Jess Tennant

For the longest time, I held my losses close. I remembered every detail of every cycle: how many embryos there were, estrogen values (particularly when they spiked dangerously), HCG values for my two ill-fated pregnancies. It was somehow comforting to me to be an encyclopedia of loss, to own the data that represented so many heartbreaks.

But now, six years from ending our quest to be parents and eight and a half years from ending fertility treatments, I don’t need that information at my fingertips. It’s just not there anymore.

I discovered this while filling out medical paperwork for a new provider, and finding that I couldn’t remember just how many of the many procedures I’d endured. I thought about going to my exhaustive notebooks but they weren’t nearby. I briefly ventured into my back blogs, which brought me back to how I felt during all of that but not the specific numbers.

That’s when I stopped.

I didn’t need to provide a reckoning for Every. Single. Moment. of my medical trauma. I could just generalize, which would provide what was necessary.

Even better, I didn’t feel upset. I was thrilled that I’d forgotten all the details I’d held on to for so long. I imagined the opening of cognitive space, freed up for other memories, other tasks.

When we moved to our new house for our new life, we moved a lot of mementos with us. Countless children’s books, toys, childhood things that we once thought we’d give to our children. Some lived in bookshelves, and most of the more painful items lived in a clear plastic tub in the attic.

That tub is now more than half empty. The things left in it were either made for us, or special books or onesies that I just can’t quite let go of. What’s gone has been given to friends with young children who can use these items, and appreciate their origins.

My mom was cleaning out storage areas and dropped off cardboard boxes filled with childhood treasures at our house a couple years ago. I left one box in the garage for literally over a year. I just didn’t want to go through it. What would I do with these things that were loved by me as a child, but were left with no one to pass them on to? I thought of my mom’s closet in her childhood room at my grandma’s house in Ohio that was a treasure trove of dolls and kitchen/tea sets and jacks and marbles. I loved playing in that closet as a child. So having a cardboard box in the garage of my childhood treasures felt… not great.

This summer I did go through the box, and found my seashell collection in various tins and buckets. I used to know all their names, and loved categorizing and inspecting them and enjoying imaginative play with ones that looked like strawberries, or ice cream cones.

It made me sad for a hot minute, until I realized that I have friends with little girls who might love those seashells. So I sent a picture, and they were thrilled to inherit my collection. My friend sent me a picture of two of her three daughters, sending their Barbies (and one hyperflexible GI Joe) on a treasure hunt for the shells.

It gave me hope, because I don’t have to necessarily dump everything into the trash, or send it to Goodwill (where it may end up in the trash, because truly, not everything is a treasure). I can creatively pass things on to other children and families.

I realized  I was ready to part with these things – either childhood memories or stilted memories that got cut off before they could actually be.

Not everything has to be passed along. This summer, I enjoyed sharing some of my books with a friend’s 18-month-old who came to visit. Our house is decidedly NOT child-friendly (by design) and so it scared me having such a little in the house, but her mom kept her close and my little office was a perfect place to enjoy picture books on the soft carpet. It was a good reminder that I don’t have to give everything away.

It was that visit and then visiting another friend of mine with very young children that led to the most amazing discovery of this continuous process of moving forwards – I realized that I enjoyed the company of the tinies while I visited, but was more than happy to return to my quiet house with my quiet life. It was almost shocking to realize… I don’t want this anymore. I wanted it so badly for so long, and I couldn’t imagine life turning out the way it did, but now? I am happy to enjoy other people’s children and then go home, listen to classical music while reading a book on the couch with my husband and cats, a glass of wine in my hand. It gives me a window into another life, one that didn’t work out for us, and that now isn’t nearly as painful to watch as when I was deep in the longing.

It is a small miracle to hit these moving-forwards milestones, to find things in my not-so-new childless not by choice life that once would have gutted me, but no longer hold that kind of power over me. I’ve freed up space in my mind, my physical surroundings, and my heart.

It reminds me of a quote I received at some training or event, I can’t recall where, but the slip is all wrinkled and torn and tacked to my corkboard in my office where I type now. It’s by Colette Baron-Reid, who I didn’t realize until just now is a well-known counselor, medium, oracle, and lots of other, other-worldly titles. She is a proponent of radical acceptance, which explains why the quote spoke to me so much that I rescued it from the bottom of my pocketbook: 

There is a surrendering to your story and then a knowing that you don’t have to stay in your story.

Wherever you are in your story, know that sometime, someday, you will realize that you are not so deeply entrenched in your story. You may find that you can free up space that used to be monopolized by heartbreak, and find a new way to live with it, even beyond it. It won’t necessarily consume you forever.

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash