I know it’s been a hot minute since you’ve seen a blog post from me. Both literally, because I’ve read that 2026 is on track to be one of the hottest years on record, which is a big yikes. It is maddening to me that we have known about global warming and climate change for decades, and known exactly what we need to do and not do in order to slow it down, and here we are, trying to make individually better choices and recycle containers, while we are collectively at the mercy of a few billionaires and political leaders who refuse to make decisions that would actually make the real change we need to see. Gah.
But I digress. My metaphorical hot minute is that somehow, I haven’t written a blog post or even newsletter since March. I feel a little sheepish about it, especially because as I sit here, thinking about what to share, I can’t think of what to write. That’s about the worst thing for someone who’s identified as a writer since pre-k. It might, however, also be the most common thing for someone who’s got an actual degree in writing, so there is that.
Whenever I’ve taken a break from writing consistently, the return to writing feels a bit messy and congested. I’m all backlogged with Things to Say, Ideas to Share, and Stories to Tell.
I’m not stymied because nothing’s been going on. On the contrary, it sort of feels like everything’s been going on, all at once, and not in a super fun way. Let me assure you: we’re okay (we being Bay, Adam and Pongo and all our immediate friends and family), so please don’t worry.
If I’m being honest, and I do like to be honest, then I would have to admit that Life has been life-ing pretty hard at me. If you read my last post way back in March, then you know about some of it. The Hard Things have had the sheer audacity to continue being difficult.
And since I’m a pretty positive person, it’s harder for me to share when things aren’t awesome. I don’t want to be a bummer or leave people feeling concerned. Plus, some of The Things That Have Been Happening™ have been physically, emotionally and spiritually pretty awful, and I’ve been processing a lot of disappointment, grief and confusion. To top it all off, while I can feel like I need to provide value and service in my writing, it can be hard to talk about life lessons when you’re still writing the exams.
The latest hard thing is this: at the end of May/early June, we finally did a round of IVF, which we’d always held as a kind of Hail Mary if we weren’t able to get pregnant, which we haven’t, since our miscarriage four years ago. We were all set to begin IVF nearly 3 years ago, but between my mom’s terminal cancer and passing, the tsunami of grief that hit me, and the autoimmune diseases that the grief triggered, we kept needing to bump IVF further down the road, until this May.
Going into the process, we are excellent candidates, test-results-wise, so while success is never guaranteed (our ages are the biggest constraining factor), it felt very promising. It started out really well, and we all had high hopes. The process went shockingly south, however, and it turns out that the fertility clinic was negligent in several instances, and so we were left with nothing but an apology from them, and a promise that they’d address their protocol failures to make sure the same thing didn’t happen to other hopeful couples, which in my opinion, is a pretty inadequate remedy to a service failure of this degree. While I think I’m a pretty kind and generous person, I really don’t care to be the reason other people get the care and service we were denied, especially when the stakes were so damn high.
Whatever you imagine I may have felt during June while we navigated this disappointing experience (from utter devastation to heartbreak, disbelief and rage), you are probably correct.
I’m getting a real masterclass in grief over the past few years. Doctorate level, it feels like. Maybe this is my honorary PhD?
Again, don’t worry (but thank you for caring): we are okay, even though we find ourselves navigating a future that looks different than we’d always assumed it would. We are even happy and peaceful a lot of the time, which I will say is the most surprising yield of all the grieving and Life-ing I’ve been doing lately.
Honestly, I will admit that I used to spend a lot of time worrying about what had happened, what was happening, and what would happen. I’ve tended to use my anxiety to fuel my relentless trying and pushing forward and forcing Life to bend to my wishes. All that time spent diligently worrying turns out to not have been the invisible forcefield against disappointment that I’d so hoped it would be. And now here I am, with Actual, Real Problems And Failures that require solving, and I’m more okay in the midst of it than I had been when all my worries had been mostly made up by my astonishingly creative monkey mind.
I’m still heartbroken and grieving, and sometimes in denial about our future not including parenthood. It is a hard thing to accept that I am motherless and will be childless, too. Some of the hardest and worst things I can imagine have occurred and yet, in the midst of these very real storms, I’m able to find more peace, joy and acceptance than I genuinely think was available back when my concerns were mostly just imagined.
So, it is a welcome surprise to me that nowadays, I can be with just about anything with more acceptance and less upset than I have ever experienced in my life.
Go figure. I’ll take it, though. My peace is a hard-won prize.
One of the things that all of this Life has really shown me is that I haven’t really had a clear direction or vision for my life. Or maybe it’s more fair to say that while becoming parents wasn’t a sure thing, I think that both Adam and I had really been presuming that the next couple of decades would be about raising a family, while still dedicated to our work supporting people and improving the world, one ontological conversation at a time.
So since it’s September, and September always feels like back to school and levelling up a grade, I’m taking a look at what I want to create, learn and experience in the coming months and years. It’s time for Adam and I to re-envision what our future looks like, and dream a new dream. I’m not saying I’m over the losses (in my experience, that’s not how loss and grief works); but I know that I need something to aim towards, a direction forward, like a light in the darkness, so I don’t get mired down and stuck in what isn’t working.
Dreaming a new dream is a brave thing, especially when you don’t want a new dream, because you still really wish the old one would come true. But no one whom I’ve lost would want me to get stuck or become hopeless. They would want me to dream again, and make those dreams come true.
So, here I am, being brave, looking forward, looking for dreams to dream, and looking for things to hope for again. Thanks for waiting while my light was flickering, and thanks for being here again for this next part of the story.
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