I set up this blog years ago and let it sit, unsure of how
to proceed or what to write. I’d written a memoir of the time spent carrying
and mourning my little girl, an attempt to distill my experience into a
readable, relatable form. I thought that the blog would somehow go hand-in-hand
with the book, maybe even promote it.
But I found myself curiously stymied. It wasn’t just that I
was unsure of my ability to navigate the technology and commit the time to
posting—I had plenty of tech-savvy, would-be advisors and had blocked out daily
writing time on my calendar.
I was stumped by both a lack of direction and an inability
to create content. I had no idea of what to write. It went beyond writer’s block.
Paralyzed by self-doubt, I was linguistically frozen, unable to articulate the
thoughts and emotions that churned in my brain.
My circumstances had placed me on the outermost edge of the
realm of moms’ groups, well beyond the normative experiential bands of the
social circles most women my age ran in. In a seven year streak of decidedly
dismal luck, I’d had breast cancer, lost a daughter, and regained breast
cancer.
These challenges had pillaged my stockpile of beliefs about
the world, burning beyond recognition the ones that had enabled my introverted
former self to engage with the world around her. I shrank in fear from the task
of trying to express thoughts that contradicted the prominent and pervasive
themes of perfectionism that ran rampant in the sanitized, artificial light of
social media.
I felt like a misfit, a social pariah. I didn’t fall within
the range of “normal” as a wife, as a mother, or even as a woman. I was no
longer able to relate to the plastic demands of the appearance-and-ego-driven corner
of the world in which I lived.
It took a while, the slow and painful realization that I was
incompatible with my own life—or at least with the life I’d lived before grief
and loss wrapped it in mothballs and tucked it away for safe-keeping.
The discomfort of
trying to contort myself into the confines of social niceties and unrealistic expectations
that no longer suited me was the biggest shackle holding me back, not just from
blogging, but from living.
I had to embrace my scarred, post-menopausal, radiation-tattoo-riddled,
one-boob wonder of a body. I had to make peace with the chronic fatigue and
fuzziness of my post-chemo brain.
I had to forgive myself for my failures, especially the ones
I carried closest to my heart—the inability to give my baby a healthy genetic
makeup and incapacity to protect her big sister from the pain of loss.
I had to stop beating myself up for real and imagined failings
and accept my best efforts as good enough, in every area of my life. And in
that revelation, I found the seeds for this blog.
The tagline for my book reads: Incompatible with Life is the life-affirming memoir of one woman’s medically fragile pregnancy
and all the joy, sorrow, and—ultimately—hope that her difficult journey brought
her.
Consider these posts a sequel of sorts, a chronicle of the challenging
climbs and daring descents on the next leg of the journey.