Torrefaction

I'm a blues man. A blues man is a prisoner of hope, and hope is a qualitatively different category than optimism. Optimism is a secular construct, a calculation of probability. --Cornell West, Rolling Stone, November 15, 2007

I'm having a hell of a hard time right now, walking the line between hope and optimism, at least as it relates to adopting a baby. In my case, the optimism is there...but the hope is going, going, gone. Two days ago we got a call about being shown to a potential birth mom. Today I got the call that she chose a different couple. This has already happened a couple of times, and it's going to happen a LOT more times, and it kills me every time. I'm not mad about it--when we pray about this, we pray that the baby gets what he or she needs, so that prayer is always answered. When we pray for ourselves, our prayer is that we have the strength to see this through, and the strength to go on hoping.

Right now I know I have the strength to see this through...but I don't know if I can go on hoping. I'm optimistic, actually. Our prospects are very good. We'll be shown to various people, and we'll be a match for somebody, and we'll be parents and it'll all be good. That's what my brain tells me. But I don't *believe* it. Because I've been watching too much Discovery Health Channel, I'm starting to think of it this way: that hope is produced by a gland of some sort, and mine has been damaged by an autoimmune disorder, and is no longer able to replenish the hope that is leaking out of my soul from a tiny pinhole in my mastoid bone. (I repeat: I watch way too much Discovery Health Channel. Also, I am weird).

The silver lining, I guess, is that hope I don't have is hope that can't be crushed. And if I lean on my optimism instead, I'll be able to keep hobbling onward until I reach my goal. The big steely grey cloud inside the silver lining is this: every time someone looks at our profile and doesn't pick us, I blame myself. Fiercely and comprehensively. So I have to find ways of keeping my spirits up, and I must not ruminate.

I have noticed that the process of subbing stories and getting rejections, which used to make me a little blue, now seems like a complete piece of cake. After all, they're rejecting my writing, not rejecting *me,* and I can improve my writing. Probably I'm just numb now, but it seems like a good time to polish some stories and submit them to some places, if only for something fresh to focus on.