Lists of Longing

Wait number five has come to an end.

Same story, different month.

Friday night I checked my cervical fluid and saw some pinkish spotting. Since that happened last month too, it immediately crushed me. La told me to stop sticking my fingers in my vagina and keep hoping.

Saturday I started getting brownish colored discharge without  any decided effort to check things. That +  dropping my phone in the toilet + friends leaving our BBQ and Performance Salon to go to a dumb club + PMS big feelings = a pretty shitty day all around.

Yesterday the brown continued and I started getting cramps and I took a pregnancy test anyway because why the fuck not, you know? It was negative, in case you were wondering. 

This morning there still wasn’t actual blood flow and I had the tiniest bit of hope creep into my heart in the shower. La and I decided that if I hadn’t started bleeding by the evening we would take another HPT. Like magic words, my uterus produced and I started bleeding less than an hour later. 

I can’t really handle narrative right now. So here is a list.

• I am grateful for our friend A who talked to us and cried with us and yelled with us on Saturday night about her experiences and our experiences and the way this shit gets in deep with how we are raised to be women.
• I am overall heartbroken and feeling exhausted by this process. I also cannot imagine stopping.
• I’m angry. I’m jealous. I don’t feel like these things are rational, but they are true for me in this moment.
• I am excited to go to Cancun next week and lay on a beach with my baby and soak up sun and eat delicious food and drink cold drinks.
• We are going to see the OB-GYN on July 2nd. I am both terrified and excited about this.
• We just keep going. We try to figure out how this can not take up so much space in our lives while still holding onto hope.
• I still believe that a year from now, I will have a baby. I am letting this co-exist with the many other layers that seem in contridiction.

 

One Down

Yesterday I was sitting in a meeting and my breasts were throbbing. As much as I have tried to stop paying attention to the minutia of my body, I couldn’t help from noticing the throbbing. And I got excited. Because that’s what we do, right? Look for throbbing breasts or extreme fatigue or maybe a touch of dizzy nausea and pray they will become worse or couple up with something else. Anything to tell me what I want to know without having to ask the question.

I came home and told La. She said, “isn’t it early?” Because my breasts always ache, but maybe this time they ached before they usually ache, or worse than they usually ache. But no. It was cycle day 24 and, if my prior record keeping is to be trusted, they always start hurting on cycle day 24. But maybe it was worse? More intense? Different?!

The truth is, I don’t know. The barometer of human feelings – never a very reliable instrument – has become increasingly fallible over the last 6 months. I’m not saying the throbbing *isn’t* different, I’m just not saying it is either. Because I honestly don’t know. I remember thinking, in the airport, at the tail end of the last wait, that my boobs hurt more than usual. But the thought is the only thing concrete. I can’t conjure up the feeling now. I can’t say with any accuracy that they actually hurt worse than the month before because the month before I was willing them to hurt too.

The reality that you just can’t know until you know just keeps crashing down on my head.

I said to La last night, when we were discussing when to take a test, that I just wanted *something* clear to happen this weekend so I would know without knowing. Don’t ask questions you don’t want answers to – right? Its the same feeling that drives me to wait to the very last minute to take a pregnancy test. The same feeling that kept me from asking an ex girlfriend if she was cheating on me. Sometimes the world we make up is better than the one we know exists.

This wait has not been anxious. I’ve had a lot of feelings, sure. Just not anxiety. A few days after ovulation, I had a crystal clear dream of having a girl baby and naming her Dorothy. And that dream’s sweetness bouyed me with a feeling of just KNOWING this time worked, even though I also knew that was impossible to know. That lasted a few days before I resumed my general see-sawing and symptom spotting. One week down, one to go. Sometimes my calm is one of resignation. Sometimes it is one of serenity. Sometimes it is one of impossible knowing.

In the hope column for today: I almost fainted in the copy room an hour ago – had to catch myself on the table and squat down till my knees regained form and the dots dissipated. Since then I’ve felt near-nauseous. Not quite sick, just not quite well either.

Then again, it could just be allergies.

Blogging for LGBT Families: Always Enough

This morning, I read a lot of these “Blogging for LGBT Families” Posts and thought about whether I qualified or not. I know maybe that’s silly, but its true. “Family” often implicitly means “children” in our culture, and so its hard to feel like you count when you are sans babies, you know?

But then I started to think about how much family we have already. Like a lot of queers, our friendships have filled a space that family does for a lot of other people. Even when your family of origin is pretty cool with the gay stuff (mine is) you can feel not quite a part, just this side of fitting in.

Then I thought about last night. How La and I attended a wedding for a couple we don’t know well, but already feel super connected to. About how, after that, we sat with BFF on the couch and created the most absurd list of baby names ever and laughed and laughed. I thought about how the three of us ARE a family and we are making our family bigger and that a lot of people won’t understand the nuances and complexities of that.

I thought about picking the Bug and the Bee up from daycare, how the teachers asked if we were their Aunties and I didn’t hesitate to say “yes” because we ARE their aunties.

I thought about all the beautiful people with whom we have forged a family. This isn’t sentimental, its real. This is not “love ya like a sis” or “brother from another mother” passe hallmark shit, you know? Its serious business, making a family out of the pieces and parts that you are handed. Its a skill a lot of people don’t have, because they have never needed it. Its a skill people reject because they think its second best.

One of the best things about being queer is the creativity you are forced to embrace. I have long held that – regardless of whether this is a choice or not (a debate I won’t have now) – I WOULD choose this. I would choose it because it has offered me remarkable opportunities to think about gender and culture and society. I would choose it because it has afforded me the chance to make my family and re-think what that means.

So, today I am blogging for and about my family:

This babe that I married, who is my very favorite.

This man (and his badass partner) who are helping us fill in the biological cracks.

This bestie, who is full of kindness and tender hearted beauty.

 

This group of incredible people who care for me, call me out on my bullshit, make me laugh at myself, make me see myself, and see me.

 

This ex-girlfriend who  spends so much time making the world a better place while simultaneously having the clearest grip on reality of anyone I know.

 

These furry buddies, who make my heart sing.

These babies, and their mom and dad, who show up in incredible ways.

And more. There are more. Today, my tribute is to the knot of roots that connects us, to the families that protect one another when nothing else can, to the bonds we built without legal representation because sometimes the state can’t give us what we need. Today my tribute is to Queer Families built from heart love blood sweat tears and fists raised high in the air.