Happy New Year

I have a very distinct memory of being upstairs in what is now Emmeline's room, alone, on New Year's Eve in 2008. We had a failed IVF cycle in the fall, and I remember writing a post that night on my old blog about a review of the year - the good and the bad. Alex was somewhere across the pond and although it would have been nice to dress up and enjoy a night out, I remember feeling quite content to be staying in, by myself, just me and my blog...attempting to make sense of my world through the written word. I also remember looking around the room that I had planned to be a nursery and bargaining with the universe. Please, please, please. Just give me a baby this year, just one (I don't want to be greedy), and I will never ask for anything else. I will be good. I will be eternally grateful and happy.

And here I sit. Exactly five years later. Very different circumstances, yet a similar feeling...minus the pleading for more children. Alex and Emmeline are at a neighbor's house, brining in the New Year with some friends, while my boys are asleep upstairs and I am cozy on the couch. I once again find peace in my aloneness and seek the challenge of bringing beauty and order through writing to what can only be described as the most chaotic year of my life. Ok, universe, I come clean. I am not eternally grateful, nor happy...nor terribly good.

There has never been a year in my life that is more of a blur than this past year. It's one of those time periods where I only remember the large events, the details are lost. I look back at pictures of us in the NICU and I don't even recognize myself. It was as if I was there in body only. I also feel that I survived the year by being completely detached. I went through the motions. I did what I had to do. I kept everything on the surface. And now, on the Eve of 2014, I realize that the weight of 2013 is just starting to feel too heavy to maintain on the surface. It's just starting to settle in my gut, in my core. And man, do I ever feel wiped.

These boys have rocked my world. I still feel shock. Imagine...12 years of unprotected sex, 5 years of ACTIVELY trying (going to extreme lengths to get the timing right, including an 18-hour trek to NYC because I was supposedly ovulating and Alex was on an overnight there...I was so sure that it had worked that I had purchased a little NYC rubber ducky at the airport for the baby I knew we had just conceived. Bahahaha! That was only one year into our actively trying time period), three failed IUIs, a failed IVF cycle, and a touch-and-go pregnancy from a frozen cycle which resulted in one amazing baby.

And I think out of my own fear of another loss or disappointment, I exhausted my mothering skills with her at each step of the way. I wanted to use up all of the mothering I had in me so that there would not be any yearning left. For yearning for more children would open up the possibility of having to try again, and having to try again would bring the risk and likelihood of disappointment and/or loss.


And now, on the Eve of 2014, there is no loss. I sit in plentitude all the while my exhaustion, the weight of undigested 2013, distorts me from seeing things clearly.

My hope for myself for 2014 is that I finally let 2013 settle deeply in my core - so that the weight of it no longer feels like heavy burden trying to push me under, but rather like an stable anchor that secures me in the lap of this abundance.
Happy New Year and you and yours. May you find yourself cozy and confident in your own abundant lap in 2014.