Sometimes this yearning to be a parent lark is all consuming. I mean, first there's all the fertility stuff: the charting, the special diets, the acupuncture, the reading, the therapies and the endless, endless wishing. Following on from that, there's all the adoption stuff: the workshops, the probing into every aspect of your life and whether it's normal that when you were eight you used to nick stuff from your recorder teacher's house (I had a pretty impressive klepto habit in my early years), the finances, the health and safety of a house on a cliff without electricity, all the references, the attachment interviews...on and on. Sometimes, it's good to just do something completely different.
Today, I went with my writing group to a talk by a new novelist who has just been published to rave reviews. She was great, inspirational. I did a reading of some of my work from my Edwardian novel-in-progress which was nerve-wracking but also exciting. Afterwards, I felt compelled to go and give the writer a hug, and then we talked and laughed for ages, and had this wonderful time of connection. The sun came out, I was inspired, I came back and wrote a lot of new stuff. Even driving back from the talk I listened to the radio on full blast, singing along embarrassingly loud. My friends in my writing group asked about the adoption (one of them is writing a novel about adoption) and we chatted about it, but it wasn't all consuming.
You know, I love that when we have our child, after all these years, we'll just be a family doing family things. We won't be the couple everyone smiles sympathetically at when we're playing with children. WE'LL BE A FAMILY!! And I experienced today just the warm, centred feeling of being myself, doing the things I love, not even thinking too much about the adoption. Just being. It felt really really good.
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