Escape

The silence surrounding the heartbreak of infertility and miscarriages is an interesting phenomenon that I'm only uncovering bit by bit. People who I previously had thought weren't interested in having children turn out to have struggled with infertility for years. People who I thought had it easy getting pregnant in fact struggled for years. Family members who I didn't know had had miscarriages are coming forward to share their long hidden stories with me. It has given my husband and me some comfort knowing that we're not the only ones going through this difficult process, but it's still a very difficult road to travel. I hope that people reading this blog who have had similar struggles will take comfort in knowing that they are not alone. I think that silence only magnifies the pain and further isolates people who already feel painfully alone. Besides, I've never been one to suffer in silence (in case readers of this blog haven't figured that out yet.)

After weeks of self imposed exile, I saw my family on the weekend. My sister has a baby. It was hard to look at the baby. I love my little niece, but I found myself disassociating often during the visit because I just couldn't handle reality. It was too much, too soon. My husband held the baby and played games with her, while I tried to ignore her proximity to me. Then he thrust her into my arms. I wasn't ready. It was painful. To see something you want and have wanted so badly for so long is difficult. To see a baby after you thought you were finally going to have one, but then had a miscarriage is agonizing. My husband and I left her house and returned home soon after. We were both shaken by this close encounter with a baby. We were sombre the rest of the day.

The feeling of needing to flee which had been mounting for weeks finally became unbearable. I tried to sit with the discomfort, breathe into it, and all those other things that mindfulness experts and counselors tell you to do, but eventually I surrendered. I booked a last minute flight up to Kamloops to stay with my parents in law in the house where my husband grew up.

My husband, busy with work, couldn't come. Since we've been together, almost ten years, I've only taken a couple of nights here and there without him and he has been away for up to five days on business trips without me, but normally we always vacation together. But since he can't vacation any time soon and my fight or flight response is in overdrive, I hurriedly packed, and then my husband drove me to the airport. It was hard to contemplate being away from him when I love him so much and I've been so dependent on him lately, but I just couldn't stay put any longer.

Air travel used to be fun, exciting, even glamorous. Between annoying carry-on rules including tiny liquids carefully tucked inside a specific sized Ziploc bag, games like drink your entire bottle of water down and then fill it up again on the other side of security, and let's pick the blondest person in the security line and give them extra security screenings so we don't look like we're racially profiling even though everyone knows that we are, plus decreased legroom or seat room (and the odd man who feels entitled to take up not just the armrest but also regularly jostles you in your tiny little personal bubble that you are working so hard to stay within even though you are much taller than him and have shoulders just as broad as his), decreased niceties in flight (no you can't have a drink or a candy or anything on short flights), and the underlying fear that something, somewhere will go wrong, air travel has become an annoying chore. Not that I'm into driving long distances or being stuck on the ferry. Really, if we could just get to a place where we could beam to the destination and skip the travel that would be great. I know that they say that getting there is half the adventure, but I'm really not into the transportation part of trips (or this transportation part of our journey to have a baby- we've been stuck on this rickety old bus with no air conditioning on a bumpy road for far, far too long and no one has told us yet if we're ever going to actually arrive at our destination or when or if the bus is just going to break down and never reach its destination at all.)

Like a sardine in a flying can . . .

Sometimes, a change is as good as a break. I am in desperate need of a change of "scene and society" as Jane Austen might put it. I'm hoping to get back into editing my books again regularly as I was before my world suddenly expanded so joyfully, only to then eject all my hopes and dreams in a supernova of emotion, abruptly collapsing like a dying star days later (I am enough of a nerd that I should have a neutron star joke here, but I don't- leave a comment if you have one to contribute).

My mother in law picked me up at the airport in Kamloops.  We went for lunch, then went to the strip mall near to their house. I browsed in a couple of stores while she looked for something specific. Then we grocery shopped and went home.

Obligatory bathroom selfie . . .

Viewing the house that has become familiar to me over the past almost decade, I knew that I had made the right decision in coming here. I went out into the back garden in the afternoon sun, the rain from the morning evaporating from the yard, hot interior sun beating down on me, and picked blueberries and strawberries from their garden. I caught an unsuspecting garter snake and admired him or her, before releasing them (probably shaken and disgusted by the experience) back into the garden. As my husband texted me when I recounted my afternoon, I was reliving childhood, catching snakes in the back garden.

The colour of the sky!

I had a short lie down, as I had still not been sleeping well. I had dinner with my mother in law and then father in law when he returned home from work. While my mother in law went out, my father in law and I watched the news. I did a Google Hangout with my husband and our cat, who was looking unimpressed by my absence and kept looking around for me at the sound of my voice.

Lamont is such a little grouch.

My father in law and I then went out for a walk around the neighbourhood, admiring the view of the valley from a lookout. I had only visited Kamloops as a child en route to the tiny place my mother is from, but since meeting my husband, I've spent a lot of time here and it has become a comforting and happy second home to me.

The view down the valley in Kamloops . . .

. . . and down the valley in the other direction.

Just being in Kamloops, looking out at the view down either direction of the valley makes me smile.

I was feeling quickly at ease being in a neighbourhood that I'm familiar with from countless trips over the years with my husband. It felt rather strange to be in Kamloops without him, but I was glad that I had come nonetheless. I was already feeling that the change had been good for me last night. The loving, gentle attention of my parents in law made me feel like I was swaddled in high quality cashmere (not that cheap crap that feels like wool). Being able to get away from home, but to still be sheltered in a familiar place with people who I love, who love me, and always make sure that I'm taken care of, is exactly what I need right now. I feel too fragile to go it alone on a trip or be anywhere unfamiliar. I'm trying to reconnect, re-evaluate, recuperate, gain perspective, regain hope, and figure out where to go from here. Doing that in a second home is much more comfortable that being alone in some strange place where I can't even make a decent cup of tea and where there's no one to laugh at my dark and sardonic musings.

I ended the evening by writing a bit. I eagerly anticipated going to bed to trying to catch up on some of the sleep I've lost over the last couple of weeks. Plus, I had brought with me Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh by Irving Stone with Jean Stone, which is a book of the collection of Vincent Van Gogh's letters to the brother (Theo) who supported him through his life financially and otherwise. An artist friend of mine and my mother raved about this book years ago and I've been trying to get around to reading it for years. Now seems as good as a time as any; I could use something bracing.

Vincent Van Gogh's diagnosis has varied over the years, but it is currently thought that he suffered from Bipolar Disorder, like me. I love his paintings. His life was tragic; he died at age 37. As Kay Redfield Jamieson says he was "touched with fire" (her book Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament is excellent.) His mental disorder made him different. We would not have his masterpieces to enjoy if he had not had bipolar disorder. Sadly, if treatments had been better back then, his genius could have been harnessed better and his life probably would have been far less tragic and perhaps could have been longer (bipolar disorder has a very high rate of suicide, at least 25% to 50% of patients make suicide attempts in their lifetime, double that of unipolar depression patients, and about 15 to 19% of bipolar patients succeed in committing suicide including Vincent Van Gogh who shot himself). When I feel down about the incurable mental disorder that we share, I just have to think back to all of the different times that I've admired Van Gogh's gorgeous paintings in various art galleries around the world and think that if he could accomplish such unbridled beauty unmedicated and I'm medicated and relatively stable, maybe I can accomplish something too.

I read late, savouring Van Gogh's poetic descriptions of everything under the sun to his dear brother, Theo. Then I slept.

Last night was the best sleep I've had in many, many days. I slept 9 hours. I awoke feeling more refreshed than the previous several days, but still somewhat dozy (a good sign I may be coming down from my mixed episode where my mind was racing and I couldn't sleep even with medication).
I wrote in the morning and then went out into the back garden and gardened under the hot Kamloops sun for more than an hour. I felt so much better after ruthlessly pulling out weeds and errant grasses (even if I had to ignore the sound of children playing next door and my dark thoughts about how I'll never have any children and how even if I was somehow able to have a child I wouldn't be able to be an adequate parent, so children would probably be better off without me. I'm losing my nerve over whether or not I could actually handle being a parent and do a good job at it the longer I've tried to have children and not been able to.) But I find gardening  very therapeutic, so under the bright blue skies and blazing sun these dark thoughts quickly evaporated (and the weather report predicted thunderstorms and it was a bright, hot sunny day, so as usual the weather forecast was wrong).

If only I could have a garden of my own. I feel like a garden would help get me out of the house on the days when I don't feel well enough to go for a walk or go out anywhere else. The place we rent (a duplex) has a very small garden that the landladies maintain tight control over, preventing us from planting what we want, etc. In Victoria, BC, the average house price is $850,000 currently, while the average household income is $88,000. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that most people who live in Victoria can't afford to buy a house in Victoria (an excellent blog about the Victoria housing market where the comments are just as good as the content is House Hunt Victoria). But of course, there are people already in the Victoria market (or coming from the east where real estate might be even higher). From my generation, the cursed Millennials, few are going to be able to afford to buy a house (or a townhouse or a condo in many cases). But housing markets, low interest rates, the government insuring risky loans, increased tolerance for massive debt, the movement of peoples, and potential corrections to the housing market are beyond the scope of this blog.

After lunch, my mother in law and I went out to run some errands in the sweltering afternoon heat (28 degrees Celsius is about ten degrees lower than the usual temperature here but much higher than the normal Victoria summer temperature which is pleasant but not particularly hot).

Car Selfie.

We returned home and worked on dinner (and in her case, making a pie for dessert!) I felt bad that I'd be enjoying strawberry rhubarb pie with ice cream later, while my husband would be eating whatever he had managed to scrounge up back at home, with the cat yowling in the background wondering where I am (but I tried not to dwell on these feelings, as I later tucked into dinner and dessert).

I'm still feeling low and my confidence has been severely shaken by this latest experience (miscarriage) on this very bumpy unexplained infertility road. However, I'm glad that I got away. I feel better already just having a change of scenery and being in the loving embrace and care of my gentle and kind parents in law. Hopefully in time, I will feel even less dark and start to believe again that could actually have a child or two and that I could actually be a decent parent. In the mean time, I stare at the cornflower blue sky, listen to the hum the bees in the garden, smell hot grass and blooming Shasta daisies, taste strawberry rhubarb pie with French vanilla ice cream, and caress my cashmere blanket, as I fall into dreams at night. Using my senses to stay in the present moment is about all I can do right now to stay here, in the present moment, where I am safe.