crazytown, babies and sadness

Jon and I watched Inside Out two nights ago (for the first time).  I cried like a baby because it's really well done and because... sadness.  And all the happy, sad and angry memories from this past year rolled before my eyes and the beauty and the ashes and the truth that sometimes letting sadness lead brings you through to deeper happiness - well, that resonated deeply.

So in the spirit of honoring sadness:

I miss being pregnant.  And I'm grieving that loss [at which point, reading this, my husband has a minor panic attack - don't worry honey, I'm not going where you think I am].

I haven't miscarried, and I'm not wrestling with infertility or longing to be able to have kids - those are griefs that run far deeper than mine, and I won't dishonor or minimize them by equating them.  If that's you today, I'm with you and for you, and where there are echos of your grief in mine, I grieve alongside you.

I'm not even pining for more kids - the three that I have presently keep me running for the hills on a daily basis as is.  Our house is crazy town, if you haven't gathered from my regular fb posts.  And I think three might be all that I can reasonably handle - if you can call what I'm doing reasonably handling.

It's not even the sensations of being pregnant, although maybe those are closer.  The kicks and wiggles and hiccups - those are beautiful - but they also disrupt precious sleep and make you achy and cranky and hormonal.  And they also lead to a (beautiful, delighted in, precious) small human that adds chaos to our aforementioned CRAY-Z-town.

It's a weird thing to explain.

I think what I miss the most is the hope - the anticipation - of something good and beautiful to come.  The knowledge that, in most healthy cases, after 9 months of waiting, you will hold that beautiful, noisy little wrinkly bundle in your arms, and you will feel... well, you'll feel all kinds of things.  But mostly, you'll feel love.  A love, a joy, and the mostly-beautiful entirely-chaos life that is hoped for will come to be... 

And that tiny human, that will be noisy and messy and disruptive and will destroy your house and insist on walking with theeeeeeeeeeeeee slowest possible gait and theeeeeee teeeeeeeeny tiniest steps, while wearing three pairs of underwear, a backwards shirt and their swimsuit on top of their clothing - that tiny human will bless you and change you and bring joy and tears and laughter and all the feels to your life in ways that you can't even imagine.  And also possibly throw literal lemons at you in the produce aisle after an epic tantrum by the cream cheese counter because today, inexplicably, you didn't need cream cheese.  Duh. *Not my little cherubs, of course...*

And yet, welcoming a brand new baby, with all that anticipation - those aren't things that I will most likely get to experience again.

When you're first diagnosed with cancer, and told that you need to undergo chemotherapy, one of the first non-diagnostic questions that that they ask you is if you are done having kids.  See chemo contains a cocktail of really strong drugs that kill lots of fast growing cells and damages many others - including, often times, sperm and eggs.  If you aren't done, thanks to the miracle of modern science and medicine, you now have the options of sperm banking or freezing your eggs so that you can continue to grow your family through other means.  Sometimes the loss of fertility is temporary and will return months, or years, after chemo stops - sorry, can't consider it a reliable form of birth control either.  Other times, it's permanent, irreversible.  It's not talked about a ton because it's private and intimate - but it's a major issue for young adults with cancer that is different from the issues you face with cancer later in life.  A private grief added on top of the more public one. 

So, told that we had cancer, we had roughly a week to decide if we wanted more kids or if we were done.  We were already pretty sure that we were done - we were already considering opting for a more permanent birth control on our own volition - so you would think it would be an easy decision, or one that I wouldn't grieve.  But I do. 

I don't know if I'm making any sense at all - sadness is a weird thing.

It's not that I lost something that I was longing for - or even that I lost something that I didn't already have - and I actually am pretty sure we don't want more kids.  I just feel robbed of the choice. 

Robbed by a bandit who has already stolen so much in this past year - and then this too.  We were pretty sure we were done having kids - and we were and are so thankful that we had chosen and been able to have them early in life, even though conventional wisdom said it would have been better to wait until we were more established in our careers.  We feel full, and thankful, for the children that we have, and the life that we have together - and mildly terrified even, of the possibility of more children because again, let me repeat...  CRAY-Z-TOWN in a teeny tiny 2 bedroom apartment.

Sadness is an odd thing.  Loss is inexplicable sometimes.  It doesn't always make sense and sometimes it makes you feel kind of silly to talk about the things that do make you feel sad.

But as I honor sadness, this is part of it too.  Cancer steals a lot of things - one of those being choices that you thought you had some measure of control over.  And that's a real loss too. 

I've debated a lot whether I actually wanted to share this post - because it does feel both intimate and a little intangible (and I don't want to be confusing, but it is...). Grief that isn't really a full grief, but it is? But as I've reflected on it, I decided to share because it is an issue faced by many young adults with cancer, and perhaps there's a way that I can share about it, since the grief isn't as shattering for me, that will create space for others for whom it is far more intimate to find spaces for their own voices.

And in the healthy, processing, moving forward sense, that sense of hope and anticipation of good life to come that comes during pregnancy - that's where I'm focusing and where I'm sensing a deeper invitation for me in the here and now.  That's what I *actually* really want right now, and what digging deeper into sadness reveals for me in this particular area.