Two vacations and a funeral

I've been away from this blog for a long time. Much longer than I'd planned.

It's been insanely busy with my new promotion, but while true, that's obviously not the whole explanation for my absence. It's also that it is hard to know what to write as we've struggled and struggled to find the next path. Somehow this space hasn't felt like the right place to continue to hash it out and come to any peace with it. I keep imagining that people are sick of hearing about our fears and misgivings at this point,  our uncertainty about what to do, what specific steps to take, how to get from the "here" of seemingly endless infertility to the "there" of a life with children.

I think we've finally settled on a direction - found something that makes sense intellectually and that feels right (whatever that means at this stage of the journey). I promise to blog about it shortly. It deserves its own post...or maybe several posts.

In the meantime, though, wanted to share a bit about our summer. It's been a beautiful one and a rough one marked by grief.

First, we took a vacation. It was meant to be one of those compensatory vacations that theoretically "make up" for the fact that we can't have children. One of those "we could NEVER go on this vacation with a small child" vacations. Just to make it extra edgy, we camped. In a tent. In the middle of the wilds of our destination... Here's a little video clip to give you a clue about where we were...

Unfortunately, though, a couple of days into this vacation, we received terrible news. Will's father died. He had been ill for some time but stable. Somehow in the middle of the night that Monday night, he became disconnected from his oxygen supply and he passed away.

We received this news late the next day, the evening of our second day, via satellite phone, in our camp (which was comprised of just us, our driver, a cook, and a camp helper). I've never felt so far away in all my life. We then proceeded to try to return from our vacation. Two chartered flights, one intercountry flight into a more developed country, and one transcontinental flight later, we were home, double jetlagged (having never recovered from the first jetlag), and sad beyond belief. On the upside, we already had time off arranged and so could devote ourselves to Will's mother and spend a lot of time with his siblings and nephews.

We've been coping with this loss for much of the latter part of the summer. This plus the fact that somehow Will and I now have jobs that are truly out of control in terms of our responsibilities (and also fortunately in terms of their sense of reward and meaning). Will is hanging in there and we've both tried to step up and be a help to his mom as she transitions to a life alone after 50 years of marriage. We knew this day was coming but it was not expected so soon. It is really so sad to be without Will's father. We're both glad, however, that he is no longer suffering.

As the summer started to fade toward fall, we decided a couple of weeks ago to try again for a vacation. We desperately needed one, actually, and still had the summer slow down going on that affects all of NYC and NYC academia in particular. So we took a long weekend over Labor Day and we went here:

The second trip was lovely. SUPER relaxing and very stimulating all at the same time. And not as far away as we'd always thought! Wish we'd had longer (we only took 3 days off of work), but it was definitely still worth it.

So that's where we've been physically, what we've been dealing with emotionally,  and a promise of forward movement to come on the fertility front.

More on that to come. Soon.

Mo

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