Em on Em

More Than a Woman?

Tired. That’s how I’ve felt this past week­end. I think the 10-​​hour days are catch­ing up with me and I’m not look­ing for­ward to Mon­day when it will start all over again.

I think it’s time to take some time off. Maybe a sched­uled men­tal health day to regroup myself. On a Mon­day. Or a Fri­day. So I can extend my week­end by an extra day.

Oh, who am I kid­ding? I’m still going to spend the day before return­ing to work wor­ry­ing about what I need to do the day I actu­ally return to work. 

I worry too much. Not a sur­prise for peo­ple that know me very well. To oth­ers though, espe­cially at work, I guess I put off this vibe that every­thing is going to be okay. But inter­nally, I’m a ner­vous wreck.

Why is that?

Hubby seems to think I put too much pres­sure on myself, that I should learn to ease up on myself. That I should learn to break down projects into man­age­able tasks. And he’s right, the smart man that I married.

I do put a lot of pres­sure on myself to be as best that I can be. I guess it goes back to that thought that if I try hard enough, I’ll suc­ceed in any­thing I do.

And we all know that Infer­til­ity taught me that that state­ment is not always rel­e­vant to everything. 

So why am I still liv­ing my life like that? I guess I do it in the hopes of being a bet­ter per­son than would be if I had kids. That some­how, I need to make up for being more of a woman because I don’t have kids. 

Does that sound ridiculous? 

I know it does. There are lots of women liv­ing child-​​free by choice that can attest to this. Heck, there are women that have gone through infer­til­ity and are now liv­ing child-​​free that can say that they still feel like a whole woman. 

Right now, I’m not one of those women. Which is why I worry too much. And expect more out of myself. And I wish there was a way that I could just be happy with who I am. 

 

Forty

I’m turn­ing 40 tomorrow.

Yep, it’s a mile­stone birth­day; one that makes you pon­der what I’ve done for the past decade. And while I might not have done every­thing I thought I would in the past 10 years (you know get preg­nant and start our fam­ily and all …), I know that I’ve done enough to make my 30’s a mem­o­rable decade.

Turn­ing 40 seems like I should be turn­ing over a new leaf. I should eat bet­ter, exer­cise more, be more finan­cially respon­si­ble. It’s like New Year’s Res­o­lu­tions, except in July. And I don’t know about you … but I tend to fall off the “Res­o­lu­tions wagon” mid­way into the sec­ond month.

At least I get a whole decade to turn over this leaf.

Seri­ously though, I hope that my 40’s is a lot less drama and a lot more fun. I hope that Hubby and I con­tinue to find new and excit­ing ways to live our child-​​free lives fully and not in the shadow of liv­ing child­less. (I see travel in our near future!) So that’ll be what I aim for over the next 10 years.

Here’s to jump­ing feet first into my 40’s!

 

Five Years

Did you know that both the tra­di­tional and mod­ern anniver­sary gift for five years is wood?

Wood?!

Good thing we don’t cel­e­brate anniver­sary dates with other peo­ple, because I’m pretty sure I’d be get­ting a lot of wooden bowls or cut­ting boards. Or wood statues …

Why am I bring­ing this up? Because today, my friends, is my fifth blo­giver­sary. Or rather “Blog O’Versary” since it’s St. Patty’s Day. (Luck o’ the Irish to y’all …)

It’s funny, because my goal was to reach 500 posts by today. I fig­ured … hey, why not cel­e­brate two mile­stones at once.

Except, well … I some­how missed that 500 mile­stone about 11 posts ago. Amaz­ing, con­sid­er­ing I haven’t been writ­ing much lately.

It’s been dif­fi­cult, I must admit, to write lately. Work has me on a crazy sched­ule and I’ve had waay to many per­sonal issues that I’ve been obsess­ing over lately. So that leaves me lit­tle time to sit and write.

Think I’ll cel­e­brate with one of these!

I’m hop­ing to make some changes in the next few weeks that will allow me to write a lit­tle more, but right now it’s just a glim­mer of hope. So if the kind blo­gos­phere could send a quick prayer up to the heav­ens above that this glim­mer become more of a flame to light my way to a bet­ter change in my life, I’d very much appre­ci­ate it.

I real­ize I’m being vague about what I want to change, but I just ask that you stick with me and pray for the change that I need. If things do go the way I hope it does, then I promise I will tell you more.

Any­way, just wanted to write my lit­tle ditty for the week and … WTH … brag to peo­ple that I’ve man­aged to keep this blog alive for five years!

Thanks to all of you that are still out there read­ing … I can’t tell you (in words) how much it means to me.

Nothing Important

Sit­ting and star­ing at the blank Word Doc­u­ment in front of me is kinda intim­i­dat­ing. I hate how the cur­sor blinks to the tune of the back­ground music at the Cari­bou Cof­fee I’m cur­rently sit­ting at.

I know it’s been more than a cou­ple weeks since I last posted, but there hasn’t really been much of inter­est to write about. Unless you wanna talk about how hec­tic my last onsite visit for work was. But why would I want to bore you with that?

I could also tell you that I came SO close to see­ing Jefferson’s Mon­ti­cello estate dur­ing my last work trip. I even took the 20 min­utes to drive there, only to be dis­ap­pointed that I could only get to the visitor’s cen­ter … Which then would have required me to pur­chase a ticket for a shut­tle to take me up to the prop­erty just so I could look at the building.

If I had the time, I prob­a­bly would have done it. But as it was, I had already been teach­ing all day and I was exhausted by the thought of tak­ing the extra time to buy a ticket to tour the entire prop­erty, when all I wanted to do was admire the struc­ture. Plus I wasn’t feel­ing too hot.

When trav­el­ing, noth­ing sucks more than not feel­ing your best … Espe­cially when you have to get up in front of a group of strangers and teach. But since there was no way of can­celling the class, I just did my best and hope that all the par­tic­i­pants would stay engaged in our dis­cus­sions. Lucky for me, they did.

So now I get to travel again next week and I hope that this cold has finally left my sys­tem. It will be another hec­tic onsite visit (large hos­pi­tal, two dif­fer­ent loca­tions for each ses­sion, etc), but the best I can do is leave it up to God and my con­stant chant­ing of the Seren­ity Prayer.

Until next week …

Lazy Sunday

The title of this post says it all. And you know what? Me and my skinny ham­ster are per­fectly fine with it. In fact, she’s tak­ing a snooze as we speak.

I got some pretty good advice from peo­ple after putting up my last post. (Thanks, oh inter­net peeps!) One of them told me to cut myself some slack, so today (actu­ally this whole week­end) was about doing so.

No wor­ry­ing about the upcom­ing travel or all the expec­ta­tions of new stuff going on at work. No obsess­ing over rela­tion­ships and how to “fix” them. No freak­ing out about how com­pletely messy the house is.

Just me and Hubby; watch­ing a movie, grab­bing some Dim Sum, and clear­ing out our saved TV shows on our DVR.

It’s been a while since I’ve done noth­ing but the bare neces­si­ties and it feels good. Usu­ally I save those days for when I feel com­pletely sick or run down.

And maybe I’m already at the lat­ter … run down and exhausted. But these two days have been rest­ful, relax­ing and much needed.

Per­haps I’ve got to do these kind of days more often .

Weeakly

I’m try­ing to be dili­gent about updat­ing this blog at least once a week. If any­thing, let the blog serve as a sort of a rou­tine for my oth­er­wise routine-​​less life.

Okay, so my life isn’t with­out rou­tine. Oth­er­wise, why would I be at a tea house on a Sat­ur­day after­noon try­ing to catch up with some work that I can’t seem to get done after my online teach­ing sessions?

I’m feel­ing over­whelmed and anx­ious lately. There seems like there’s so much to do and not enough time to do it. I mean, I’m glad that I’m catch­ing up on some work today out­side of my home office, but then that leaves all the other house­hold stuff up in shambles.

To top it off, at the end of this month I’ll be trav­el­ing 5 days a week for the next 7 weeks, which – on top of try­ing to learn a new expense sys­tem for work (as well as quite a few new things work has got up her sleeve) – has me at the brink of a ner­vous break­down. (Or maybe I’m already there?)

My hus­band seems to think that I’ve got some really skinny ham­ster on a wheel run­ning non­stop inside of my nog­gin. He tells me this because he thinks my mind spins out of con­trol, work­ing over­time about worrying.

And d*mnit if he isn’t right. I just wish I could slow the ham­ster down enough to allow me to quit wor­ry­ing about … well, worrying.

So yeah. This is my weak attempt at a post this week. Maybe next week I’ll have some­thing bet­ter to talk about.

But for now, it’s all about the “Seren­ity Prayer” in my mind. That and a warm, hug­gable Hus­band is all that keep the ham­ster in my head at bay …

Boulevard of Broken Dreams

The irony doesn’t escape me. It’s 5:15 am and –thanks to our dog — who refuses to sleep, I’m wide awake.

It’s not as if I’ve had a dif­fi­cult time falling asleep … it’s more that I can’t seem to stay asleep. If any­thing, all I want to do is climb under the cov­ers and fall into a deep, deep sleep. Depres­sion can obvi­ously do that.

And with me, depres­sion can cause waves and waves of anx­i­ety, which only add fuel to the insomnia-​​fire.

Recently Hubby and I had one of our long dis­cus­sions (one of many we’ve been hav­ing lately). This one hap­pened to start off with an inno­cent com­ment our 15-​​year old nephew had said last Sun­day when we met them for lunch.

“Aun­tie,” he told me, “you look sad” . And I couldn’t tell him any dif­fer­ently, other than to say that I’d been tired a lot lately.

My hus­band brought that up dur­ing our dis­cus­sion as a means to show me how even a 15-​​year old could see my depres­sion. And if he could see it, how many other peo­ple would see it as well?

All I know is that over the years, I have changed. Oh … I think the heart of me — my cen­ter — will never change, but the way I’ve looked at things or approach things have def­i­nitely been altered from my life experiences.

I know these thoughts are no dif­fer­ent than any other per­son in their late 30’s/early 40’s. After all, isn’t this when we begin to look back at our lives to where we were and com­pare them to where we are now? Isn’t this where we reflect back on those dreams we had in our early 20’s and think about whether we’ve achieved them or not?

You see, as I approach 40 this year, this is one of the anxiety-​​ridden things I think about fre­quently. I think about our early post-​​college years where then-​​fiancé and I would dream about our future together. We’d dream about our mar­ried life together; of kids and the large house in the sub­urbs. We’d talk about how our kids would be into sports or some sort of activ­i­ties where we would be the proud par­ents who’d show up with video cams in hand to record such moments. We talked about vaca­tions as families.

And, of course, I also had my dream of want­ing to be a Stay-​​At-​​Home-​​Mom for a spell, while wait­ing for our four (yes, four) kids to all be old enough to go to school. I also dreamt about mak­ing friends with other Mom’s; friends of our kids, where we could hang out and com­mis­er­ate about daily life with kids. I dreamed of arrang­ing play­dates and birth­day par­ties and all these won­der­ful things I could do when I became a mother.

But we all know where those dreams went. Our best laid plans … right down the potty.

While mak­ing the deci­sion to live child-​​free has less­ened the “blow” to my need to mater­nal­ize (is that even a word?), it hasn’t taken away the fact that I have had to face the “Boule­vard of Bro­ken Dreams” when com­ing to terms with my infertility.

In other words, in order to fig­ure out what our next step in child-​​rearing would be … Hubby & I had to walk that “boule­vard” alone. Together, yes def­i­nitely … but alone.

So now that the we’ve passed that boule­vard … and even though it’s been almost two years now … what do we do now? What’s our next step? What’s our goal? I know that chil­dren aren’t in our future, but so what is our new future?

It’s all of those wor­ries that keep me from hav­ing a full night’s sleep. It’s what causes me anx­i­ety in the mid­dle of the night.

Which direc­tion in life do we need to be head­ing? What we can do with our lives now that we’re clos­ing in on 40 … the decade where we should feel more “set­tled” in our lives?

It has all the mak­ings of a dream­less night. A night where I’m not sure what our new dream is going to be.

Which, again. The irony doesn’t escape me.

How Winter Kills

Like the snow in Metro Detroit, I’ve been in and out of every­day life. And like the snow, my mind should be ever present dur­ing this par­tic­u­lar month, since it’s sup­posed to be the month of new begin­nings; of mak­ing res­o­lu­tions to change things.

But like the snow, I’ve only sur­faced in bits in pieces when­ever life seems to be most inconvenient.

This depres­sion sucks.

No. I mean lit­er­ally. It sucks the life and energy out of me. And throw in a (un)healthy dose of anx­i­ety with it … well it just makes life all the more interesting.

I’m try­ing my best to move past this depres­sion; doing all that I can phys­i­cally and clin­i­cally do, but the weight of this sad­ness seems to be omnipresent.

Thank God for an under­stand­ing Hus­band; one who has stood by me through thick and thin. He’s been there through the low-​​hanging, non-​​anxiety moments and all the way through the high-​​octane drama-​​fueled moments. Some­times I won­der – scratch that – I always won­der how I’ve man­aged to find my soul­mate and my best friend who still loves me despite all the bag­gage I carry.

If any­thing, Hubby (and the furkids – although the fur-​​dog has been on my last nerve lately … ) is the rea­son why I keep get­ting out of bed every morning.

Even though I’ve writ­ten the occa­sional post about the grief I’ve been expe­ri­enc­ing, I know I’m not usu­ally so out­right with my depres­sion. But it has been sug­gested to me that I start writ­ing more about it, because this seems to be the only out­let where I can openly talk about my struggles.

And although this blog is (and always will be) about liv­ing child-​​free after infer­til­ity, I thought that this was my lit­tle cor­ner of the uni­verse where I can tell you about my life, both good and bad. So here’s where I lay it out on the line:

  • I’m still griev­ing over the death of my father. Between my two par­ents, it’s become appar­ent to me over the past year and a half that I truly was a “Daddy’s Girl.” I thrived in the moments when my Dad would play around with me and tease me. And there were the silly jokes the two of us would play on each other that only the two of us would get. And I miss those things horribly.

 

  • In the same aspect, I real­ize how much dif­fer­ent my rela­tion­ship with my Mom has always been; par­tic­u­larly now that my Dad had passed. I’ve always known that we never had that “Mother-​​Daughter” bond that is con­stantly seen in movies and TV shows; we’re just two very dif­fer­ent peo­ple. And with­out Dad being there as a buffer, this rela­tion­ship has only inten­si­fied … and not always in a pos­i­tive way.

 

  • Even though it’s been over a year since decid­ing to move back to Detroit, not a day goes by that I don’t miss liv­ing in Chicago. I miss the city and the atmos­phere. I miss the late night trips to Dim Sum or Korean BBQ with my cousins. I miss walking.

 

  • But what I miss the most is that Chicago rep­re­sented a new life for me. A life where Hubby & I carved out a place for our­selves; where the two of us really started focus­ing on us as a “Fam­ily of Two.” And while I love my home­town and take pride in telling peo­ple that I’m from Detroit, I miss that part of our lives where we were just far enough from “home” where Hubby & I could be our own family.

 

  • And finally … even though Hubby & I have decided that child-​​free liv­ing after infer­til­ity is our life, there are still those days where I worry about our future and what other things in our lives we can con­tribute to the greater good of our world. Will all I have to show at the end of my life is that I’ve worked hard for a liv­ing? That I loved my fam­ily and friends to the best capac­ity that I could? What about my legacy? What will I leave behind? And will I have made a dif­fer­ence in someone’s life? I know now that hav­ing kids won’t nec­es­sar­ily “sat­isfy” or pro­vide answers to all of those ques­tions, but hav­ing lost my Dad … and know­ing the per­son he was … this is some­thing that weighs heav­ily on mind.

 

I could prob­a­bly go on with more “issues” that seem to run end­lessly through my anxiety-​​ridden head, but these are the ones that are con­stantly in my stream of con­scious­ness. These are the things that keep me from doing the things I would nor­mally enjoy doing.

Like read­ing.

Or knit­ting.

Or tak­ing pictures.

Or writ­ing.

Or sim­ply watch­ing TV.

But I’m try­ing … at least I’ll try to work on the writ­ing bit.

And maybe Mother Nature will be kind enough to work on a mild win­ter for the rest of us.

Too Pieces

The day stretched on as if it were the longest day of sum­mer; yet it was the mid­dle of win­ter. It was only 4:30 pm, but dusk was around the cor­ner; the clouds in the win­tery sky mak­ing it seem darker than it should be.

She should be doing some­thing to keep her mind busy; any­thing to take her thoughts off the shades of grief that lay inside the pit of her stom­ach. Instead, she sat at her local bookstore’s café mind­lessly flip­ping through the lat­est gos­sip rags and fash­ion magazines.

Nor­mally read­ing such things would enter­tain her; would make her laugh at such ridicu­lous­ness. Or at the very least, inspire her to change her wardrobe to some­thing other than jeans and a t-​​shirt. But today, she nei­ther felt nor heard noth­ing but the silent hum inside her head that told her that some­thing about her was defective.

That silent hum had always lived inside of her for as long as she could remem­ber. She never felt pretty enough or smart enough to accom­plish any­thing sig­nif­i­cant in her life. And although she had a good career and an incred­i­ble hus­band, she never thought she could deserve to be happy.

At times in her life, the silent hum would sur­face out­wardly. When she and her hus­band found it dif­fi­cult to start their fam­ily, that hum became a silent roar. When she lost her job, the silent roar returned. How­ever, even­tu­ally that roar would once again return to a hum.

She knew that her antsy-​​ness today was because that hum was slowly turn­ing into a roar. She even knew her actions over Christ­mas was its root cause. But just like those other times, she had no idea how to silence the roar. She had no way of stop­ping such neg­a­tive, self-​​defeating feel­ings that lay rooted inside of her.

Although she knew she had the sup­port of her hus­band, her best friend in life … her fam­ily … she also knew she would ulti­mately be the one respon­si­ble for tam­ing the beast inside herself.

She also knew that in order to tame the beast, she had to get rid of the hum all together. She had to stop depre­ci­at­ing her­self and start to build up that self-​​esteem.

This will prove to be a dif­fi­cult task for her; espe­cially since she never par­tic­u­larly had con­sis­tent, ongo­ing self-​​confidence. Her entire life had been rooted in self-​​doubt with only fleet­ing moments of con­fi­dence. It would take a lot to rid her life of that silent hum.

What could she do? What *would* she do? She had already sought the help of pro­fes­sion­als; she already had the sup­port of her lov­ing hus­band. The only thing she could do is uproot those thoughts of self-​​doubt and self-​​deprecation and replant con­fi­dence and self-​​esteem in its place.

It sounded sim­ple enough; replace the neg­a­tive with the pos­i­tive. Believe that the glass is half-​​full rather than half-​​empty. Begin to believe in herself.

But why then, did it seem so much more com­pli­cated than that? Why does the silent hum persist?

Grief Bacon

I love bacon.

There, I’ve said it. And I’m not ashamed to admit that the smell of bacon brings back mem­o­ries of cook­ing break­fast for my par­ents when I was in my pre-​​teenage angst years. You know, back when I was a rel­a­tively obe­di­ent kid who only wanted to do some­thing nice for her parents.

And the taste …. Oh, the taste! Noth­ing com­pletes a great break­fast like bacon can. Espe­cially those thick, maple-​​cured strips that they serve up at Orig­i­nal Pan­cake House.

I mean after all, there is the say­ing that noth­ing can make a veg­e­tar­ian go pro-​​meat more than bacon can.

I’m guess­ing that with all this talk about bacon, you’ve fig­ured out by now that I’m not the health­i­est per­son in the world. And it’s true. I’m hyper­ten­sive. I’ve got high cho­les­terol (no sur­prise there!). And I’m at high risk for heart disease.

And given the events over the past year, I guess you can say that I’ve been lax at keep­ing myself healthy. In fact, you could prob­a­bly say that I went the oppo­site of healthy. What can I say? I’m an emo­tional eater.

In fact, I’m not just that; I’m an emo­tional over–eater. When things get tough or stress­ful, not only do I munch on chips or choco­late or candy … I over-​​indulge myself with them. And because of that I’ve gained a sig­nif­i­cant amount of weight over the past year.

So what does this all have to do about bacon?

Yes­ter­day, at one of Hubby’s work-​​related events, we had sat with some friends and another cou­ple I had just met for the first time that night. Some­how (and I can’t exactly remem­ber how) the sub­ject turned to bacon. (I mean, really. When does bacon come up in a con­ver­sa­tion?!) That’s when I learned that the Ger­man word kum­mer­speck … which is the excess weight one gains from emo­tional overeat­ing … lit­er­ally trans­lates to “grief bacon.”

So there you go. Now I have a name for all the weight I’d gained.

But lest you’re wor­ried, Hubby & I have been mak­ing efforts to regain our health. First off was join­ing a gym to make time for some weight train­ing and daily car­dio. Sec­ond is re-​​learning to eat healthy again. Third … and this is the most dif­fi­cult … is main­tain­ing the moti­va­tion to keep up with both.

I guess this means I won’t be eat­ing too much bacon in the near future …

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