The Constant Flower

One of the ways I've heard to separate types of people is to say some are gardeners and some are flowers. I'm lucky in that my hubby is a gardener and I am a flower (usually, sometimes we switch). Not a fussy, high-maintenance flower like an orchid or a rose, more like a daisy or a chrysanthemum...just give me a little love and I'll continue to bloom for you year after year.

Right now, I'm feeling like someone forgot to fertilize me. (Ha! Sorry for that little Freudian slip there.) I'm that sad, pathetic plant left in a plastic pot outside who only gets water when it rains. Many people in my life are trying to provide comfort and kindness right now, I think I'm just not able to accept it. Several friends have gently suggested I go back to therapy, but I just.don't.want.to.talk.about.it.any.more. I sure as hell don't want to pay $100 an hour to sit there and tell someone else I don't want to talk about it. It's not just ending up childless, it's all the back story -- the sexual abuse, the mentally ill mother, blah blah, I've gone over this ground a million times, I'm not going to "get over it", any more than I am going to get over trying and failing to have a child.

That's the "f" word that everyone keeps telling me I shouldn't use. I failed, ladies and gentlemen, there's no way around it. My friends tell me that saying I failed connotates that it was my fault, which it certainly was not. Perhaps not in any provable way, but it was my body that failed to produce a viable egg that was then fertilized. The only job my reproductive system was designed to do. If it wasn't my organs, then it was my decision to wait until I was 38 to even begin the process.

I've already talked about how I am not sorry that we went down this road, and neither is D., and that's the truth. When we first got together, legitimately, it was after a 5 year struggle, a messy, precarious slope that we nearly slid off of many times. For the next 5 years we were so damn slap happy just to be together the thought of marriage or children or anything except US never entered either of our heads.

I love D. more every day, I know that sounds corny but it's true. That's why this failure is so crushing. I am so lucky. How do I restore some of those feelings from the halcyon US days?