The Year of Grace

Once upon a time ago, I used to come up with New Year's Resolutions. And then I moved on to various mottos and key terms for the year. 2008 was the Year of the P, focused as it was on patience, presence, purpose, and peace. Last year, I couldn't come up with much of anything, beyond vague notions of remaining "in the moment." Perhaps that was a sign that the year was destined to go badly. I've been thinking a lot about how to frame this upcoming year, and I finally settled on grace. I'll thank Sprogblogger for that one, actually. Once, offhandedly in a comment I'll have to dig up, she said something to the effect of being impressed with how I handle my life with grace. I don't know that I do, but I'd like to.

I recently read Rapt, by Winifred Gallagher. What I liked about it is that it focuses on paying attention as a way of living a good life, but it does so from a behavioral science instead of touchy-feely perspective. The moment that really struck me was when she suggested, quoting someone else, that paying attention is what keeps us from being stuck between fear and hope. For a fertility patient, that seemed spot on. Yet if Gallagher acknowledges that paying attention to the small things allows us to live life more positively, to say that I want to spend this year focusing on the positive, to my mind, fails to adequately recognize that the experience of infertility and recurrent pregnancy loss sucks beyond words. I don't want to get sucked down into a vortex of negativity, but neither do I want to be all Pollyanna-ish and ignore the shit that has happened to me in a year that I've decided is the second worst of my adult life (2002 was far, far worse).

So, the other day I looked up grace in the dictionary. What I like about this idea, living my life gracefully, with grace, is the way that it both acknowledges gratitute (you can expect a lot of SMG posts in the upcoming weeks) and also incorporates ease and beauty. It seems to me that the best way to go about these next few months of not trying is to try to accept my life and live it as gracefully as I can. That doesn't mean seeing a silver lining in everything. It doesn't mean focusing on the positive. It means embracing the sum total of my life, and, all in all, my life is pretty darn gifted (a friend recently used that word in a holiday letter, in lieu of blessed, and it seemed to me just right).

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These months of not trying, I know, will be incredibly hard, because I will be sitting and stewing and trying not to think about the thing I most want. Right now I have a friend starting an IVF cycle with Dr. Gorgeous, and without even wanting to, I know her calendar. It's a cycle I could be doing, if I wanted to. And I keep reminding myself that it's MY choice not to cycle. It's in my best interest, physically, psychologically, and professionally not to cycle. AND I REALLY REALLY REALLY NEVER WANT TO DO IVF AGAIN. (The caps are for me, not for you, dear readers!). But when Dr. Gorgeous asked me so what are you going to do in January and February, she clearly understood the problem. I do well when I'm acting. I do badly when I'm sitting and thinking, and, unfortunately, sitting and thinking is a major part of my job.

I figured out the approximate number of hours I'll save by not cycling in January and February. It seems to me roughly 8-10 work days total, or essentially 4-5 hours per week [wait: that math doesn't work. That's actually 8-10 hrs per week!]. Here's how I plan to fill that time:

• yoga class
• meditation
• reading for pleasure
• major cleaning/organizing project
• writing time
  

This is a way to strike a balance, I think, between the de-stressing that Dr. Gorgeous would like me to do and addressing the real practical life needs that I have hurried or ignored. I have my plan, I have my meds, I have the specimens. And now I need to live my life with grace for the next eight weeks. And all the trying weeks that follow.

Happy New Year, everyone. I keep telling myself that 2010 just has to be better. It has to, right?