Circle Game

We went to our friends’ child’s Bar Mitzvah this weekend, which was a hugely wonderful affair.  It was exactly like them: warm, fun, laid back, caring.

A few days before the Bar Mitzvah, I started getting very weepy and chalked it up to hormones.  But I think it was more than that.

I remember when this child was born.  I remember how hard it was to go to his bris: I was so happy for them, and so sad for me.  I remember hiding in a bathroom stall at the shul for a moment after the service and trying to cry silently.  I wanted that to be us: cradling our child, introducing him or her to all of our friends.

They were such sad tears.

I think, this week, they were more happy tears.  Or maybe they were the last of those sad tears coming out, like squeezing a little extra toothpaste out of what looks like an empty, flat tube.

How huge to see everything come full circle.  To have our kids with us at his next life cycle event.  To want to put on the brakes as our own kids careen towards their B’nai Mitzvah in a few years instead of race forward, wishing they would just get here.

To still be friends with the same people!  I mean, that, in and of itself, is a major feat.  For our kids to all be friends and hang out with each other.

When you’re in the moment, when you are grappling with the active portion of infertility (because I believe that there is both active and passive infertility — the action of family building and the more passive emotions that come afterward), it is impossible to see outside of it.  Infertility is so huge that it blots out the future, and you can’t see the future anymore.  You just have to trust that it’s there, that there will be a time when you aren’t crying daily and you aren’t wishing daily and you aren’t feeling as if your heart is being squeezed through the narrow crevices of your rib cage.

So it was hugely emotional to know that I’m standing in a spot I couldn’t even fathom at this boy’s last life cycle event.  When my heart hurt so badly.  When my heart was so full of wishes.