Compass Points

Thank you all so much for your comments.

I logged on today with a post already half-written in my head, knowing that I had a bit a free time to type my thoughts down. But I'm so moved by your comments that what I meant to say has flown out of my head. I think I sort of thought in the back of my mind that this might be what it would be like to blog, but I really had no idea.

On Wednesday I wrote a post about feeling lost on the path to parenthood. I didn't even realize that I was asking for help in knowing where the heck I am. I just sent a smoke signal into the ether. "Helllooo. I'm heere. Can anyone hear me? Can anyone tell me where is here?" One by one, you arrived. No one could necessarily point the way north, but each came bearing something: a magnet, a needle, a cork, a cup, the last water in the canteen.

Bugs writes a blog that I love, how great to have her say that something I wrote sums up just how she feels.

Ann moved me to tears with her recognition of my story, with its unwritten ending, and even more with her offer of her story, in which infertility has become a closed chapter. I long for the day when the last paragraph in this chapter of my life will be written.

Journeywoman's name says it all. She knows how hard this trip is.

Sarah and Alisa understand the sense of accidental sisterhood that binds infertiles. Getup Grrl has said she once thought of calling Chez Miscarriage the Miscarriage Club to capture exactly that feeling.

V's Herbie just got out of the car for a second and hopes to get right back on the road. I wish you Godspeed, but in the meantime I'm glad to have you here in the clearing.

Sol traveled through a lot of cyberspace to get here. I'd love to know where you're writing from.

Angela's metaphor about trying to retrace her steps moved me deeply. Where is the damn trail of breadcrumbs when you need it?

Each of these comments is like the strike of a needle across a magnet. And while I may not yet know the way North, I feel so heartened by the needle's feeble wiggles. Someday, somehow we'll find a path out of here.

In the meantime, the extraordinary experience of writing what I'm feeling and having perfect strangers "materialize" (etherize?!) to say, yes, they know what it's like to face in just this direction is something I'm very grateful to have.

"Compass" has so many meanings. As verb it can mean to draw an enclosing line, to measure a curve. And I wonder if it might not also be related to the word compassion. Because what I feel in having written and then gotten your responses is that I've been circled, compassed with compassion. I hope that people reading this will feel that too.

Each of you is a compass point.

I'm glad I decided to take a try at this blogging thing.