Try.

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." -Mark Twain


Years ago, when it became time to face what I knew would be a long haul with fertility treatment, I froze. It was after two years of trying on our own, a clomid cycle from my gynecologist and then an IUI from RE #1, all without so much as a faint line on a pee stick. After moving back to our home state following these attempts at parenthood, I walked into an appointment with an RE (one who would have been #2) and walked out before the front desk could call my name. As much as I deeply longed for a child, something stopped me in my tracks. Six years later, I'm still not sure I can put a name to it, but it would take another year after that before I would walk through the doors of another fertility clinic.

Money, time, or fear of failure. Perhaps all of the above were the culprits. And yet 6 IUIs, one IVF, one child and six years later, and that pause in my chest still lingers.

For Mr. S, it has been a number of things. I think he had a less than successful sibling experience (and continues to), while I had a less than successful only child experience. I was lonely and now that both of my parents are gone, I virtually have no family outside of my husband and child. My only option is to create one. That loneliness seems to be digging even deeper trenches in me as I face the idea of my mortality and being on the front lines of my family. I am standing here as the last generation, watching the people in my life dwindle and I am questioning what I want from this life. Well, I want more. Call me selfish, but don't call me ungrateful. I cherish what I have so much that I long for it to multiply and according to my personal medical statistics, this next year is likely my only chance to see it happen, if ever.

As I said to Mr. S, "We have our whole lives to make money, but this is our only opportunity to make babies."

But again, Mr. S has been less-than-thrilled with the prospect and as anyone fighting the battle of IF knows, if you both aren't on the same page, you're nowhere.  And that's where I've existed in the space of family building for a long while-in some far off no man's land. I have two frozen embryos that have been in storage for more than three years and a conversation I've been too terrified to begin for fear of its consequences. I hadn't approached Mr. S on the topic in months. I was terrified that I might learn he was done, for good, and doubly terrified that even if he agreed to push forward, it would only be with the frozens and not a fresh and that they would prove unsuccessful and I would squander my very last chance. So, my fear of failure, of the unknown, stunted me from moving forward, perhaps much in the same way it did that day I walked out of that RE's office so many years ago.

In the last few months of my Mom's life, she and I discussed baby names constantly.  It was her hope that she would leave me enough money to pursue treatment. It was my hope that she would live long enough to exhaust that money, but she didn't. So, one of the things that stood in our way was eliminated the day she died. It was her gift, one that I would have given back in a heartbeat for another day with her.

About a month and a half after she passed away, my friend, Sarang, gave me this beautiful necklace in remembrance of my mother:

It's my Mom's initials, VRT, a pearl and an angel wing. Lest you think I'm floating way off topic, take a look at this picture of the necklace in the mirror:

Maybe I'm the only one who sees it, but in the mirror, her initials in this font reflected back spell, "TRY."

Try. It was her whisper to me. When I saw that, I knew. I would no longer sit and be held back simply because of the fear of failure. I have never regretted trying and failing any of my cycles. But if I wait any longer, I will.  I will regret deeply letting the opportunity my Mom worked so hard for slip by because of the same cowardice that prevented me from letting her in on the words I had locked in my heart before she died.  I know firsthand that the pain from regret is much heavier than the pain of having tried and failed, so in that sense, I have some control over my destiny.

A few days after seeing the reflection and building up the courage, I approached Mr. S. It wasn't easy. I had no idea the outcome and was prepared to begin grieving a child who would never be born, as so many of us are faced to do on this journey. After consideration, he agreed we should go forward with our frozens. And so, the wheels have been set in motion once again. This summer I'll climb right back into those stirrups and give it at least one more last shot.

While I might never give birth to another child, I will look back and know that at least I tried, that I didn't let fear stand in my way this time. And that my Mom made this possible and just the opportunity alone is one of the greatest gifts I have ever received.

Grief

Forgive me, I'm new here, to this place you call grief. Well, relatively new. I had an introduction back when we lost our first baby and later, when my Dad died. While I love my Dad and miss him terribly, this is the first time I've lost a best friend, my mother, and it's nothing that I've ever known.

I'm a school psychologist and was also trained as a marriage family therapist. Having counseled many in grief, I intellectually knew what that meant. The five stages-the bargaining, anger, acceptance, etc. I knew what that could look like, but to actually stumble through it on my own is pointedly different. I'm groping blind in the darkness and no amount of textbooks or having seen the looks on other faces that I now see on my own has prepared me. No matter how much I braced myself for what I knew would happen, made it any better when it did.

I never knew that grief would be a trickster. Cruel and always at the ready, it is never far behind me. I never knew how quickly that one moment or even an entire day feeling as if I could breathe again could be ripped out of my hands when least expected. The minutest of details and the most mundane of activities remind me that she's gone. Every street corner echos her name and yet, she only lived here for just under four months.

I drive to the store-simple enough, right? Except that all I can think about is the night before she died when I went there to buy BenGay for her. She was in pain from being in the same position, but too weak to get comfortable. Aside from the pain medication, it was the only thing that gave her any physical comfort and now I can't even stoamch the store I bought it from, which used to be my regular haunt. Instead, I make excuses to go to distant stores. Sometimes in the middle of my day, I can still smell BenGay in the air. Even my god damn toilet bowl cleaner smells like it, so every time I clean my toilets, I'm taken back to that night.

I go to work, which seems like neutral territory, but it's not. Recently, the high school I work at had a demonstration for a program about drunk driving on our upper parking lot. It was a simulation of what might happen after a drunk driving-related crash with the fire department, paramedics, a helicopter, crashed cars, and of course, some students playing either injured or dead. I floated on the outskirts of the crowd and felt assured that even with being in a vulnerable time of my life, the demonstration was 'fake' enough. And then they started to bring the 'dead' kids out on stretchers covered in body bags and who should show up? The town funeral director in his minivan. He was the one who took care of my Mom. I watched him for a moment, thinking I was fine and then I realized that that minivan was the last car my Mom was ever in. It was the same year, make and model as mine and instantly I was in tears. Just the sight of him threw me into the most unexpected tailspin for the rest of the day-no, week. I've been trying to recover, but it feels like everytime I claw my way up, I slip back down.



Exisiting in any moment where there's not noise is impossible. Putting my son to sleep in the quiet darkness, driving, it's all a portal for ushering in recollections of what I've lost, what I'll never touch again, and most of all, what I might have taken for granted.

Even my own cell phone, my life blood, is a reminder. I used to talk to my Mother everyday, always when I was leaving work, so now that walk to my car with my silent cell phone in my pocket is like a funeral I relive over and over again.


A little over a week ago, I had Mr. S restore my phone. Being completely technologically naive, I had no idea that it would erase my voicemails-over a year's worth of "I love yous" from her. In fact, I made a mental note a few months ago while listening to her last voice mail (not knowing that it was the last at the time) that I wanted to keep it forever because of how incredibly loving it was. It's gone. And because my Mother was completely video camera shy, I have very little to remember her voice by. Mr. S worked long and hard to recover some of the lost voicemails from a backup months back, but the one I wanted was lost. It was like losing her all over again.

That's the way life feels nowadays-like I re-lose her everyday.  I wake up and remember. I reach for my phone on my way out of my office and remember. Every other moment I remember. She's gone.

I am 33, the same age she was when she had me. I have plans to live past 66, but more than ever before I recognize that there are no guarantees. There's no guarantee that I'll see 34, even. But assuming all goes according to 'plan', I will have spent more of my life without her than with her. That seems impossible to me, too tragic to wrap my mind around. Our time was too brief. I am still learning not to live in my regrets, my feelings of being robbed. Give me time. I'll learn somehow, but again, I'm new here. Still learning the ropes.

Mother to the End

I am writing my mother's obituary. As much as this is a moment that is natural and circle-of-life, it is at the same time the stuff nightmares are made of. I'm staring at a blank page. How do I begin? 66 years of life thrown into type doesn't seem feasible. The complicated and beautiful and hard and ultimately deeply loving mother/daughter relationship ended and somehow fit into words. Impossible.

Our relationship was just that-complicated. There was so much emotion, for better, for worse, but when I simplify everything, as life and death moments require you to do, I see all that mattered. My Mother loved me. Beyond measure. During her last moments, she worried that I hadn't eaten and insisted I finish her soup. I did, and it was awful. Depite that, I drank every last drop as she no longer had the strength to. She wanted me to go home, get some rest. She could barely speak the words and yet, she devoted the last of her energy to them. Simply put, she was a mother to the very end.

When I think of my last moments, I hope my son can say the same.