The fear of weight lifting

This pass week has found me living in this constant state of mild panic that feeling right before the major panic attacks hit. In my life, I have had one major panic attack, and it was years ago but that feeling memory of that feeling is imprinted in my body. So living in a state where I feel like the next moment I am going to fall apart is SCARY. What is even more frightening is that I have no idea what is causing me to be in this state. I am at a moment in my life where everything is moving along just as it should, in some areas years later than scheduled, but it is still where I want to be. I just feel that I am about to have a massive breakdown.

For the first time in many years, I am not scrambling to make pieces of my life fit into the boxes that I need to feel functional. There are those things that I am going to have to wait for, but that is nothing new. It feels like I have been waiting for something or another all my adult life and I am sure that I will always be waiting for something, that is just life. Maybe, just feeling at peace is what is causing this feeling of panic. Leave it to me to be afraid to of peacefulness.

Then I thought maybe it was working in an adoption agency. Focusing so much of my energy on making it possible for others to be parents on the surface is something that could throw someone in my situation into a full-blown panic. I have found it to in reality be a very different experience. Many days I am with people who are in the place I was years ago. That place where the whole world was spinning, where I questioned everything that I thought I knew, and where I felt so horribly hopeless. I sometimes visit that place, but I have learned that I am so far from that place that I really can only recognize it in others. On those days when I am on the infertility Tilt-a-Whirl it still is not the same ride that I once rode. I see in these couples the pain, anger and frustration that lives right below the surface. I am grateful that I am not where they are, and as cold as that sounds it is because I am not there that I am able to do everything in my power to make them parents.

In some ways, I am afraid that all the years of pain and anger have turned me into a cold person. I want to believe that I have come through those days with only small wounds. I also want to believe that there is a tree in my backyard that blooms hundred dollar bills. I am scarred, and I will never be the same person I was before I knew that my path to parenthood would be a marathon that lasted for years (and I hate running). Infertility changes everything that you believe about yourself and the world. No matter how much I hope and wish that this were not true I know that I am forever changed. Some of these changes are wonderful and some are horrible and really most of them are somewhere in the middle. In some ways, I am more compassionate, understanding and patient. The worst part is that there is an anger that I know will never go away, a rage that I will never be able to rid myself of fully.

Some days I am still enraged about our situation. I walk past a family and SLAP there it is that anger. All the questioning of who I am as a person. It scares me, how quickly the feelings well up. What is good is that it goes just as quickly as it came. I am getting better, I have accepted this process, I am even excited and grateful that I get the opportunity to experience something that so few people ever really have happen.

Wounds heal, wounds heal, and wounds have to heal. Unhealed wounds become infected until the body is no good anymore. As I have said many times before I spent many years miserable, what some people would call "teen angst" only multiplied by a million. I distinctly remember one day saying (and fully believing) that I was miserable because it was comfortable. It was, that place where the whole world was upon me was where I was comfortable, it really was a warm and squishy. I am over that and have been for years, and a long time ago I learned that being happy was so much easier than the misery. Now I am just afraid that I got too comfortable being angry, that the anger snuck in hiding behind the happiness.

Deciding which method to start a family with, dealing with health issues, and all the frustration and pressure that comes with the package puts the weight of the world on your shoulders. You learn to deal with it and one day it just becomes normal. Then something happens and so much of that weight lifts. At that moment you realize what the real cost of infertility has been, or at least you think you do, and then you realize that there are going to be more days to come.