I spend a ton of time every day reading blogs. Way WAY more than I should. Lately, I can’t get enough of craft blogs not only for the great talent and ideas and inspiration they showcase, but also for the lifestyle they share.

Every blog I read has been inspired by Spring and therefore Easter. I love Spring too and once I actually succeed in acquiring a plot of land I plan on going hog wild with the garden and the growing things and the change of seasons. But right now, I have no garden to grow, there is no snow melting in San Diego, and I have no children to watch change with the seasons and find Easter eggs.

Easter has pretty much nothing to offer me.

On a spiritual level, of course this is totally false. In General Conference a couple weeks ago, the prophet pointed out that without Easter there would be no Christmas, and the point he was making was that our level of celebration is not in line with the sacredness of the event. I agree with him, but other than spending the day in worship like we should spend every Sabbath, I don’t really have any ideas on how to mark the occasion.

This weekend we went to Bear’s parents house in Orange County where we did a lot of furniture shopping and then the siblings and their kids came in for Easter dinner. I spent the majority of my time cooking while I watched the kids run around hopped up on crazy amounts of sugar, playing with their Easter toys, finding eggs and generally being adored. It sucked. Not to mention that I was irrationally bitter about an acquaintance who just gave birth to twins – her seventh and eighth children. And of course the kids got up to sing in church. And my niece and nephews were tweaking out on sugar that made their sweet selves totally unrecognizable. By the time dinner was over I just wanted to run to the car and have myself a good cry.

Without kids, all the trappings of this holiday don’t apply to me. I felt like hired help at somebody else’s party. At Christmas we have our own traditions and celebrations to focus on so that, although we feel the delay of our kids then, it doesn’t incapacitate us. By just spending the day as a family holiday, it turned out to be like window shopping when you have no money. We just got to sit back and watch everyone else enjoy the day while we once again tried to figure out how we fit in.

I didn’t get the gorgeous red Addison Shepard hair I had my heart set on. I got to the hairdresser and she realized that she didn’t have enough dye. She had only bought one tiny little bottle (because here in SoCal nobody goes red, they go blond) and hadn’t even thought to ask how long my hair was.

She was perfectly nice, and she gave me a nice little cut (nothing fancy, just freshened the layers), but the experience was still a mess. She had a salon in her garage and her kids were all home from school and the dog kept running in and sniffing my butt. And I didn’t get any color at all and now she’s going out of town for two weeks. I haven’t decided if I’m going back to her or not.

The odd thing was that for a normal rational person, this experience would hardly be worth more than a shrug, while I had to fight back tears until I got to the car and cried myself all the way home.

Most of time I really feel like I am over the miscarriage. It was sad, it happened, cest la vie. I hold babies without a single pang, I babysit my nephews without thinking about what could have been, I’ve even watched television shows where someone loses a baby and I don’t shed a single tear. But if I run into one obstacle over the course of my day, if one unforeseen event fowls up my plans, I turn into this hysterical, over-sensitive, weeping willow.

I’m basically operating at full capacity over here. I have just enough to keep me going on an even keel, but if that balance gets upset, I have nothing else to fall back on.

Typically, I’m a beyond rational person. I don’t get over emotional, I don’t frequently get crabby, I’m totally high-strung, just not emotional. I’ve been finding myself acting out of character more and more lately. I’ll be crying over something that does not warrant it, or completely stymied by my choice of restaurants, or absolutely out of the minimum amount of patience it requires just to deal with the normal friction of life. Bear has to return the phone calls, and the movies. He has to tuck me into the couch with some knitting and a coke, because I am suddenly like an overtired toddler who can’t see that relief exists.

We even have a code phrase now. When I find myself reaching the point of tears, I just turn to Bear and say (or maybe sometimes scream, but almost always at the heavens, not at him) “I HAVE NO MORE RESOURCES!” And he understands that that is the equivalent of Code Red with a big flashing light and a siren, and it’s time for him to take over cooking dinner while I sit down and watch a Tivo-ed craft show.

Lest I sound like a hothouse flower, this happens maybe twice a week. And it’s almost always precipitated by yet another offer on a house being rejected or the fact that I haven’t seen another human being in two weeks. When Bear reaches his threshold, he just takes it out on the cats.

I had the D&C yesterday. Today I’m just cripplingly depressed.

Things aren’t looking too good for the baby. We went in for an ultrasound on Monday and they still couldn’t find a heartbeat. So they sent us to the hospital for another ultrasound and about four different doctors, and they recommended doing a D&C right then and there.

We couldn’t bring ourselves to. So we asked to wait another week and see if anything changed, but they made sure we knew that our odds were infinitesimal.

We don’t really know what to do at this point. We’re pretty much beside ourselves as I’m sure you can imagine. We’re bracing ourselves for the miscarriage happening any moment now, but hoping beyond hope for some miracle.

Monday morning we’ll have another ultrasound, and if nothing changes by that point there will be no other possible route. We’ll know that the baby just stopped growing. It happens every day. And then I’ll have the procedure and we’re back to where we started from.

The doctors are actually very optimistic about all this. We beat the odds in a lot of ways and it’s very positive for our future, but it’s pretty hard to see things in those terms right now. These days are pretty dark.

We’re going to go eat our feelings and then Bear’s going to take me to where I can really soothe my spirit: Borders.

Every year the women in Bear’s maternal side of the family get together for a Vegas retreat, and in the past I’ve really worked to avoid going. Last year I just couldn’t find a way to talk my way out of it, so I sacked up and went, clawing my way to the door like an animal going to the vet. I ended up having quite a lot of fun despite myself. So when this years retreat came around, I didn’t hesitate and decided to go again. That was probably a mistake.

I think it might have had something to do with the fact that both of my sisters-in-law are pregnant (I threw a baby shower for one of them the day before we went) and then there were two pregnant women there out of the seven of us. I, of course, was the only one there without kids, so whenever we went shopping it was all about the kids stores, and all conversation revolved around kids and pregnancy and labor.

Not that I fault any of them for it. Mark my words, if it does ever happen for me I’m going to be the most insensitive and annoying person there ever was. After all this time I am not going to bridal my tongue for anything. I expect that every third word out of my mouth will be ‘baby’. But for right now, it just cut me to the heart.

It’s different after all this time. When we first started trying the longing was horrible, but we weren’t that far behind from our friends and family. Everyone expected that pregnancy would happen any day now and all that sadness would be instantly erased and that our little sprout would have all these cousins around to play with. Happy Day. But time has marched on and left us behind. By the time we have a child, if we do get to have a child, all the cousins will be so much older. Instead of all the baby excitement, now I’m watching everyone around me live through toddler and school excitement. And I’m still waiting.

I went on a scrapbook retreat a few weeks ago where a bunch of friends went up to a cabin in the woods and scrapbooked for a solid weekend. I was only close with a couple people there and was looking forward to getting to know some new women in the community. But they all have school age children, and I don’t. They spend their time researching schools and arranging play groups and chauffeuring to lessons and running the PTA. I spend my time embroiled in the creative process and trying to carve out a career. They swap stories about which teachers are the best and how to help little johnnie to read, and I…make stuff. I didn’t really have anything to add to their conversations, so I sat there. Feeling small and broken and out of place.

Going to baby shower after baby shower, I really thought it couldn’t get any worse. I thought that baby showers must be the epitome of hell to an infertile woman. But I’ve discovered that it gets much worse. I’m still standing on the pier and watching as Motherhood sails away into the sunset, growing smaller and smaller until it’s far away and I’m here on my own.