The Winter edition of Exhale magazine is out, and it’s well worth reading cover-to-cover (or pixel-to-pixel, as the case may be). And I’m not just saying that because I’m in it. Editor Kristin Binder and her team have done a fine job of collecting creative works from all over the ALI (Adoption/ Loss / Infertility) community. You’ll want to click over to these features (and others), in my clearly biased opinion:

Motion Blur by Deanna Roy of PregnancyLoss.info begins with the boy-who-never was. I can picture him how he would look now, thirteen, awkward, all elbows and knees. Most often he rides a bike, one foot firmly on the ground. One sock perpetually sags…The day my first baby became a ghost in my memory seems so long ago, before Y2K, before 9-11, before Katrina. (More…)

A stunning painting by Angie Yingst of Still Life With Circles. The story behind the painting is equally moving. In the months following Lucia’s death, I began painting the image of a pregnant woman meditating, bathed in a healing light of orange, yellow and white, representing aura colors for pregnancy, good health, childbirth, healing, calm and hopefulness. I painted one of  myself. I wanted to visualize me pregnant again… (More…)

In The Impossible Dream, Kir of The Kir Corner muses about the dreams she held as a child and the way things have turned out for her as an adult. Years of perseverance can also instill a sense of strength in you that, quite frankly, you never knew you had. Once the words “you might never be a mother” had been implied, spoken in a hushed tone and found their way to my consciousness, I ran after my dream of motherhood with vigor. (More…)

Kathy of Four of a Kind reviews the book Swimming in Circles: A Baby Chase Odyssey by Michael C. Barr. This infertility memoir is one of the first, that I am aware of, to be written from the male perspective…Barr addresses the feelings and emotions those struggling with infertility encounter and the hard questions we ask such as, “How is this our reality?” and “What the hell have we done to deserve this?” (More…)

And lastly, Kristin interviewed me for this edition. She asked insightful questions that really made me think, such as Can you briefly explain what mindful living is? Surprisingly, nobody had ever asked me that.

An excerpt from my response:  Let’s start instead with mindLESS living, which happens when I’m not present in my body. Instead I might be in my emotions, in the past. I replay old hurts, rehash conversations that happened or that I wish had happened. Or maybe I’m in my head in the future — I’m planning tonight’s dinner, what gifts to buy, posts to write, or wondering if we’re saving enough for college and retirement…on and on. In the meantime, I’ve missed my highway exit, I wasn’t listening to the speech I paid to hear, I can’t remember if I just used the shampoo or the conditioner. (More…)

There are other compelling articles in this issue. Check out the Table of Contents.

Comments are closed here, but I hope you’ll find something comment-worthy over there.