“The center of your own sorrow”

My best friend, my sister really, as I can not remember a time when I did not know her and love her, is pregnant.

I am not proud of my reaction when she first told me they were trying, a little over a year ago. It was something along the lines of, flippantly but too bitterly to be entirely joking, “If you get pregnant before me, I will be sincerely pissed off!” At that point we had been trying for almost two years, with about an eight month break for cancer, had one IVF miscarriage, and one round of IVF with absolutely no result. All the while she had been blithely denying that she was old enough to have kids yet.

But that is my story, not her story.

They have not had an easy time of it either. They had an unexpected pregnancy that ended in miscarriage just about five years ago. When they finally did start trying, it took 12 months of no success before they sought advice from a fertility center. One wham, bam, thank you m’am IUI, with no hormones or surgeries necessary, and they are now pregnant 14 months after starting to try.

When we first made the decision to cease fertility treatments, and I was newly zen with the sudden freedom, I wrote her a long letter. It was about many things, but the central theme was that I did not want that for her and that I hoped she would not let my struggles shadow her joy when she became pregnant, or her desire to share that joy with me.

And now it has happened. And I am struggling with the duality of my emotions.

When she first told me, my first instinct was joy. I am so happy that she is happy, that she is going to be able to experience this joy, that she is achieving something she has been struggling with. Her joy is my joy. I was the first person she told after her mom, so she was full of things she wanted to say and brimming with the newness, excitement, and hope of the situation. But as the conversation dragged on, and the reality began to settle, I could feel my eyes stop smiling, leaving my lips turned up in a facsimile of a smile.

I am at peace with our decision to stop fertility treatment and begin the adoption process, but I am still very much grieving the reality that I will never be pregnant or have a baby.

I have been asking myself how I am going to plan a baby shower and discuss a million little details that will prick at me like thorns. It is the wrong question. There is no, “how.” I love her. The strength resides within me, and thus, I will find it. I want this to be a full, rich, rewarding experience for her, and I will do everything I can to make it so.

The struggle is not how to be happy for her and support her despite the fact that she has something I want so desperately and can not have. The struggle is how to reconcile the ambivalence of joy and the sorrow I am feeling. They need not be mutually exclusive. I believe it is possible to rejoice for her and yet sorrow for my own loss. One need not detract from the other.

I need to believe that there is room in our friendship for us both to acknowledge our stories and our truths. She does not need to minimize her joy in reverence to my sorrow, just as I do not need to minimize my sorrow in reverence to her joy. They are both valid places to be in our lives, and each place requires the support of the other.

I think that I can truly come to feel these words as truth, deep in my bones, if I let myself sit with them for a while.

Not quite yet, but soon.

In the meanwhile, I will meditate on this:

The Invitation

by Oriah

It doesn’t interest me
what you do for a living.
I want to know
what you ache for
and if you dare to dream
of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me
how old you are.
I want to know
if you will risk
looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me
what planets are
squaring your moon…
I want to know
if you have touched
the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened
by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.

I want to know
if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.

I want to know
if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you
to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us
to be careful
to be realistic
to remember the limitations
of being human.

It doesn’t interest me
if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear
the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.
And if you can source your own life
from its presence.

I want to know
if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
“Yes.”

It doesn’t interest me
to know where you live
or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me
who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the centre of the fire
with me
and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me
where or what or with whom
you have studied.
I want to know
what sustains you
from the inside
when all else falls away.

I want to know
if you can be alone
with yourself
and if you truly like
the company you keep
in the empty moments.