where to start? the things i want to write about have been piling up–health issues, emotional issues, relationship challenges, work challenges, you know, the usual. but ever since i returned from my trip abroad, i’ve been in a not so good, not so productive place, and have mostly lain around watching people’s court, weeds & heroes on dvd, and following the skip gates incident rather obsessively on cable and on the internet. and feeling really shitty about my life. over the past 2 1/2 weeks, i’ve felt myself slipping into a deep depression. but today a cloud has lifted, for no other reason that i know of except that if i continue to just lie around, nothing will improve for me. so i’m going to fake it for a while.
i've been struggling a lot with faith lately. capital "F" faith and lower-case "f" faith. i've always believed in a higher power, something greater than me. i was raised presbyterian in a pretty laid-back household and a pretty laid-back church. we went to church regularly, i was part of the youth group, babysat for my minister's kids and was thrilled to hear the minister's wife use the word crap, because although my house was laid-back in terms of religion, my mom was a little nutty when it came to what she considered inappropriate language. we couldn't even say the word fart. or butt. although bitch was okay, as in "quit your bitchin' and move on." but family, well, that's part of this post but really a whole other story!
so, when i went a way to college, i stopped going to church. it had started to lose its allure for me in high school, b/c although i was part of the youth group, i was a bit of an outcast even there. and when i went to college, my world changed, for the better. for the first time, i had friends who really cared about me. who really got me, who accepted me completely. and they happened not to go to church. and i'm sure if i had wanted to go to church, that would've been another part of me that they accepted, but i just didn't feel a need to go to church.
i never stopped believing in god, or some kind of higher power, but i just didn't feel pressed. fast-forward to the end of my freshman year, and i decided to lock-up (grow dreadlocks). growing up as a black girl in the u.s., i had learned to despise my natural hair texture. i think i've gone over this a bit in an earlier post, so suffice it to say that my sense of self was largely tied to my relationship with my hair. and so deciding to lock up for me was a conscious act of affirmation, of self acceptance. i would love what my hair could do, instead of hating what it couldn't do. this was about 20 years ago, before locks had become as ubiquitous as they are today (to me they are perfectly normal, i see them everywhere it seems, and it surprises me how many people still find them strange or exotic or dirty).
locking up back then was a wonderful experience for me. because back then, locks weren't accepted widely even in black communities. and, back to the point of this post, nine times out of ten, if someone had locks, s/he was most likely rastafarian. (not so now.) so other folks with locks would see you and acknowledge you and recognize. wearing locks invited me into a certain community. i wasn't rasta, and didn't pretend to be, but it was so affirming to have people see my hair and react positively to it. around this time, i met my first serious boyfriend, and in the interests of karma, i will not call him voldemert but simply j. he called himself a rastafarian. and a rastafarian in very particular, patriarchal ways. he wanted me to start covering my hair, so i did. he wanted me to wear skirts, so i did. it's another really long story, him. but anyway, with him i opened myself up to and practiced a certain brand of rastafarianism, although i was forever taking note of his hypocrisies.
where am i going with this? while we were supposedly together, i left the u.s. and did a year abroad in ghana. while there, i encountered evangelical christians and our debates prompted me to read the bible from cover to cover, to decide once and for all what i believed. i apologize if i offend anyone if i say that after reading the bible that year, i decided that christianity was not the path for me. i won't go into my reasons here and please don't try and proselytize, because i am totally not down with that. if, on the other hand, you want to share with me why you believes works for you and not why it should work for me or anyone else, i would love to hear you. because i am looking for something that works for me. and while i believe faith is deeply personal, i love to hear other people's relationships to faith or spirituality because, well, i just do.
and so, i guess this is the purpose of this post. i am trying to figure this out and i feel like i need help. not in what is out there, but how do you figure it out? because this journey through (in)fertility has been trying. after my break-up with j, my friend introduced me to a babalawo who gave me a reading. and for a few years, i read deeply about the yoruba practice Ifa and other traditional african religions. i have very close friends who practice Ifa and it works for them. and i feel really drawn to this practice. if i were in the bay area still, i might pursue it. but it's a practice that is very community centered, and where i live, i haven't found that community.
but more importantly, the state of my life makes me feel so disconnected from anything. whereas i used to feel like i was connected to god/dess, creation, spirit, whatever you might call it, these last few years i have felt utterly lost. this year, i started reading about buddhism and took a meditation class at the local temple because i just want to find a place to sit and be still. to silence my despair over not getting pregnant, not keeping a pregnancy, not knowing why. to work through my grief over losing my closest friend to breast cancer and needing her so much these days and losing my mentor suddenly and wanting so badly to be able to ask her questions. so i have started meditating. in part to connect to myself. but i need something more, because i need to find that connection to the memory of my friend and my mentor. it's been 3 1/2 years for my friend l and 2 1/2 years for my mentor v, and i cannot tell you how much i need them here. they both always led me to joy. and i've lost that ability, to find joy, to be in joy.
i need to feel spiritual. since i was a teenager, i have struggled with depression. what's kept me here, i think, is a strong sense of connection to something larger than me. through all of my experiences with organized religion, non-western spiritual and religious practices, i have always felt connected to something. and that connection has allowed me to have faith, not just hope, but to have faith. that i will be okay. i'm losing that connection. i feel like i'm drowning and i want to hold on. i want to believe in something. i want to share that belief with a community. i feel like i need a spiritual teacher/guide, but i don't know what i believe. my therapist isn't cutting it for me.
and i need to find some kind of faith because i'm really scared. i'm scared we may not have a child together, and we may not be able to afford to adopt. and i cannot imagine living the rest of my life without being a mom. and don't worry, i'm not jumping off any bridges or anything like that, mostly because i couldn't imagine doing that to my family, especially my nephews and niece. but right now, i am getting dangerously close to being a really bitter person, and i don't want that. i know it doesn't help. the problem is, i used to think affirmations and positive thinking were useful (from my dipping into the new age bag), and now, i don't know what to do, how to be.
dragonfly mama 