Nice trunk

Ok, let’s talk about the elephant hanging around the IF blogosphere. This coming Sunday is (dare I type it?), Mother’s Day.

To wax not so eloquently: It sucks for the IF crowd. It sucks for the I love my mom but she’s far away/deceased crowd. It sucks for the I love my mom but she has an entire chapter dedicated to her in several psychology textbooks crowd. 

So for me, who is an infertile currently estranged from her mother who lives 1000 miles away there aren’t enough metaphors to express the anger and bitterness I feel about this upcoming Sunday. There is no acidic substance that can be dripped onto the open wounds in my soul that could fully illustrate how I feel when I allow myself to look at the elephant.

Mother’s Day has fucked up one Sunday a year for me. And I’m pissed because for me Sunday is supposed to mean church and feeling spiritually refreshed for the week ahead. And when I go to church on Sunday, I will be up in front standing in the choir watching the pastor bless the mothers and her blessing will not be for me and Mikey. Don’t tell me to not go to church. I miss church once a month to make room for an AA committment and I feel so off center I can’t imagine missing more.And did I forget to mention I have been asked to join the deaconate? I have a month to make my decision and then will receive 12 weeks of training starting in July.

But there is a balm this year. Mother’s Day this year falls on a date in May that is full of joy. While it will hurt to watch the mothers’ blessing I will take comfort that on May 11, 2001, God gave me proof of His love for me by sending Mikey in my path. And while we may not have the child we still have our love.

 

What I’ve learned so far

• So much stuff has sugar and corn syrup in the first five ingredients!
• Goodbye to my breakfast shake
• That the only cereal I can eat at home tastes like Communion host. For the non-Catholics: think less flavorful rice cake
• Goodbye to baked L*ays (huh? baked potato chips? never would have thought it when I read the label.)
• No cola slurpees
• I do not miss honey

So again the plan is no sugar or cornsyrup in the first five ingredients, no honey, no white flour and for now no pasta till I figure out my relationship with whole wheat and non-wheat pastas.

And to keep it real. Today I got on the scale, in the morning, nekkid: 221.2

First goal: a minimum 15 pounds by New Year’s Eve.: 206.2 

 

An experiment

I was talking to a friend who lost a lot of weight and has found a new peace about his food plan. He recognized that he was a food addict and began a plan of abstinence. His plan was:

No sugar and corn syrup in the first five ingredients

No honey

No maple syrup.

I talked about my eating triggers and habits and decided that my biggest triggers were sugar, corn syrup, good breads and bagels and pasta. Honey, I rarely use. I don’t like maple syrup. What I couldn’t figure out if it was just white pasta or would I go crazy with whole wheat pasta or nonwheat pastas. At home, I’ve already made the switch to non white rice, whole grain breads, and raw sugar and the yellow stuff. The final frontier is the pasta and my food choices out of the house. After some reflection I decided that one day at a time I will follow this plan:

No sugar or corn syrup in the first five ingredients.

No white flour

No pasta of any kind for now until I figure out if non wheat pastas are a trigger or if I could eat whole wheat in moderation

Let’s see how it goes

 

 

Pray-In

On Wednesday at 3pm there will be a pray-in to protest the Sean Bell Shootings. Full details here.

I’ll be less than a weekat my new job but I hope to be at one of the sites, praying. I haven’t decided if I will take it a step further and be a guest of the City of New York. I will be ath either lower manhattan or brooklyn site.

Those out of the area please takae a moment at 3pm to pray for peace and justice.

 

Questions

Over at Fostering Pride, there are a ton of questions to answer so I decided to put them all in one post

Do you believe in ghosts? The short answer is yes because I have many a tale to tell. Another post

What are your gas-saving ideas? Everyone move to New York City and use mass transit.

What is something you wish you did better? Blog regularly with wit and talent. Lose weight.

What movies are you looking forward to seeing this summer? Narnia, Indiana Jones and I’m sure there are more I can’t remember.

How many places have you lived? 10 different places within the NY/NJ area

Do you smoke?  Have you ever smoked? I am slip sliding back to cigarettes and have been an on and off smoker (pack a day my highest) since I was 13.

What do you plan on doing with the tax rebate (if you’re getting it?) Pay off some bills.

What kinds of things do you like to bring home from vacation? Native foods and photographs

What’s your usual breakfast? Good girl: breakfast shake with a boiled egg or oatmeal with fruit Bad girl: 2 eggs bacon and cheese on a plain bagel.

How are you when waking up?  Do you bounce out of bed, or are you a dragger, like me? I am a dragger and a chronic snooze button pusher.

Do you share the same political views as your family of origin? I come from a long line of left leaning democrats towards socialists.

How do you sleep?  Stomach, side, back?  How much of the bed do you like to cover? I am a stomach sleeper and I am NOT a bed hog depsite rumors to the contrary.

 

Recovering

Sorry for the blog silence but with the blog transmitted virus going from here to here, I was afriad to also be felled by it and decided to remian silent until it was safe to go to the internet again.

Last day at my job kinda sorry to see it go because I enjoyed the kids but I know it was the right decision for me. Went yesterday to a big lobby day at our state capitaland the kids did really great even in the face of visiting a known opponent to our rights. But a sure sign of aging is the fact that my internal system is a wreack after a long bus rides with the high quality food offered on the average US highway. Ugh. It’s going to be a while before I get back to normal.

 

Brown, White and Shame

This verdict makes me remember the many discussions we have about race in our household. As visible Latina in a Latino dominated neighborhood we think about bringing a child into the world with the baggage of moving around as a person of color and as a child of queer parents. Will our child be subject to the day to day racism? Will he or she be able to rely and trust the authoritities supposedly hired to protect and serve him/her. What does it mean to raise a Latino male in this city? Yes I am more worried about males than females because males are uncharted territory for Mikey and I having had no brothers and very few male cousins. And how will the addition of homophobia complicate matters?

And then I rethink our desire to have a child that is visibly a child of color. When we were on our donor hunt many moons qago, Mikey and I had a desire that the donor be Latino, Puerto Rican, and have very visible Latino characteristics (black hair, brown eyes, olive/brown skin). This desire I confess comes from a place of mild dislike for “White” features and a desire for the baby to look like Mikey. The last couple of times this was mentioned I had put most of the onu on Mikey bu I know it existed in me too. Maybe not to the extent of Mikey but it was there for me too.

I feel bad that that White dislike did flare up in me as I have a mother, sister and nephews with very European features and I worship the ground their little toddler feet walk on but yes I confess that I made a joke or two on how Sis found the one BabyDaddy that was White on the entire island of Puerto Rico. 

And all this is just a bunch of nonsense because all Latinos are a genetic stew and many brown parents have given birth to white, blue eyed babies even in my own family so I could easily be one of them but i still have the hope that I am not because I don’t want to be mistaken for my child’s nanny (which I was for my nephews here in NYC) and I want my child to be proud of that extra melanin from God.

 

Justice Denied….again

Acquitted on all counts.

How can the life of one African American man mean so little? A fiance, a son a father so dispensible?

How can we live in a world that a night of legal carousing can lead to your death and injury? Is this our reality? People of color and people with limited means have to live with the fear of injury or death when they go about doing what the majority of the population can do without having to create safety plans? When are 51 bullets ever considered a good shoot? This is what people call “good police work”?

I am so very sad and upset about this all.

 

Where’s the off swtich?

It’a a beautiful spring day here in NYC and the last place I want to be is at my soon to be ex employment but hey it is what it is.

Thinking about friends going through rough times and what will happen once Sis is released from the hospital. Then I think about my new job and how it’s going to be. I hope to get back on meds this week. Mikey is waiting to hear back from the therapist about available time slots.

I love Mikey. Mikey loves me. But is that enough? We are feeling our age difference in the way we look at life, the way we cope with infertility, the way we need sex and passion. Sometimes I think if we would move to better place, get better jobs, get pregnant everything will be alright. But then I wake up.

I need to turn my brain off don’t I?

 

saturday Salutations

thank you all for your posts and your support both on and off line. It’s a day at a time. right now I am concentrating on the work i have to do this weekend. its a beautiful spring day and i plan to enjoy it.

this blog has become less and less a ttcinfertility blog and more of a daily happenings blog. i guess right now ttc seems so far away from everything else i want to do: fix my marriage, steady myself in a job, move to a new place. to name a few.

so i guess i will plucg along continue to read and blog because no matter what i write about i need to continue because this is my sole outlet right now.