Fongo Fever

I have discovered a new dish that I love. Last week, we took a quick vacation to Puerto Rico, and I ordered this every single night. It is

MOFONGO!

It's basically mashed, fried plantains stuffed with fried meat or vegetables. It's often served in a big wooden mug, like the kind of thing a pirate would sip grog from. It's kind of like baked potato, or yucca, or taro (all of which I love), but even better. Each night, I had a stomachache from eating too much mofongo, but it was totally worth it.

Yesterday I bought plantains and tried cooking them myself. My husband laughed at me as soon as he came in the door and saw me frying them: "Someone's got the fever for the fongo!... Haven't you learned your lesson?" But it would take more than a stomachache to deter me from eating this stuff.

As it happened, I bought the wrong kind - ripe ones; they turned out good, but they're sweet like baked banana. The starchy flavor and texture I liked was from green ones. So I'll pick up some more and continue my experiments in the kitchen soon. Wish me luck!

Happy Fifth!

Wow, I've been keeping this blog for five years now! I am amazed. I didn't think I'd stay interested in it that long. I figured either I would get sad that no one reads my posts, and give up, or I'd get nervous that too many people read my posts, and go silent. Well, I am a little sad that no one reads my posts (snif!). Except for my one loyal and awesome reader who knows who she is.

I wonder what the secret is for getting lots of readers. Maybe having a wild and interesting life? But some people just write about their kids and post pictures of the new lamp that they ordered from a catalog and get 1000 comments a day. Being terribly funny? That's beyond me, although I can be wry or funny in an unintentional, tripping over my own feet way. Emailing real-life contacts and asking them to read the blog? But then I wouldn't be able to write about them behind their backs.

Perhaps the secret is reading other people's blogs and posting comments on them. But I do that sometimes, and never get a return visit. Realistically, I will have to just keep deriving satisfaction from writing this blog and not from hopes of being "heard."

I read my first entry and had to laugh. I was being so coy. I don't have a sister! And my middle name is not even Phoenix, though it would be great if it was. Anyway, I look back on the person I was five years ago and I've definitely changed. As I read those early entries, I see how desperate I was to be liked. I was nervous that no one - my boyfriend, my coworkers, my friends - liked me enough and I was going around trying to be really sweet and appealing so that they would. I'm not so much like that any more. I feel stronger inside and more capable of shrugging things off.

There was also an element of hopelessness and fear in some of the early entries, because I wanted things (marriage, a house, kids) that seemed unattainable. And now I have them. I am just rolling around in those riches every day. Really, I am much happier for having them, just as I knew I would be, and the fact that I got the things I wanted so much makes me feel a bit more secure. Plus, motherhood has given me a self-esteem boost because I've learned how to do all these things I never had experience with before, and I'm endlessly capable and magic in my child's eyes. Even though I'm ranting and raving these days about being infertile, secretly it's not throwing me too badly. I feel confident that I'm going to overcome it and either manage to conceive or manage to be OK with a one-child family.

I wrote a lot more about what I was reading, back in the early days. I still find time to read nowadays, mostly on the train to work. I should write more about that. Right now I'm rereading Heart's Blood by Jane Yolen. I feel like she is really writing about a real place, the details are so well worked out. I can feel the hot shimmery desert sun, and see the fields of burnwort, and hear the dragons houghing and smell the heaps of fewmets the bondboys are shoveling. I wonder how much time she put into imagining all that stuff, before she even started writing the story.

I also used to write a lot about cleaning, and how guilty I felt for doing that instead of going out and being an interesting person. As though some invisible outside presence was going to judge me for not being well rounded enough. I don't worry about that any more. I still like cleaning, and I still spend way more time at home than I do expanding my horizons, but it's all right with me.

All in all, it's been a good five years.

Vicarious Happiness

My friend is pregnant! The one who has been going to the same fertility clinic as me. Back when I found out she was receiving fertility treatment too, I wrote that if only one of us could succeed, it should be her. And she's done it. She actually got pregnant just a couple of days after our heart-to-heart. When she told me today, I was so happy and excited I was jumping up and down. She's like a sister to me, and there's no one I know who's more deserving of the chance to be a mom. She's very worried that she'll miscarry and hasn't told anyone yet, besides her husband and mother. But I have this joyful, calm certainty that it will all be just fine.

I wish I was pregnant too. (Duh. That's like the duh statement of the year.) The day that I ovulated all on my own, back at the beginning of July, was the same day that I knew she was having her IUI, and I had this wild hope that we would both get pregnant on that same day and go through the whole experience side by side. I imagined raising our babies together and having them be like siblings, or at least cousins.

Now that she's succeeded, and I haven't, I feel like I'm watching her run away down a racetrack while I got left at the starting gate. I should be running down that track too. It feels wrong that I'm still stuck here and can't, due to various factors, even start my own treatment for two more months.

I was genuinely, thoroughly happy for her for about three hours, with not even a flicker of anything else - and the joy of her pregnancy was on my mind continuously during that time. But then around midafternoon I started to feel a sadness creeping up on me. I ought to just be simply happy for her. It's stupid to feel that twinge of sadness and envy. It'll be my turn eventually, I hope. But I want it now.

It's almost as though the universe was listening when I made my bargain that if only one of us could get pregnant, it should be her. Well? the universe is saying. You got your wish. And I feel greedy and selfish all over again because even though she did get pregnant, I want to be too.

Cutting Some Slack

Today I was thinking about that standard list of things that people say to women who are dealing with infertility, that are intended to be nice but are actually hurtful - you know, "maybe it's for the best," and so on. And the general gushing that people do who aren't infertile, basking in babylove, talking about how many children they will have, etc. It's hurtful because it's little nagging reminders of that thing that seemingly everyone around you can have, merely by deciding they want it, whereas for you it's out of reach and only obtainable (sometimes) if you spend a lot of money and time, and sometimes not even then. So fundamentally unfair.

But. Something it's important to remember is that the things people say are intended to be nice. People whose lives aren't consumed by infertility don't always realize what the emotional landscape looks like. I've been guilty of that myself.

Years ago, before I was even married, I was talking to a coworker who was trying to get pregnant and had so far been unsuccessful. "Maybe you're working too hard. You should just take some time off," I said. I was repeating something I'd often heard about infertility. Another friend who was with us said, "Have you considered adoption?" Our coworker said, "Maybe. And yeah, I've thought about it." Looking back on that conversation, I realize how stupid our comments were. Her infertility probably had nothing to do with working too hard. And yes, she had probably considered adoption. She didn't need us to suggest it. But the two of us, unthinking 20-year-olds that we were, thought we were providing support and suggesting helpful things she might not have thought of before.

Another time, a friend confided to me, soon after the birth of my daughter, that he and his wife had been trying to have kids as well, but she had had a miscarriage. I said, "Oh dear. I hope you'll have better luck next time." That comment haunts me - what a flip thing to say to someone who had been through the deep misery of a miscarriage. I'd probably be inconsolable if I actually got pregnant and then miscarried. And that I said it to him with my healthy newborn in my arms was probably the salt in the wound.

I want to cry out in protest whenever people say things that hurt me. Just today a friend sent me a video of her kids playing together (her daughter is exactly my daughter's age, and her young son was conceived right around when I wanted to get pregnant again and realized I couldn't). She commented, "They're going to be best friends for life!" That's what I want for my daughter too, and I can't have it. I felt so frustrated and upset as I watched the video. But true courage, I think, is cutting people some slack and just clamping down on that internal dialogue of pain - smiling and replying as though they said the right thing. Because they probably meant to.

Summer Is Over

It's only just turned August. But just now a cricket started piping under my study window. The sound conjures up so much nostalgia for me, it almost makes a lump come into my throat. Cool days, frost on the grass in the mornings, car doors slamming. Getting ready for school. Wearing a jacket with a hood in the morning, carrying it over my arm on the way home. Maple trees decked with sunset colors. Running from the bus stop to keep warm. I remember E.B. White's classic line in Charlotte's Web, the crickets singing, "Summer is over, summer is over, summer is over and gone." It makes me think of things quickening.

Happysingle

Today I was reading an article about happy singles - women who aren't searching for a mate, who are actually content in their lives, all by themselves. They distinguish themselves from the "quirkyalones" who are single but don't want to be. The quirkyalones keep posting personality profiles on matchmaking sites and recasting their personalities in hopes of attracting someone who will appreciate them. If I hadn't met my husband, I would be a quirkyalone. Occasionally, maybe most of the time, I'd stray into depressedandmiserablealone territory. I often think how lucky I am to have him and how my baseline mood is so much better than it used to be when I was single.

But. If I knew somehow that being married would never be an option for me, could I be happy?

I thought about this for a while and finally decided that yes, if the pressure of the search was taken away, I would be fine. I could create a nice life for myself, packed full of all the things I like to do: gardening, reading, visiting friends, travel, animals, camping, poetry. I'd take art classes and carry a sketchbook with me. I'd go on long tramps across the English countryside in knee-high boots for the mud, hopping over stiles. I'd probably get a PhD in ecology and have a career in academia, with no family longings to distract me or encourage me to settle for less. I wouldn't have to compromise on anything I wanted to do - no apologies that it rained during the camping trip I planned and really wasn't fun like I promised it would be. It would actually be fun, if I didn't have to take anyone else's feelings into account. I'd lie there Buddhalike listening to the rain and composing haikus, then warm up hot chocolate on my camp stove the next morning and go for a long hike across the dewy fields.

Thinking about this life in another dimension I almost wish it's the road I'd chosen. If only I could live my life again, and again, and do it in every way.

Bandwagon

I fell off the bandwagon. Quite a while ago, in fact; as it rounded a curve in the road, I just slid right off the tailgate and landed with a soft thump in the dust. Ever since, I've been sitting on the side of the road, eating the most delicious moist velvety chocolate cake with melt-in-your-mouth icing, while the strains of the band grow ever fainter in the distance. I can still glimpse the sunlight glinting off the saxophones and horn section when the wagon tops the occasional rise. I don't think they've even noticed I'm gone.

While I eat my cake, I've been mulling a few questions, including
- Should I try again, and see if I can be sugar-free for the month of August?
- Why is my willpower so damn weak, anyway? It shouldn't really be that hard to give up sweets. Millions, probably billions of people in the world live without sugar in their diets. But for me it seems to be this huge unconquerable mountain - I count the days, obsessing over what I'm not allowed to have and how much longer I have to do without it.
- That fact makes me feel like a terrible greedy slug. I ought to have my mind on higher things.
- For the first two weeks of July, I thought I might be pregnant, so it was easier to be pure. Then I found out in mid-July that I wasn't, and I was so disappointed, I binged on sugar just to try to stop crying.
- My husband isn't addicted to sugar. Giving up sugar for a month would be easy for him. He probably doesn't even realize that there are two Klondike bars in the right-hand side of the freezer, that have been there for a month, that are so prominent in my imagination it's like they're burning a laser hole through the freezer door and flashes of disco light are escaping into the kitchen from the party that they're having in there, and he walks right past the fridge like he doesn't even see it.
- My husband also doesn't particularly want a second child. Or increased family togetherness like I'm always trying to get us to have. Or better conversations. Or more emotional closeness. Or more travel to interesting places. Or more friends.
- What the hell does my husband want, anyway?
- Is this just how our lives and our marriage are going to be from now on? me always putting on a brave face and acting cheerful and trying to keep things lively, while he exudes inertia and spends the weekend in his computer chair if at all possible? Do other couples have to try this hard to find things to do together and to have fun together, or does it just happen naturally for them? I'm so grateful that we don't fight, that dinnertime is harmonious, that we are nice to each other. And underlying that, I'm so grateful to be married at all. But is that as good as it gets?
- Why doesn't he read my blog, anyway? He knows the URL. I was a little nervous about giving it to him, initially, because I thought that if he read it I'd censor my thoughts. Then I realized he never did, and was able to relax. Then I felt wistful, and wished he would, because if nothing else it's a good way to project, in a passive-aggressive way.
- If he had a blog, I'd check that thing every day, I'm that interested in getting a window into his thoughts. When we have nonconversations in which I come up with four or five things to say and he just doesn't answer at all, not even a grunt to show that he heard me, what is going on in his head? Is he lost in his own thoughts? Thinking about something completely different? Mulling over what I said? Not at all interested in what I said? How can you just not say anything when someone is talking to you?
- Being happy is something that you have to work at. I know that. And I never want to be one of those people who makes someone else responsible for their happiness, and who then gleefully blames them for failing. I've been on the receiving end of that and it's an awful thing to do to someone. So I do take responsibility for my own happiness. The day that I found out I wasn't pregnant, all I wanted to do was weep and lie around and be comforted, but I didn't even call a single friend, or ask anything of my husband. I came up with a plan that would get me up and out of the house all day with my child, to keep both of us occupied, and I pushed all the misery down inside. But. It would have been nice if he had noticed. Either the sadness or the way I dealt with it.

See, this is why freewriting can be so revealing. I started here thinking I wanted to write about my weakness for sugar, and I ended up talking about my relationship. I have probably written more than I should share. If he ever did read my blog, I know he'd be uncomfortable that I'm writing in this vein. But he doesn't, so he'll never know.