October, 2010 archive
Grateful 1
I’m stressed out about writing dissertation fellowship applications, frustrated about whether another month will go by with no baby hopes, and worried about the holidays with my family. And yet, I am feeling incredibly grateful for the family of two I have with this guy. I feel like I got struck by a bolt of luck when he came into my life. He has this uncanny ability to pick up on things when I’m having a rough day (week, month). He makes me laugh all the time. He pushes me to go to yoga when I’m stressed (like last night). He gets tickets to concerts and brings me coffee before I run out.
I’m so grateful to be married to him!
Curls and Drops 1
On Tuesday, dinner with friends who live nearby for the first time since high school. Before dinner, I played outside with their daughter in their new backyard. We buried our bare feet in the sand and caused earthquakes, slowly shaking our toes to the surface. We poked and tickled beneath the sand, wiggling toes and watching the dog chase a squirrel. Then we hunted for baby lemons under the lemon tree, and washed them in a dripping faucet, again and again, filling the small terra cotta pot, feeling the water dribble away, and filling it again. When the sun went down and the night air came in, J came out and changed j’s wet flowered dress, and we went inside for dinner.
Fall Clouds 1
This week, sunny afternoons, moments out on the patio, feeling the sun warm my legs, listening to birds twitter in the redwoods. Seeing the first clouds in months, high in the sky. Thinking how until you live in a place where there’s fog, and you watch it burn off (or not) day after day, you don’t know the difference between fog and clouds.
Today, a lazy morning outside before driving south to see friends (me) and play soccer (JJ). Hearing sea gulls in the distance, the grinding gears of a bus in the valley headed up the hill, the clank of tools in the construction next door. Smelling fresh air, and relishing in the feeling of bare feet and sun on my hair, outside my own house on a Saturday morning.
Bridge, Bay, City 0
*Joint credit to JJ for these favorite shots from a while back; when we go out together we sometimes lose track of who took what picture.*
Balancing anxieties 1
Talking with my husband’s 90 year-old grandmother in Spain the other day, I was asked, again, “¿bueno, algunas noticias?” (“so, any news?”). She then began worrying at me, saying “and at your age you shouldn’t be wasting time”, and “you should look and see if somethings wrong, if one of you “no vale” (literally, “doesn’t work”). All I wanted to say was “mind your own business”, but at the same time, I want people to feel like they can ask how things are going, because it’s a big part of our life right now. This is a hard balance to strike, because I’m both wanting to share how it’s going, and not wanting other peoples’ anxieties to make my own even more pronounced.
Every other week or so my mom tells me about some naturopathic doctor she ran into at a farm market while selling her dolls, or an old midwife friend she saw who had some advice for getting pregnant. (The latest, told with a good laugh, was to eat goat balls. Yes, goat balls. According to this 40-year veteran midwife, it works every time.). It makes me realize my mom is bringing me up a lot, and it also makes me think how when you know someone who’s trying to start a family, they’re the first people you think of every time you see something related to fertility.
It kind of makes me wish we hadn’t said anything to anyone. But too late for that. On Halloween, grandma’s 91st birthday, it will be a year since we started, a year since we whispered in her ear on her 90th birthday that we were trying for that great-grandaughter she’d been asking us for. And in some ways that’s a long time, and I get anxious about it. And in other ways, given that this last year was very stressful and unsettled for us, it’s really not that long at all. So for now I’m trying to be relaxed about it, tell people how I’m doing when they ask, but avoid letting them get inside my head with their own worries.
Not an easy balance to strike, but it feels good to try. And I’m glad to be talking about it with people–it seems somehow better to be open about it than secretive, the way people used to be.