What will the New Year bring? Hopefully a better me ...

With Samhain just passed, we begin a new year and another turn of the wheel. I have been thinking about what I want for this year.

This year, I want to be the River. I want to flow over and under and around the obstacles that crop up in my path, moving ever onward toward my goals. I want to rush wildly with excitement, burble over with laughter often, move steadily forward on the day to day, and rest still and calm when I need to. I will be the River.

I want to pause to take better care of myself. I have never been great at self care. I have a tendency to take care of everything else before turning my focus on me. It's been especially bad since my parents passed away. Everything got shoved to the back for a year to deal with the legal, financial, and logistical details surrounding their deaths and managing the estate. That took all of my focus. I didn't even feel like I could let myself grieve until it was all taken care of because I was afraid I would fall apart. The next year was full of a mix of delayed grief and guilt over questions of if I had done everything right the prior year. Did I honor them and respect their memory enough? Was I respectful of what was left behind? I still don't know. The grief and sense of being adrift overwhelm me sometimes. No living parents, no living siblings, disconnected physically and emotionally from the extended family I do have left. They never call or write. I never hear from them without being the one to reach out. Without my parents as the binding fiber, I have lost the sense of connection I have always had with my family. Intellectually, I realize there is nothing I can do about any of that. Emotionally, it feels like the universe telling me that the feelings of isolation and not "fiting in" that I experienced growing up have all been proven correct. Regardless of why or why not, maybe it is just time to move on and find a new definition of myself without them or at least separate from them. I can't continue to define my worth by home much they outwardly show they care.

Over the past few years, my physical health has started to take hits too. I know part of it is from the stress of everything above. 

• My anxiety has been extremely high. My blood pressure has been higher than it should be, and I know the two are related to a certain extent. I've recently sought evaluation and medication for that. 
• Sleep has always been a struggle for me, but my quality and quantity of sleep has deteriorated even more in the past few years. I am exhausted but not sleepy. When my brain should be winding down for the day in prep for sleep, it's just getting a second wind to go, go, go throughout the night. It's getting harder to pull myself out of bed in the morning because I haven't been able to get to sleep the prior night. I am Vitamin D deficient, and I am taking meds for that. I am anemic, and I am taking meds for that. My thyroid glands are underactive, and I am taking meds for that. Every medical condition I have causes fatigue, and yet, I can't fall asleep at a decent hour.  It's kind of ridiculous. I have had two at-home sleep studies so far because my insurance will not cover an in-lab one to try and figure out any underlying medical causes. I should have results for the last test later this week. Hopefully it will show something conclusive or at least help cross some potential causes off the list.
• I need to take better care of my teeth. I have been avoiding the dentist like the plague for the last few years. Part of it was the Covid pandemic. Part of it was the fact that my father died because of anesthetic toxicity due to a miscalculation at the dentist office. I realize that I do not see the same dentist and that I have never heard of anything similar happening to anyone else. My anxiety doesn't care about that though. All my anxiety knows is that my dad was completely fine, he he sat down in the dentist chair to have some work done, and he was brain dead less than an hour later. It's not rational. I get that. But it's what I think of every time I go to schedule a cleaning. I have scheduled one for next month though. Hopefully I won't freak out.
• I want to do a better job of being more physically active after the holidays. I would love to lose some excess weight. I want to improve my mobility, decrease stress on my body, and hopefully just generally feel better and feel better about myself overall. 

Financially, I want to really focus on lowering and eliminating debt this year. We had to use a chunk of savings this year to do house and car repairs and replace a piece of furniture that we hadn't anticipated replacing for a while into the future. It makes me nervous to have so little in savings.  And of course with student loans reactivating, unlike all of the promises claimed, my monthly payments went up instead of down. It sucks, but nothing I can do about that. One loan will pay off in about three months, which will free up a bit of money that I can add onto the monthly payment for a credit card. I want to focus on paying extra toward those with the highest interest to lower my overall debt to income ratio. 

What will I find this time next year? Hopefully a happier, healthier, more financially secure me. That's what I am hoping for anyway. It won't be easy, but then nothing worth it ever seems to be.

The Childlessness Syndrome

I think I have it ... The Childlessness Syndrome.

My 35th birthday is coming up very soon, and my ovaries feel every tick of the clock. I'm approaching that invisible wall where once you're past it the risks involved in starting a family multiply and keep on multiplying every year. Gestational diabetes, multiple births, infertility, birth defects, chromosomal abnormalities, low birth weight/early births, high blood pressure issues ... the list goes on and on. I'm already facing infertility issues and a family history of premature births and early menopause. I so desperately wanted to have kids before I was 30 and beat the multiple clocks that are ticking away. Now that I'm fast approaching 35, the pressure is on, but there isn't really anything I can do about it.

The doctors have told me that I'm unlikely to get pregnant without help via either IU or IVF procedures, and my insurance only covers a small fraction of IU and nothing on IVF. The doctors also told me that even if one of these procedures works so that I do become pregnant, the chance of a full-term, live birth is very slim. Hearing that, logically and emotionally, I have to ask myself is it worth it? My mother miscarried two daughters, and my older brother only lived for 6 hours after he was born. I was her miracle baby who survived, but she still grieves for those three who didn't make it.

With the chances being so small, should I put myself and Steffie through that grueling and expensive process? I just don't know. I don't know. I know I would survive the disappointments and potential losses, but would we as a couple survive the emotional roller coaster? I would like to say absolutely yes, but I've seen so many couples torn apart by these sorts of things. My wife is the love of my life, and I won't sacrifice her and our relationship for the slimmest possibility of a biological child.

The thought that I may never be able to carry a child, to give birth to him or her when I've wanted it for so long fucking hurts. And if I'm being completely honest with myself, it doesn't raise my self esteem any either. I know intellectually and logically that it isn't my fault. I didn't do anything to cause these medical problems. I've been very careful about my reproductive health. I've never missed a yearly check-up. I was always particular about having safe sex to avoid disease, infections, etc. My weight could be better in order to potentially improve some hormone levels and general mobility, but otherwise I am in very good health. Still the thoughts creeps in from time to time that if I had started trying to have children earlier before my thyroid problems developed that maybe this could have been avoided, that starting birth control so early and trying that horrible depo shot maybe have permanently screwed up my hormone production/levels, that if I weren't broken, Steffie could have children of her own. Not having kids makes family functions awkward as hell, and my mother resents me not giving her grandchildren yet.  Logically I know there is nothing that I could have done that would change what is happening or isn't happening now. I know that it isn't my fault. But ... sometimes it's so very hard to remember that.

I've thought about surrogacy as an option. I've even had more than one friend make the offer to be our surrogate. I have mixed emotions about it. If my eggs were viable (the doctor says there is a good chance they aren't), then I would consider it further. If we were able to use biological material from both of us, I would definitely want to go with a surrogate that we don't know rather than a friend. As much as our friends tell us it wouldn't matter, that the child would be completely ours, I would worry that at some point it would turn into, why are you raising the child I carried this way or that way, etc. I don't want to lose a good friend over that, and I won't have someone else tell me how to care for my child. Sticky situations abound. Excluding the possibility of using my own eggs, I don't think I would do it. It would bother me if our child was biologically Steffie's but not mine. What if something were to happen down the road where we split? Then there is the argument that the child is more hers than mine, and child custody just gets ugly so quick without that extra layer of ownership. Maybe that is selfish of me, but it is how I feel.

I would rather at that point look at an adoption instead. And then comes a whole other set of potential problems. We are a lesbian couple who have pretty eclectic social and religious views. In a world that likes to make the adoption process doubly hard for anyone who doesn't fit into the one size fits all box of white, heterosexual, practicing Christian wholesomeness, I know adoption will not be an easy process for us. We both work full time, and we do not have a huge amount of money in savings after buying a new home this past year. I don't know what the requirements are now, but I know at one point adoption required one parent to be able to be off work for 6 months to a year to bond with and acclimate the child to his/her new family. I don't know if this is still the case, but if it is, neither of us can afford to be out of work that long.

And then there are the completely selfish lifestyle changes to consider when asking myself if I want to make the changes necessary to start a family. We are very socially involved with our friends and hobbies. We are part of multiple alternative lifestyle groups, we have very active gaming hobbies, and we keep strange hours. We hate being fully clothed at home. We have sex toys and latex clothing and adult oriented literature scattered liberally throughout our house. We have a dungeon and fetish closet. We host parties. We spend hours or days at a time playing tabletop games at three or four day conventions. We like to pick up and go whenever time and work allows. Neither of our families live close enough to us that we could look to them for an occasional babysitter so that we could still participate in those activities on a limited basis. Finding a babysitter for even something as small as a night out would be an interesting feat. It would be honestly a very big change that would have to happen if we choose to have children. Thinking about those parts of my life being greatly reduced or going away completely brings a whole other bag of mixed emotions.

So ... child or no child in my future? I don't know. Am I happy without a human child? Yes. I have my wife who loves me and who I love enormously. I have a puppy who is decidedly spoiled because of the very fact that we do not have humie babies. My life is full of social activities, friends, and family. I have a job that I really enjoy and a new house that we are working very hard to make into the welcoming home that we want it to be. My life isn't broken without children. I can be and am happy without kids. Maybe it is just time to decide that they aren't going to be part of my complete. That's just the way it is. Time will tell better than any hypothesizing I can do on my own now.