Michigan

It's Christmas Eve, and it's raining. I can't help but think of all the snow we've gotten this December, and it's melting away under a cold drizzle that I can hear hitting the windowsills and the roof of the porch beneath my window. Interestingly enough, the grass that is showing on my backyard is green, not the brown it will be in March when the spring is trying to assert itself. Funny that green can be so remembered, even under a snow and ice. It's a message-- and even though it's not a "White Christmas" there's something so much more poignant and meaningful about that green grass than a covering of sparkling snow. It mightn't look seasonal, but it is ever-more seasonal than snow.

The other thing I've thought about as I cozied under the covers (trying to rest up for true midnight Mass) while listening to rain is that sometimes things that seem like they're so normal, so par for the course, just don't happen. Like this rain after a month of snow-- it's not what we're supposed to get on Christmas Eve night. And that reminds me of how easy (ha) I thought it might be to get pregnant. A little less than a year ago, I was writing on this blog about seeing lawyers and our known donor. We thought we'd be doing insemination at home. Then we thought we'd just see our ob/gyn. Then we were off the cryobank for anonymous sperm. Next we realized we'd probably be doing IUI. I was conflicted in my excitement: I wanted the experience of pregnancy sooner rather than later, but I also wanted Partner to get pregnant and assumed she'd get up the duff quite easily. Like snow on Christmas in Michigan. But things panned out, and what we expected is not what we got. Retrospectively, it's been quite a year. Partner, who always assumed she'd give birth to a child, was told she could not do that. Me, who thought she'd have at least three years before getting pregnant, is on the cusp once more.

Anyone who's been through more than one cycle of IVF knows how elusive hope can be. Today I found myself thinking that on our third cycle, maybe I'd consent to a three embryo transfer. The implicit lack of hope there made my thought process stop.

Then when I saw the green grass, the hope of this season came back to me. The starry eyed hopefulness I once had when we started our baby search in earnest-- it might seem like we've been covered up with snow, but it's December, and underneath it, we're green with potential for new growth.

And that's just got to be one of the messages of Christmas.

Merry Christmas, friends. To close, I'd like to share the ending of one of my favorite pieces of work, and so apt for this night, "A Child's Christmas in Wales" by Dylan Thomas:

"Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang "Cherry Ripe," and another uncle sang "Drake's Drum." It was very warm in the little house. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnipwine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart was like aBird's Nest; and then everybody laughed again; and then I went to bed. Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept."