This was supposed to be a year-end promotional post for my Self-Care Checklist (and maybe it still is), but it turned into an engagement story. This year produced the checklist; but the checklist was made possible by the stability of my relationship.
When 2024 began, I had just moved in with my partner (now fiancé).
We had gotten back together (after 10 years apart) with the acknowledgment that the desired path for us would be marriage, and children. But we hadn’t officially gotten engaged, because he wanted to live together for a few months first, just to make sure we weren’t being crazy.
I acknowledged that this was logical, but I hated it after having strung myself along after guys for the last decade. No one actually wanted to commit, and I was just tragically fooling myself.
But I did my best to be patient for those first few months of living together, and finally after the New Year we came back to the discussion of our timeline.
He asked how soon I wanted to get married. I suggested maybe in a year… and he was surprised, thinking we might need to get married, like, the next month.
I was both horrified and relieved. He would have been willing to get married that soon?? And yet had kept me in the dark for these painful months since moving in? This was almost as bad as not wanting to get married at all.
That last thought tipped me off to the fact that I was seriously triggerable in a way that didn’t have anything to do with him. This began a long year of working toward feeling secure in our relationship.
When we moved in together, we went from living in different houses to sharing a bed. We’re also both introverts who need a lot of space and alone time, and we were both suffering/recovering from some degree of burnout. For many months, being in such close proximity triggered us both endlessly.
We used the guest room a lot. I had a lot of minor panic attacks, and he had a lot of shutdowns. After each one, we talked it through.
Sometimes we wouldn’t really get along for days at a time. Sometimes it aligned with the downswing of my hormonal cycle; other times it aligned with the peak. No matter where I was hormonally, I found a way to feel hopeless and full of flashbacks to times of abandonment.
But with patience, and the miracle of communication, we slowly got used to each other. I found safety, not just because he did finally propose (in May), but because we always came back to a base level of goodness and care. He is very reliable, and we are both very determined.
The engagement did make things easier. I had no idea it would affect me so much. I wasn’t expecting it yet when it happened, and that day I happened to be triggered and mad for a reason I couldn’t identify. I felt hopeless, the same strung-along feeling from past relationships.
When he took me to the beach where we’d first held hands 14 years ago, knelt down, and offered me his grandmother’s rings, I went into shock and could only say “Okay!”
The idea and image of a proposal is SO oversaturated in my mind that I couldn’t conceive of it as anything other than a scripted, predictable, detached phenomenon. When this happened, though, it shifted the tectonic plates of my life.
The self-protective defenses of not-counting-on-anything and maybe-this-is-the-end moved out of the way. They made way for we’re-doing-this-together and this-is-really-yours.
I still had my fearful flashback moments after that, but the ring could banish them quickly. Because of the words he said, and the way he talked about it afterward, the ring was imbued with great power. Its meaning was reinforced, and its significance grew.
After we decided on a wedding date, our focus turned to the preparations: the venue, the guest list, the honeymoon destination, and our preconception health. We wanted to be healthy anyway, to live long lives and to be able to move freely throughout; but we also wanted to positively influence the quality of our gametes.
Meanwhile, we also felt the need to connect each other to as many pieces of our separate social webs as possible. We met as many of each other’s families and friends as we could. We traveled and socialized well beyond our comfort levels. Finally, we stopped making plans and won a few quiet weekends at home. Adulthood.
At the end of this year, I’ve gotten everything I wanted. My prince has returned, the ceremony of my princess-ship (or queening?) is upcoming, and I have food, rest, and exercise enough to qualify me as healthily fertile and free of addictions and bad habits. I am ready.
My hopes for next year involve mainly creation: creating another human, ideally, and also a business. I am delighted to find that the main job of an entrepreneur is to write, if they are inclined not to hire that part out, and so I will finally live my dream of being a writer. This follows from my romantic dreams coming true: if I have the one thing I most want, then I have no excuse not to pursue the next thing I most want.
In the last week, I unintentionally began to loosen the creative faucet, by way of attending to my creative business instead of being called to births as I had been expecting. It has been utterly delightful. I feel alive, I feel purposeful, and I feel at peace.
I am surrendering to the creative process, and so, though I have many plans and schedules and numbers all lined up, I don’t actually know what my business will be by the end of the year. I only know that my work will be creative, and for that I am almost ragefully grateful.
In the meantime, I am sharing what I know. I ran one “freebie” called the Real-Talk Guide to Your Fertility & Birth WTF’s, inspired by an email exchange with a friend who decided she wants to reproduce but felt very “WTF?” about it all. I made another document called the Complete Self-Care Checklist after compiling everything I knew I needed for optimal fertility in terms of nutrition and movement.
My next offering will probably be a workshop (or masterclass, or mini-course) on Radical Self-Care, or Breaking Addictions, channeled in a fit of inspiration and then expanded for the sake of another friend who sought my help with quitting sugar.
I’m steadily working on building my body of work. And, unlike past bodies of work, this time I am publishing it as I go instead of hoarding ad infinitum. Thank you for being a part of this beginning, and for reading. To the beyond!
Birth.DIY 