Is it?

Will it really be a New Year?

..... or just more of the same.....

I'm so tired.

Every day struggle

7 months pregnant with her second, she leans over the pew, and retells a conversation with a mutual friend, equally pregnant. "It's not fair"the friend had commented to her "that some households have two great cooks in them and ours has none." The friend was refering to us, she said, laughing. "It's not fair" I said to my husband as she walked away "that some households have two kids, and ours has none". Bitterness and shame rise equally in the aftermath of that exchange.

And here I am, wondering again, how is friendship possible?

I have been engaged in a serious building project, the aim is to construct a significant internal fortress, that will provide the protection and support needed to be with these women - my sisters and my friends. Sometimes it works, sometimes we can all avoid the obvious. We can chat about movies and food, good wine and plans for the New Year.

But there are some things I cannot do. I don't tell these women how it is. I don't want to sit and cry in front of them. I certainly don't want to recieve a hug from them, feeling their swollen tummy press into me. They don't tell me certain things either - quite a few don't even tell me that they're pregnant. I figure it our when it is too obvious to avoid. They don't tell me anything about their pregnancy, or even their problems, because, on the whole, they don't really compare to what I am going through. In short, we have gone from being friends to being acquaintances.

I can see them hovering around sometimes, trying to find a way in, to offer support. But I don't really let them. I am closed. I change the topic. I don't want to receive. I don't believe that they have anything to offer, because they will never ever understand what I feel. Truthfully, I don't even want to see them. It gives me panic attacks thinking about it and trying to prepare myself for those occasions when I know it is unavoidable. Simultaneously, I am sure that I have nothing to offer them except my bitterness and jealousy, which makes at least one of them angry. Fair enough I guess. Afterall, why should they feel guilty just because they can have kids that live. All the same, i feel so incredibly distant. Alone.

Add to this my anger at not being understood, at people's clumsiness around me, my scorn for the inaneness of conversations I overhear or partake in. And yes, I am fully aware of the irony in this and my participation but am I interested in changing it?

What can I give? What can I receive?

I feel so broken that I cannot do either, at least not in the way I used to.


So, what is left?

What can I give and receive?

I gave and received a hug to a women - who after three years of trying has become pregnant.

I cried into the arms of an older woman simply because she was not afraid of my grief.

I put thought and care into the Christmas present I bought for one of my neices (yes, the one born before Maya died, I struggle being with the others).

That is all I can think of. Not much, in this season of giving and receiving. Drops of water in a desert.

But it is not nothing.

Thank you Lovely Ladies

I always feel sheepish after I have put it all out there.

Undeserving of the support I recieve, knowing that there are others doing it tougher...... and that is before you reach war zones, which, in my head, are the pinnacle of suffering.

But your words lifted me up and here I am, on Thursday afternoon, and I am seem to be doing pretty well. If there's one thing I'm learning it's how to right myself when I have been totally tipped over.

Thanks for the boost up.

Barbs