Milestones and Millstones

Or,

"I Wish There Was A Different Word That Better Expressed Exactly What Hope Is."

Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak whispers the o’er-fraught heart, and bids it break.
- Shakespeare, Macbeth

If this post comes out a bit jumbled and confused, then I’m sorry. It’s because I had a completely different idea in mind to write about and then something happened that made everything look different again. I’ll try to explain.

I haven’t been completely honest with you. It’s not that I’ve told you any lies, or at least not knowingly and that hardly makes it a lie if that’s the case. It’s just that I have withheld certain things, either to maintain mine and my husband’s privacy (of course), I wasn’t ready to discuss it, or I didn’t think others would be up for reading about it. But certain events have taken place over the course of the past couple of weeks to nudge me in the direction of getting some things off my chest.

In reading back over my posts, I have skated over the top of the one thing that undoubtedly has lodged most permanently and sorrowfully in my psyche. It is my deepest pain and my darkest space, and every so often it clubs me over the head and drags me off to torture me once again. I have hidden this millstone so artfully under my disguise that some may forget it is there. But I feel its weight. And perversely, I’m not ready to choose to put this burden down just yet.
I used to hate “hope”. Firstly, it reminds me of Days of Our Lives characters Beau and Hope, a pathetic pair who endured outrageous misfortunes to always be reunited, even after we long stopped caring. Also, it’s a sappy word that puts me on my guard when I read it, and can be over-sentimentalised and tritely trotted out Pollyanna-style, but those are not the reasons why I hated “hope”. I used to be on a repetitious monthly treadmill of “hope” and I can tell you, it was not my friend.

I’m going to lose some readers at this point. This is not going to be light reading, not for a few paragraphs yet. But it’s a funny thing, because hope is what’s going to keep you reading, if you decide to.

We are socially conditioned to expect to be capable of having children. We all assume we are fertile, until we find we are not. And here’s the kicker – there can be no reason for this. Some get to have kids, and some don’t, and that’s all there is to it. Or is it? says hope. Hope (the abstract noun, not the DOOL character) whispers in the recesses of your mind: if there is no reason for this not to happen, then surely there is still a chance that it could? And so, Day 1 of the monthly treadmill is rubbish, because your period started, but by Day 14, you’re hoping again, and you go right on hoping until Day 28, then Day 1 rolls around again. And this happens over and over for years.

And then you get help with it all. You accept that you can’t make it happen, just the two of you, so you get a team of people behind you. You get blood tests, and laparoscopic surgery, and your partner gets semen tests, and you get injections, and hormones, and nasal sprays, and ultrasounds, and follicle counts, and egg pick-ups, and with all this intervention, you think this really has to happen. And hope has become like your worst enemy and yet it’s your oldest and truest friend. It builds you up, buoyant, and anything seems possible, until the crushing reality arrives: that some things aren’t possible, some things don’t happen the way you want them to. And there is no logic, no philosophy, no art, no music, no written word, to explain it. Or make it feel better.

Hope is an inadequate word. It masquerades as something quite simple, and knowable, and straightforward. You know what hope is. But really, there is so much more to it. You can dread hope. You can’t control it; you can’t stop it from springing up from nowhere, and when it’s there, you can try and shove it away, squash it down but it won’t go. It leaks in under the cracks of the doors without you noticing. It is just THERE. Uninvited, unbidden. Like a blank, flat fluorescent light, dully buzzing, and blinking back on after you’ve tried to shut it off. Pure torturous evil and sweet blessed relief. How can hope be both those things? Why doesn’t the word express it better?

So the punishing ritual had to stop. Hope wouldn’t let us actually close the door; we just stopped resorting to the production line techniques we had undertaken. And we let things go for awhile, using naturopathic potions and trying to rein in our expectations, and make plans for enjoying ourselves, being thankful for what we had.

We got pregnant.

Hope, I really hate you.

Hope can transform from a humble, tentative wish into a full-blown monster of expectation. It can multiply and expand, changing from that dreary buzzing fluorescent light into bursting conflagrations of sun-like rays beaming throughout the universe. Hope morphs into gargantuan emotions like joy, a word which people hardly ever use because what it represents is so elusive, or goes unrecognised in lives expecting to make do with iPhones and lattes.

If “doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother”*, then disappointment is hope’s big ugly unhygienic inbred cousin with halitosis. There is a direct relationship between the magnitude of the hope and its corollary, disappointment. Find the inverse of the bursting sunrays and you begin to have some idea. The cruel joke played on me dished up first joy, then worry, then fear, then dread, followed by two large servings of disappointment and grief, side by side. I was full to overflowing with this indigestible muck. I spat out the joy, and swallowed the worry, fear, dread and disappointment whole, but I keep chewing over the grief. Mixing the metaphor as is my wont, grief for my baby is the millstone around my neck.

I could choose to put it down, but I won’t just yet. Hope won’t let me. Even though my final “fertile” years are being eroded by cancer treatments and surgery, and by the time it is all finished and I am recovered I will be into the age of much greater risk, as long as it still hurts it shows that deep down no matter what I say to myself, I still want it. And really, I can’t expect to have it anymore. It is my deepest and darkest hurt.

But here is the problem: I am infected with hope. I am contaminated with it; its reek is all over me. It dogs my steps, and stalks my dreams.

The best news I’ve had in a year occurred this week. My cancer count is down to the level of someone without cancer. This result comes at my half way milestone for chemo, and changes the remainder of my course of treatment. It brings forward my expectations of recovery, and changes the landscape of my thinking. Those big bursting sunrays happened in my life just this week, and I felt joy. If this can happen, then what else might be possible?

Hope, my old friend, you stink. Welcome back.


* Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet