Blogging While Color-blind

Around about a decade ago, I bought a book called 40 Over 40, a book of advice about getting dressed after age 40.

I was bored with what amounted to the uniform I was wearing -- chinos, turtlenecks and blazers for work, jeans and T shirts the rest of the time.

My sense of embodiment and my gender identity were also shifting pretty significantly as the result of an unexpected pregnancy after ten years of infertility, and after that an even more unexpected live birth, and then raising a baby and a toddler and eventually a child, and eventually shedding a deeply felt sense of unreality about it all. Mostly.

The book has a lot of good advice, actually, about dressing for your actual body, keeping your closets organized, only buying -- and wearing -- clothing you love.

There's also a fair amount in the book about color, including the advice to wear clothing to match your hair and eye color. So, over the years, I bought a few items in greens and browns to pick up my eye and hair color.

Ready for the kicker? At some point, I somehow found out that a "brown" blazer I'd bought wasn't actually brown, but plum colored. It took a while, but eventually it occurred to me to ask people about the colors of the other brown clothes I'd bought. It turned out several of them were not brown, but one or another shade of purple.

I do have this vague childhood memory of being tested for color-blindness, and having trouble in the brown-purple range.  But I had no idea that I was, in fact, color-blind: I can distinguish greens and blues and reds and oranges just fine. Yet it appears there's significantly more purple in the world than I can see.

It's a funny thing to learn about yourself after half a century.

On (Not) Logging Exercise

For years, decades, I kept lists and logs of the exercise I'd done each day: runs, bike rides, trips to the weight room, swims, hikes, in preparation for triathlons, running races, backpacking trips or biking vacations.

A few months ago, I quit.  Quit making notes and deleted all the records from my iPad.

Because for the past several years, this has been a cyclical record of getting sick, too sick to do any exercise, and then recovering slowly, and then working slowly back up to a moderate amount of exercise.

I came to the conclusion that keeping these records wasn't functioning as encouragement to get more exercise, but rather making me feel inadequate for not getting more exercise.  Kind of like keeping records of my periods during the long years of infertility wasn't doing anything to get me pregnant, but just making me attend to each failure to conceive, month after month, year after year.

I like exercise. I feel better if I'm active every day, and the more the better.  I work out to the extent I can, given a full-time job, a relatively high-needs child, and the sometimes disabling demands posed by living with chronic illness.

I don't think I'm getting any more or less exercise than I would be if I were still recording it all.  Yet not keeping these logs feels lighter.  The change feels incremental, and I suspect there's going to be additional evolution that goes with letting that go.  I'm curious about what it might be.

Remembering Infertility

The well-meaning questions: "When are you going to give Doug a baby?"  "Where are my grandchildren?"

The celebrations of joy: new babies announced.  Other people's new babies.  Other people's reports about conceiving easily, even accidentally.

The Offspring looked up from his book this afternoon and asked, "Mom, are you okay?" I was reading an entry in Lotsalaundry's book, Your First Year of Motherhood, about infertility, and he saw it on my face. I burst into tears and went and hugged him, and it was a few minutes before I could explain.

Because ten years later, it can still hurt like hell.

Remembering all those years of wanting a child, remembering the pain as others had babies, and the babies grew into children and then into teenagers.

Ten years of wanting a child.  An adoption attempt that ended badly: another story, another pain that will never go away.

Ten years during which I went on with life.  Got a PhD, got a tenure-track job; completed some triathlons and half marathons; traveled with The Mate and hiked and biked and saw beautiful places and experienced something of some other cultures.

Yet always in the background, often in the foreground, the ache, sometimes mild, other times a stabbing, heart-rending pain.

And then, surprise, a pregnancy.  Ten years ago today, I was already pregnant, but didn't yet know it.  I was surprised again when he was born, an actual live baby.  A miracle.

Nine and a half years later ... the most difficult and the most rewarding thing I've ever done, the most exhausting and the most exhilarating ... life changing?  No, change isn't a strong enough word.

The externals are much the same.  I still live in the same city, I still work at the same job, with many of the same colleagues.  I'm still married to The Mate.  I have hiking boots, skis, a bike and some clothing that are older than The Offspring.  I still listen to the Indigo Girls and Simon and Garfunkel, still play Mozart and Bach on the piano when I can find the time, which is less frequent these days.

The landscape of my heart, on the other hand, has had a complete overhaul.  Yet that pain is still carved into my flesh and etched into my soul.