Baby Inertia

Lifeslurper and her motivation went their separate ways some years ago. The breakup was less than amicable. Neither party can trace the exact date that things began to go wrong. Subsequent countless attempts at reconciliation have all failed. 

I have to admit I think more frequently about the issue of motivation (and my lack of it) than I do about the issue of babies (and my lack of those!) These major Lifeslurper themes are inexorably linked. If only I could be bothered to work out the reasons why.

Point is, I have things I need and want to do. Having a baby is something I need and want to do. Of all the things I need and want to do, having a baby is probably the only thing I ultimately have no control over. Which probably goes in some small way to explain why I can mostly live with my failure to so far have a baby. It most certainly explains why I find it so hard to accept my lack of ability to just ‘get on’ with the other things it might conceivably (pun intended!) be in my power to achieve. 

For the best part of my life I have spent my time waiting. Waiting to escape my hometown and bullies; waiting to graduate; waiting for a job; waiting for love. The love wait was the longest, lasting for decades. Yes, I have been more than comfortably rewarded for my efforts in the form of Wobbles, but it will be a long before I forget the despair I felt during that long wait. Despair that I might never love or be loved created a lonely existence. I wasn’t faithfully going about my business, living life to the full until he arrived. No, I was huddled in a corner somewhere doing my best to survive from day to day. There was no certainty on my part that he – or any aprroximation – might eventually show.

Somewhere in the midst of waiting, my adult life fell into one great stinking pile of inertia. Bad career moves, illness and weight gain all served to compound my miscellaneous fears and decrease my confidence generally. Whatever the reason, motivation went. There has been no word from it since. Not even a postcard! 

A few years into the slow and steady burning flame that is my Wobbles’ love, I can now accept I am worthy of love. I accept that I have love worth giving. My desire to do things is slowly being reawakened. Sometime it jumps into consciousness ready for action, but quickly becomes overwhelmed by all it finds. Another comatose like sleep envelops it again. 

Sometimes I feel panic. That often has something to do with time. Infertility has all been about time passing. Time going too quickly. Time spent lost. All at once I am reminded of a poster stuck to the wall of my high school library wall; ‘the hurrider I go, the behinder I get.’ Just when I sense I have come to terms with the things I can’t change; the lateness of meeting Wobbles, the mature commencement of our baby quest, possible middle age start to any parenthood, the years lost – the more I realise I am only compounding my difficult relationship with time through living in my own self-created achievement-free zone.

 I have been thinking. Really thing hard about this – quite an effort for the terminally lazy person. Yet I seem to be unable to find my own solutions.

Sure, I have two books by Eckhart Tolle. They would surely be interesting if only I could find the momentum to read them. I get less than three pages into the introduction and my mind has lost interest. Yes, I am that lazy – in body, mind, and soul. 

There are many theories I have produced to try to make sense of this, but I am so far yet to discover one that provides my mind with that one essential key; that thing that will set my mind free. 

As usual, in times of difficulty I turn to the lyrics of Mike Scott: 

These things you keep
You’d better throw them away
You want to turn your back
On your soulless days
Once you were tethered
And now you are free
That was the river
This is the sea

The past? Is the past to be held responsible here? I live mostly comfortable with my past. There was a time before and during long term therapy that I did not cope with my past. Things can bother me from time to time, but I am no longer feeling like my past will strangle me if I struggle to break free of its restraints. 

Often I tell Wobbles that it might be a case that I am a malcontent. Here I am with the man who turned out to be the love of my life, yet I feel these stirrings to achieve and create. I felt them before I had love and the opportunity to discover my infertility. Now these desires seem harder to cohabitate with. Wobbles thinks I can achieve anything. He really does, poor lovable fool! In the absence of my own faith in myself, I borrow heavily from his unwavering belief in me. Not a good or fair thing to do, but for the moment it helps. I want to achieve things for myself, but also to provide him with some repayment for his belief. 

I have ideas for things I want to create. Actually, I have endless lists; Teddy has enough adventures at a rate of three a week to keep going for years – seriously! I have outlines for various book ideas; fiction and non-fiction. I have an idea for a series of children’s fiction. I also dreamt some ideas for stories involving time travel and space aliens, pretty funny for someone who does not care that much for science fiction. There are also various film script ideas floating about too. Ideas come thick and fast around here, but that is all they are. Unless they get turned into reality, they never get a chance to be. They never see the light of day or get to prove their worth (or not!) 

My very worst nightmare is this: to continue on in a world of ideas with no expression. To always be that person who was “gunna”  – as we say here in Oz – as a shortened version of “going to”. I don’t want to be a person who was going to do something, anything, if only I had bothered. 

How do people re-find motivation once it has gone? How is it possible to fight the feeling of being overwhelmed? What is left after breaking things into baby steps (arghh, that pun really was not intended!) fails over and over again? Where can anyone find the reserves to plunder to get beyond inertia? What good is the thinking if the actions never follow? 

This time, these years can not be lost. My worst crime will surely be if I can only look back and see these years as being the time I spent waiting for a baby. I cannot allow this infertility to choke the one life I have made out of me.