parallel lines

the versions we never live

In another parallel dimension, in 2010, I got two blue parallel lines on a pregnancy test, soon after I started trying to have a baby. The two lines didn’t fade and in the summer of 2011 we had our first baby.

They’d be approaching their 13th birthday now.

Their siblings would be 11 and 8. We’d be living in a bigger house. We’d be more tired, more broke. We’d be totally oblivious to what it means to Not Get The Version You Imagined.

We’d probably ask friends clumsy questions about their lack of children. People would talk about infertility and it wouldn’t register too deeply. IVF postcode lotteries would wash over me in a land of otherness.

An ocean of trauma doesn’t exist in this dimension. There is more noise in the house. The seats at the table are full. There are half arsed talks about vasectomy because the third was an accident no one saw coming (and that we don’t fully understand how it happened if we’re honest).

And yet.

The rose tinted glasses of an imagined hindsight aren’t real. We know this. In our fantasy of what could have been, we edit out the other things that happened when the butterfly wings beat differently and opened out an alternative reality. In this version, there will be other hardships. Maybe.

This isn’t to disrespect the trajectory I did travel through. I wouldn’t swap it. Not any of it. In this imaginary version, there are different children and I don’t recognise them and they don’t belong to me. In this version I undoubtedly have less compassion, less humility and my iron cast resilience never got chance to materialise. Because it didn’t have to.

But this is not to turn away from a desire for things to have been different anyway. For it all to be a bit less hard, a bit less lonely, a bit less brittle. Which is why I am writing this. We are allowed to be wistful about what could have been.

Indeed, sometimes, we are allowed to want to beat our fists on the wall about how fucking hard it has been, whatever the small print of our gratitude says about the dimension we do live in. And whilst it is rarely said, we’re also allowed to dance in resentment that others got dealt the better hands.

The dimensions will keep on diversifying.

On April 15th there is a version of me that walked into my consultants office who wasn’t greeted by a breast specialist nurse looking sad. In this story, sat in the black coat I recently wore to my fathers funeral, I have a benign lump. The meeting is mundane and I go on my way.

I was thinking about all of this today, whilst drinking a glass of champagne to celebrate being halfway through radiotherapy. I sat in the sunshine in the dimension of the universe that I live in now and felt glad to be alive and pissed off that I live in a cancer shaded world now and I get to be both.

We always get to be both.

People will want us to be grateful for the lot we got, to be OK, to be fine, to be good company, to not be a worry. For the most part, we’ll play that role whilst inside we are desert and fire and storm clouds and rainbows.

There’s no shame in wanting it all to have been easy though. You did deserve that.