So on Friday we decided to take an impromptu day in the mountains – to play with our dog and generally recharge. Instead, moments before we were hitting the road, I discovered that our basement was home to inches of unexpected and unwanted water. Not my idea of fun!
We have now had at least one sort of work crew in our house every single day. Friday we had people in our house for over 12 hours as they worked to locate and stop the source of the water and another set of people worked to remove the water and start the drying process. As I sit here typing right now we have a disaster recovery team in our basement measuring the moisture left in our walls and floor. We also have a few plumbers in our house replacing our hot water tank and re-doing/improving a bunch of water line connections. Our house is now a very busy place.
While I am annoyed that we have construction crews in my house daily, loud industrial fans running 24/7, and not being in control of the major decisions (insurance is), I am also annoyed because my space is quite literally gone. Our home gym, which has been a 
significant part of my efforts to reclaim my life, is now completely out of service. I’m guessing it will be a few months before we have the space back together in a usable manner. I keep reminding myself that at least it’s spring/summer so we can focus on outdoor cardio for the time being. My exercise does not have to stop, it’s just changing for the time being.
But even more important than the loss of our home gym, I am most bothered that the constant flow of people in and out of our house means that my personal freedom within my own home has been compromised.
No matter the situation, our house has always been our space. Basically, my house is my space to do whatever I want without any care in the world. Instead, now, I get to deal with people constantly in my space.
Once upon a time I thought I was an extrovert simply because I’m incredibly talkative and social. I can get alone with along anyone, and I can strike up a conversation with a perfect stranger without blinking an eye. In fact, I can garner the attention of an entire room if I must and I am often paid to do just that. I actually make a living based on being incredibly social and being great with people.
But in my older and wiser years I’ve begun to understand that I actually have a lot more introvert characteristics in that while I like to talk I truly need my down time. I need me time to be able to recharge and move forward in life.
So, 5 days into a flooded basement with rotating construction crews, I’m really struggling with my house being invaded.
My safe space, the space where I recharge, is now gone. This only adds to my desire to run away and my frustration that we cannot due to our tight finances thanks to an overly expensive international adoption.
I’ve discovered that I’m struggling to focus on writing or getting any work accomplished because I don’t have the quiet and peace that I’ve become accustomed to. With the rush that is circling around me, I don’t feel that I’m able to connect with my emotions and my inner thoughts – I’m starting to feel disconnected from myself. And in the last year I’ve really come to love my time to ponder and challenge my ways of thinking. Until now I’m not sure that I realized just how important this freedom to contemplate has been to my well-being.
Needless to say, I’m struggling. And, while I know it could have been worse, I’m still not thrilled about the entire situation. Yes the damage is most definitely not desirable, but more than anything I just don’t like having my space taken away from me.
I will be a happy camper when the industrial fans are turned off and my permanent headache goes away. I’ll be extra happy when we are not juggling daily visits from various construction crews and I get my space and freedom back. And I will be a very happy camper once everything is sorted with insurance and my basement turns back into the nice space it once was!
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Dani, at Blooming Spiders, recently posed a very interesting question in a comment to me.
“I have had fleeting thoughts of how I’ll feel once I’m officially past child-bearing age. There will finally be a period at the end of a heartbreaking run-on sentence of loss and trauma. But will there be a sense of relief??” – Dani
Once I read her question, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It has peaked my interest.
My first thought is, I hate recurrent pregnancy loss. I hate what it has done to so many women and couples out there. I despise the fact that Dani, myself and countless others have to live in a place where pregnancy is heartbreaking and simply results in loss and trauma. Where pregnancy teaches us to be resilient, rather then just offering us the opportunity to be delightfully happy.
Once I moved on from my initial pity-party rant, I started to think, will there be a sense of relief once we physically out of the child bearing age?
I am not officially past my child-bearing age. In fact, I am 32. Mr. MPB is also 32. We are considered very fertile in our ability to get pregnant, and infertile in our ability to stay pregnant. And we have years ahead of us to continue to try to procreate if we choose to.
Photo Source: Office.com Clip Art
I do not have a crystal ball, but I cannot help but wonder what will happen? Will I throw myself a party when I hit menopause? To know that I’m free of ever having to endure another loss, in so many ways that will be liberating. Or will it be more of a pity-party to know what I was never able to achieve? Will aging out of child-bearing years actually just remind me more of what I was unable to achieve? What my body was unable to accomplish? What my body did to our five little babies?
Then I realized, maybe I don’t have to wonder. Maybe, I already know, or at least have a pretty good idea what it will be like when we can no longer try to procreate. While it’s self-imposed, we’ve made the decision to prevent another pregnancy and as such we’ve essentially cut off our ability to procreate so I think I have at least some insight into what it will be like. By choosing the most effective birth control on the market, statistically it is very unlikely we are going to conceive again. In many ways by turning to adoption, we have mentally moved out of the place of loss or at least out of the actively living the loss.
Honestly, adoption has about a million emotions wrapped around it – grieving the loss of Mr. MPB’s eyes in our future children, frustration about the adoption process, fear of the unknowns of adoption, etc. But yet, I can say with absolute certainty that somewhere in all these emotions there is relief.
There is relief in knowing that my body cannot kill another baby. If we do not try again, my body cannot slowly kill another one of our children
There is an immense amount of relief in knowing that we will still have children. We don’t want to live a childless life, and by choosing adoption I know we will have children.
And, honestly, there is relief in taking my body out of the equation – I am not longer responsible to carry our child to term, something my body was not going to let happen no matter how much I wanted it. That responsibility is now on someone else – I’m off the hook, I’m free. It’s a weird thing to say, but I feel so much relief in knowing that my body is done. No matter what happens next, my body will not be at fault. My body will be innocent. And that sense of innocence bring an immense amount of relief.
I’m sure there will be some different emotions when I actually do reach menopause, but I’m also hopeful that by then, I’ll have moved on from these emotions in a healthy way. Because, honestly, I don’t want to be carrying all this loss at the top of my heart for that many years. I don’t want to be consumed with the sorrow and the loss in the way that I have been in the past and the way that I still am at times today. I want to keep working hard to process all the emotions and to work on recovering so that when I am 40 or 50 or even 80 I am not harbouring feelings of significant guilt and sorrow.
I don’t want to forget it, but I do want to learn to let it go.
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My Perfect Breakdown 