tryin to shed a few myself!

skinnyselina067 — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 15:52:52 -0600

Just started the 2009 National Body Challenge that Discovery Health kicked off forthe new year. Some great tips and insight how to start your new year on theright track! There will also be a week long event beginning tomorrow where 6 challengers will compete to replace old habits with healthy ones! health.discovery.com/national-body-challenge/national-body-challenge

So Right

MrsWsKitchen — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 08:52:02 -0600

For years I muddled thru holidays & birthdays with horror. Family gatherings always brought The Terrible Question: so, when are y'all going to have kids? Once in my 30s there came The Terrible Comment: y'all better hurry up if you're gonna have kids! Of course there was that one birthday card from my mother, which read, "Don't worry. There's still time for children."

Now I just try to have the holiday. Or the birthday. Or whatever. This year we signed up for high-option quality health insurance for my area that covers IUI and IVI (but not IVF, the bastards) and we're going to give it the old college try. One year to try. Because we can't afford paying $100/week for health insurance forever. I suppose there should be added pressure to that, but I just don't feel it right now--instead, I feel happy that we're making the sacrifice to really go for it with a qualified RE who has a good success rate.

I used to think that I could finally be happy when... finally feel successful when... finally be personally fulfilled when... and I missed out on a lot of happy times, preoccupied with The Goal. I do my best nowadays to take pleasure in everything, push my fertility to the back of my mind, enjoy other peoples kids (which I couldn't do before) and do fun things for myself. It's easy to say, not so easy to do--but must be done, otherwise I become this ghost of a person just waiting.

I try not to mention my fertility issues on my food blog--it's my world away from that particular issue.

Amanda
Mrs.W's Kitchen

Resolutions

Melissa Ford — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 09:16:37 -0600

New Year's completes the Infertility Trifecta of Suckitude (at least for American, Christian infertile men and women) which starts with Thanksgiving, moves into Christmas, and ends with New Year's Eve/Day as you reflect upon another year closing of banging your head against the wall. Pass the champagne!

The next three months hold this small, strange window--the only chance left to have a 2009 due date. After that, the due dates will be set for 2010 which sounds so far away when you still have your feet in 2008. Just as people measure a last chance to be pregnant before Christmas or their birthday or whatever milestone juts out of their personal calendar, I think a lot of people see these next three months as a closing door they need to leap through. We all create new goals once the old goals have passed, but it doesn't make the enormity of the numbers look different even holding that in mind.

It is naturally a time to become reflective. On New Year's Day for three years running, the ALI (adoption/loss/infertility) blogosphere has posted a list that we call the Creme de la Creme. It honours a single post from every blog in our corner of the blogosphere from 2008. Everyone is welcomed to join and the list remains open and updated throughout the year until the next December. It is amazing to reflect on the year through the diversity of experience found on the list.

There are a lot of posts popping up through the ALI (adoption/loss/infertility) blogosphere slamming the door on 2008 as well as sighing with relief that the year can be written down as a good one.

Ruminations sees the new year as a clean slate where anything can happen. Infertile Ground gives a TS Eliot quote reminding us that making an end is also making a beginning. The Infertility Journey to Motherhood reflects on the good things that did happen even if she didn't get her wish.

One of the most moving New Year's posts comes from The Burdens of Being. Her twin's birth and death occurred in 2008 and moving out of the year also moves her farther from her boys. She writes: "When I speak of them, I will say that they died 'last year'. And then another year. And another. Sometimes, I feel like I am forgetting them."

It can be emotionally difficult to close the door on a year.

The way we set up the next year to be better is to create a resolution, a promise of something we'll do to actively enhance our world. If you cannot come up with a New Year's Resolution, let me make one for you (I'm sweet that way).

Infertile men and women have a tendency to focus on the goal because it feels finite. Even if the goal feels too far away to actually see, we also know that we won't be in this space forever. With limited emotional resources, we use them on the goal and cease to take care of ourselves. And it leaves us miserable, depleted, and emotionally and physically exhausted.

A while back, I started trying to follow some of the advice in Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar and it fell by the wayside like so many New Year's resolutions. But I'm resurrecting it. I am choosing one thing that makes me happy and doing it on a regular basis. It doesn't need to be daily, but it needs to be scheduled. When I proposed this many months ago, people came up with ideas such as taking themselves out for coffee every Thursday, eating one good piece of chocolate every night, or making time to run three times a week.

I think I'm going to schedule a date to read food blogs and try recipes one night a week. It will be my protected sanctuary of happiness where I focus on one thing that is not reproductively related that makes me happy.

And, if resolutions aren't really your thing, Twin Peas proposes making 12 wishes for the year instead. It will be interesting to look back a year from now and see how many came true.

Happy New Year.

Melissa is the author of the infertility and pregnancy loss blog, Stirrup Queens and Sperm Palace Jesters. She keeps a categorized blogroll of over 1600 infertility blogs and writes the daily Lost and Found and Connections Abound, a news source for the infertility blogosphere. Her infertility book, Navigating the Land of If, is forthcoming from Seal Press in Spring 2009. She is the keeper of the IComLeavWe (International Comment Leaving Week) list which is currently open for January.

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tryin to shed a few myself!

So Right

Resolutions