Baby making, self-love and other random thoughts...

I keep meaning to follow up on some of my older posts, and it just never seems to happen. Today, I have the urge to write – I’ve read several blogs of epic and inspirational proportions (Cold Antler Farm , Carrying Jada), and even though I don’t have anything this eloquent or important to say, I just feel the urge to write. So please bear with me while I ramble.

Many people have asked me how my surgery went. Most of them apologize when they ask – which I understand, but seeing as I posted about it on the internet you don’t need to worry about overstepping… I promise. The surgery went well - at first it was difficult to wear anything with a waist, as I had incisions on either side of my belly button, which is where a short person’s pants tend to sit. Luckily, its summer and I own a lot of dresses. I was back at work in under a week, and was grateful that I was able to attend a friend’s wedding 3 days after surgery (although we didn’t stay late). After the external began to heal, I started to notice that my insides felt a bit off – but all in all, everything healed up really well with minimal discomfort considering the whole being cut into to insert cameras thing…

For me, the strangest thing about surgery is how disorienting it is to wake up afterwards. If you’ve never had surgery, it might be hard to imagine. Close your eyes. Now open them – you are now in a different place surrounded by different people. You are also on drugs.

Ok, so that was the surgery. We’ve also been in for our follow up appointment, and it’s all good news – no endometriosis! We also made a decision that for the remainder of the summer we are taking some time away from this whole process, in so far as that we are not taking any further medical steps regarding fertility drugs, or tracking fertility cycles, or anything else. Basically the fertility conversation is off the table, for now.

The other thing I’ve been dyeing to tell you all about is what has happened since I posted My Body is Freaking Awesome. Fact. I started a Pinterest board call Beauty, and I got in there and started searching for images of non-traditional beauty. I kept thinking of the pop culture beauty myth as a concept that was waging war on my happiness – I needed to reframe my whole state of mind around what was beautiful – what is beauty at all? I realized that beauty is joy – its people taking true joy in the way their body is and saying ‘to hell with the rest of you, and your fucked up notions of what my body and my joy should look like’. So I started posting images that represented this idea for me, that challenged my own fucked up notions about what my beauty should look like… and I waited. I waited for the haters to come out of the woodwork… I waited for someone to dare call these images gross, or unhealthy… I waited, and I waited… and do you know what happened? It never came. I went from having a small group of Pinterest followers who were mainly my friends and acquaintances, to having over a hundred followers – most of whom follow my beauty board. One of my pins from this board has been repined over 800 times (for those of you not on Pinterest, your average pin gets a handful of repins), and has 42 comments – all positive! That is inspiring.

It’s still hard – I can honestly say that I now have a much broader view of what constitutes beauty in a general sense – but in a more specific sense, when it applies to me I still struggle to be as kind as I am with others. I'm putting in the work, and it's paying off - I can see myself growing.

So, aside from baby making and self-love (weird combination of words… I’m going to leave it because I’m totally enjoying the awkwardness of it), what does the summer hold for us? We just returned from a week at one of my favourite Winnipeg summer traditions – Folk Fest. Sean and I met there – we started our relationship there. The year we missed it to travel overseas, we got engaged on a beach in Thailand, on our 3 year anniversary, while all our friends were at the festival. This year we celebrated ten years of being together at the festival. Hell, we even got married in Bird’s Hill Park, where the festival is held. As my friend Tania likes to say – Folk Fest created me. No matter how tired and dirty I am after camping there for nearly a week, it is nearly always the best week of my summer. Wednesday morning, as I contentedly watched the sun come up over the horizon from my car (where I had slept, waiting to get a good spot in the campground), I wondered ‘how old is too old for this shit?’ – and then I spent the next five days with the best friends a girl could ask for, I finally saw Ben Harper, and the Sheep Dogs put on one of the best shows I’ve ever seen – and I still don’t know the answer to my question – but I do know it is not likely any time soon.

Next week we’re road tripping down to North Carolina to see my family, which I’m extremely excited about. I love road trips, and I love my family – so it doesn’t get much better. We’re going to drive along the Mississippi as far as we can, we’ll take a trip into Tennessee to see Ray Lamontagne (assuming we can still get tickets – we’ve been remiss in planning on this one), and then through the Appalachians – which I’ve wanted to see ever since reading Bill Bryson’s “A Walk in the Woods”.

Life is good… and my eyelashes haven’t frozen to my face in about 3 months… so I’m enjoying every minute. Hope all of you are having a summer as lovely and fun as I am.

The Secrets we Keep

I’ve been writing this post in my head for months. To be honest I’ve really been struggling with whether or not to write it, and even as I’m typing I’m not sure I’m ever going to publish it. But regardless, it needs to be written. My thoughts are a thunderstorm, and I know from experience that until I get them down on paper they will just continue to occupy me. This is why I started my blog in the first place – to give myself a place to hand it all over. Some people pray, or meditate – I write. The difference being, when you blog your prayers, you make them public and sometimes that is cathartic - telling the world (or my 5 readers, whatever) about my struggles to love my body is something I am incredibly proud of – but I also believe in understanding the difference between a public life and a private life, so sometimes I struggle with how much personal information is too much.

So you’re probably wondering by now what it is that is that is so personal that the girl who seems to blog everything is struggling to put out there. Here goes nothing: my husband and I are struggling with fertility issues. We’ve been trying for about a year and half to get pregnant (12 months is considered normal). The day we decided we were ready to try was truly one of the happiest days of my life – it deepened my connection with my husband in a way I couldn’t have imagined. I was excited, life was grand, I was going to be a mom. 18 long months later the shine has worn off, and now my relationship with my husband is even deeper, but it’s deeper for having gone through something much harder than we expected.

Sometimes it feels like our whole lives revolve around this. At first it was just prenatal vitamins daily, and making a concerted effort not to drink every month around the time I was most likely to possibly be pregnant. About six months ago our family doctor referred us to a fertility specialist. Now it’s blood tests (I’ve had a lot), doctor’s appointments (my co-workers probably think I’m dying), daily temperature monitoring and charting. It’s moderately invasive medical procedures, that involve things like pumping water through your reproductive organs while taking x-rays to ensure there are no blockages – this one was so painful I could barely walk for almost a day and half afterward, and caused me to miss a big event for a friend.

Now that we’ve determined that my blood tests are a-okay, and I have not blockages, and the ultrasounds look good, it’s time for exploratory surgery. Wait, what? Surgery? Isn’t it a bit early for that? Isn’t that a bit extreme? Yeah, you read my mind. A month ago when my doctor told me that was our next step I was so shocked that I didn’t ask any questions. Why surgery? What are they looking for? Are there any other less invasive things we could do first? So when I got home and told my husband that this was the next step, he was rather surprised to find I had no answers.

We decided it would be best if he took some time off work to go to my most recent appointment with me, so we could make sure both he and I had a chance to ask questions. So why surgery? Turns out they are looking for endometriosis – which I found rather shocking. I don’t have painful periods, or regular abdominal pain, or any of the typical symptoms my friends with endometriosis have described. I’ve done some research since, and it seems that there are women who are virtually a-symptomatic but do have endometriosis and according to one web site it is one of the top three causes of female infertility. So many women have it, but never know until they try to get pregnant. My research has also confirmed that while there are alternative treatments for the pain caused by endometriosis, the only way to truly diagnose and treat it in a way that also aids with pregnancy, is surgery.

It still feels early in this whole process to be having surgery – but at the same time if I can do something now to help our chances of getting pregnant I can’t see a reason to wait. So tonight I’m going through a check list of things I have to do before I go in tomorrow. Remove all jewelry, check; remove all nail polish, check; fill T3 prescription, check; pack a robe and slippers, check. I feel remarkably calm right now – I’ve been anxious about tomorrow for a while now, but today I’m just glad the wait is finally over.

After that, depending how everything goes is when we start to talk about fertility drugs, which will give me hot flashes, and worsen my periods.

Are you tired yet? Do you feel overwhelmed yet? I certainly do.

Early on in this whole process we decided that we were going to keep it to ourselves that we were trying. We didn’t want everyone constantly checking in, and I didn’t want it to affect my chances for advancement at work. But it turns out that this is a pretty isolating approach. I’m sure I know women who have had similar experiences – but we don’t talk about them, so we effectively cut ourselves off from the support systems we might have. We don’t talk about the ugly bits of this whole process of becoming a parent. We don’t talk about how sad and overwhelming it can be. We don’t want to pour salt in each other’s wounds, or make others uncomfortable, so we pretend we don’t have the wounds in the first place. And the truth is that I am tired of living like that.

My Body is Freakin Awesome. Fact.

I used to think that if I was thin I’d be happy. The odd truth about this is that I was thin. I look back at pictures from high school, and my early 20s when I hovered around a size 8 and I can’t believe I didn’t see what I really looked like. I mention this for a few reasons. It reminds me that when I had made my mind up that my body wasn’t good enough, thin would never have been thin enough. It also reminds me that being thin is like having money, if you truly get obsessed with it, enough is never enough; and if you aren’t happy without it, you will never be happy with it.

This is me in 2003, looking pretty thin and feeling fat because my weight was still 10 lbs over a "healthy" BMI.

Please don’t misunderstand what this is about… I have nothing but the utmost respect for people who run marathons, lift weights, love exercise or live the life they love in whatever way they see fit and find fulfilling. What I am saying is that hating myself for being less than perfect was a disease that was eating me alive, and I have to do something about that.

I’ve struggled with social anxiety and gone through periods of mild depression. Do you know what the common thread was, whenever I was feeling like my breath was nowhere to be found and my heart was beating just a little too fast, making my ears pulse and my skin tingle, until I could barely stand to be around people? It was always in periods of time when my weight was going up, and I was losing “control” of all the disgusting fat that was enveloping me. I didn’t want people to look at me and think that thing that we’ve all thought on occasion – that it was too bad I’d put on so much weight. How much prettier I’d been before. So I made up for my so-called shortcomings by acknowledging them, by telling people about my plan to fix them. As if by telling you about my plan to try weight watchers, or buy an elliptical, I was acknowledging that I was broken, but had a plan to fix it.

Well, now I do have a plan to fix it… by completely changing the way I look at the problem. By realizing that I didn’t even know what the problem was. By changing the questions, and statements in my head. I’m not broken. At least not in the way I thought I was – my body is not broken. But my mind certainly was. My mind has been fed poison for decades, and it rotted my ability to see myself.

The quote above is a bit problematic for me, because being fat is not only not worse than those things, it has nothing to do with being boring, cruel, vindictive, or any of those other adjectives. But the point is that the way we obsess about not being fat, the emphasis we put on not associating ourselves with it, implies that as a society we do think of it as the worst thing a person could be. You don’t see Cosmo publishing a lot of articles about how to better your soul by being a kinder, more compassionate person.

Here’s a new question: What is wrong with being fat?

If your answer is health, then I want you to ask yourself a question: Does the girl I described above sound healthy to you? The thin girl who could only see a fat, unworthy girl in the mirror because her body wasn’t Kate Moss skinny – does she sound ok? She wasn’t ok.

She wasn’t ok, but I am going to be. So how do you go about changing your mind about something you’ve believed most of your life? You change the story. You listen to the voices that are speaking your truth – you seek them out, even though they are quieter than all the others. You cheer on women like Gabourey Sidibe when they refuse to be put down – because they are fighting your battle alongside you, and they need you as much as you need them.

I love fashion, and I always felt like I couldn’t really participate in it if I wasn’t skinny – like I didn’t really have the right to wear certain things. A friend introduced me to the blog GabieFresh. I love Gabie because she dares to wear whatever she wants. She has even designed a line of plus size bikinis! If she can’t inspire you to be brave in your fashion choices, well keep looking I guess…

One of my main sources of fashion inspiration is pinterest, and at first glance it seems like every fashion pin is on a tiny little body… and yes, many of them are, but if you start looking – which I have – there is fashion inspiration to be found above a size 8.

Ever read that old trick that says you should pin pictures to your fridge, or the inside of your closet door that “inspire” you to envision yourself with your perfect body? Well I’m doing that. I’m collecting pictures that depict beautiful bodies.

I can’t make the naysayers disappear, or the world change its mind. Cosmo will always publish articles about how to get a beach body in 2 weeks, pinterest will always be filled with thinspiration memes, and someone will always think I looked prettier ten pounds ago. But I can stop reading bikini body articles. I can unfollow that friend’s board that is filled with quotes about how I’d be a better person with perfect abs which I could have if I would just stop being a lazy, good for nothing slob. I can recognize that what the world thinks of me is none of my business, and is irrelevant to my happiness.