Floating

I found myself reading (lurking) in an online group where I would have once belonged. Just about everything these women are expressing is how I have felt (still feel, oddly) for so many years. I wanted so much to meekly come out and stick my hand up and say "I hear you, and you! AND YOU, up the back there" because I really felt the need (for myself mainly, I guess) to make that connection with them.

It's like being in limbo land. I don't mean to stay in this place, where efforts to conceive an elusive baby brought no end month after month (with miscarriages littered throughout the years). And anyone who knows me knows I don't begrudge or regret (god no!) or not appreciate our little LGBB. But I do still feel rather stuck between worlds.

On the one hand, I'm now a mum, involved in playgroups and chats and days/nights out with them (they're a great bunch of girls). I do all the 'mum' things, but I sometimes feel like a bit of a phoney doing it. I almost defy the overwhelming stereotype (perhaps built up somewhat more in my mind, having been given so long to idealise the role?), not willingly joining in on a lot of the conversations here and there - at occasional care or playgroup or at the park - when someone will inevitably start up with how 'annoying' something is that their child does. Or talking about 'the next one', now that topic just leaves me bristling.

On the other hand, I am still that person striving to create and nurture life. I have settled down. We are not planning another baby. We never will, ever again. It's this side of the coin that has me stumped. If I am not planning on being pregnant anytime soon (and a recent scare - which actually turned up the faintest hint of a line, only to herald the arrival of the good witch - assured me I am not in any kind of state to be toying with the fantasy of welcoming baby #3), why am I still envious of those girls who are pregnant and who look to be doing it like those magnificent men in their flying trapeze (....doing it with the greatest of ease, come on, keep up!). Why am I still so much more comfortable finding kindred people who are yet to have that one child? And not only that, but who are struggling? Do I relate more to them than I do to being a mum? Have I not focused enough effort on being comfortable in my new role? Perhaps.

I'd like to think it's more than just about me, me, me still. I don't need further understanding - after all, I've lived it long enough to have about as much experience and understanding as the universal teacher could ever hope to load on a pupil. I am looking on this latest realisation that I'm still feeling the struggle, the pull, the yearning and the striving because I am somehow going to be working with women like this. Maybe. Eventually. Who knows? I have to embrace the fact that these feelings are still surrounding me, it's where I am comfortable (it doesn't drain me, and not nearly as much as supporting mums who have lost a baby - that takes infinitely more energy, is also completely different playing field with different tools and gifts to focus on). And I think there is a reason for it. I have to trust there's a bloody reason, otherwise hell just call me Harper and tell me I'm harping more than a choir with harps in it. On Harp Street. In Harpville...

Each time I attempt to just ease in to focusing on "the mum thing", there are painful memories, flippant comments that I just don't like hearing. The added curveball of not just taking so long to conceive a baby but losing our first born, plus having all those miscarriages, prevents me just relaxing into it I think. It almost feels like when I read the comments of these women who are still trying to cope and doing an admiral effort, I would rather join them than fit in to this new, perhaps less understanding role (I am so glad they have each other, I did not have such comeradery for the first five years of my journey and it sucked, in hindsight - perhaps I would have been more critical and angry, though, come to think of it, of people around us and their comments, had I been more aware of what others too were going through).

Something somewhere unhinged the trapdoor on the box marked "Warning! Your opinions and feelings enclosed, DO NOT OPEN" when I found this community and realised that, hell, if others could say what they felt and how much it hurt, then so could I. But I did so by relating myself to them. It's left me pretty open to being slayed sometimes but I can't help it, it's who I am and how I do it. I noticed the other night as we were chatting (only some of the girls from mothers group could make a post-dinner impromptu dessert.... last-minute cake! the best kind) that I had been possibly too honest all the time, with this and other groups. I've scaled back a lot. I'm learning and I'm practicing not putting so much of me "out there". It's pretty hard, because I often read things that compel me to go in and ensure the writer that, yes!, I get them and I feel their pain. And I really. Do. Feel. Their pain.

It's this that I must learn to properly harness if I'm ever going to get anywhere. With moving forward more/faster than I am currently, with this book, with my relationships with people. With all of it.