Yet

This is a heady word, this "yet."

You can throw it around like, "Yet, the chair was red." And it means essentially nothing, or you can say that you haven't done something... yet.

There's a lot I haven't done yet.

For instance, instead of writing my memoir right now I'm vacillating between eating hippy chips, Facebook, and this blankish page (and the other blankish page that has bits on it). I'm having a hard time settling into the writing groove. I haven't really gotten my "book" off the ground.

Yet.

I have this thing on my calendar. This surgery. This trap door that might open the Way of my Cervix and drop me into the illusive land of motherhood, or cancer, or I could probably just straight-up die.

And I'm not sure I'm ready for any of these things.

Yet.

I told my mother yesterday, which is how I know for real and for certain that she does not in fact read my blog, as she was surprised to hear that I might consider an elective-ish surgery to possibly reinstate my fertility without first landing a husband. This was her first concern, my marital status, not my health or the state of my health insurance and finances, nor even the state of my advanced directives.

No, mama.

Don't you get it? Polly the Polyp is not about my marriage, although she sure seemed to have a lot to say about it. She's some sort of manifestation of something - like my fear of motherhood and the requisite failures and rebirths that happen around that, or possibly what happened to the chewing gum I repeatedly swallowed as a child despite my extreme effort to chew and chew and chew. Maybe Polly is here to inspire me to Write My Damned Book before I possibly die on the equinox - what if Polly is really an entire universe and she's just waiting for the big BANG?

I'm not ready to die, yet.

I have a lot of things to do, like birth a book, and a baby, and make a few thousand more epic mistakes worth writing about. I'm here to write about the important things like losing and letting go, like expectations and disappointments. Like how to avoid being a dill-hole and how to manage adult diagnoses of HFM disease. These things are important.

Oprah did not get married, and look at her. Sure, she endured a hellish childhood but now she owns Maui and Africa and puts her picture all over everything, like, "OH, YEAH, LIFE? YOU AIN'T SEEN NOTHIN' YET."

(she didn't have babies either, I know).

Mama's got some expectations. And I haven't lived up to them.

Yet.