2014: the ask and the answer

So 2014 is dead, long live 2015. For at least 363 more days at least. In what’s become a little bit of a tradition (2013, 2012, 2011) around these parts here’s my year in review. In January I, along with my bestie Ros, had our hair chopped off in memory of dearest Lianne who is gone but never forgotten. So many lovely people I knew (and a couple I didn’t) donated money to help the Phyllis Tuckwell Hospice. You are all awesome people. Group hug? I also dabbled in veganism and gave up cheese for ONE WHOLE MONTH. It was really fricken hard, you guys? In February we travelled to see our friend’s Gareth and Akie get married in Tokyo. Just looking through the pictures makes me want to go back. We ate sushi, we visited temples, we went to Tokyo Disney. But I need to see the cherry blossoms bloom, I need to go to a cat cafe, I need to have another creme brulee pancake. As if one awesome holiday wasn’t enough, we then flew down to Australia to see the Great Barrier Reef, drive down the great Ocean Road and caught up with our friends Roger and Sarah nine years on from our last visit down under. It was the trip of a lifetime and being back in the dead of winter makes me wish even more I was back under blue skies with Roger and Sarah. In March I celebrated my ten year anniversary with the love of my life HWSNBN In April suffering from a post holiday hungover of epic proportions I began 100 happy days. Which I totally will blog around. One day. Soon. Ish. Maybe? I had one of the best summers on record spending most of my time in Pells Pool. Although I still haven’t been to a drive in *sad face*. One of my personal highlights was leaving my job after seven years. Although I missed my lovely colleagues it was time to move on taking a role within a NHS mental health service. Having more time and space allowed me to grow my private practice in leaps and bounds. And I’m cutting my hours down even further at work because of how much my practice has started to grow. 2014 was the year my career really started to thrive. I turned 32 and shared 32 hard fought life lessons. Trust me on the absinthe. I missed Lianne Irayla Munaf very much. HWSNBN and I travelled to France to stay in a chateau and watch our friends Amelie and Joey get married (yep 2014 was the year of the destination wedding). There was sun, there was wine, and there was streaking. And it was so awesome, we’re going back again this year. After much deliberation, I came out of the closet and talked about the difficulties HWSNBN and I have been having trying to conceive. Although those dreams of being parents still feel very far away talking about this openly has been an extraordinarily healing process. Thank you for all your messages and kind words. They have meant more than I can ever say. In a not unrelated note I spent much of November and December working out like a mofo. So far with the help of the body coach and Jillian Michaels dvd’s I’ve lost just under two stone even with time off for good behaviour over Christmas. 10448234_773253149415290_3495426446452203943_n I’m back on the exercise wagon today and I want to die. Looking back over 2014 has been really interesting. If the last couple of years have been full of questions, 2014 had the answer: turn towards, turn towards, turn towards. It felt like this year all the work I’ve been putting in on myself began paying off. I got unstuck. I believed that I was good enough. And instead of waiting for a knight in white and shining armour I saved myself (with a little help from a group of strangers, one or two friends and a bearded guru called Steve). Despite myself I still get excited by the possibility that new years brings –the chance to wipe the slate clean and start over. But this new years, I looked over my life and felt content. So much of what I want I already have or am I working towards. There are certainly some dreams I wish would come to fruitation sooner rather than later. But although I hope the more I learn about infertility and life how much I realise this stuff is in the lap of the gods.

But this year I am more accepting than ever of the parts of myself that are difficult or uncomfortable. I am OK, for now, with not being OK.

Bleak midwinter

It’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas…

As in I’m feeling incredibly sad. I knew this was coming even thoughout the past couple of months I have been genuinely happy and at peace with my life. A friend suggested that maybe I had been burying these issues. But it didn’t feel like I was denial. More that my happiness was that bittersweet sensation of a person who knows that winter is coming but dances in the sunshine anyway.

Like Jacob Marley I’ve been visited by some familiar ghosts. The first let’s call the ghost of primordial darkness. I’ve always found this time of year difficult. And I know from speaking to others and from working with people struggling with their mental health that I’m not alone in this.

As the darkness grows like ink swirling through water, as the trees stretch skeletal fingers towards the dying sun, as the earth freezes appearing so barren nothing will grow. Some primal fear catches me and I begin to worry that the light will never come back and we’ll remain in this internal twilight forever. And I always breathe a sigh of relief when we pass midwinter and the longest night and begin to move back towards the light.

The Ghost of past trauma

It’s fitting that the actual longest night has always been the anniversary of the darkest night in our family history. 32 years ago today, my first Christmas, my sister was knocked down in a hit and run. I haven’t written about this on the blog before. It isn’t my story and I don’t want to cause any pain by talking about it in detail. But it has always been a difficult day. There is an ambivalence between the pain of what happened to my sister, the loss of the person she could have been, and the joy at the person she has become despite the most difficult odds. My sister is the kindest person I know, a talented artist and a silly bugger. To think only about how she became disabled is to ignore the gift that is her, ‘the girl that lived’. But neither can I deny how sad it is that choices have been taken away from her.

Tonight in Brighton there is this pagan festival that sums up this ambivalence. During the burning of the clocks people march through the streets with paper mache clocks and sculptures which they throw in the sea. We are going as a family. Although we haven’t talked about it I think it reminds us that even in the darkest night the sun still rises eventually.

The Ghost of recent loss

I’m sad because Christmas always reminds me of Lianne. If you’ve ever experienced a loss you will know that anniversaries and special occasions are bittersweet. She loved Christmas and every year we would go drinking Christmas eve in reindeer antlers. Spending every Christmas day with a stinking hangover was a small price to pay for a night of laughing with your friends until your ribs ached. Even before she died as she got sicker and sicker and finally was unable to come out, Christmas became infused with fear. Would this be the last Christmas with her? I really miss her and have so much I want to ask her and talk to her about. So Lianne if you’re there and not a ball of energy somewhere or been reincarnated as grumpy cat: what’s heaven like? Are the angels hot? Do you miss us too?

The Ghost of future pain

So we’ve covered seasonal pain, old trauma, recent loss and that brings us nicely like Jacob Marley to the ghost of future pain. Another year passes and I am still not pregnant. And I’m not going to lie Internet friends, this fucking sucks. When I started trying for a baby every month I would get my period I would console myself by saying don’t worry it will happen next month or surely the next month after that. By the end of last year during a similar depressive episode I told myself ‘don’t worry it will definitely happen next year’.

This year that hope has burnt away to ash and I no longer make any predictions at all. I hope against all evidence that I could get pregnant next year but know it is equally likely to take years and also there is a possibility, slim but it exists, that it may never happen for us.

Do you want to know the cruelest thing about infertility? As it becomes more clear that the problem is with me I realize I can bear my pain. But I love HWSNBN so much, how can I bear the thought of being the one to prevent his dream of being a father? We talk about it and I know this is my fear not his. That he loves me more than that. But it hurts.

My period was late for a week and a half this month and even though HWSNBN and I tried not to hope we couldn’t help but imagine a different Christmas one of possibility that next year would be different. My period came last night and I wept inconsolably. Speaking to HWSNBN and my parents helped. Knowing that they will be on my side wherever this journey takes me helps. This pain is changing me, tempering me in the fire into a new person but I worry about losing who I was. I worry I might snap and break under the crushing weight of a thousand disappointments.

And so it goes
ESTRAGON: ‘I can’t go on like this.’
VLADIMIR: ‘That’s what you think.‘
Waiting for Godot, Beckett

Like many others with depression I’ve been here before. This is territory I’ve mapped too many times. And there is something almost comforting about the bleakness of the vista, the scarred rock face, the waves tumbling over my head.

There is nothing I can do about these ghosts. The more I work with trauma the more I realize how unhelpful the notion of closure is. There are some wounds that never heal, despite our best efforts we have to learn to limo along with them anyway. I can’t protect myself against past loss or from future pain. All I can do is sit and feel these feelings until they pass. The only way out is through.

Small things help. The realisation that I am not alone, that other people find this time of year difficult too. That there are people who love me even when I am not my best self. Letting go of expectations of how Christmas will be helps. If I cry then I’ll cry and if I laugh that’s OK too. Writing about how I feel here helps even if only my mum reads it.

But the thing that really helps that keeps me trudging forward when path is so dark I can barely see is the knowledge that no matter what long dark night of the soul I am experiencing this too shall pass and somehow, somewhere the light is returning.

32 years exactly, and 32 lessons learnt

Today exactly I turn 32! When I was 15 I always thought that by 30 I’d have it all sorted. I’d be well-established in my dream career, holiday three times a year, the gorgeous house, the perfect husband and the one kid with the other on their way. Yeah… not so much.

But it’s funny I am so content with my life, I am really am. In reality my life is so much richer and surprising that I ever imagined. I’ve been thinking a lot about where I’ve come from and where I’d like to go and here are 32 hard-won lessons I learnt over the last 32 years I’d tell my younger self. My own personal ‘Everybodies free to wear sunscreen.’

1. It’s OK to change your mind. Many times. You will keep yourself stuck for months and years by insisting you ‘shouldn’t’ feel this way. You go travelling by yourself at 20 and hate it. You ‘should’ love your job in publishing but you don’t. You ‘should’ have it all together by now. Like clockwork every seven years you upheave your life. But out of the wreckage new things grow.

2. Be vulnerable, but only with people who deserve it. Those parts of yourself which you are most ashamed of are where you connect with others. And that ‘me too’ feeling is better than any drug. Remember what Lester Bangs said: ‘The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we’re uncool.’

3. No one person can be everything to you. Not your mum (even if she is wonderful), or your husband or your best friends. Much as you hate to admit it, no woman is an island and you need people – lots of people. A friend who you can dance with at 2am, and a friend who likes jogging bottoms and trashy TV about drag queens and vampires as much as you do. A friend whose known you for so long they remember when you got your first bra, and a new friend who sees you just as you are now.

4. Try new things, challenge yourself and expand your horizons. You contain multitudes.

5. You like what you like. And it’s OK to enjoy reading more than listening to music, to find shopping boring but to love going to museums.

6. Expectations will bite you in the arse. That big night out you planned for three months will end with you crying in the loos. That quick drink after work with friends will turn into an epic night out. Make plans, make many plans but remember life is what happens when you make other plans. (Thanks Dan Savage)

7. Observe the campsite rule in all things. Leave people’s hearts, nature and the world in a better state than when you arrived. (Thanks Dan Savage)

8. Therapy is like a long trudge down into a deep canyon. You are terrified, you have no idea how deep this goes. You don’t know if you will ever emerge. All you can see is two or three feet in front of you but in the end that is all you need. It is the best thing you have ever done.

9. If someone tells you who they are, believe them

10. If you are ever confused: look at what people do, not what they say. Words are fucking cheap, actions cost. When you’re 18 you will fall for your best male friend. He’ll tell you he loves you. Hours before kissing every other girl in the club. For a month the dissonance between these two thoughts will tear you apart. Until one day you ignore the words and look at his actions. The hardest lessons are often the most valuable.

11. At 20 you look back at photos of yourself at 15 and think my thighs look normal. At 25 you look back at photos of yourself at 20 and think how great your body looks. At 30 you look back at yourself at 25 and think how pretty you were with happiness shining through every pore. You are not as ugly or as fat as think you are. And the trick to muster is to be able to look into the mirror and realise how gorgeous you really are.

12. Remember the lesson of Florence Foster Jenkins – ‘People may say I can’t sing but no one can say I didn’t sing.’ Do things not because you are good at them but for the sheer pleasure of experiencing them.

13. You will spend your adolescent and twenties tormented by the opinions of near strangers. One day you will go to a friends wedding. You will see people you haven’t seen since you were at school. And you will realise with the sense of something lifting that their opinions of you don’t matter. And you will dance like nobody is watching because who cares if they are.

14. Be kind. The things you will regret most are failures of kindness. Be kind, be kind, be kind.

15. Know the difference between being kind vs being polite. Kindness is calling people on their bullshit. Politeness is saying nothing because it’s not done. Fuck being polite.

16. Listen to your feelings. That feeling of envy you get when a colleague mentions she is studying counselling will lead you down a new career path. That anger you feel with an old friend is a sign your boundaries are being violated. The bubbles of happiness you get when he takes your hand tells you he is the one. That fear you felt is a gift and you need to use it.

17. Listen to your body. Three Dr’s will tell you that stabbing pain in your kidney is a muscular ache and not the cyst a dark passenger growing inside you. 5 years later two Dr’s will tell you to relax ignoring the hormone fluctuations which make carrying to term almost impossible. You know your body inside out, so trust what you feel and don’t give up.

18. Find some way of moving your body that you love and do it regularly. Yes, I know exercise sucks but there will be one form of exercise out there which will make you feel gloriously fully alive. When you swim you feel like you are flying through the water.

19. Choose experiences over things every time.

20. Run your own race. You are running your own race and all those other people they are running different races with different goals. Keep your eyes on your own track. Remember ‘the race is long, and in the end, it’s only with yourself.’

21. Treat the people you love better than strangers.

22. Let go of things. Forgive if you can not because they deserve it but because you don’t need to keep carrying this stuff around.

23. Embrace space. You enjoy being busy. You want to do all the things now. But allow yourself time to wander, to daydream, to relax. Magic happens if you give it space and time.

24. See as much of this world as you can and not just the furthest corners. Try to explore your home town as if you were a tourist.

25. Learn how to manage your anger. For years when people annoy you instead of a) saying something you will b) distance yourself until they stop. Learning how to be assertive and express your feelings is one of those skills to master sooner rather than later.

26. When you were in your teens, you will 80% responsible and 20% a hot mess. Looking back you will regret that the ratio wasn’t reversed. Be ridiculously irresponsible while you still can.

27. You don’t have to earn your place in this world. For years you will almost kill yourself trying to be enough. Then one day after a lot of effort you will realise you always where enough. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz the way home was inside you all along.

28. First impressions are often bullshit. The first time I met my husband I thought he was incredibly handsome in clean-cut old movie star kind of way. I was also certain he was gay. The first time I met my best friend I thought she was a bitch, sorry Ros. You will be wrong about lots of people so give people a chance.

29. Absinthe is always a bad idea.

30. You will make many mistakes. They are inevitable and unavoidable. Learn from them. Forgive yourself and move forward making newer mistakes.

31. Don’t settle.

32. This is your one true wild and wonderful life. This moment here: a woman on her birthday writing this blogpost is all there is. You only get one shot make it count my darling. Eat the peach that is life until the juices run down your chin.

Lianne, two years on

Dearest Lianne,

1. It’s been two years since you died. Two fucking years. It feels like a lifetime. It feels like a week.

2. I miss you.

3. August used to be my favourite month. My birthday! Summer! No hellhole that I will never escape from aka school! You remember 🙂 Now I dread August because I know what’s coming and the deep well of grief that I will topple into.

4. Next week I will be 32, and you will forever be frozen in amber at 30. Part of me realises you’d be amused by this. At the thought of yourself young and beautiful whereas I get older, fatter, more wrinkled.

5. I read this advice column again and again. This sentence in particular hits me like a blow: ‘It has been healing to me to accept in a very simple way that my mother’s life was 45 years long, that there was nothing beyond that. There was only my expectation that there would be—my mother at 89, my mother at 63, my mother at 46. Those things don’t exist. They never did.’

6. I haven’t yet accepted that your life was 30 and a half years long. That there never was or will be anything more. It was only my expectation, and yours, that we would sit with Debs, Ros and Greg in the nursing home and cackle about the male nurses. You will never be 70 or 50 or even 31 – and it breaks my fucking heart again.

7. I think about you at the oddest times when I see a grumpy cat that looks like you, a kitkat, or watching Sleepy Hollow and thinking ‘I have to tell Lianne about this’ and then remembering I can’t.

8. I collect quotes about grief like a macabre magpie. Why? Because knowing that other people ‘get it’ makes me feel less alone.

‘It turns out that Hollywood has grief and loss all wrong. The waves and spikes don’t arrive predictably in time or severity. It’s not an anniversary that brings the loss to mind, or someone else’s reminiscences, nor being in a restaurant where you once were together. It’s in the grocery aisle passing the romaine lettuce and recalling how they learned to make Caesar salad, with garlic-soaked croutons, because it was the only salad you’d agree to eat. Or when you glance at a rerun in an airport departure lounge and it’s one of the episodes that aired in the midst of a winter afternoon years earlier, an afternoon that you two had passed together. Or on the rise of a full moon, because they used to quote from The Sheltering Sky about how few you actually see in your entire life. It’s not sobbing, collapsing, moaning grief. It’s phantom-limb pain. It aches, it throbs, there’s nothing there, and yet you never want it to go away.’

9. I’m celebrating my birthday this year. The first year I celebrated, numb to what had happened waiting for the feelings to rush back in. Last year I cancelled all plans and just spent time with HWSNBN who didn’t mind when I started crying into my meal. This year I’m going out with the other people who knew you and loved you. I’m going to drink big fruity cocktails, dance to cheesy music, and if I cry, and I will, I’m going to pretend that my tears are glitter.

10. I have been and always shall be your friend. I’m glad to have known you. Thank you for that gift my friend. Thank you for everything.

love Row xxx

Infertility and me

Everybody has an untold story. This is mine.

For the last year I haven’t been talking about two big things going on in my life in this blog. I’ve written endless drafts of posts that remain unpublished. The first, my struggle with finding fulfilling work that pays, I wrote about here. Here is the second.

Coming out of the trying to conceive closet

In our modern world, it feels as if many formerly taboo things are now acceptable: white shoes after Labour day… sexting… hipsters…

Is confessing you’re trying to get pregnant the last taboo?

It makes sense. I mean, few of us feel comfortable telling the world let alone *gulp* your family that you are totally DOING it. I haven’t been open for pragmatic reasons with work in case it might have ‘ramifications’. But as my friends, family and now the entire internet knows, *waves* hey internet, HWSNBN and I are trying to having a baby.

And it isn’t going well.

I mean stuff’s happening, no sniggering at the back. We aren’t sitting there twiddling our metaphorical thumbs. But I’m not pregnant, not even a little bit, not at all.

Most of my friends got pregnant in month one or two. When we started trying I ‘expected ‘ it might take a while – three months, maybe even *GASP* four. But it’s been well over a year and counting now and I’m not pregnant. Which means I’m officially infertile. Never have I tried so hard to not achieve something and yet I have. Do we get a special badge? A secret handshake? A scarlet ‘I’ to pin to my clothing? (If I look as hot as Emma Stone then I’m game)

I get that when it comes to the infertility leagues over a year is nothing. But when it feels like everybody around you is getting pregnant as soon as a willy is waved in their direction. I can’t help but wonder – what’s wrong with me?

F– you body

What makes it hard is that for the past year my body has engaged in bi-monthly game of Psych. ‘You know what would really fuck her up, ‘ it whispers, ‘if we give her all of the pregnancy symptoms with none of the actual pregnancy. Wouldn’t that be funny? Psych!’

The first month we tried, my period regular as clockwork was late. I felt nauseous, there was a taste of sour metal in my mouth, my breasts killed. Torn between excitement and terror I wondered – was this it? When my period arrived a fortnight late, I cried in HWSNBN’s arms. But it was OK, it was the first month. I’d be pregnant soon, I knew it. Insert the foreshadowing laughter of doom.

Over a year later this has happened five months out of twelve with varying intensity of symptoms. Although I tried to not hope I couldn’t help myself. I imagined myself being pregnant. Holding the baby in my arms. Brushing my lips against their downy head.

And then when my period comes the despair cuts like a knife. I feel stupid and deluded. ‘Idiot, you really thought you were pregnant this time. As if this will ever happen for you.’ It doesn’t last, I have weeks where I am OK more than OK. But when my period arrives like a bloody malignant visitor for a day or two I feel so gutted as if infertility gods have scooped out my insides with a blunt spoon.

A new hope

The Dr’s have been less than helpful. The first time they tested HWSNBN, who was fine.

The second time they looked at my age and told me to ‘relax’ you’re still young ignoring my insistence that throwing up every other month wasn’t right. Only when I insisted did they refer me for blood tests which revealed that my progesterone levels were low.

Here’s the science bit. Progesterone is a key part of the luteal phase, the phrase after you ovulate and prepares the womb for the embryo to implant. If you don’t produce enough progesterone then there isn’t enough time for the embryo to grown and implant. Which explains all the impostor pregnancy symptoms because it seems I might able to get pregnant. That all those times where I thought I was pregnant, I might have been. The embryo just isn’t getting enough progesterone to stay.

Yep, after all those stupid jokes I made it seems it’s really true my womb is like the Sahara and just as welcoming.

I was told to wait until it’s been two years, the NHS cut off point for my age, and then we’ll refer you. So I took herbal remedies and ate a special diet and hoped, and hoped, and hoped. In the meantime at the advice of my acupuncturist I started tracking my cycle using my temperature. This reconfirmed the test results the length of my luteal phase which was only 7 days not long enough for the standard 10+ they recommended – supporting the fact that I had a progesterone deficiency.

Determined not to have to wait another year I took my charts to see a nurse not a Dr and she took one look at my charts and bloodwork and typed a referral letter to the fertility clinic immediately. I didn’t know whether to cry or kiss her but the relief of being heard was immense.

Emotionally being infertile sucks. Who knew?

Before I found out about the progesterone for the long year of trying and failing I’ve felt there was something wrong with me. Not biologically, although there may very well be. But emotionally. Not being able to get pregnant makes me feel sad, stupid and ashamed, deeply fucking ashamed. Because this simple natural thing that everybody else seems to be doing so effortlessly I am failing at.

What makes it’s harder is that I am of an age where everybody seems to be getting sprogged up. Some days all these babies and pregnant women make me feel so happy and hopeful. One day that will be me, I tell myself. On those good days, and there are many of them; I can parcel out my pain, shoving into the closet at the back of my mind. I can say with only the tiniest twinge: ‘I am so happy for you’ because I am.

Other days it only seems to confirm my wrongness. I feel like Maleficient at a christening peering in cribs jealously. Except not gorgeous like Angelina Jolie but ugly deep within. I want a baby. What’s wrong with me? I deserve it as much as them (as if deserve comes into it at all). I tell myself that these feelings of grief, of anger, of envy are why I can’t have a baby. That I’m so filled with poison that nothing could grow within me.

Logically I know it’s silly. Many people struggle to conceive, I’m not alone. The reason I can’t conceive is not because of my feelings, or that I am not so secretly and awful human being but because of a hormone imbalance (and possibly other undiagnosed problems. I expect them now like lightning bolts from above).

And I know I am lucky in comparison to many of my friends who have struggled with miscarriages, still births, losing a child. I am lucky but comparing myself to others, telling myself I have no right to my pain when others have it much worse, doesn’t help.

I also know many women who I love and admire who have either through choice or chance not become mothers. I don’t think they are stupid or should feel ashamed. Why do I feel that way about myself? As if this one thing that I cannot (currently) do sums up my measure as a person. But still the feeling persists.

I love HWSNBN so much. And we can control many things. The effort we put into our relationship. Where we live. What jobs we do.

But we have no control over whether we will be able to have a baby naturally. It could happen next month, it could take years and let’s face it, it could never happen for me. For us.

No matter how hard we try. No matter how much we love each other and believe we would be good parents. No matter how desperately we want a child.

Ask me again when we're going to have kids

And it’s that I think that keeps people from admitting they are trying to have a baby. The possibility of coming so close and never getting anywhere. And the question, the raised eyebrow, the hints – all well-intentioned and coming from a place of love. Yet still they flay you, until you feel like you are bleeding from a thousand papercuts. The world feels fecund while your womb remains a barren wasteland.

Let me be clear, we aren’t giving up. Even if the hormone therapy doesn’t work we are very privileged to live in country where IVF is available on the NHS. Furthermore, there are hundreds of children who need a good home and parents who will love them.

I will be a mother even if it doesn’t happen how I envisioned. But oh god, this infertility rollercoaster is not for the fainthearted. It hurts. How it hurts…

Coming clean about my infertility

Why am I writing about my struggles to conceive?

Because this is a huge part of my life and I am not willing to hide it anymore.

Because I am compelled to write, to open a vein and bleed onto the computer screen just as I have written in journals and on scraps of paper. Words help.

Because my infertility has felt shameful for too long and I know the answer isn’t secrecy but showing that vulnerable side of me to the world.

Because I ask my clients daily to make themselves vulnerable and I am not doing the same.

Because I have been helped so much by brave women talking openly about how hard this process can be. Including my best friend whose courage and honesty always inspires me.

It feels like there is a massive pressure on women, in particular, to pretend that our lives are effortless and easy. But trying to expand our family is hard, it takes effort and I am sick of lying and pretending that it isn’t hard and it doesn’t hurt. It does.

If anybody else is out there, whatever your story, please get in touch. I would really appreciate someone to talk to about this.

It’s got easier recently. I let go of my expectations that this might happen for me, it may not.

Turning towards these feelings helped – I can’t even describe how much. Finding a medical professional who took me seriously helped. Realising that even though I want children that they aren’t a destination and they won’t solve anything or make me happy helped. But if I know anything about feelings is that there will be times when I will be devastated I cannot move from grief.

Stay tuned for further, probably incredibly self-indulgent updates. If this is oversharey I’m sorry, please skip these posts and I promise be back to my old self soon.

What I learnt about marriage, two years in

Two years ago, I married HWSNBN. In front of friends of family I vowed to:

‘love you til the seas run dry, until the sun grows cold and the stars grow old. And if there is another life beyond this, I will love you there too. With these words, and all the words of my heart, I marry you and bind my life to yours.’

One of the oddest things about being married is how natural it feels. I never dreamt I’d be this conventional. Growing up I wanted a loving partner eventually, but a husband never seemed part of my story. As HWSNBN delights in telling people in the early days of our relationship I vehemently announced I didn’t believe in marriage. But I love being married, and here’s the important bit, to him. Here is what I learnt about my marriage two years in.

It feels odd talking about our marriage even to a compulsive oversharer like me. It’s just not done. Other people’s marriages are another country, with their own secret languages and minefields. I am insatiably curious about what goes on there. (Seriously people, tell me more about what goes on in your relationship.)

In the first two years of a relationship you talk endlessly to your friends about ‘what’s going on.’ Why do the conversations about relationships stop? Is it because I don’t want to see the look of fear in their eyes when I tell them that sometimes when he has a cold he coughs in such an intensely irritating way I want to jab an icepick in his ear. Is it because if I have to hear about how my friends boyfriend prowess in bed or lack thereof and then sit opposite him in the pub, I might jab an icepick in my ear. Or is it because it gets bit boring.

People talk a lot about the wedding but not about the marriage. That ratio feels wrong. A wedding is day and if you’re lucky and I was it’s a really fucking good day. But marriage is what happens when the confetti has blown away, when the champagne is long drunk and life begins again. I really want to ask people questions like: how do you fight? How do you listen to somebody tell the same boring story about their day again? How do you stay together even when tragedy drops the sky?

Marriage is half luck, half work. As is said in our wedding reading. ‘Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.’ The fortunate accident is that in this big world we found each other because I cannot imagine doing this with anybody else. And yes, Tim I get the odds. But I still feel so lucky to have met you HWSNBN. As in I must have saved children from a burning building in a previous life lucky.

I try to not be complacent about marriage. I went into it knowing that half of marriages end in divorce. Statistically we have a fifty/fifty chance at best. I wouldn’t bet on anything else with those odds but I bet on us. And that’s not including the odds of us being separated by something outside of our control: death. So we try hard to be there for each other. To carve out little oasises of time for us. There are some things I just tell him. And vice versa. And whenever we can we dance by the light of the moon. It’s work but it doesn’t feel hard not yet anyway…

I love this quote from Tim Dowling: ‘A little paranoia is a good thing in marriage; complacency is the more dangerous enemy. You should never feel so secure that you are unable to imagine the whole thing falling apart over a long weekend. I can’t give you an exact figure for how many sleepless nights per year you should spend worrying that you’re going to die alone and unhappy if you don’t get your shit together spouse-wise, but it’s somewhere between five and eight.’

In recent months I seriously haven’t had my shit together spouse-wise. I work full-time and also am out most evenings counselling. When I’m not doing those things I am mostly staring at the wall and rocking. Connecting with my husband has moved further down the list as I struggle to find time to do the most basic things to keep myself functioning. I asked him if he felt abandoned expecting anger or hurt. But he simply said: ‘I miss you but I understand. This is not forever and it’s for us.’ I am so much harder on myself than he could ever be. Reader I loved him even more. For example: tonight instead of doing anything elaborate or romantic we’re spending it at home as I am bedridden with a cold. That is love.

People ask me what’s changed. Nothing has. Everything has. The most concrete difference is we fight differently. Before for me, at least, when we fought things felt unstable. There was always the nuclear options of running out the door. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold. Now when we argue it feels like we are both in the same ship bailing out from the tide. Sometimes we bicker fiercely over the tiller. But we still have the same goal, to keep the boat afloat. That helps. Knowing the way I know which way north is that we are in this together.

It’s nice to have somebody on on my side. So on my side he’ll call me on my bullshit.

There is a sweet spot between connection and distance. He’s my crack. If I could spent every moment together I would because I like the way he makes me feel safe as if nothing bad can touch me. Even if I know that’s not true. But it’s not good for me to always be together. It’s not for us. It’s not for our friends and family who want to spend time for us as people not as a couple. Spend too much time together and I begin to take him for granted. Being alone feels great the first night. I get shit done. I indulge in secret single behaviour (you know eating salted caramel sauce from a saucepan. With your finger. Just me eh?). But my day two I feel hollow as if some part of me has been amputated. I hate it. But I need time apart like a drink of fresh water to remind me of who I am without him. To remind me of how much I love and miss him.

Sometimes I spy him from a distance and I fall in love him all over again. His posture. That vulnerable spot at the nape of his neck. The way he throws his head back exposing his molars when he laughs.

We are stronger together. Without him, I would be a social recluse happier with books than people. Without me, he would be a bear in a china shop unaware of the undercurrents of polite behaviour.

We’ve been together ten years now. I’m not the same girl I was when I met him. My hair is shorter, my waistbands bigger. He’s changed too. But at moments I get glimmers of the boy he was when I first met him faintly like seeing something through water. His fluffy hair, the interest he takes in everything, the way he holds my hand. Softly as if I am precious.

Marriage is a choice we both make daily. I chose him when he’s popping to the supermarket and I chase after him kissing him ‘goodbye’ as if we’re starring in brief encounters. In case something awful happens I want him to know how much I love him. He hasn’t lived a life in the shadow of uncertainty like I have but he choses me when we kisses me back even though he thinks it’s silly. It’s on such small compromises that a marriage is made.

I chose him when I want to gnaw apart our relationship like an animal in a trap because I cannot stand another repetitive fight about who left crumbs on the bathroom floor but I stay. He chooses me when I woke from my frequent nightmares and he holds me close, strokes my hair and tells me I’ll be OK. He never seems to get bored or frustrated with telling me things are OK.

Over the last year we’ve been struggling with some tough things. But it’s only made us stronger. I chose him when I collapse in pieces on the bathroom floor knowing that he will catch me, always. He chooses me when he picks me up and patiently pieces me back together. He chooses me when he says he is sad knowing that I will hold him until it fades. Even if it takes days.

There are only two pieces of relationship advice I have. The first is figure out: what are you really fighting about? HWSNBN and have two main fights we’ve perfected through long and tedious repetition. The first fight is he loves order and cleanliness and although I like tidiness, I want a flat I can live in more. It was when we were conducting this fight like old pro’s for the 50 millionth time that I realised what we were really fighting about. He was really saying: I want you to respect my need to feel in control of my environment. And I was really saying: I need a space in our flat and to feel like I matter in this relationship. Once we discovered that we could talk about what we were actually fighting about.

My second relationship lesson? Be kind. This less a relationship lesson than a life lesson. You will never regret being kind.

OK, so talk to me in the comments about your relationships past and present. What have you learnt, what have you unlearnt?

Turning towards

Blogs by their nature are exercises in navel gazing. And I’ve never kidded myself that my blog had a wide appeal, mostly I ramble on about things that interest only me/hair. But this post is so incredibly narcissistic that I give you my regular reader aka mum complete permission to skip this post.

I have to write about turning towards. Because this revelation has been so fundamentally important in my life that to not mark it here feel wrong. Maybe this might help other people struggling with the same thing. Plus when I inevitably forget this lesson, before the universe slams my head against the wall again I can re-read this post again. And tell myself turn towards doofus, turn towards.

As I hinted in my beginning of the year post for the past six months I’ve been struggling. In short:

There are two things I really want. I’ve been doing anything I can think of to accomplish these goals. And running face first into the universe’s indifference as I realise how completely out of my control everything is.

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In response, I’ve felt very sad, hopeless and useless. I don’t like feeling sad, hopeless and useless – these feelings bummed me out. So I would do whatever I could to make myself feel better. I have *takes deep breath* journalled, gone to therapy, cleaned, seen friends, isolated, eaten chocolate, meditated, drunk many fruity cocktails in different shades, gone on the holiday of a lifetime, distracted myself with books and TV. I even whisper it exercised. That is how desperate I was.

And all of these things worked. I’d feel better for an a hour, an afternoon, a week. But inevitably because I want things, and those things aren’t happening, I would feel very sad, hopeless and useless again. I flipped so fast between hope and despair I gave myself emotional whiplash.

Even worse the negative thoughts began: ‘you’re a trained counsellor. If you’re so good at fixing your clients, why can’t you fix yourself. What’s wrong with you?’ So in addition to feeling crappy, I then beat myself up for feeling crappy. It was if I imagined after gaining my diploma that I’d be teflon coated never suffering again.

Fellow counsellors, I’ll give you a moment to stop laughing at me.

This cycle (feel sad, try to make self feel better, while beating self up for feeling bad) might have continued ad infinitum. If not for one weekend when something happened.

During the break in a experiential counselling group (think a therapeutic group for counsellors) I took a walk. It had been an emotional day and I’d connected with an old wound from childhood. I felt off, like a small animal was scritching a hole in my breastplate. I needed… something. I went into the bookshop and stared at my books, my drug of choice and familiar companions. No, that wasn’t it.

I went into Waitrose and stared at sugary things, hoping they could satiate my pain. Nope, not it.

I walked scrolling through my phone desperate to find somebody who could help take this feeling away.

In that moment I would have done anything, taken anything for the momentary cessation of that scritchy feeling.

Instead I did something different. I sat down on a bench and (in my head) I began to talk to myself. ‘OK’ I said to myself. ‘What up with you?’ I turned towards those feelings blossoming within me like a dark flower. And I felt it all the sadness sloshing inside of me bigger than any ocean, the anger juddering like tectonic plates moving and there at the base of it all a raggedly old wound that never healed.

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It took almost everything I had to not turn away from those feelings. Instead as each feeling emerged I acknowledged it. I tried to name the feeling: was it grief or despair that I was drowning in? I put my hand to where the feelings where located and breathed through it.

Was turning towards those feelings pleasant?

No.

It felt like shining a light into my soul and seeing creatures wiggle in the darkness. It was intensely painful but mixed up in that pain was a relief at those feelings being heard. An ‘Ah yes, there you are!’

In that moment I drew on a couple of ideas that had inspired me but I’d struggled to integrate. Buddhist notions of acceptance, vulnerability from the work of Brené Brown, and techniques from mindfulness and focusing. I accepted those feelings. I embraced my vulnerability instead of turning away in shame. I open myself up to my current experience whatever they were.

I knew from my counselling training that feelings need to be heard. But I had been ignoring mine and worse telling myself that what I felt wasn’t valid.

Let’s get all metaphorical for a minute. It felt emotionally I was in Hull but I really wanted to be in Brighton. It was almost as if for the last six months I spent all my time either distracting myself or being self critical that I wasn’t in Brighton. Neither of which actions got me anywhere. If I ever want to get to Brighton I need to accept I’m in Hull.

I need to accept the reality of my current emotional experience before it can change to make way for something new.

For years I’ve had this quote pinned to my fridge. ‘The only way out is through’ by Robert Frost.

The thing is going through our feelings hurts, it’s uncomfortable, the terrain is unwieldy. Wanting to avoid pain is human nature. It’s in my nature. But when I avoided my pain it only reinforced my secret fear that my pain is bigger than I am and I am not resilient enough to handle it. By trying to shut of my pain I’d limited my ability to feel pleasure. By turning towards I remembered that there are no shortcuts, the only way out of a feeling is through.

So for the last month I’ve been practising turning towards my feelings. I can feel the ripples spreading. I don’t know where I’ll end up but this feels huge and revolutionary.

For the first time in months I’m feeling like myself. I feel… better (she says tentatively eyeing the skies for more thunderbolts). Nothing externally has changed but I’ve changed. I still want things that aren’t happening. I still feel sad, useless and bummed out.

But instead of ignoring those feelings or telling myself I’m not allowed to have them more often than not I turn towards them. ‘Who are you?’ I ask. ‘What do you need me to hear?’ And whatever I hear and no matter how uncomfortable it is, I try to turn towards.

Ten years of us

Dear HWSNBN,

Ten years ago today I was sat next to you in the Funky Fish as this song played:

Praying you’d kiss me. Some wild god must have heard because you finally did and I realised that I never wanted to stop kissing you.

Us the day after. Already I'd decided I didn't want to part from you — Us the day after. Already I’d decided I didn’t want to part from you

It doesn’t feel like ten years has passed. I still feel as if I’m seeing you, discovering my love for you anew and hope I shall never become jaded to what we have.

Over the last ten years a lot has happened, even in the last year.

We’ve been to many, many parties.

We’ve lived in three places, one separately and two together. In 2007 we bought our flat.

I’ve had ten jobs and you’ve had four, you slacker… 🙂

We’ve made some amazing friends and lost some along the way.

New Zealand 2004, Australia 2014, Cuba 2013, Scotland 2010

We’ve had so many adventures travelling to the furthest reaches of this small world.

You asked me to marry you, and I, of course, said YES. After eight years I had to get used to not being your girlfriend anymore (no more girlfriend points) and becoming your wife.

You supported me as I retrained in my dream job as a counsellor and never complained about the time I spent studying and with my clients but not with you.

You can still make me laugh…

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like nobody else can.

There’s been so many changes that at times it feels as if the world is spinning vertiginously around me. But you remain my constant, my north star.

Thank you for loving me, for taking care of me and for letting me take care of you.

I’m no longer the same girl that you met all those years ago and you aren’t the same boy. But like I wished we’ve grown together not apart. At dinner tonight we sat next to a couple who had been together 50 years, only 40 years to go!

Happy 10th anniversary HWSNBN. Here’s to us.

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love,

your Rowan

2013: one step forward, two steps back

2013 has been… interesting. Not as full as emotional whiplash as 2012 which remains both the best year of my life and the worst. But 2013 was still challenging and wondrous in it’s own ways.

I started this year in Budapest courtesy of lovely best friend Debs.

Really this year I hung out with my best friends, a lot. Losing Lianne has really pushed home the importance of having regular meet-ups to eat yummy food and wear silly hats.

I spend most of the spring shut inside reading all the books and writing my final essays in between trying to get enough hours on my placement.

Shortly I handed in my dissertation, HWSNBN and I flew out for the holiday of lifetime and our honeymoon to Cuba. It was three of the most amazing weeks of my life and I was on a high for most of the summer. (And I still haven’t blogged about it. GUILT!)

And in July I graduated qualifying me to pursue my dream career as a counsellor. I still can’t believe that not only did I complete the course (when battling through grief) and I got a distinction!

Over the summer I swam in the sea so much HWSNBN christened me the mermaid.

And in August I spoke about losing Lianne one year on.

I went to France with the family and ate many crepes the size of my head. Sea salt caramel FTW!

HWSNBN and I started househunting then thought fuck it we are never going to be able to afford to move let’s go on holiday to Tokyo and Australia instead! To say I am excited is the understatement of the century.

In December to raise money for the hospice that looked after Lianne, Ros and I cut off our hair for charity raising over £600.

It’s been a good year. But the latter half of this year, ugh it’s been tough. I struggled with health issues. The last six months there have been two things I’ve been pursuing with every fibre of being. And although I haven’t exactly fallen flat on my face, in different ways I’ve failed to make the changes I wanted. The thing about change nobody tells you is how much it sucks. It’s uncomfortable, it forces you out of your comfort zone, and mostly it’s slow.

Feeling so stuck has led to some big emotional revelations. I started setting boundaries. I began counting my blessings and letting go of guilt. I cut down on the amount I took on. And this, really surprises me sometime this year something shifted within me and I started being kinder to myself.

Would I have learnt those lessons if everything hadn’t gone exactly to plan? Probably not. Would I preferred it everything had gone smoothly? Hell yes! But so it goes…

So for the 2014 in the grand tradition of making overly ambitious resolutions and giving them up in a strop within a week, I have three resolutions:

1. Make a recipe a week.

I need to expand my repertoire beyond pasta and studenty stir frys before I contract lurgy. So I’m committing to cook something new every week in the hope that come 2015 I will have 52 new dishes to add to my repertoire.

2. Write and submit a story

I miss being creative and writing had to take a backburner while I completed my degree. But now I have all this free time (haha) my plan is write and submit my story about anything by the end of 2014

3. Complete five things from my much neglected life list.

Overall if there’s one wish I have for this year, it’s that I surprise myself again.

Missing you

Dearest Lianne,

You died a year ago today. It doesn’t feel like a year. Sometimes it feels like yesterday the grief as fresh and savage as a wild animal gnawing in my chest. Other times it feels like decades have passed since we lost you and the world got colder, darker and a lot less fun.

I talk to you everyday. You never answer but that’s OK I know that if you could, you would. In the year since you died the shock faded into numbness, rage, grief and bittersweet nostalgia before cycling back round again. I listen to the playlist I made and it makes me cry and laugh all at once.

Sometimes I dream of you and in those dreams I forgot your dead. When I wake up, for a moment you’re alive. Then I remember and salt meet wound!

Seeing you in dreams is cold comfort when all I want is to spend an afternoon chatting shit with you. ‘All’, as if I would ever be satisfied with an afternoon: friendship has made me greedy. For a long time I tried to convince myself that you’re just abroad, somewhere where I am unable to contact you. But I could never quite believe the lie. Half glimmers of you and dreams could never be enough.

I try to remember you but I feel like I am losing bits and pieces on after one and that is like a thousand tiny deaths. I was never as good at remembering as you.

‘Trying to remember you
is like carrying water
in my hands a long distance
across sand. Somewhere
people are waiting.
They have drunk nothing for days.’

Stephen Dobyn, Grief

Do you remember the school trip to Germany and Prague when we were 15? Dorm rooms, being mistaken for prostitutes and streaking across the corridor to the showers = good clean fun!

In Prague, our guide told us that if we touched the cross on Charles Bridge and made a wish it would come true. So many girls made wishes about love. But we placed our hands on the gold cross together and vowed to be best friends forever. And we will be. Not even death can take that from me, when he has taken so much else.

Last year before you died one of my worst fears was that I would do or say something that hurt or offended you. And you would die before I could make it right. Even though you were the most reasonable teflo- proof person I know. I finally I told you, quivering with fear. And you laughed and called me a silly cow, ‘as if we could ever stop being best friends.’
Next week, I’ll be 31 but you’ll always be 30. For the first time I will be older than you who always called me ‘a fetus’. It reminds me of the Ode of Remembrance:

‘They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, We will remember them.’

This isn’t a pain that can be lessened just something to be endured.

The day you died it was beautiful bright sunshine. One year on the weather is finally playing ball and it’s grim here in Brighton.

I read this quote and it reminded me so much of you. Salman Rushdie said of Angela Carter, one of my favourite novelists.

‘Death snarled at her and she gave it the finger. Death tore at her and she stuck out her tongue. And in the end she lost. But she also won, because in her furious laughter, in her blazing satirising of her own dying… she cut death down to size: no distinguished thing, but a grubby murderous clown. And after showing us how to write, after helping us see how to live, she showed us how to die.’

My friend after showing me for years how to live you showed me how to die.

What I want to say more than anything is that I miss you. I really, really do. But you already knew that 🙂

Love your bestest westest friend,

Row xxx

Rowan January

Believer that life is brutiful – half brutal and half beautiful

Author: Rowan January

2014: the ask and the answer

Bleak midwinter

32 years exactly, and 32 lessons learnt

Lianne, two years on

Infertility and me

Coming out of the trying to conceive closet

F– you body

A new hope

Emotionally being infertile sucks. Who knew?

Coming clean about my infertility

What I learnt about marriage, two years in

Turning towards

Ten years of us

2013: one step forward, two steps back

Missing you

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Coming out of the trying to conceive closet

F– you body

A new hope

Emotionally being infertile sucks. Who knew?

Coming clean about my infertility

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