I have been thinking a lot of thoughts lately, and feeling a lot of feelings.  Have you?  I was remembering a time when my high school best buddy got her driver’s license and we were thrift shopping as our first driving adventure.  I asked her what would she do if our song came on while she was driving,  she said probably pull over and dance. It’s a pretty uncommon song, it wasn’t played on the radio station often and we had a dance we made up to it. Our song did play on the radio!! We “invented car dancing” in that moment, we were pretty sure we were the 1st people to think of it.  

3 things: 1. Check my privilege and naivety that a great song on the radio was my greatest concern while driving. 2. When unexpected things happen we get to innovate our response.  3. Feeling my feelings in that very excited moment did not consume me as I thought it might. I predicted that I would likely explode if this crazy awesome thing happened.  I rose to the occasion.  

You guys, guess what??? International travel has opened up again, at least to the country of Barbados. I’m so stinking excited to get back to our little embryos I could invent car dancing all over again. More on that in a minute.

I listened to a bunch of podcasts during quarantine and learned some great language for describing my experience. “Prescriptive Positivity” is the first thing I want to unpack with you. It’s the idea that if you are positive and see the bright side you will perform your suffering in a way that makes others comfortable. Also if you stay positive your ailment will be cured. (That’s the prescriptive part.) I am here to tell you that I have tried positive thinking for a good long while and it does not cure infertility. If you are going through chronic pain, or relationship struggle, or death of a loved one, or financial despair positive thinking is not a cure. It might not hurt, it might even make you feel like you can get through it, but it will not be a solution. You probably already knew that though, but I didn’t.

Another thing I am learning is to dismantle the meritocracy in my brain. This means that you can earn anything you want or need by sheer merit. Kate Bowler, who is a hero of mine, says the day after she was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer she woke up and began auditioning for the role of good and faithful cancer patient, she was going to out-work and out-cheer cancer and show that she was someone who deserved to live. I have done that too with fertility, but the problem is we ALL deserve to live full and flourishing lives. There really is no “deserve” though because crummy things happen to lovely people every time you turn around. To think I don’t have a baby yet because I don’t deserve it is a pretty ridiculous thought, but to think of the support I have from friends and family is because I deserve it is also not true. I have the privilege of sharing my story and people reading it is not earned by me. In a lot of ways I have a “leg up” in this society and the good stuff that happens to me I receive as something I did not earn.

I am incredibly thankful to be back giving massage after 8 weeks off for the stay at home orders. In part because it’s good to earn a living, but mostly because its an honor to serve the public as they move through the collective grief we are feeling as a culture. Grief happens in our bodies and massage can help, I have been on the receiving end of massage since we reopened because I practice what I preach. It feels nutty to be thinking about fundraising during a pandemic, when most of our incomes are so unreliable. We only need $3986 this time though. (only, ha!!) I have some leftover meds from last time that I can use. Strike that we have some stupid expensive blood tests to do ones $900 + overnight FedExing of my blood to Chicago and ones $280. So we need $5166. Who thinks a garage sale is a good idea?

As an Enneagram 7 I have a lot of “fun” ideas, they come to me right after I eat glitter for breakfast. Many of them don’t leave the breakfast table. A Yard sale fundraiser just makes sense: after weeks of staying home organizing our lives we have lots to get rid of. So if you can donate used things for us to sell we would be grateful, or if you feel like shopping in my driveway put August 1st on your calendar. Will there be macaron? Yeah, I think macaron fall out of my pocket wherever I go. (This will also be a bake sale.)

It’s been 4 years this summer since Josh and I started trying to conceive, and while I have always longed to be a mother, having little globs of cells frozen on an island in the Caribbean has made me feel the urgency of parenthood. MOMMY’S COMING! I know they are fine, they can’t hear me…can they? Anyways I’m beyond excited to have a date to transfer them and I’m praying they both survive the thaw and snuggle right in. Fun fact: the reason the lingo is “transfer” and not “implant” is because we don’t know what they will do when we put them in a warm body…we hope they implant and flourish but we only know for sure that we are transferring them. The words we use give us a sense of hope but ground us in reality at the same time.

I am learning some new words as I move from being not-racist to being anti-racist. I have also learned that there are not a lot of women of color talking about their infertility even though it affects black women twice as much as white women. Even with Michelle Obama, and Beyonce, and Tyra Banks sharing about their struggles with fertility many women are not comfortable talking about it. I was wanting to amplify mylenated voices as I wrote this month, as an attempt to leverage my privilege to lift oppressed persons (without becoming some kind of white savior). I haven’t been able to connect with anyone who is currently writing about their fertility experience as a person of color. I don’t think I have much of a “platform” as some bloggers are really well known and sponsored and stuff like that, but it seems that I have a really supportive group of people willing to listen to my story. I hope that we can begin to listen to stories from all communities and reduce the stigma that surrounds infertilty. If you know someone who would like to write to my audience about their baby making challenges please direct message me with contact info.

I’m terrified that the feelings I am feeling will overtake me. The risk of losing another pregnancy is very real, even still I’m here planning my trip. Our embabies exist and they need us, so we’re walking into the unknown. Please join us as we embrace this experience, its like hugging a cactus. Let me exaggerate that hugging is a favorite pastime of mine (remember hugging?) so squeezing a prickly succulent is still not a terrible course of action. Either is a yard sale fundraiser. Stay tuned. Thanks for reading to the end, I feel a little scattered in my writing and thinking and living for that matter.

The Refreshments : Down Together is the song that invented car dancing, and also the lyric that is the title of this post.