up on that hope—he was asking me to embrace the myth that I was already holding onto and to see what would happen if I did.
A few months ago after a particularly bad bout of self-doubt, He-weasel and I were at my favorite Peruvian restaurant. As I devoured spicy muscles and bits of octopus with hedonistic gusto, I told He-weasel something straight out of a Disney comedy. I wished out loud to have my desire to be a writer taken from me. It is a wish I had made many times before about having a baby. If I couldn’t have a baby I wanted to no longer have the desire to have one—it seemed only fair. In the Disney movie version of my life in which I would have been played by Lindsay Lohan( pre-jail), I would have instantly lost my desire to write and then I would have learned how valuable it was to write and by the end of the third act I would be desperately trying to get the wish to write back by the end of the film I would have learned my lesson and I would have gotten my writing mojo back and I would have gotten a book deal. Only this wasn’t the Disney version of my life.
He-weasel responded to me in a way that made me want to pick up the empty mussel shells that sat on my plate and throw them at him. “You can’t. You can’t give up. You are a writer. It is who you are. No matter if you publish or not, you are a writer. If your laptop was taken away you would write on paper. If your paper was taken away you would write on the wall. If there was no wall you would write on your body…writing is what you do. You can’t not write.” In that moment I felt like a somewhat modified Salieri. I didn’t want to be a writer if I wasn’t a writer with a published book. Instead of throwing mussels at him I went home and wrote about being mad at him and how he didn’t understand and how awful it was that he used a double negative. But even as I vented to my journal about how he didn’t understood me, I knew he was right.
I am not far enough along with all of this to know what it means. And as of yet I am not able to take Igor’s advice. I can tell you that I have been thinking a lot about hope. I have been thinking about how Igor says that holding hope for clients in psychotherapy can be sadistic. I have been thinking about what my boy-friend, James Hillman*, says about hope, “Hope is an evil. It was the one evil left in the box when Pandora snapped the lid back shut. Hope is about the unknown future. It’s like the promise of salvation in the afterlife…I just think we should pay attention to what is here right now. It’s this hope thing that has gotten the planet into such a mess. If we paid attention to what was true right now, instead of what we hoped would be true in the future, the world would look very different.” I am not sure how this relates to everything I have said before, maybe you do and if you do I invite you to tell me. The only phrase that comes to mind is a Latin one, sorry if that sounds fancy-pants, but it was the phrase that my psyche gave me and my psyche does have a tendency towards fancy-pants, it is Amor Fati which means “love your fate”. I wish my psyche would think of something else, something more constructive. And if my psyche doesn’t have anything nice to say I wish it would just shut up. If it doesn’t I will reward it for its bright ideas by watching “The Real Housewives of Washington D.C.”, that’ll teach it to bust out Latin on me.
* Just in case you are new to the blog, I have non-dangerous and completely harmless delusions that James Hillman is my intellectual-boyfriend( i.e. the boyfriend of my mind). Hillman doesn’t know anything about this and it is probably best that we keep it this way.
I don’t know if Ms. Manners, Martha Stewart or any other blond anal-retentive woman with a well developed Super-ego who is keen on handing out the rules of genteel and polite society has come out with a primer on things best not to say to women who have been pumped full of mind altering hormones, and endured an alphabet soup of invasive procedures(ART, IVFs, ICSI’s, IUI’s,), miscarriages and/or had failed adoptions.
So even though I am only a redhead who occasionally confuses my desert fork with my salad fork, I thought I would take this matter into my own hands and create a guide of what not to say to someone who is infertile, going through infertility treatment or has just had a miscarriage. Perhaps if I do this I and others who are in my position will stop enduring these comments that hurt more than a progesterone shot in the ass.
Continue reading ‘The 16 things you shouldn’t say to a CNBC (childless not by choice)’
1. Yesterday, here in the states, it was mother’s day and I didn’t cry once. Let me also say that I didn’t spend the day with my mother, his mother or anyone else’s mother. It likely helped to not spend the day fete-ing what they are and what I will never be. It also helped to read Anne Lamott’s fantastic piece “Why I hate mother’s day”. I considered watching Mommy Dearest to make my mother’s day complete but I couldn’t find it on Netflix on-demand.
Continue reading ‘Progress report’
There was a time, long before the infertility years, when my PMS was so bad that He-weasel would put the anticipated date of Aunt Flo on his calendar just so as to be prepared. It was kind of like a hormonal storm tracker that he kept in his Filofax reminding him what days it might be best to come home with brownies and to remind himself that no matter what I said the correct response was, “You are so beautiful and thin and you are highly intelligent”
I haven’t for many-many months felt the kind of PMS that is emotionally destabilizing, fight inducing or the kind that was so severe it would make me think about leaving He-weasel. Sure, each month when Aunt Flo would visit, I would cry at every commercial with kids in it; I would need chocolate, heating pad and a bottle of Midol. But that is to be expected, at least for me.
Today at 4:00 p.m. I was hit by the kind of PMS that requires an evacuation, a trip to Home Depot to stock up on supplies, and two week supply of food( carbs in particular). It came on fast and furious and out of nowhere. Just hours earlier I had been feeling great about the run I took on the treadmill and about a great referral source for my practice and how great my skin was looking after a Triple-Oxygen mask. I was positively glowing with good feelings.
But when the hormones hit I felt like I had swallowed a whole stink bug. My runners high is nowhere to be seen and I now feel lower than a snake’s hips. The PMS hadn’t been here for even five minutes before it started telling me that I am fat, ugly, stupid and that my blog is stupid and that I should just take pictures of L.A. or of clothes or only post pictures of Lily. PMS even suggested I just take down the whole stupid blog as who the f*ck cares what I think. PMS, is a bitch and may, I think, be a liar. However it does have a voice of authority and it all feels so true now that it is here. I know I will likely feel differently when it is gone.
I feel bad for He-weasel, he will be home soon and he doesn’t stand a chance against this level of PMS. He will surely do, say or not do or say something that will totally piss PMS off and he doesn’t even know to bring home brownies.
About Me
My name is Tracey, aka La Belette Rouge. I am a psychotherapist and the author of Freudian Sip @ Psychology Today. I blog about psychology, my therapy, dreams, writing, meaning making, home, longing, loss, infertility and other things that delight or inspire me. I try to make deep and elusive psychodynamic concepts accessible and funny. For more information, click here .