Growing up, I think that my teachers used to think I was "most likely to succeed." There was usually a kid or two in my class, at least, smarter than me, but I was more motivated. Indeed, I might be the only person from my small grade school class with a Bachelor's degree.
This may seem like an advantage, but it kind of made me stick out like a sore thumb. I had a tendency to be kind of a teacher's pet, but it was a role I hated and tried to reject where I could. My grade school was so tiny--one class for every grade, and 13 people in my 8th grade graduating class. I did not fit in well and high school was such a welcome relief.
By the time I got to high school, I think I had conditioned myself not to stand out, to just fit in. And I did, I found a large group of like-minded girls, I joined the swim team, I was liked well enough by most people when I interacted with them, just not particularly noticed. I say this mainly in terms of academic performance. I took some advanced classes and got decent enough grades, but I never pushed myself. A's and B's were good enough. And I liked it that way. I was happy. I actually mostly really enjoyed high school.
Not standing out, I think, meant I didn't get a whole lot of attention from boys, and attention from boys was something I definitely wanted. For a short period, I had a boyfriend from the next town over, and he was, and is, a nice guy. He eventually broke up with me, seemingly out of the blue, for a reason I didn't understand. I since have come to think that I was just his "Natalie," minus the Krav Maga/aggressiveness. (If you aren't a HIMYM fan, you should be, but I'll help you out by pointing you to the wikipedia article about the episode I'm talking about here.) But I had always felt he was out of my league, there were actually a couple girls from his school who hated me for being with him, so at the time I just figured I wasn't pretty or skinny enough for him. I wasn't even mad, just sad, resigned. In retrospect, this was an unfair thing to think about him, he's a good guy, I just thought about it in a very egocentric way.
Unfortunately, I think toward the end of my high school career and leading into my 2 years in community college, my strategy of not standing out started to work against me. In the first place, it was a completely unconscious strategy, plus I think it also seeped into areas of my life other than academics. I had conditioned myself to be liked at all costs, at the expense of ever standing out. However, I had other interpretations of my lack of male attention. A few things were at play here: First, I had believed that I was a little overweight since I was a child. By "since I was a child" I mean like...4 or 5. When I was very young, it kind of amused me, if I remember correctly. I felt bigger and more grown-up than my peers. However, around age ten, when I started to develop earlier than my peers, it started to become distressing.
Now, I was certainly never a 10 or anything close to it, but when I look back on pictures in high school, I was actually cute enough. I don't think anyone looked at me and saw "chubby" but that's definitely what I saw, as I think many teen girls do. I blamed my failure to land the much-desired boyfriend/male attention on this apparent chubbiness/unsightliness.
By the time I got to my junior year of college, I could do no more at a community college and I transferred to OSU. I attended a barbecue the first night I moved into my new cooperative house, but the next day I didn't eat anything all day. I befriended my next door neighbor, with whom I had a brief and miserable relationship that first term, and he got me into going to the gym with him. Soon I was eating very little and going to the gym very much. I lost over 20 pounds in my first 2 months at college. I started really liking the way I looked but came pretty obsessed with maintaining it, since after I ended the relationship with the neighbor, I still wasn't really getting the attention I wanted from the opposite sex. I was always striving to lose that next 5 pounds, thinking that would really be the ticket, I'd be thin enough, and then the guys would start noticing me. Eventually, as you can imagine, this took a rough toll on my health. That February, I made myself so sick that I passed out--twice--while showering one day. This scared the heck out of me so I called my parents and asked them to come get me. I spent about 6 days at their place, in bed, drinking gatorade and eating frozen yogurt. It was a critical event that led to a turning point in my behavior over the next several following months, but it would take years for my mindset to follow suit. The good news is that after coming through that, I think I see myself more clearly and I have a much more balanced attitude about body image. In fairness, I also got married and my husband has a lot to do with my change in attitude about body image.
After the short-lived boyfriend in college, I went through a pretty significant dry spell in the romantic department. There was the brief...thing...with the guy who was in seminary studying to be a priest who called me two to three times per day and confessed his "love" for me while drunk one time (and subsequently denied it the next morning), but it was pretty stupid of me to get involved with that in the first place. I was still in the process of figuring out how to eat normally again, but in retrospect, I was probably in a more stable place in life than he was at the time.
I started off a real career in a job I was too mentally young for, and it made me grow up pretty fast with no lack of growing pains. There were a lot of worries about getting fired and having it ruin my chances of getting into grad school, and therefore my future in my dream job (private practice counseling) forever. To deal with this, and to deal with the fact that I still wasn't getting any male attention (and felt like I had missed my "window" of finding someone in college) I drank a lot on the weekends. In my mind, I was just having "fun" with friends, but when friends started confronting me the morning after to tell me that it worried them when I would be blacked-out sobbing about what a "horrible" caseworker I was, and that maybe I should look into some counseling, I started realizing that I might be trying to escape from my emotions.
I have journals filled from times I sat in front of adoration, begging God to find me a husband. One time, I did a 9-day novena where I tried to seriously consider religious life to be sure I wasn't missing my calling, even though that's not remotely what I wanted. During that time I managed to (again) get nearly black-out drunk at a Halloween party and kiss a 19 year old named Melvin. I was 23, but in my defense he looked older. (Maybe it was the beer goggles.) (I was pretty horrified when I realized that "I graduated in 2006" meant from high school.) I decided not to count that day in my novena so I guess it actually went for 10 days.
I was getting better at my job and finding my confidence, and yet, I started to worry that my career was going to be my vocation and that I was going to always be alone. I started making really silly bargains with God, like if he just sent me a nice Catholic husband that I would be happy and never ask for anything again. I didn't put it in those words, but that was basically the spirit of it.
At the same time, toward the end of 2008, I got this idea that maybe I was going to just be single for the rest of my life and that the best thing I could do would be to find a way to accept it and be happy with it. So I started thinking about what I would want out of life. My best friend turned to the internet to find love. I was lying on her bed while she was looking through CatholicMatch.com, and she said "Oooh, this one's perfect!" Bored with the whole idea, I said "Oh, message him then." She said "No, not perfect for me, perfect for YOU." I stood up and walked over, and looked at this profile she was showing me. He was an engineer (money, CHECK!) who had studied at OSU (Beaver, CHECK!), and he was in a wetsuit holding up a kayak (outdoorsy, CHECK!). He was also a "7/7" (agreed with 7 core Catholic teachings), SUPERCHECK.
Based on this one guy, I paid a month's subscription fee, created a whole profile, and sent him a message.
He never messaged me back.
As it turns out, I was supposed to sign up for CatholicMatch, but not for Kayak Boy. (Whose name I cannot for the life of me remember, nor is it important.)
A few days into 2009, some random guy took a quiz/survey/thingy I had on my profile, with playful and intriguing answers. I checked his profile...good looking, ambitious, and a 7/7! Great! Except...he lived WHERE? Yeah, not moving to Illinois. After a little bit of (unusually bold for me, since I was assuming this would never work) flirting, I basically told him "Well, this has been fun but I want to be upfront that I'm never permanently moving away from Oregon. Have fun!" He turned around to announce that he felt no need to permanently stay in Illinois and was open to other options. He finished up graduate school in the coming months and started telling me he was applying for jobs in Oregon.
We were not officially in a relationship at this point. After a good 10 years of twistedly convincing myself that the lack of male attention meant that I was unworthy of it, it took some coaxing on Zach's part to un-convince me. Believe me, I didn't make it easy. He worked for it. But after the better part of a year, we finally met in person which confirmed what he'd let himself believe for a while and what I'd opened my eyes to over the preceding months: this was meant to be.
My prayers turned from the bargain of "Find me a husband, God!" to "Help him find a job here so we can actually be together!" Our relationship was quite long-distance for about a year and a half before that happened. In less than a year after he moved out, we were engaged, and then we got married.
Meanwhile, I finished graduate school and my career took off. I've worked hard but I've also found some lucky breaks. I have a full-time job that I love, and I have a side project working for a private group practice, which is everything I'd always hoped it would be. Over time, all these things I've desperately wanted and begun to believe I wouldn't have, have started to come true.
So the rhyme goes, "first comes love, then comes marriage then comes..." and you know how the rest goes. And what's funny is that after bargaining with God that I wouldn't ask him for anything more if I could just have a nice Catholic husband, it turns out I'm being the stereotype of a woman. I feel a little as though I would never feel satisfied if I wasn't able to have babies. And as it happens, I'm not as in control of that as I'd like to be. This past summer I was noticing that there were some things happening in my body that just weren't right, and when I talked them over with a doctor, she gave me a diagnosis of PCOS. Luckily this is treatable (doc thinks my case is actually especially mild), and I'm already on some medication for it. It's not fertility medication, perse, it's more of an attempt to help my body heal itself so I can be more fertile on my own. All side effects have been pleasant and welcome so far. (The shedding of most of my "grad school weight" has been key among them! An addendum to that: the body image struggles are so far behind me that this is just "nice," not "life-consuming.")
Still, I'm not pregnant yet, and every facebook announcement is starting to feel like my female friends are getting pregnant at me. I went to the grocery store the other day and the checkout girl kept complaining about pregnancy symptoms. I was barely holding back tears, I wanted to tell her to stop complaining and be grateful her body isn't broken like mine.
Most women with PCOS get pregnant eventually, but given that I'm over 31 and a half, "eventually" doesn't seem soon enough. I want more than one baby. I ideally want 3, and I'm starting to feel as though I've run out of time to do so, even though I know mathematically speaking that's not entirely true. Still, there are definitely people who struggle with fertility and never get there. In my brain, I'm already at the point where I'll never get there, and I'm mentally preparing for a life of childlessness, when I still have several years to make this work. What should give me hope is all the times I've believed God did not want me to have what I wanted to have, and then I got it anyway, in a way that was perfect. How my mind is choosing to think about this instead is that I've used up all my wishes. That I have so much when so many have so little, and I will just have to deal with not having babies. It makes me want to throw something at God and say "What do you want? I'll give up my career and live under a bridge. That doesn't matter, I want to trade that one in for a baby."
I really have no great way to end this post. I have a really wonderful life with a great family, great job, and doting husband. I am having a hard time loving and missing some little people who don't exist yet, and whom I'm not sure ever will, and watching other people get to that point in life. I see how happy it makes them, and I also know that raising kids is really hard, which must mean that it's really, really worth it. And I just want it too.
