Life Without Baby

filling the silence in the motherhood discussion

Your Next 15,000 Days

I was recently introduced to Klara, a blogger in Slovenia, and her new blog The Next 15,000 Days. Her title caught my attention immediately, and I had to know what it meant. Here’s what she writes about her choice of title:

“Just a few days before Christmas we will celebrate 3,000 days since our wedding day. Our first 3,000 days were mainly sad. Of course, there were also lots of great things. The greatest was that I realized I married the love of my life; all the pain brought us even closer together. If we are lucky, another 15,000 days are waiting for us. So, we decided to start living a new, happy life. We lost, already, enough days being sad. We just don’t want to lose another day.”

I love this attitude. It’s the same notion Mr. Fab and I had when we decided to start figuring out how to be a family of two. We drew a line in the sand and said, “This is where we start living our lives again. But it’s not always easy to do.

You can’t just decide to not be sad anymore. Sadness and grief are much more complicated and sneaky than that. They tend to hide in unexpected places and leap out on you when you think you’re safe. Family gatherings, pregnancy announcements, and closets where you kept baby clothes you planned to use are all places to be on the look out for a grief ambush.

But you can decide, as Klara says, to “start living a new happy life.” It takes work, and it might not always go as planned, but deciding is half the battle.

So, how do you plan to live your next 15,000 days?

Comments

  1. My new year’s resolution… which was probably there before New Years, was to 1) live in gratitude… to wake up every morning and count my blessings, from miniscule and often unnoticed, like having the chance to see a new flower bloom in my garden or discovering a new fragrance at the perfume counter, to huge, as in still having my parents around and healthy, my brother and his family, my aunts and friends, and of course my husband. 2) fight hard against negative thoughts the moment they pop into my head and keep them from taking over. 3) get myself out there, teach a new class, take a new class, volunteer more 4) read more on spirituality and faith, and of course, 5) get in shape. I once heard or read that the Dalai Lama told someone that the most important thing to do is to be happy. I guess I was young and really didn’t “get” the message at the time. It is important and it is also difficult… What really annoys me lately, is that while I’m really making the effort to be “happy”, I still have dreams revolving around pregnancy and my inability to have children… I think my subconscious is lagging way behind all my conscious efforts. :/

    • Iris, all I can say is that your subconscious eventually catches up. I called it “reprogramming my brain” and it took time.

  2. I love this! I plan on going back to school in the fall to get my master’s degree, I’m going to take some Parkour/freerunning classes (!), and I want to learn Spanish as well as the guitar. I want to grow as a person, learn new things and put some fun back into my life!

  4. dear Lisa: thank you so much for including me in your blog. I am honoured!

    dear Iris, Angela and Mali: yes, it is great to have some goals in front of us… it is important that we do something for ourselves and also put back some fun into our life!

    lots of love from sLOVEnia, to all of you!

  7. I found out by pure chance that i became a father for the first time when i was exactly 15000 days old. I was born on feb 3 1966 & daughter born 28 feb 2007. Its probably more strange that i found this out by accident that the fact itself!