Midlife crisis

Fertility Diet

The fertility diet continues although so far my attempts at baking sugar free gingerbread men were really rather disastrous. Firstly the mixture wouldn’t bind together to make a dough, despite following the recipe to the letter, and then when they came out of the oven they tasted oddly salty, a little bit burnt, vaguely gingery but not particularly nice. Needless to say I’m not likely to start posting pictures of my wonderful creations just yet! I’m hoping for better results with the buns later in the week. But I desperately need some kind of sweet alternative before I raid Taters' stash of Easter eggs! Perhaps honey just isn’t going to cut it?

Ancient!

My 37^th birthday is now less than a month away and I’m starting to feel old. I know 37 is not old per se, but for a woman trying for a baby and bombarded with stats about how fertility declines dramatically after 35, well, 37 feels pretty old. I even catch myself saying “I’m 36 you know?” far more often than I should. 

See there you have it, evidence. Ancient.

It’s not that I feel mature and wise either, if I did I could work with that. I think I’ve finally accepted that my youth is gone, but I still feel like everyone is more grown up than me and everyone knows more than me, I still find myself deferring to everyone else’s supposedly superior knowledge... I feel like a strange woman-child sometimes. Oh my god, I’m turning into Mavis Wilton from Coronation Street aren't I?! (showing my age there you see, yes, ancient!)

I recently upgraded to my very first iPhone and it just went to prove my point further, I’m totally intimidated by the bloody thing and daren’t ask anyone how to work it because I know I’ll sound stupid. “So what exactly is an App then?” I don’t like dealing with things I don’t understand and technology moves so fast and is so bloody complicated I can’t keep up!

See. ANCIENT!

It’s my hope though that once I figure out how it works I’ll be able to upload more pictures to this here blog.

The Flow

I was catching up with my blog reading the other day and I came across this on the Tiny Buddha website. How timely, because this sounds a lot like “The Flow” I was talking about the other day. I especially liked this bit:

“When I am on my path, my life feels good and right; off it, I am aware that I am scrambling through the undergrowth and finding my way at the edge of cliffs.

The idea of a “path,” or what Lao Tzu calls “the Way,” works for me.

It’s as though there is a channel through life that is “right” for each of us to take. An invisible highway of least resistance in the midst of white noise, which resonates at the same frequency that we do and seems to draw us forward, exerting some sort of magnetic pull.

When we are on it everything makes sense, we find flow better, we feel right in ourselves, we have a sense of something larger than our own small ambitions guiding us.

I have begun to see that the path, this invisible pull to our souls, is in fact our own personal way to wholeness: our own unique healing prescription.”

THAT’S what I meant! The fact this came along a few days after I was trying to define it was perfect, I believe coincidences like that occur more regularly when you’re tapped into the flow. So this feels like a good indication I’m on the right path. The right path to finding my right path at least. 

This particular writer, Lucy H. Pearce, is also the author of a book called "Moon Time: A guide to celebrating your menstrual cycle" - a book whose cover never fails to amuse my husband... The subject of this book was something I'd become interested in but was unable to find much about, until a few weeks later when reading Lucy's Dreaming Aloud blog she announced a book she was about to publish... about the very same subject. It was uncanny.

So anyway my plan now is to check in with myself as to whether things feel right or wrong, and respect and be guided by that – something I know I haven’t done in the past.