I haven’t been writing the last few months. Part of me was just… tired of being sad. I fear other people are tired of me being sad. But at the end of the day, whether I write about it or not the sadness is there – and writing, acknowledgement of my feelings, is helpful. So now, on a lunchbreak after a therapy session, I’m starting a new post. (May have to finish it up & post it tonight.) I want to try to resume the prompt-based writing pieces – I haven’t looked at a prompt in over a month, but for today I’m just letting my fingers do the talking without a prompt in mind.
It has been 13 months and 8 days since Sara died. Last year I got comfort from putting our holiday trees up, but I’m having trouble working up the motivation to do so this year. I’m not going to be having any holiday visitors – it’s just me and the pets, and it’s hard to motivate myself to decorate just for me. I may pull out one of the trees and put it up this weekend… I guess we’ll see.
I am finding that it is so, so hard seeing all of the “happy family” holiday posts on social media. Even the “we’re settling for a zoom call and will be so happy to resume our big family gatherings next year!” posts are hard. I can’t zoom call with Sara – oh if only I could. I also won’t be seeing her next year…. or ever again. I want other people to be happy and I absolutely understand that this pandemic sucks for everyone – it’s so hard not being around those you love. I feel all that have empathy, and it’s still hard for me to see these things sometimes.
2020 has been a rough year. Personally, 2019 was worse, but 2020 is ranked a solid #2 on worst years for me. In addition to dealing with the covid-19 pandemic & finding myself super isolated at home, all while working through my 1st year as a widower, I’ve had some other stuff going on. Some people in my life, but not a ton, know that I’ve been trying to conceive again. I decided pretty early on after Sara died that I still wanted to be a parent to a living child. I worry about people judging me – for purposefully wanting to have a kid who will only have one parent, for trying to conceive during a pandemic…. for other reasons I wouldn’t even think of. But – I’m tired of purposefully excluding any mentions of trying to conceive on my blog, so I’m putting it out there – there are so many threads that connect my fertility journey with my grief journey.
Unfortunately, 2020 was not kind in the “trying to have a kid” arena, and 7 failed attempts later I’m now looking at moving on to IVF in 2021. I’m so frustrated and sad that the universe couldn’t just give me this win. It wouldn’t make up for George or Sara, but I was so hoping that baby #2 would come a little easier than it’s turning out to be. This is adding another layer to my grief.
I will not be posting progress updates or going into specifics about my IVF journey on this blog (or on my social media, if you know me in real life), but I may occasionally discuss it here in the context of grief. At some point I may write about the incredibly complicated feelings I have around trying to become a parent without Sara being involved. But for now, I just wanted to put this out there so that I no longer have to purposefully exclude any whisper of this topic from my blog.