Dec
12

The Cheese Stands Alone.

I do not care for this season.
Perhaps I would if it meant a long vacation, but it doesn’t. Perhaps I would enjoy it if I were Christian, and believed in the religious trappings of the holiday, but I am not and do not.
I rather like Christmas Eve—which I spend with my mother and brother and a smattering of close family, but Christmas Day, to me, is unbearably depressing and anticlimactic. When I was young I generally spent Christmas Day with my father and his family—my father’s family having a seemingly bottomless ability to depress me. Afterwards I would sit in my room in my father’s smoky carpeted apartment and look out the window at the underpass, feeling crushed by an unnamable weight. Since I stopped seeing my father, I have spent Christmas Day by myself, making up excuses to avoid the huge Christmas Gin Fest in Afton my mother and other family, friends, and acquaintances attend.

Last year I was 7 weeks pregnant on Christmas Day. The Nearly was in Iowa visiting his family—I had decided not to go largely to avoid his mother, who was not pleased by the pregnancy, and about whom I was feeling teary and forlorn. I spent most of the day Googling miscarriage statistics and shoveling vanilla ice cream, bananas, ice chips and candied ginger into a blender–slurping the resulting concoction directly from the appliance while watching a Law and Order marathon. I cut my shoulder-length hair as short as I could with nail scissors and admired my new cap of hair in the mirror. I read part of “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” and cursed whomever had written the section on the recommended pregnancy diet.
That evening my phone started ringing—my mother, at the party, trying to induce me to drive 45 minutes to join them.
I declined. By this point I was quite enjoying my solitude—my new hair, my banana milkshake, my Law and Order.
But she kept calling. And calling. The fifth time I answered the phone she said “I just told everyone your news! Now you have to come!”
I wanted to reach through the phone and shake her. I had begged my mother not to tell anyone I was pregnant—it was too early, I had miscarried once before. Now the phone was being passed around so that people—some I barely knew—could congratulate and cajole me.
“Come to the party!” they cajoled, “It’s Christmas!”
I was too tired to argue with them. I had spent the past weeks ill with worry that I would lose the baby—perhaps it was time to relax and let people be excited for me.
Washing my newly shorn locks I resolved to trust that this pregnancy would work. In the car, I put on a CD and sang “Lullaby of Birdland” to my bloated, queasy stomach. I arrived at the party and let myself be hugged and asked my due date. I tried to smile when my mother started a poll about what she should be called: Grandma? Nana? Nonna?
I miscarried on New Year’s Day.

This year I would rather not see anyone at all. If I could, I would hibernate through the entire month of December, and wake up in the New Year. I am sending the Nearly to Iowa, to his family, but I would rather swallow a live eel than accompany him. There is the Nearly’s cousin, who miscarried a few months after I did and is now due in April, but mostly it is my need to not see the expressions on people’s faces when they look at me and remember the difference between this year and last. And I will defenestrate myself before I will attend that Christmas Day party in Afton, full of people I have not seen since the last one, people who may or may not know that I will not be bringing a 4-month-old baby with me. I have made arrangements to volunteer at a shelter for battered women and their children on that day—volunteer work soothes me, and there is the added bonus of being unreachable, should my mother take it upon herself to attempt to persuade my attendance. I am also hoping that working at the shelter will keep me from being sucked into some horrible Miss Havisham moment wherein I wander my house holding my positive pregnancy test from last year and keening, or something equally unattractive–like writing a whiny blog entry like this one.

The Nearly and I are not buying each other presents this year, instead we are allowed to request non-material things. My requests were a day in bed together and a chance for me to give him a presentation about infertility and our options. The presentation was last night.
I think the Nearly was expecting a brief pitch for a course of treatment, maybe an overview of PCOS. I am pretty sure he wasn’t expecting what he got—four pages of bulleted lists, statistics, and case studies of some of my fellow bloggers, followed by a PowerPoint presentation called “A Decent Proposal.”
He listened to me read the bulleted explanations of diagnoses and procedures (“A Follicle is a fluid filled cavity or cyst…”) in the singsong-y book report voice I cannot help but lapse into during such things. He laughed at my clip-art syringes during the PowerPoint, and dutifully studied my statistical pie charts. In the end, though, the result was not what I had expected.
I don’t think the Nearly has ever been kinder or more supportive of me than he was last night, and so when it became clear that my expectations regarding his reaction and our plans had been misguided, I tried to keep from sobbing unprofessionally. Which resulted in a lot of the Nearly trying to comfort me while I said “I’m fine!” repeatedly in unnaturally high-pitched tones. I drank half a bottle of Bailey’s left over from last week’s party (thank you, Erin) and went to bed to dream of bloody snakes crawling out of my nether regions with dead babies in their snakey jaws. I woke up with eyes swollen nearly shut from crying—making me look kind of tough, actually, like a prizefighter. I reminded myself that I had other things in my life—like the pursuit of my MFA.
When I got to work, I had an email waiting for me from my student advisor—I will not bore you with the bureaucratic details, but suffice it to say, it will take several years and several thousand dollars before I am able even to apply.

If I were a rat, and my life were a maze, this is the part where I would stop and settle in on my tiny rat-haunches.
Fuck the cheese, I would say. I give up.

By Alexa | Posted in Ceci N'est Pas Une Ecrivaine |