Today is my 42nd birthday. I feel so melancholy – not at all like celebrating. I think about where I was a year ago today. Pregnant (just six days away from giving birth), happy, full of hope and excitement. I’m trying so hard to get there again – happy and full of hope and excitement, anyway. It doesn’t look like pregnant again is going to happen. I had the HSG test in April – a test where they shoot dye into your tubes to see if they’re open. And the results were that the one tube that was reconnected wasn’t open. Another blow…and one of the many reasons I haven’t written in my blog for so long. I’ve had so many disappointments in my life in the last several months that I just haven’t known what to say.
Ian’s first birthday is next week. I’m trying to think of a way to honor him…a way to mark that day as significant and special. I can’t really think of any way that will make me feel any peace or closure, so I’m leaning toward just taking the day off and spending it with my husband and kids. Maybe we’ll have cupcakes. Maybe we’ll go to a baseball game. All the things we might be doing if Ian were here to celebrate with us.
I often wonder if this pain will ever lessen. I’m getting through the days much easier than I was six months ago. And I have moments of peace and happiness. I have more good days than bad. But sometimes the pain I feel – those times at night when I sit in the recliner…the one I used to nurse Ian in…alone, in the dark of night when everyone else is asleep in bed - that pain is so deep and so crippling I almost can’t breathe. I cry during those times, and sometimes it feels like my heart will stop beating. At those times, I can’t think about anything other than how blissfully happy I was in the past, and how much pain I am in now. Other times I look forward to future happiness…watching my remaining children grow up, spending the rest of my life with my husband.
One of the things that has been so hard for Brandon and I is trying to change our vision of the future. Ian was our plan – we were looking forward to spending the next twenty years raising our son together. And by then we would be ready to retire and sail into our Golden Years. Now we have to come up with another plan. Of course our lives are still wrapped around children…but they will be grown sooner than we are ready for. I have been raising children for the last twenty years…I don’t know how to envision a life without that. I’m a child-centered person, and life without a child seems so bleak at this point. But now I have to wrap my mind around the idea that there will likely be no more children in our future. So…another adjustment for us.
Back to my original thought…birthdays. Mine. Ian’s. What does a birthday mean to me, exactly? I believe that my focus for this year – my 43rd year of life – needs to be on trying to regain some of that contentment I used to feel. Living in the now instead of dwelling on what I don’t have anymore, or on what I want to have someday. So, I’m starting a project today. I’m going to take one picture a day that represents what that day means to me. By July 3, 2011 I’ll have 365 pictures that show what life meant to me on any given day. I’m hoping it will be more than just a collection of meaningless pictures. I’m hoping it will be a journey…a project that forces me to look at each day with new eyes. And when I look back on it, I hope I see joy and hope and love in those pictures. That’s what I want my next year to be full of.
