To be involved and exposed

“Courage… is the sine qua non of any attempt to deal with the threat of senility – courage to face the truth, and to live fully in the face of it. With courage a person can go about living in another way – a way that will give maximum chance of dying with his faculties intact. This other way is not the way of the welfare culture in which we are all immersed. It does not involve the constant search for comforts or the obsessive pursuit of health. On the contrary, it is a way of benign shabbiness and self-neglect, of risky enjoyments and bold adventures. 

“It involves constant exercise – but not of the body. Rather, exercise of the person, through relationships with others, through sacrifice, through the search for opportunities to be involved and exposed. Such, at least, is my intuition. The life of benign shabbiness is not a life of excess. Of course you should drink, smoke, eat fatty foods – but not to the point of gluttony. The purpose is to weaken the body while strengthening the mind. 

“The risks you take should not damage your will or your relationships, but only your chances of survival. Officious doctors and health fascists will assail you, telling you to correct your diet, to take better forms of exercise, to drink more water and less wine. If you pursue a life of risk-taking and defiance the thought-police will track you down, and your lifestyle will be held up to ridicule and contempt.

 “It is not that anyone intends you to live beyond your time. Rather, to use Adam Smith’s famous image, the old people’s gulag arises by an invisible hand from a false conception of human life – a conception that does not see death as a part of life, and timely death as the fruit of it.

“Each of us must decide for himself what the life of benign shabbiness requires of him. Obviously dangerous pursuits like hunting and mountaineering have a part to play. Equally important is the forthright expression of opinion, so as to win grateful friends and implacable enemies, a process that enhances both the consolations of social life, and the tensions of day-to- day living.

“ I am not sure that I could live like my friend the writer and campaigner Ayaan Hirsi Ali; but there is an adorable recklessness in her truth-directed way of life that makes each moment of it worthwhile. Going out to help others, in ways that involve danger and the threat of disease, is also a useful form of exposure. The main point, it seems to me, is to maintain a life of active risk and affection, while helping the body along the path of decay, remembering always that the value of life does not consist in its length but in its depth.”

—Roger Scruton, Dying in Time

Rainbows

I have journaled or blogged for most of my life, but the motivations for doing so have varied over the years. My current blogging space/identity was created in 2013 when my husband and I had been trying (and failing) to have children for about a year and a half. I recognized this as a major life crisis and took steps to deal with it, one of which was connecting with the infertility blogging community via my other blog (now restricted to private readership). It was a significant part of my life until the past two or three years. 

I interacted with a variety of people in this community over the 5 to 7 years I was most active, and they resolved in one way or another, most by having a baby (-ies) but sometimes without doing so. I don’t follow many people anymore, but there’s a few I read, including one who who was not able to have children despite years of trying multiple strategies.  Recently she wrote a blog about reframing the concept of a “rainbow baby”. A rainbow baby is a baby who is born after pregnancy loss or the death of an infant (sadly both of these things often happen to mothers who have difficulty conceiving, though they can happen to those who don’t as well.)  However, Finding a Different Path discusses what a rainbow looks like for those who did not have any children in the end. She quotes a recent book:

Sometimes a rainbow is a child, and sometimes it's the renewal of vows, a career milestone, a new sense of self, the ability to self-love.

I started thinking about this with relation to my own story. I never lost a pregnancy to my knowledge (if I ever did it was very early, before I even knew). And I did in the end have two children, though not without many years of anxiety and uncertainty. 

My “rainbow”, as my friend defines it, would be living my life without the relentless focus on my body and biology. During the years we were trying to conceive, I was so focused on the physical possibility of having a baby that it became very difficult to envision any kind of life outside of that, even the life with children that I was trying to achieve!

I see in hindsight that this was a very materialist focus. My body and what it could and couldn’t do was the most important influence on how I saw myself in relation to the world. One of the few ways I pushed back against this was by refusing to unequivocally label myself “infertile.” My blog name, for example, is an Irish word that means “fertile”. But overall I would say I was the most cynical, atheistic, and materialistic in this phase of my life that I have ever been. Never completely so, but tending toward that way more so than not.

 Particularly before the conception of my eldest daughter, I was very focused on “means to an end.” I did not want to do anything unethical, but neither did I want to think too deeply about any issue beyond the fulfillment of my desires. If other people that appeared decent were doing something to conceive, whether that was IVF or egg/sperm donation or IUI, then that was reason enough for me to consider it.  Did I know there were aspects of all these actions that were complicated? Yes. Did I want to look too closely at any of those issues? No. 

But my point is not really about specific assisted reproductive techniques. It is more about my overall focus. Even when we were not using ART (and ultimately no form of ART got me pregnant) I defined success in terms of processes in my body and the degree to which I could submit them to my will. The fact that most of the time I couldn’t get my body to do what I wanted didn’t stop me from trying or from seeing it as a somewhat faulty machine, for the most part. Where there was disappointment or sadness, it was also not too difficult to find ways to blame others: infertile/sub fertile people and our challenges are often misunderstood or overlooked by the people around us. This is true, but fixating on this also blurred out the ways that I myself was adding to my own unhappiness. 

What shocked me out of this mindset? Honestly, it was the conception and birth of my children, especially my eldest daughter. AJ was conceived, bizarrely and unexpectedly, following our one and only IVF cycle, which was canceled midway because my body did not respond to the powerful drugs that were pumped into it. A emotional rollercoaster followed, where I had bleeding and believed I was losing the pregnancy, but ultimately didn’t. My world shattered. One message emerged starkly from the chaos:

YOU. ARE. NOT. IN. CONTROL.

Although a baby is a joyful event, this is not an uncomplicated joyful message to receive. Other than my two amazing small humans, my life is now about learning to live with this knowledge. If I’m not in control, what is? How do I negotiate with it? How do I steer over choppy waters in strong winds? What would life be like if I stopped mainly viewing my children as results of a biological process and more as gifts of grace? Obviously they are both, but which story is closest to the truth of who and what they are? I would have to say “grace,” especially as I move away from the obsessive process of trying to conceive and towards a desire to understand life as a meaningful whole.

After the storm, a rainbow. And a whole new road to take.