I think one of the reasons I haven’t been able to write much lately is that I’ve somehow wound up back at Stage 1, i.e. Denial.
So, that seems healthy right?
One of my senior team member’s wife had their twins this week. Once again, I’ve been a tiny bit surprised at how truly happy I can feel for other people even though my mind does always eventually wander back to how horribly broken and inadequate I feel over my body’s inability to function even semi-normally. I am really happy for him though, I can tell how excited he is, even if trepidacious over the fact that they are having not one but TWO coming at the same time (they already have a young child and twins were conceived without intervention so came as a complete shock).
But, of course, this means that once again the office is buzzing with baby chatter and has been for the past couple months.
Which is totally fine and understandable. I chime in where I can and ask questions, I really am genuinely interested in all of it too. I’m just as caught up in the excitement as everyone else is. Because it is amazing and miraculous and wonderfully exciting and all that good stuff AND a bag of chips.
I know all of this so well. And I’ve really been attempting to stop myself from feeling anything beyond that. Because I’m not really sure I could continue to function on a daily basis if I didn’t.
First, there’s the fact that pregnant women, babies and children are just a normal part of life and if I allowed myself to melt-down like perhaps I could everytime I came across one of these sights, well yeah, I wouldn’t exactly be functional. But beyond the more basic aspects of being a functioning member of society, there is the fact that I spend 50% of my time at work listening in on other peoples phone calls (since I backup other peoples’ business I need to know what they are talking to their clients about), one of those being this guy who’s wife has been about to have twins for the past couple months and another guy with a newborn and a toddler. Most of the people on the other side of the phone seem to have young children too, based on the conversations I hear. Quite a few also have pregnant wives.
As much as I try to numb myself to it, there are still a lot of times recently when I’ve had to drop off the call because the conversation was just starting to make me feel like, “Do I really want to do this to myself and keep listening?”
Being numb apparently takes a lot of effort.