death and the goldfish

I’ve been thinking a lot about something Nayla said in an earlier post, about how she isn’t sure whether it’s grief or Lupron that has caused her to forget how to open her front door. This is a completely bizarre time in life, and I wonder how uncommon it is. The mid to late thirties are, I guess, considered to be at end of the childbearing spectrum, but certainly still in the range of childbearing years. And most women will not experience infertility, per se, and in population groups where women have many children, childbearing is normal even into early forties (google search: Mennonite, childbearing). I suppose the difference here is that those women often already have several children, so are not dealing with the possibility of having no children, of never having children, at the same time they are dealing with ill or dying parents. Maybe it’s a little like ear piercing for children- everyone prefers to do both ears at the same time, so nobody has second thoughts halfway through. If I hadn’t already decided to have children before my father got sick, I don’t know that I would have the resolve to go through fertility treatment at this point in the game, not when I’ve seen what can happen, so to speak. Which is also bizarre, because it’s not as if I’m a four year old who doesn’t understand about death and what happened to the family hamster.