Spaces and Shapes and The IVF Lyfe

A short list of nonstandard shapes

• An upper lip that resembles a waterslide at a park, the center section a fast runway down and then a dramatic u-shaped curve at the bottom for launching bodies into the great public pool.  (This is the upper lip I had in my dream last night, a dream in which I found myself presenting at a company meeting and everyone secretly making fun of the way I look, me being aware of the whispers and comments in that omniscient dreamlike way that seems so normal while you’re experiencing it — im ugly im ugly im ugly everyone thinks im ugly is what I woke up with in my head)
• Flat sheer ice with pockmarks from rock salt that somehow reminds me of an adult’s face with acne scars (It snowed on Sunday and since then the top layer melted somewhat and then re-froze in a perfect coating glaze… perfect until I dumped salt on it.)
• My wife J’s body mass increasing in size, becoming lumpy and a little like an eggplant with boobs close to the stem, not because she is pregnant like we both want her to be, but because she is gaining weight from inactivity and overeating and stress and living without taking all that much care of herself

A short list of nonstandard spaces finished and not

• A mostly completed basement room that has a television mounted on a wall and will have an elliptical in it next week and I’m wondering if I should put in a desk in the corner for paperwork or hobbies and a workbench in another corner for small projects like taking apart an old record player and re-soldering the L speaker output which has become flaky, or would that make the space look too chaotic and weird as a three purpose room with hard concrete walls and black rubber flooring
• My old blog, in my headspace, eating up an outsized portion of my non-working, non-J-related thoughts.    I should delete it, I think.  It bothers me.  I should either post or delete it, I have concluded, not for the first time.  But I have been unable to post.  Someone linked to it on reddit last week and I viewed the comments.  A few nice things and then 1.  he writes like he’s autistic.  2. the conversations he has with other people .. wow, it’s like reading AI generated dialog so fucking cringe.  3.  he’s SMARMY af bro.  I want to make this space smaller in my head but it grows instead.
•  The virtual space in which I hold therapy with Scarecrow, on a zoom meeting, only his head and shoulders visible, impossible to tell he is actually 6’5″ from the angle of the camera, a picture of northern England on the wall that reminds me of All Creatures Great and Small, rolling hillsides and decaying wooden fences and a solitary one lane road weaving through it all.  I have never met him in person and probably never will but I will exist with him in this space tomorrow morning even though I will, while talking to him be wondering why I bother visiting this place at all.

ten minutes left you only have ten minutes left

Even as I write I am under the gun.  I should be doing other things:  Working, caring for my wife, exercising, taking the trash out, determining why the lights in our bedroom sometimes go out unexpectedly and the fuse trips.  In ten minutes J is home and I want to look busy when she arrives so she doesn’t think I have an easier life than she does.  She will be tired from the drive back from her work as a librarian, tired from acupuncture, tired from having to go to Walgreens and wait in a line full of oldsters for a medication that she needs for shingles, which she came down with last weekend.  She will be home in ten minutes, fifteen tops, and that’s what I have to journal in, because I have not yet figured out how to tell her, when she is home, that I don’t want to hang out with her, and would prefer to write banal journal entries for an audience of practically no one rather than spend time with her, because somehow I feel like the act of writing itself might be a good thing for me to periodically engage in.

J and I are doing another IVF cycle.  We’d been on hold through December after a disastrous November attempt that I don’t care to recount.

Two days ago, Wednesday, J went in for an ultrasound and they found fifteen growing eggs, ready to be harvested, implanted with my semen, potentially becoming blastocysts in a petri dish, then re-implanted into her to hopefully become a baby.

Fifteen!  It’s more than we’ve seen in any other cycle, and this is our ninth.  Maybe there’s hope for us after all.

I still wonder if we should have a kid.  Wonder if she’ll care as much for the kiddo as I will.  Wonder if I’ll get stuck with the bulk of the rearing — I’m currently stuck with most of the cooking and cleaning and caring for the house as it is.  J is just .. less capable than me.  I know that makes me sound like an egotistical piece of shit, I absolutely know it does — but it’s also true.

I hate feeling this way.  I wish I could just be like LETS HAVE A KID like everyone else but as soon as I have that thought I think about distribution of work between me and J and HOW THE FUCK OLD AM I GOING TO BE when the kid is 15 (62, pretty goddamned old to be handling a teenager) and what kind of planet we are going to leave to any offspring given that we’ve just blown past the 1.5 degree so-called safe level of temperature increases for the world.

I wish I could shut my thoughts off and create better spaces inside my head, blank spaces where I can draw any shapes that my heart imagines.

But I get what I get.