I was tagged a bit ago by Shelli from BagMamma to complete the six-word meme that was apparently inspired by the book, “Not What I Was Planning“, which in turn was inspired by Hemingway’s proported statement: “For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn” (an infertility blog title if ever there was one that would never require a single post).
I’ve thought quite a bit about this, and while I worked and reworked in my head several phrases that might surmise my life to this point, one word in particular kept making a return like some kind of boomerang of phonemes. That word?
Extraordinary.
But I don’t mean “extraordinary” in the typical sense, as in “the sunsets over the Grand Canyon are extraordinary!” Instead, I see the word in my mind broken down into its two subparts: extra and ordinary.
Let me put this another way: if I was to say that something was extra dull, it just means that it is more dull, not that it’s more exciting. Extra Ordinary is just that when I refer to my life up until this point. The Extra comes into play when you look at one definition of extraordinary: beyond what is ordinary or usual.
My life stopped being ordinary November 2004 when I had the first of my four miscarriages. While one miscarriage is typically dismissed by friends, family and even medical professionals as not uncommon, it still changed my life forever. It was my gateway into Infertility; into my life made Extraordinary.
In this sense, who of us is truly ordinary? In attempts to get add to a family, it doesn’t matter whether you went as basic as OPKs and temping for several months or you traveled the globe for the sixth time for a donor egg transfer, you have become EXTRAordinary.
In some ways I do wish that my life had remained ordinary, holed up in this town in Nebraska living my life with a six and a three year old, and not carrying a chip on my shoulder. On the other hand, there is something so profound and far-reaching about the blogging community, both literally and figuratively, that I can’t imagine that it should have been any other way.
I guess my six-word story for me would be, “Finding peace in the extra ordinary.”
Punch Drunk 