Goodbye 2010

I’m writing this post out in midair to San Diego. Very reluctantly, on New Year’s Eve, I packed up and left the comfortable cocoon that is my parents’ home. I’ve spent a wonderful month there, I spent the days rolling on the floor with my 2 dogs, playing with our newly acquired cat (pictures coming soon), having long conversations with my parents and brothers and getting ridiculously pampered. This past month has saved me, no doubts there. We all need support structures in trying periods and mine unfortunately is half a world away, but once I got to it, it was pretty darned wonderful.

I entered into 2010 a girl who had never experienced loss of any sort, as somebody starting out on this journey with stars in her eyes.  I’ve been pregnant almost half of this year, and all I have to show for it is 2 D&Cs, one yeast infection and 3 karyotyping results (my 2 babies and mine).  I could hate this year. Loathe it. Be angry and miserable when I remember it.  But I don’t feel that.   I actually don’t know how I’d describe 2010 one day in the future, but I’m waiting to find out.

 I’ve had numerous philosophical conversations with my mom . One theme we keep revisiting, is that as souls go through their various lifetimes, they can evolve (or devolve, if you think about somebody like Ted Bundy). Obviously, it is only suffering and challenges that evolve the soul, not the wonderful, easy times.  I don’t want to be one the evolved souls.  I wish I was a  slightly ditzy type got married to the love of  her life early on and plonked out 3 perfect kids and had a uneventful life.  I wish I had not an ounce of complexity and that my soul got through this lifetime with not one darned lesson learned.  But that’s not what was in store for me and since I’m being force-fed all this crap, then I might as well get something positive out of it.

The lessons 2010 has taught me:

Patience:  When such horrible things happen to you in a short period of time, you zoom in on the pain. You magnify it and you forget that it is only a moment in time. So much can change so quickly and there all these journeys and paths waiting for you, and you never know what will come in 6 months, one year or 5 years.  What I need to do now: wait for it, with equanimity. I’m doing this…after a fashion.  Diana Gabaldon (my all time fav author) has a line in her book which goes something like this: If Time is akin to god (in its ability to heal pain), then memory is the very devil. It is true. I have cried very little I found out Turbulence had died, mostly because my brain does not think much of that time, of her, or what she might have been. If I go there inadvertently, I back off like I’ve been scalded.  On the plane I was sitting surrounded by children. On the seat ahead of me was this adorable baby that kept playing peekaboo with me. I played with him for about 10 minutes then suddenly, I was sobbing helplessly, something I had not done in weeks.  Memories, they are the devil. 

Humility: I thought I could control my life.  I thought I could plan these all important things and they’d turn out the way I’d imagined.  2010 has ruthlessly demonstrated that I have no control.  I have none over my biology, over destiny, over anything really.  How do you deal with this sense of utter powerlessness?   The only recourse (available to me) is humility and say that I’ll do whatever I can to achieve my goals, but be ok with whatever results emerge, even if they are horribly cruddy ones.  It’s an exercise in faith actually, to say no matter what comes, I’ll be ok with it, that I’ll see it as a blessing.  Sometimes  I feel I’ve gone a little way towards this, and at other times I think of my worst case scenarios and my throat still closes up.  But still, I’ve come a long way from where I was at the start of this year.

So goodbye 2010.You were a pretty harsh teacher, I hope 2011 will be kinder.