Perhaps I'm a glutton for punishment.

Today is my ten year wedding anniversary, and the "pragmatic me" scheduled a gyno appt, much in the way of how I scheduled blood work for my birthday last month.

I'm finally going to address the excessive pain and excessive mess of my periods. Tomorrow is a mamo. 9/12 is the ultrasound to get an idea of what’s cookin’ in my uterus (i.e. fibroids, cysts, endometriosis? the mind reels, honestly).

Depending on the outcome, I may end up having to go in for a procedure which not only could potentially decrease my ability to get pregnant, but make it even more dangerous (more dangerous than just being 43 with a blood clotting disorder, that is) to get pregnant.

I spent 10 years with the ex, wasting prime baby making years on him, with that marriage imploding the very year we were to start working at starting a family. Yet, there he is, divorced from #2, and with a son who has the very name I picked out for the son we never had.

And here I am 43, rickety, broken down, some days unable or unwilling to take care of myself, and kind of feeling numb, not really sad, that the notion of DECIDING to have a kid was not something I’d have a part in.

My reality I have to come to accept, eventually is, that for me, I never had the luxury of making that decision. Either other people or circumstances stood in my way (poverty in the first marriage; and now post-op gastric bypass here), and here I am at the tail end of that aftermath, with husband #2, who is okay with the idea of adoption if we choose to do so, and I just feel numb.

Time is standing still, somewhat. I can look backwards in time, and look to the present, but left to live in the here and now, and not look forward. Beyond me there is nothingness.

I’m undecided how I feel about this. I love my life. I love my vacations and my husband and my home. I would have loved to have had a kid of my own, and yet, always held back on letting that desire drive me in life. To me my gender never equated to my destiny.

I wasn’t sad when I first started typing this. And now…I selfishly wish my dad were alive today, so I could bury my face in his chest, and we both could cry about this together.