Sometimes the world seems a terrible place

(or: All is not lost)

I’ve been feeling a bit grouchy/depressed lately about the state of the world so I thought I’d do a brief update and reconnect with my blogfriends to try and cheer myself up.

Because you guys are cool!

Anyway, I’m not properly depressed or anything; I just feel a bit of existential malaise at the things going on right now. It seems bloody crazy that there are random terrorist attacks on people just living their lives; people fleeing from war zones; hatred and xenophobia and misunderstanding. Not to mention the sheer amount of stupidity on the internet, of which I’m probably a part!

I try not to think about those things. If I thought about all those things on a macro level that bother me: polar bears swimming in seas with no icebergs to sit on; rainforests and orangutans dying; people fighting and bloody well killing each other over a difference of opinion… AAAAAAH. I don’t think I’d be able to carry on.

And I see stories like this one that particularly strike a nerve for me – the story of a baby who’s been taken from a father who didn’t want her to be adopted, who looked after her for the first two weeks of her life and yet got taken and given to adoptive parents who knew that her father wanted to raise her but took her anyway. And it’s times like these I just want to yell “Stop the world… I want to get off!” The baby has now been returned begrudgingly to her biological mother (the one who signed away parental rights under duress from her religious parents) and the baby’s father who wanted her, and never signed away his rights (because under Utah law you don’t need the bio dad’s permission – wtf?) still hasn’t seen her at time of writing. 

This stuff cuts close because I was adopted as a baby and I don’t like to think of adoption being used as a tool for rich white people to take babies away from poor weak people. I don’t like to think of a child being “given up” for profit rather than more altruistic reasons. I don’t like to think of a child who has a living, biological relative willing to raise him/her to be cut out of that child’s life. It makes me examine my own adoption story a little more closely, and whilst there’s nothing to suggest there was anything untoward about it (my parents met my bio mum) I still don’t like to think that there may have been a balance of power there that swung it towards something less than ethical. I love my parents and they’ve never shown themselves to be dodgy – but ultimately I don’t think anyone likes to examine the reality behind these things any more than I love eating bacon but don’t like to think of the animal that was killed to make it.

Anyway, maybe it’s just PMS or something. Perhaps it’s the miscarriage in my family and the personal tragedy… Perhaps it’s the thought of another birthday and Christmas without being a parent. Perhaps it’s the thought of our IVF #2 appointment coming up next week. I’ve actually kind of enjoyed the not hoping aspect of not actively trying. (We’ve done the traditional way of course but hold out no hope!) Perhaps it’s all the new babies that keep arriving, who don’t stop arriving because I happen to be infertile or miscarried.

So I figure the only way to deal with this is to have things to look forward to and projects to focus on. Right now this mainly involves cakes.

T needs a turkey themed cake for his work tomorrow for Thanksgiving. It’s becoming more and more common for people to do stuff in the UK around Thanksgiving but it’s still a niche thing mainly if there are Americans or if you work for an American company.

I have made all the cakes for the next few days. Here they are, cooling…

 
Tonight I have to make one or more of them into some kind of thanksgiving turkey themed cake. I’m thinking I’m going to go for the live turkey rather than the roast turkey look. I think it’s more appealing!

   

Other fun stuff: Our bathroom has now been transformed into a vista of NYC. (Look at the bottom left corner.) I think it’s funny as you can sit on the loo and pretend you’re looking over a skyline of Manhattan! It took a lot of blood, sweat and tears for T to put this up… It’s vinyl stickers and it takes a lot of effort to get them lined up straight! He was cursing a bit! But now it looks really cool! We rent our place but our landlord is kind of absentee so probably won’t notice – and anyway, it’s an improvement on what was there before (a kind of horrible peeling paint wall). In theory you can peel off the stickers when you leave, but I reckon we would just leave it. It’s a tiny bathroom and it adds a bit of oomph.
  

My mug that our friends from DC gave us – the Starbucks mug you can get from a variety of places. With hot chocolate. (Ashley you know about my hot choc fixation! This is not Ghirardelli as we ran out of the stuff you gave us, so it’s double strength Cadbury’s!) Plus a whole heap of marshmallows and cinnamon… Why not? It’s been cold and miserable here so we have to do something to counter it!

  

Finally, we put up our tree. Yup, you read that right – we are big into Disney as well as big into Christmas! We are like all the things people complain about rolled into one! This has cheered me up no end. It’s nice to come into the house and see a giant tree and lights and things. One wall is totally fairy lights which looks magical. Dog doesn’t quite know what to make of it, but he’s had two Christmases so far and enjoyed the turkey dinners a lot. And we are having a sort of Friendsgiving this weekend which is super exciting! I am planning a big cake project for it (hence the cakes, not all planned to be a turkey) so I will post more when I’ve done that! The week after that I have a huge chocolate 50th cake to make, and then a huge golden cake to make the week after that – all rather optimistic / ambitious, so they’ll keep me busy.

And before you know it, we’ll be starting IVF again…

That’s all for now folks. Work to do; cakes to make. Hope you’re all well – tell me your plans for spending these cold winter nights! Tell me your stories of cheer! I’m sending happy thoughts your way…