Please Touch

Growing up we went to the please touch museum which we just called the please touch. I guess I didn't realize that I continue to call it that because today at lunch when Ivy got a little pear juice in a cut on her thumb, she wondered if she had gotten that owie at the Please touch, it was cute! We went to said museum this morning with some friends and had a grand time. Ivy could have played with the babies in the hospital all day! She went around checking their diapers, because she wanted to play with a boy one! Once she found her boy (they are anatomically correct) she fed him, changed his clothes, diaper and clothes again, took his temperature and rocked him.

I loved to watch her be so sweet to this small plastic doll but it made me ache. 55% of the women there were pregnant and 45% had infants. I felt old and dull and empty. I don't think I realized it until I got home. I love to take Ivy to places like that, and the zoo and the library, and the supermarket, but inevitably I feel like the rest of the world is procreating like mad and I am being left behind. I just want to stop wondering what I am supposed to be learning from this, or doing to make this happen.

I am surrounded be new life, it is spring up out of every womb I know and I am genuinely happy for my friends but I want to weep, and weep and weep and I can't. I can't for Ivy, I can't because I need to hold it together and I feel like if I admit defeat things will spiral downward and it will be very hard to dig myself out. But at the same time I don't want to be sad. I don't want people to feel weird around me. I don't want people to downplay their joy so as not to offend me. I want a guarantee. I want to do/pay/learn/give/donate/teach/sew SOMETHING and in return, have a baby. Why won't it work that way?

I have to say, though as sad as I am, I am lucky to have the friends that I have. I just feel safe, and cared for and accepted and I am very fortunate about that. You know who you are, and I can't thank you enough for your friendship.