Life plans and whiplash

I'm having trouble sleeping. That in and of itself isn't so unusual - there's a reason I have two different kinds of sleep aids in the medicine cabinet under the bathroom sink. But there's a lot to unpack from tonight's insomnia.

The clock's past midnight so we've officially reached the winter solstice. We can count another year round the sun, and a full seven since our sole Burning The Clocks celebration to mark this day the way only Brightonians know how—with an all-out parade through town packed with handmade lanterns that all wind their way down to a fiery end at a beach-front bonfire.

Today was a good one - seven years since partying on the midnight beaches of Brighton, I officially ticked perform a solo aerial act off the bucket list. Was it perfect? Hardly. Was it fun? Very much so. Still a track athlete at heart, I'll never have the grace and fluidity of movement of some aerialists, but I'm amazed that I can challenge my body to reach new physical limits while simultaneously pushing myself to explore creative expression. And (some) people actually want to see me do it!

Knock "perform a solo aerial act" off the bucket list

But today was also a weird one. We'd hardly gotten home from my performance when one of our couple friends announced their pregnancy. We knew they were on that timeline, but learning the baby is officially in the oven still feels weird. Another one of our friends who'd attended tonight's performance has been trying. And yet another had her heart broken just last week when she learned her body won't be able to achieve pregnancy. Two other friends have told us they plan to start in the new year. It feels like the walls are closing in.

In the midst of all this, we have a deadline looming: January 3. It's our appointment at a fertility clinic. If that statement gives you whiplash, believe me, I'm right there with you. This is officially, 100%, in no way part of the life plan. But what is the plan? With dreams of fostering dashed and rolls of Christmas wrapping paper purchased at the tail end of last holiday season now collecting dust, where do we go next? The fertility clinic. Even though we've never even tried to conceive. Even though a pregnancy is the last thing I want. All in the hopes that some freezer will become home to a healthy-sized batch of frozen embryos that can buy us a few years to figure out the plan. But there are so many ifs.

Some ifs are easy: What if it turns out I'm sterile? Cool, proceed as planned. Regroup and dive back into foster care, or don't! It's our life, and the only thing that's certain is we won't come out alive. Between now and then, game on.

But then there are more tricky ifs: What if we can afford a surrogate? Can we justify spending six figures to avoid a whole lot of pain and to keep up with my favorite aerial hobby? Or worse, what if I undergo a fertility treatment cycle just to come out with only a couple of viable embryos? With numbers so small that a freeze/thaw cycle might leave me with nothing after two weeks of total medical hell, do I just implant? Do we literally throw every plan out the window and dive in? And then what?

And after all this, why? Why am I doing something I'd never dreamed of? For a sticky, screaming, highly expensive outcome that I honestly do not want? The best answer I've got is that the only thing worse to me than not exploring this option is the idea that I'll never have the chance to nurture a child with whom I can form a lifelong bond. I don't need to be there from the start, and I've never cared about the familial resemblance or even the inherited quirks - I've got a heart big enough to love someone different. But I'm not sure that children of trauma know how to love back, and I'm not sure I have the emotional wherewithal to teach them. Maybe this is just my PTSD response to this past summer, but then again everybody's choices are just half-chance.

And I wonder why I have trouble sleeping.