Awkwardly Social

The first person most of us will ever know is our mother.

You’ll know this person, but you won’t know her the way you know your friends or your siblings or the person you married.

You’ll know her the way a daughter knows a mother.  You’ll know that she hates it when you gain weight, because you know that she hates it when she gains weight. You’ll know that she does not want to eat pasta two meals in a row, because you don’t want to eat pasta two meals in a row.  You’ll know that she wants you to blow dry your hair in the morning so you don’t look like a wet rat, but you’ll always let your hair dry naturally anyway because blow dryers are tools of the patriarchy until one day you just out of the blue start blow drying your hair.

You won’t know what she had for dinner that last week before she died, because you don’t talk to her every night and even if you did you wouldn’t ask about food.  You won’t know if she had a pedicure recently because you didn’t see her feet.  You won’t know if she thought about calling the doctor before she died, but you guess that she probably wouldn’t because you know that she thought an aspirin and a nap were all the body ever needed.  You won’t know if she read your last blog entry, because your stats don’t go back that far.  You won’t know if she would have answered if you called that weekend, if she had been gone already or if she wouldn’t have answered because sometimes she just didn’t.

There are things you will never know about her because how could she possibly catch you up on all those 30 years before you arrived on the scene.  There are things you’ll read in her diary that will break your heart and make you close the book because she wouldn’t have wanted you to know.  There are pictures you’ve never seen before, at least you don’t remember seeing them, and you’ll think about all those empty frames.  The pictures you’ll take at places she should be, but now she won’t be.

I want to write here when I’m happy, but I only turn to this page when I’m sad.  And then I realize that my mom’s journal was that for her, she was happy sometimes and maybe she only wrote there when she was sad.

When you are diagnosed with infertility you learn a lot about percentages. There is a mere 10 - 20% chance of getting pregnant through IUI treatments in cases like mine.  For those of you who might still not get it, that means a 80 - 90% chance of NOT getting pregnant through IUI in cases like mine.  And so yeah, I’m not pregnant.  It’s like all of a sudden you understand why you were forced to take all that math in high school and college.

There is no math in the world, though, that will help you come to terms with the unfairness of failing again to become pregnant.  All the stories about women who have gotten pregnant after their 7th IUI attempt, after their 8th miscarriage, after they stopped doing fertility treatments, after their parents both died and their partner was diagnosed with cancer - all of those stories just make you want to crawl into bed and never get up again.

But instead you get up again.  You buy tampons again.  You call in your refill for fertility medicines again.  You order more ovulation test sticks again.  You schedule your initial appointment for acupuncture again.  You wish your mom was alive again.  You wonder if you should hire an adoption attorney again.  You hope your husband understands why you have to get into bed at 9pm again.  You dress your dog in your nightshirt again.

But then, you plan a trip to Germany, for the first time.

There’s no reason not to keep moving forward with your life, planning trips, spending money on things that won’t be practical if you’re going to be however many months pregnant, but right now, when you’re not pregnant (AGAIN) you figure why the fuck not.

There’s no reason to believe everything will be ok.  But by the same token there’s no reason to believe everything won’t be ok.

So right now, I’m just operating under that 20% chance of no tears today.

I kind of can’t believe I’m still talking about this.  Grief is a weird thing.

How many times has this exact sentence been written?

I find myself wondering why I haven’t heard from some people I thought were my friends.  People who surely must have heard through the grapevine about my mom.  Then I sigh and think, so, they aren’t really my friends?  That sucks, what a way to find out.  Then I feel like an asshole because really, how can you possibly judge someone for not knowing how to react?  How can a person be a sympathy hoarder?  Especially when I figure that my mom, to these people, these past work friends, seemed like such a small part of my life.  And to that life she was.  I didn’t talk about my mom much, but that’s more because I didn’t expect my work friends to ever understand how complicated our relationship was.  How I really struggled for her approval, and never really knew if I had it. That’s not exactly something you want to tell someone you work with, you know? One friend who I did confide in has been strangely flip.  And I don’t know what to do about it.  How do you make it clear that this isn’t one of those sarcastic me moments, I’m actually feeling this.  So I did tell her (WAY more nicely than I just wrote) and she hasn’t responded.  So that was weird.

I keep wondering if I’ve ever done the same thing. And then I realize that I don’t know and maybe I have and I feel terrible all over again.  So yeah, grief is a weird thing.  Losing a parent changes the way you feel about everyone who has ever lost a parent.

Anyway, most of the time I’m fine, (I’m not just sitting around grieving all the time, I do things, I talk to people, I don’t cry that much anymore) but then it sneaks up on me and I’m not.