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Breaking Hope

Either Hope is fickle or I am. Our relationship, especially during my days of attempting to resolve infertility, was a contentious one. I pinned so much on Hope.

We’re revisiting posts about “hope” for Time Warp Tuesday, the monthly blog hop offered by Kathy at Bereaved and Blessed.

Kathy directs us to find an old blog entry :

It might be a post where you wrote about something you hoped for, how hope got you through a difficult or uncertain time in your life or more generally what hope means to you. Then write a new post on your blog about why you chose the post that you did and what has happened in your life since.

I dug through this blog’s archives and couldn’t find a post that fit the bill. But I knew I’d written about Hope (that bi+ch). I finally found a few posts on a different blog, an early one that details my infertility journey. I found three related posts in which my relationship with Hope arcs and resolves over the course of 3 years.

  • Hope-less: Failure to Thrive. Today I began to die. I feel alone. I’ve tried to get over my dreams to have a family, and we’ve talked about some alternatives, but we don’t seem to be able to pursue any. Now, the future literally doesn’t exist for me.
  • Hope-neutral: Treading Water. The problem with the method of dying I’ve chosen is the time it takes to do it — weeks or months of willful dying when the body is programmed to live. I feel like the dark curtain has lifted, in spite of my best intentions, and I probably will survive this funk.
  • Walking away from Hope: Fertility, Take Two. Only after a painful and final breakup was I able to move forward. Deciding on another IF treatment would be like betting your 401K on a ground sloth that somehow wandered onto the track at Belmont…Such a firmly rooted dream is not easy to pull up and discard. My pillow is wet for months on end.

With that I began dealing with my world as it was and not as I hoped and wished it would be. I am now a mom to two amazing tweenagers, whom I have parented since Day 1 (give or take). Somehow, I managed to get everything I longed for — after resolving my dysfunctional relationship with Hope.

Click over to Time Warp Tuesday to read more posts about hope, and maybe even add your own (even if it’s no longer Tuesday).

7 Responses

  1. I think most people who suffer adversity have a contentious relationship with hope. Something bad happens, and we hope that something will come along and save us from that bad thing…and then it doesn’t happen. Sometimes we waste more time than necessary waiting for something that will never come.

  2. Briefly commenting just to say that I’m so intrigued that you had another blogging space way back when. I feel like we’re getting a peek into Lori’s secret treasure room! Off to go read 🙂

  3. Just finished reading and commenting on all three posts (how could I not?!) and feel drained (in a good way) from following the journey that brought you and your family to where you are today, as I said in my comment on the last post that you linked to:

    It is a gift to be able to see the big picture of your family building journey and know now, 15 years later, where it led you, with a book to published next year about open adoption and knowing how many people you have helped (including my sister/family) through their journeys with adoption.

    I love, love, love this line in the conclusion of your post here:

    “With that I began dealing with my world as it was and not as I hoped and wished it would be.”

    I wrote a post awhile ago, called “What Is” in which I explored trying to make peace with that, as opposed to “What If.” When we can get to that place in our lives, especially our ALI journeys it makes all the difference. But I know how hard it can be and appreciate that everyone takes their own path to find that sense of peace and acceptance.

    Thank you, as always, for doing the Time Warp again with us this month! I know finding posts for this topic was a challenge for you, but I am so glad you were determined to find one or more that fit and love where it led you and all of us this time around.

  4. That is it, the excepting what our life is and not want it to be. That is the magic step I can’t seem to make. But I’ll get there. Eventually. 😉 It’s nice to be able to see how amazing it can be for those who have made that jump. Thanks for being such an incredible role model.

  5. I am not as amazing as Kathy and did not leave comments on all three posts. But I’m astounded at how that writerly voice both is and is not you … and it speaks to the quality of hope that is false. I think that hope is good if it allows us to open ourselves to the possible future, but not good if we fixate on a particular destination and way of getting there. We did a lot of heart-openers last month in yoga. It’s a practice that bears repeating.

    I love your concluding line, too. Because you made the shift from fixation to openness. xo … thank you for being such a wonderful friend and role model.

  6. Like Justine, I didn’t comment on all three older posts but I loved reading these older posts and seeing how much you’ve changed and grown while still remaining the same Lori I’ve loved all these years.

  7. I love this line too: “With that I began dealing with my world as it was and not as I hoped and wished it would be.” It’s a hard transition, I think, but such a necessary step to move on. I am curious whether you still feel the pangs of wishing you could know what the combination of you and your husband would look like? I wouldn’t say I’m sad about it, exactly, but I still think about it a little wistfully sometimes.

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