I don’t envy the “popular” bloggers. If I was one of them, I think I’d eventually find myself in fear of the written word. One hateful or overly-critical comment/email too many and I’d hightail it out of the blogosphere immediately.
As it is, I feel like I limit what I say write. I would only write in specific detail about a friend if I had his or her permission to do so. I mask the names of my family members to a certain extent. I don’t write certain posts that are brewing in my head because I feel like I’d be sharing too much. Things that maybe certain people would take offense to. My original intention was to have this be a totally anonymous blog, but over time I added a link to it on my Goodreads profile. And then my Facebook profile. So now it’s not-so-anonymous and there’s a chance that if I bitch about someone in particular, one of my real-life friends may be able to figure out who that person is . . .and, well, my reason for this blog is not to start some snarky war where people’s feelings get hurt (whether intentional or not).
Today, I said “screw it.” This is MY blog. It’s for ME. It’s ABOUT me. My life. And when something happens in MY LIFE that weighs on my mind for a week and I feel like I’m holding it in because I’m afraid of singling out one specific person . . . .screw it.
That’s when I have to remind myself that this is my journal, what will one day be my history. And if something’s affecting me to the point that THIS THING is affecting me, I need to let it out. So here goes.
Last week I played bunco with a fairly large group of people. All women. Some I know really well, some are just “casual friends”–we know each other’s names and can have a “Hi, how ya doin’?”-type conversation but don’t just call each other and chat. When we were broken into groups, one of the women (a casual friend) said to a good friend of mine in front of two other people (I wasn’t in the group), “I guess she (meaning ME) isn’t pregnant anymore, since she’s drinking.”
We’ll call this casual friend Elaine. I’d like to give Elaine the benefit of the doubt. I’d like to think that maybe it somehow just slipped out of her mouth and she regretted it instantly. But the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that that wasn’t the case.
I’m a fairly laid-back person. With so many things, I feel that I can forgive and forget and move on. But I’ve been thinking about this for over a week now, so apparently I’m not moving on.
Earlier this week on my way home from work, I saw Elaine standing in a neighbor’s yard, about 15 feet from my car as I stopped at a stop sign. I couldn’t meet her eyes. I couldn’t even wave. Tears welled up that I fought back, and I continued on my way.
What she said hurt me. First of all, I had never told her that I was pregnant, so obviously I had never told her that I miscarried. And it’s not as if she took me aside and said “I knew you were pregnant earlier this year, so something happened, and I want to make sure you’re doing OK and see if you wanted to talk to somebody about it.” There was no compassion, no concern. Instead, it was “I guess she’s not pregnant anymore.” In front of a group of people.
I hide my struggle with fertility/miscarriage a lot. I joke about it, my favorite defense mechanism after sleeping it off (which didn’t work in this case). We named our kitten Forrest because that’s the boy name that Mike loved and I would never agree to it when we were discussing baby names. So we named the cat Forrest the Cat, Not the Kid–Forrest the Cat for short.
But each day as I dutifully chart my BBT, each month when I get my period, I get a little bit . . .sadder. I remember my disbelief at the positive pregnancy tests in April, and I want that disbelieving/hopeful/too-good-to-be-true feeling back. That overwhelming sense of awe that two people can create another one. That I could be a MOTHER.
I don’t need reminders from people I barely know that I’m not pregnant anymore. If Elaine really wanted the scoop about my situation without asking me directly, she could have least waited until I wasn’t in same house as her to ask someone else. And she could have done it a hell of a lot more delicately. Does she really not understand that every morning when I take my temperature, I recognize that I’m not pregnant anymore? Or when I called the doctor’s office to schedule an appointment to discuss fertility medication, I was pretty aware that I wasn’t pregnant anymore? Or as I flip the pages of the calendar, ever closer to what was my December 25th due date, that I think about not being pregnant anymore?
__________________________________________________________________________________________
On a related note, I found out on Halloween that three of my neighbors are pregnant. I guess there’s hope that there’s something in the water and it’s working it’s way up the street to me. . . .