I’m falling more and more in love with the blog A New Kind of Normal, written by a woman named Jamee who’s about a year-and-a-half my senior. She’s also a fellow endometriosis patient who has survived the adoption waiting game and also battles other chronic illnesses. She’s been dealing with endometriosis for a lot longer than I have, but I love the fact that she understands things like people saying you’re too young to be in so much pain, or too young to be adopting because of infertility. Because while endometriosis and infertility are more common in older women, both can strike anywhere between puberty and menopause. Being under thirty (which I can still claim for seven months and five days) does not always equate to the picture of health and a carefree lifestyle, and it’s nice to find validation for this shocking revelation.
Jamee does a better job than me, at least on her blog, of maintaining a positive attitude and hoping for the best. I struggle to do that even in easy cases, never mind the genuinely hard ones. But the more I read her blog, including the years of archives, I am challenged to think about whether my current struggles really are a “new normal” instead of a condition that can be overcome. Our child-free state will someday come to an end (we hope), but perhaps I have reached a point where my periods will just always be more painful than they were when I was a teen or a college student (not that they were a walk in the park then). Perhaps this most recent surgery will have some positive impacts when my body finishes healing. Maybe the chiropractic regimen I’ve begun will help strengthen the muscles that have been favored in the past couple years and that will also help with my overall pain level. Maybe my body will eventually gets its hormonal act together.
But maybe not. Maybe my new normal involves less activity, exercise by swimming even if it’s less convenient than my cardio and pilates DVDs, one or two children instead of my dreamed-of three or four. Maybe it will involve a hysterectomy at an earlier-than-normal age or the need to find roles at church that don’t involve me running around after preschoolers for hours at a time. They’re all scary thoughts, but they are thoughts I know I’m in good company when they buzz through my head.
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