staying the course

Nearly six weeks ago, I commited to getting at least 30 minutes of continuous exercise a minimum of 5 days a week. I have managed to honor that goal and I am really proud of myself. The goal is about changing my lifestyle and getting healthier. It is also about trying to lose all the weight I put on over the past ten years of neglect and riding the diet roller coaster. Trying to do this with a positive non-diet approach. I have lost about 5 pound since I started but yesterday I made the mistake of getting on the scale at the gym and it told me I haven't lost any more weight in the past two weeks. Of course it sunk my mood and pulled me right back into that diet mentality of exercising only to meet a goal. It dampened my commitment a bit and made me feel a little hopeless which is objectively ridiculous but nonetheless true.

Here is the thing about my current commitment to fitness and trying to lose weight. I am about to start IVF after 5 attempts through natural IUI (intrauterine insemination) my fertility doctor has decided we should move on to IVF now. I am lucky enough to live in a state that encourages health insurance companies to cover fertility treatment so ironically the IVF will be covered while the IUI was not. The thinking on my doctor's part is that I am 40 and while my fertility hormone levels are all excellent, insurance companies have their actuarial tables and at some point they would probably cut me off because of my age. And of course my numbers will eventually change. So she encouraged me to seize the opportunity to do it now. Pregnancy suddenly became even more real than it had been and I realized that I was risking a very hard pregnancy and everything else if I didn't try to lose some weight and get into better shape.

taking the plunge

About two years ago perhaps more, I took a workshop on creative non-fiction - memoir style writing. I loved it. I had always loved writing - well until I had to write a dissertation and used it to torture myself for four years. Writing became a chore. I have always been an editor in process, endlessly going over and rewriting before I had finished my thoughts - in fact I just did it now. So over time, any writing, not just for the work, became tedious. I was always thinking about the audience rather than about expressing myself first. Journal writing, poetry, whatever it was I would have to spend hours psyching myself up to sit down with the computer or pen and paper. This course helped me get passed that, to some extent anyway.

I've dreamed in past about writing for an audience wider than the few academics from my field who read the paltry few articles I ever had published. I thought the course would give me a means to getting out some of my writing, sharing some of my stories. But the perfectionist in me, the woman who loves well crafted prose and beautiful phrasing, wanted it to be right the first time around without the need for the painful process of editing and revising. Ironic really, given all the self-editing I have done in so many areas of my life.

Enter the blog option. First put into my head simultaneously by my workshop instructor and a dear friend. It's taken nearly two years since then but here I finally am. I don't really know what this blog will wind up being. A collection of writing and stories from my past and my present. An online journal I share with strangers and perhaps some friends? But since starting the process of trying to get pregnant as a single woman, I've had things I need to express and writing is the means of expression with the lowest threshold for me right now.

I turned 40 nearly two months ago and at the time many of my younger friends asked me - how does it feel? In some sense that is a silly question - a change in a number doesn't really make a different. Except it did. At first, when I realized that my body's clock wasn't cooperating to give me the one thing I wanted for my birthday - to be pregnant - I felt all the things they tell us we should/will feel at turning 40 - women anyway. But once I got passed the initial feelings of loss - loss of having spent so much of my life single, loss at waiting so long to begin the process of trying to become a parent through giving birth, etc., I realized that what I felt was comfort and ease. A sense of being present and a calmness that I've only felt in snatches at earlier points in my life. I have come, over the subsequent two months, to realize that the possibilities for me are still endless. That transformation is only a commitment to myself to pursue the things I have always wanted but never allowed myself to really go after. Hence the subtitle - taking the long way round - adapted from the Dixie Chicks song. I really have been taking the long way, but finally at 40 I can see how many advantages that has. And I can allow myself to commit to the journey that is mine - and enjoy the scenic route since that is where I am anyway.