Monday, September 29, 2008

flying high; flying low

The days have been flying so fast by my eyes that I feel more winded than I have in a long time.

On Thursday, I flew to California for the Critical Resistance 10 year anniversary conference.

Kk and I spoke on the phone, of course, when I got there and a few times on Friday. I noticed that her emotional state seemed a bit wobbly--much more unstable than usual. See, kk is my rock. She is level-headed and good-natured, but she has also always been a bit reserved with her emotions. She holds things in and let's life go on around her.

On Friday my friend at the conference asked me how kk was doing and I said not so good; she has been down; she is in a strange place.

So on Saturday morning when I spoke with her and she was weeping like a wet fish and had been for hours before she spoke with me,I knew she had fallen into a place she had never been before. When I said let's change my flight so I can come home to you early and she did not say, "no, I'll be okay", I really knew she was not okay.

Clomid has invaded her range of emotions and caused her to crash into a fragility that scares us both.

Kk booked me a red eye; it left 12 hours after I spoke with my weepy beautiful girl.
I still was able to attend most of the conference (all Friday and Saturday), have dinner and beers with friends on Saturday and make it to the San Fransisco airport 2 hours early.

I took my allergy medicine and hoped that I would sleep like a baby on the three hour flight to Minneapolis where I had a layover and plane change. But, I slept like a person trapped in a thrashing nightmare. My ass burned with the residue of sitting for too many hours over a 3 day period and my head was filled with worry for my girl and the natural worry that surfaces in the pit of my stomach every time I leave solid ground and launch my body via airplane into the sky.

I made it home to my sweet baby at 9:30 am eastern time. I was sleep deprived and stuffy headed, but wrapping my arms around her slight body and knowing I was there to help hold her fragile heart made me smile with serenity.

Amidst this emotional turmoil, she has restarted the Clomid (this time a double dose). I am not so happy about any of it, but it is what she wants to do.

We are now setting off into the dreary midst of more western medicine induced depression, but I cannot blame her weariness on the Clomid alone. There is something ominous hovering in the air around us. I think the sheer fact that a bigot the size of Sarah Palin could actually be put into a seat that gives her power to be one step away from the presidency is the epitome of that hovering, grim cloud.

As a queer person, I am feeling the gloom of the potential repression that accompanies the ideology of closed-minded, hate-filled holders of power. All of this is only the surface of my thinking on how the context of politics and culture directly impacts the inner-workings of our emotions. All of that analysis is for another day...

In the meantime, I will be holding my girl through this ever-changing ride.

Friday, September 19, 2008

my thumb tip is dangling and hope is dried up...

i am having a hell of a week.

and now when i thought i would write an update here on this public blathersphere, i can barely type.

see, i sliced off (well actually it is a flap of 1/4 inch skin) part of my thumb tip this morning. the best thing about slicing my thumb, besides kk taking great care of it, was it made me forget about my headache.

on a heavier note--clomid sucks. kk took it this cycle and then failed to ever get an LH surge. she has always surged, usually for 12 hours and now she takes this drug and does not surge at all...

i am over this.

we are both at the end of our ropes and will most likely take a break from all things pregnancy related. we did inject a few times based on the days that k typically ovulates, but i have no hope. it has been dried up or washed down the drain or strung up on the wall like miserable christmas lights.

that's it.

update over...

Thursday, September 11, 2008

i will not crush her/his heart

I just drank a couple of beers and ate a super cheesy veggie burger at one of our smoky watering holes.

kk and i had a nice time sitting there talking to one another and sitting there staring at one another and sitting there listening to the not so delightful open mic in the other room.

my dinner came out with a mini-bag of better maid potato chips in the red plastic basket that held my veg burger. better maids always throw me back to my childhood. no matter what, i get sent down that rabbit hole of littleness. my ma ate the things by the handful. for the first years of my life (up until age 7), she lived on better maids, coca cola, and marlboro reds. yes, my mama was an avid smoker. she weighed all of 110 pounds and ran around like a chicken with her head cut off.

she was and is an excellent mother and grandmother. and i really fear getting into some of the sad parts of my past here in public, but there is a connection to the present.

and those damn better maids fueled this important conversation about childrearing over at the bar tonight.

my parents believed it was okay to hit their kids (they no longer believe this, but it is a little too late for me). so, one of the hard pieces connected to me really coming to the decision to have a kid with kk was the fact that i was raised getting smacked around by both of my parents, and sometimes that smacking did get out of hand.

couple the legacy of a childrearing style that i am deeply opposed to (that is the smacking and whipping and hitting of kids to keep them in line)with my huge-ass temper that was (i believe) birthed out of the violence i was exposed to (and subsequently inflicted on my sister, Eone,--we fought physically like angry wind up boxing dolls) and well...

while i know i could never raise a hand to a child, it is the raising of my voice and the brutality of the words that are capable of coming out of my mouth that have me still, to this day, concerned.

i have intense mood swings. kk is more than kind and puts up with the fierceness that piles up in my heart and then spills like toxic waste out of my mouth (and sometimes just my eyes or my body language). I go to dark places--places that only a few people, closest to me, see or know about or maybe even recognize. over the years these bouts of intense anger and depression have lessened, but still they do come on and kk asked me today," you will not crush our kid's heart with your words will you?"

and i promised, "i will not crush her/his heart."

and i do promise that. and i work everyday on lessening the legacy of the wounds of simply being alive among people who also were exposed to harshness and dysfunction as children, my parents. i hate to even use the word dysfunction cause all in all i believe that life itself is chaotic and many things are out of the path of reason and human understanding, but my parents did the best with what they knew and were exposed to and they loved me in spite of their anger and fragility.

and i will do the best with what i know and who i am and the support i have encircling me. no crushing here. i know this to be true, cause even though my heart may have been pinned down at times by my parents (this is true as a child and by the hurtfulness connected to their reaction and resistance to the revelation of my queerness), my heart has never been crushed. however, it has been tempered and tarnished, polished and pressed and now it pumps harder for what is right and good than it ever has before.

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

my girl is so hot and fast!

today k and i rode home from work in 90 degree heat; it was steamy.
so, we were riding along--kind of slow cause my knee is still all fucky, but not too slow by any means--and this macho dude on his bicycle zooms past us on the grass on the right of the path we were riding on. He totally startled me and the move was straight up rude (bike rules are like car rules pass on the left).

His move made me think that he was showing off his speediness and being a semi-asshole.

Now, my kk can ride fast. she can ride like the wind. she is determined and persistent and fucking hot as hell on her new surly long haul trucker with its bar end shifters. Have i ever reflected here about how sexy i think women are when driving stick shift cars? well, i have the same reaction to women and bar end shifters--there is a loveliness in the arms of women as they reach from the top of the handle bars to the ends and the little motion it takes to shift.

so, i whispered over to kk, "go pass that guy. you can ride way faster than he can. go blow his overly zealous shared path passing ass for a whirl. seriously, go ahead; i'll catch up with ya later."

she smiled and busted a hot and beautiful move. she picked up speed; blew past him on the left, after calling out "on your left." and then she was gone and the right hand passer was left in the dust of my hotty.

I found her later at the end of the path. she was waiting for me all sweaty and gorgeous with a smirk on her summer face.

she is also extra hot cause she started the clomid and it makes her sweat. her period is done and over. she has one clomid left and then we wait for the great egg drop followed by another do it at home with injector injecting sperm sloshing party.

but back to my baby on a bicycle; she is really so strong and sexy. her calves are like carved marble rocks--elegant and shapely and when she pedals fast and hard like she did today, well she makes me kind of pant in my pants...