Quote of the Week

"Booboos are a part of life."
-My Wise Beyond her Five Years Daughter

The Chosen Road not Taken

So, it has been over a year now since my third miscarriage. It is very difficult to come to terms with the fact that I will never realize my chosen path. You remember Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken”. Well here it is to refresh your memory:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

I studied this poem in high school and I remember interpreting it as Frost lamenting about choices in life and the difficulty of not being able to do everything we might want in this lifetime. I concluded that he was ultimately happy with the choice that he made, perhaps because he had the freedom to choose.

I have had great difficulty coming to terms with the loss I experienced with my last miscarriage. This has been in part due to the bitter pill that this event was not a choice. I was raised to believe that I had the power to create my own reality, but this is not my chosen reality.

I also have been raised to believe that everything happens for a reason and that even with pain, and perhaps especially with pain there are lessons to be learned and growth to be had. One of my favorite expressions is “Oh no, not another f----ing opportunity for growth (A..F.O.G.)!” So I have been working real hard to figure out what I am suppose to be learning here. I feel so powerless.

I think that I will always feel sad about the road not taken, but I am beginning to appreciate the road that I am on. I didn’t choose this path, but low and behold here I am and it ain’t so bad, and it surely could be worse.

Deductive Reasoning

I am 41 and a half. I just realized tonight, for the first time in my life, my half birthday came and went unnoticed. I have to say I feel a little gypped. Not that I ever celebrated my half birthday by cooking half a birthday cake or anything, but it was always acknowledged, at least by myself. Missing this nonevent seems very poignant now that my daughter is almost five and a half and the halves are very significant to her. She asked a few months back, “If you are five and a half, you are really just five, right?” “Yes dear.” “Then I can say I am five and a half, because I just turned five.” Ah the powers of deductive reasoning, I can see losing arguments with her in my future.