Muddled Emotions

Over the past week I've started a few different posts about the nursing program- my thoughts, my experience with the orientation, etc.  Everything I've taken the time to say I've saved as a draft, and I've left in draft form.  I don't have any desire to publish my thoughts...  perhaps because those thoughts are  beyond conflicted.  I don't have clarity of purpose at the moment.  By all accounts I'm moving forward, and yet each step forward seems to result in a new emotional low.  My experience with the nursing program more than a decade ago was so very painful.  I'm a different person now, in a totally different place (in every sense of the word), and yet I find myself reliving that loss.

It didn't help that my failure as a nursing student was in some respects the beginning of the darkest chapter of my life.  It was one piece of bad news in a string of bad news that just kept coming.  Before that failure, my most crushing pain had been the pain of unrequited love and friendship...  Which seemed positively laughable a few years later.

Being a nursing student again is like climbing aboard a time machine and traveling back.  I'm not sure I can stomach going there, but it seems there's no way forward unless I do. 

On top of my reluctance to relive the past there's the matter of having a baby.  I feel like there's no way I'll be able to do this thing that I always thought and planned on doing, and suddenly the pain of the realization is overwhelming.  Yesterday my sister brought my niece and nephew over for the afternoon, and it was heavenly being in their company.  Later, we went to a birthday dinner where there were two more little ones.  No, I can't imagine my life without a child or two.  As I ponder the next two years, and think about how old I'll be when I'm finished with my studies, I feel broken.  If I was to get pregnant tomorrow, I'm already borderline high-risk because of my age- I'm already on the older side of the parenthood equation.  And my husband is 15 years my senior.  The thought of adding two more years just overwhelms me.