Day 96: Clearing your head

I have a headache. I know why. It's not because I couldn't sleep last night due to nervousness about the test I am going to have on my leg today. It's not because I haven't been drinking enough water or too much water. I didn't even drink any alcohol yesterday. No. My headache is because I think too much.

That sounds funny, I know. But it's true. Have you ever had so much running through your head that it literally gave you a headache? I have...frequently. Whether it's stuff going on at work, home or social life, it all seems to come back into the head in the evenings leaving me with one whopping of a weird dream and a headache in the morning. Why does this happen? Why does my head fill with so much that it lead to the headache? Because I allow it to.

I know that sometimes we fill our live with so many things we force ourselves into these predicaments. Sometimes though, we have no option. Our health, our family, or environments all need attention and the responsibility falls on us. Sure we can take time out for ourselves to try to recoup, but most of us don't have the luxury of doing that every day. While my dream in life would be to sit in my log cabin (a dream yes...) out in the country somewhere surrounded by nothing but nature and write my novels that is not a reality. I have responsibility right now that I can't avoid. I have to think about others in my life. Thus...the headache.

So, I guess today I am not saying that I am going to work more on clearing my head or anything like that. Rather, I am going to just deal with it. I will eventually take something for it (Tylenol, Excedrin or whatever later that I can't take right now due to a procedure/test in a few hours.). Sometimes we just have to allow those headaches to happen. It helps us acknowledge that we are human, that sometimes we don't need to take on the world on our shoulders and that we need to take some time out for ourselves.

Headaches...they are a part of life. They happen. Life happens. Today is about life happening. And I am just going to let it. It keeps me on my toes.

Day 95: Walking with another

There are things in our lives that we struggle with. Yesterday I spoke about suffering and how it's okay. While its okay to acknowledge the suffering its also very important to work at moving beyond the suffering. We aren't to keep our lives full of pain and sadness. Rather, we need to keep moving forward. We have to try to do things, accomplish things, and continuing moving forward. If that wasn't the intention of where our lives were supposed to go then the length of the human day would have been more like years as opposed to hours. We are given 24 hours because we are supposed to live that day to the fullest and move on.

In our lives though, we are given people to help us along the way as well as people that we are to help along the way. We are given permanent people and we are given temporary people. People whose experiences we can learn from and people who we will teach. What we need to do is realize that no matter what is going on in our lives, we are not alone.

We are meant to walk with other people in our lives. Today I will be more responsible to recognizing that I am not alone and that it is important that I don't try to walk this path alone. Whether its the fertility issue, struggles with spirituality, or just everyday life, we are meant to walk this journey with others. Why else would I have started this blog? I want to walk this walk not alone but accompanied by others.

What's important as well is that we don't force ourselves on others in regards to walking with them. In other words, don't try and be a boy scout and help an unaccepting lady across the street! I will pay more attention to others needs and walk with them whether it is long term or short term. I will accompany them and listen and only be there for them to let them know I am here. I won't pretend to know all the answers or even think that I have to be right with my advise all the time. I won't advise...I will just walk with them. Sometimes I will just take them by the hand and when they give up I will help them stay walking.

(Interesting analogy from a woman who can barely walk 50 feet because of a foot injury,eh? But you get the point, right?)

Day 94: Suffering

One of the things I learned this weekend at the evening of reflection that I went to was that suffering is okay. From a religious standpoint, suffering reminds us of the cross that Jesus carried and that we all do need to carry our cross. From a non-religious standpoint, suffering is needed to humble us and to remind us that we aren't the center of attention in the world and that we don't get to control everything in life. Suffering reminds people that sometimes life really does suck. And life does have to suck in order for us to grow and change.

Think of it this way. A tree that receives no trimming and cutting will grow wild and all over the place. There is no control of it and it turns into chaos. When the branches are cut or trimmed, the tree will grow better, healthier, and more organized. The tree has to suffer the cutting in order to grow. We are alot like the tree. We can't always have things our way. We can't always control. We have to deal with pain and suffering and uncertainty in order to grow healthier, better, and more organized in who we are.

We also have to acknowledge that suffering is okay in our lives. I don't mean that we are to stand on a street corner and shout, "WHOA IS ME!!!!! OH HOW I SUFFER!!!!!" No. And sometimes I know that I tend to use social networking as my platform for acknowledging my suffering to anyone who will read it. (I have to change doing that and remind myself that its not necessary for everyone to know what ails me.) But we do have to acknowledge and not stuff back in our lives the suffering we encounter.

Now, I am not talking about allowing yourself to "suffer" over a small thing and to drag it on. Or even to allow yourself to suffer because you didn't like the outcome of a decision that someone or yourself made. Rather, we must carry our own crosses and understand that the pain of what we are going through in life is important to feel and to know that it shouldn't be diminished.

There are certain things in my life that I don't talk about with other people. There are things that Jeff and I haven't talked to other people about regarding our infertility and we realized that we don't have to tell anyone anything. What we choose to say or do is our decision. We are the ones suffering through this path of infertility. Please be patient with us on this. Allow us to suffer. Allow us to grieve and do the things we need to do. Do not come to us and say, I understand how you feel. Do not tell us to adopt, lose weight, try harder, don't try so hard, or any of a number of other pieces of advice. Allow us to deal with this. Do say..."hey that really sucks" or "I'll be praying for you" or "if you need anything, let me know" or even, "hey...I'm here for you." Those words are the most comforting during suffering. Those are phrases that provide more comfort to any form of suffering than any other thing that can be said.

Today I am going to be allowing myself to understand what it means to be at the foot of the cross. When Jesus died, his mother and his followers, some of whom he called brothers, were at the foot of the cross. While Jesus suffered the physical dieing on the cross, the loss of their loved one imparted suffering amongst his brothers and mother. Michelangelo's the Pieta is a great reminder of the agony of suffering and the acceptance of it as well. If you have seen the Pieta you may remember that Mary, Jesus's mother is holding and grieving for the loss of her son. Her left hand remains outstretched though. This outstretched arm signifies her accepting what suffering that God has given her with the loss of her son and yet the acknowledgement that she surrenders that suffering back to God.

Today, I will outstretch my arms and acknowledge my suffering, and also surrender it back to God. I am thankful that God loves me this much that he would impart this upon me.

Day 93: I'm no Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck

What does Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and everyone reading this blog have in common? All of us have or are characters. This weekend, Jeff and I watched a movie about a young man who makes some bad choices and ends up in juvenile detention. This young man had been a star rugby player at his school. While detained he is afforded the opportunity to play Rugby for a team that was his arch rival when he was not locked up. This difference was the coaching. The coach for the arch rival team didn't just team the boys how to play rugby, and that wasn't the reason they won. Rather, he taught them that their character was more important than winning games. He taught them never to do anything that would embarrass their family, their friends, or their team mates. He built their character.

We have a responsibility to developing our own character. Who we are deep down, not just who we plan to be, is just as important as this journey I am on. Determining who I am deep down is something that I have been reflecting on. Is who I project my character to be the same as what I want it to be? How am I projecting myself? Do I show one face to certain people and another face to another group, changing my character and changing my belief system along the way to meet the needs of who I am at the same time? These are questions I began asking myself over the last two days and today seems like the best time to really address it in my life.

I want to be the person who is non-judgemental to everyone...including my family. I don't want to be someone who is looked at as someone who objectifies other people. I want others to see that something important to me is my faith, my family, and life in general. I want others to recall my character as being honorable, courageous, and compassionate.

I have alot to work on still, but at least its a start. What does your character say about you? Do you project the person that you want to be? Do you conform to become someone different for different groups of people in order to be liked by all? Or do you stand for what you truly believe in?

Day 92: The humor of the late night blog tonight

Yes...you probably searched for a blog all day on this day only never to see it online. There were 2 reasons. First, I had to be up very early for work and was out of the office all day thus no time to do the blog. Secondly, today was an important day of reflection. Yesterday, Jeff and I were able to spend an evening with 10 other couples experiencing fertility. The evening made us ponder many things, one being how we connect to each other as a married couple. The other was how our journey together has changed from our courtship up until now and the sufferings of infertility.

As a result of this last evening I had spent alot of day reflecting in some of these things. So...my day wasn't meant fixing a problem. Rather, it was to reflect and think and to begin to acknowledge what ad where our journey is going...Jeff's and mine. Over the course of this next week there will be topics that I will blog about that were areas they spoke about and of which I have began to really acknowledge the need for integration into my life. So that's it for tonight.

Days 90 and 91: The three month hump

The title of today's blog has got me laughing for a variety of reasons that I won't go into. If you know what I do for a living it is a very humorous title. Anyways. Today is day 90 of the blog. 3 months I have been writing this blog. This also means that I still have 275 days left of the blog. After some long thinking and evaluating this whole process I have made a decision to do something a little off the path than what I was doing these past 90 days. Do not worry, I am still taking the journey. What is affected instead is the blogging.

Beginning this weekend, the blog will only be written once for the weekend...either Saturday or Sunday. My goal will to be to write about my task on Saturday mornings but it may be Sunday at times before it is written. Why is this? After thinking about it, I saw that my weekend tasks were sometimes minuscule things. Although small they were still important to do. But did I really do them to the fullest? Weekends are so varied and sometimes we filled them with tons of things and sometimes we had nothing to do. By taking one task and working on it for the entire weekend it has a much greater opportunity for me to accomplish it and to make an impact with that task.

This was not an easy decision as I wanted to live my original plan for the blog. Realistically, each weekend was harder and harder to write as I didn't feel I had been able to give it my all. This way of doing the blog and the journey will give me a greater opportunity to reflect on the process and that specific topic. It's a good thing. Change is good.

Day 89: The Power of Change

Yes, I do recall that I have spoken about change before. Today as I speak about change I believe that I am coming at it from a different angle. Today I will come at change from the eyes of someone else as opposed to me.

How often are we approached with change around us and while we deal with a little anxiety about it for a few seconds, eventually we accept it and move forward not letting it get to us too much? Once we moved forward the change doesn't seem to be too big of a deal but for that moment when it is occurring our heads begin to swim, we look for every reason under the sun to not accept it, and we panic. Once we've moved beyond it we look back and think...psssha..that was no big deal.

What about the people in our lives who haven't been able to move beyond the anxiety and stress? How do we deal with that? Sometime we have individuals that we want to just shake and say....Hey!!!! It's no big deal!!!! In a way, we need to be more compassionate to them. We need to remember the anxiety we may have felt about certain changes in our own life where we held on just a bit longer.

It doesn't mean that we cajole them and baby them. Rather it means that we step back, pull ourselves out of the chaos they are going through and help them move out of the chaos and stress and anxiety. We don't do that by yelling or telling them they are wrong. Rather we work on being patient with them. We give them their time and their space but let them know we are there to help them through this if needed.

The power of change can make or break a person. Change the furniture in a house of a person who has never changed it around and you will see anxiety. Add another person into the mix at work or in your circle of friends and you'll see it too. Today I will be a bit more patient with people who have a hard time with change. Who knows....I may need it at sometime here in the future too.