Well, I got my bag in the mail.  My very own khaki Baggalini Messenger.  The one I ordered especially for my trip to Disney World.  Me likes it.  As someone who rarely orders anything on the internet or splurges on accessories for myself, it felt a little like Christmas getting that wonderful package.  Is that sad?

Yes.

I can imagine many of you reading this are like, “Who cares about your dumb bag?”, right?  I mean, North Korea is amassing a large nuclear arsenal, Iran is going all  Tiananmen Square on its people, the economy is in the toilet, and Michael Jackson just died.  Aren’t there more important things in life than a freakin’ bag?

Yes.

When I was in the throes of primary infertility, my hubby and I went out to lunch every Sunday after church with very close couple-friend of ours.   Well, we had been going out with this couple even before infertility.  But, just as we were drowning in at least a few years of monthly BFNs, they decided to build their dream home.  Yay.  So, the next many months of our Sunday lunches were filled with napkin-scribbled maps of their floor layout, long and arduous debates of the wood choice for their custom-built kitchen cabinets, and extensive conversations about the perfect metal choice for their insane number of bathrooms.  Really how many bathrooms do two people actually need?

Should we go with pewter?  All the handles on the doors are going to be pewter.  But I really like oiled bronze.  Do you think that we could do just one bathroom in oiled bronze?  I wonder how the finish wears.  But maybe that will look too dated.  I’m afraid chrome will show too many finger prints, but at least it will coordinate with the pewter more.  What do you think, Eve?

I think you should choose the “I don’t give a flying flip what kind of metal you choose kind”.  What about that?

Well, OK, I didn’t say that.  But I was saying it in my head.  Repeatedly.  I was also saying, “I’m mourning my baby to be that won’t be, so don’t bother me with your trite decoration dilemmas.”  But instead I just played along and gnawed the inside of my cheek raw.  It just hurt to be in such a desperate dessert and to be asked to perform any sort of conjecture on such cotton candy topics. 

Who cares what your house looks like when you can’t furnish it with children?

But I never said any of that.  I mean, this was their special thing.  They had worked hard for many years to build this dream house.  And building a house IS stressful (one thing I definitely learned from them).  It always costs twice as much as you thought at take threes times as long.

One thing that never dawned on me at the time they were building this house and completely self-indulged in irrelevancy, was they actual had multiple REAL stressors occuring in their lives.  Things we rarely talked about.  Things they might half-mention or bring up just to drop a sentence later with a shake of their head or wave of their hand. 

And as I run my fingers across my new khaki Baggalini Messenger bag and admire every well-thought out compartment and double-stitched pocked, I finally get it.

Sometimes, irrelevancy is a choice.  It is a distraction amid a world of not-quite-rights and maybe-extremely-wrongs.  Did my friends take it to an extreme?  Yes, probably.  But maybe they needed to.  And I wish that maybe I would’ve learned the art of irrelevancy a little earlier in this 7 year infertility journey as well.  Not to live in all the time, but at least to land in like an cooling oasis now and then.  And I know this…

I certainly would’ve had a nicer bag collection at least.