by The Wannabe Mom
I keep a very special calendar on my desk. Her name is Georgia (I like to name inanimate objects — purses, my car, our lawnmower, etc.). She’s large and in-charge, and she’s covered with the markings of my life.
Photo by Sir Adavis, Flickr
I use a Blackberry, but I can’t bring myself to use its calendar application. I prefer my Georgia. I love writing on her — by hand — all of my life’s happenings. I love crossing through appointments and meetings that come and go. I love drawing big, bold Xs over the days as they pass us by.
Georgia is heavily tattooed. I work on top of her — marking her with red, green, black and blue ink and every neon shade of hi-lighter you could imagine. I use her as a place mat for lunch and my spills makes a mess of her days. My not-so-artistic sketches and doodles cover her corners and edges.
These past 17 months, I’ve also been using her as my conception calendar. I circle the day I start my period. I draw hearts next to the days we plan to have intercourse or inseminations. I circle the day I should ovulate and the day I couldstart peeing on home pregnancy tests. I write down all my doctor’s appointments. And, at the bottom of her page I record all my cycle end-dates for easy reference. 1-14, 2-9, 3-7, 4-2, 4-27, 5-22. You get the idea.
During the last week of each month, I transfer anything of importance to her next month’s calendar page. I rewrite all those cycle end-dates along the bottom. I rip off that old month — X-ed to the max — and toss it into my trashcan.
There is something very therapeutic in waving goodbye to an old-crummy-busted-cycle and I feel the same way about waving goodbye to each of Georgia’s used and abused pages. I’m re-energized by that fresh, clean calendar page with fresh circles and hearts. I’m renewed by the hope of a new month — and a new cycle — bringing us a new baby.
I just pitched May and all its markings. Good riddance.
I started to diagram June’s cycle. I had to stop myself.
This month, we’re not doing any baby-making. I don’t need to use Georgia as my baby-making calendar. For an entire cycle, I don’t have any doctor’s appointments to record. I don’t have any cycle days to mark. I don’t have to draw hearts or circles around any of her days. I didn’t even rewrite all my cycle end-dates along the bottom of her page. All of those failed cycles went into the trash with May 2010. I’m moving forward. And I’m not looking back.
It’s a weird feeling. For the first time in seventeen cycles, I’m not mapping our cycle-plan or our every night-move. It’s so very unnatural for me — a writer, planner, obsessive-compulsive organizer. All I have written on June 2010 is a reminder about a dentist appointment I scheduled for the middle of the month.
Georgia looks naked. I think she likes it that way. I think I like her that way, too. Wide-open spaces. Plenty of room to make anything happen. Plenty of room to make life happen. At least for one month — one cycle — I can keep Georgia and all her markings off my mind.
The Wannabe Mom has been trying to conceive for more than a year and was recently diagnosed with unexplained infertility. She and her husband live and work in Champaign, and they desperately want to drive a Toyota Sienna minivan someday. We’ll be following her journey, so buckle up and get ready to cry with her — and cheer her on, too.
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Enjoy it! I am so happy to see you relax and enjoy yourself, even though I don’t know you. I hope that if I were in your shoes, I would have even half the stregnth you do.
it has been 1.5 years of ttc#2 and i am so with you on this. i am on a rest cycle this month to prepare for ivf. i keep having this nagging feeling that i have to do or write something down- but i don’t! it’s so nice! i am looking forward to feeling better physically without all of the fertility drugs in my system. i am going on vacation and i am going to eat “banned” food like sushi without thinking twice about it! i really hope you get recharged from your month off. it is a grueling process and you deserve a break!
i agree- here’s to looking forward and not looking back!
I really loved this post. I think it has themes that reach even beyond your immediate situation. Sometimes, we all need to just breathe. Thanks for this, and thanks for contributing here.
Breathing is good. Beautiful post.
I know few things are more annoying than perfect strangers offering unsolicited advice, but of course I am going to do it anyway.
Please take it in the spirit in which it is intended.
Two words rang out for me when reading your post: “Obsessive-compulsive” and “desperate.” (OK, maybe that’s three. And ohhhh yeah, I get it.) I know – and know of – too many people who conceived after they stopped trying. Or thought they had stopped trying! Or adopted. I think that the “magic” in those moments is the complete reduction of stress that comes with letting go. We do know that stress has a physiochemical reaction in the body. (A guru/M.D. I read calls it, “Bathing your organs in battery acid.”) Given how tiny and perhaps fragile the egg and sperm are, it wouldn’t surprise me that they might not come together in a bath of cortisol.
So treat Georgia’s break as a break for you, too. Make your own mind as blank as her pages. Breathe, as the other poster, said. Breathe, and try to let go.
Blessings to you.