Saturday was four years since I had gastric bypass surgery. I spent the day playing with my daughter with a brief interlude of CrossFit. Every year this anniversary feels remarkably different. And I guess that’s what it’s supposed to do.

This year, spending most of the day playing with my sweet, beautiful daughter, it seemed I spent more time remember the hard parts. I remembered very, very clearly the day I received the rejection. I went into work late that day because I was teaching a night class. I received the news about 9:00 a.m., just as I was starting to get dressed. I remember going into the laundry room to get a pair of trousers (one of only two I had that really fit half-way decent and they were getting snug) and looking at the bottle of bleach sitting on the shelf above the washing machine. I wondered how much I’d have to drink to die. Because if I was going to do it, I was going to do it right. And then I got my pants and walked back out and put them on and got on with my life, such as it was.

I remembered lying in the room before surgery, where everything was very dim, and quiet, and Veronica, the surgery coordinator, was called in to help them situate my IV. She asked if I was ready and I said yes. She asked, “Really, why?” And it was the why only someone who’s been there, who’s been that fat and that miserable can understand and ask. I said, “So I can have babies.” And I almost started to cry. I cried so very little through the whole agonizing process of application and denial and application and everything. Veronica said, “Oh honey. Did a doctor tell you that?” And I shook my head no. No doctor ever told me that.

No doctor ever had to tell me that. In fact, I had had doctor encourage me to go ahead and try. But I couldn’t or wouldn’t do it. I was bound up in my head and trapped in a body I hated so much I could no longer connect to in any way. To make babies you have to make love and I was tired of making love to my husband without fully being present. Everyone around me had a life and a reason to live. Mine were slowly slipping away and I was letting them. I felt like I hunkered down, resolved to wait it out or freeze in place.

When I finally resolved to do it, I don’t know that I had any real hope. I spoke of having hope. I acted optimistic. But I took that step as a last one. I lifted up the act and the results, determined to let the chips fall where they may and live with the results. You couldn’t say I hadn’t tried everything. I’d tried everything—to lose weight and to hang on to life. Except that morning, alone on a gurney in a very cold room, I gave up on both of those things and decided I would live if I lived. It wouldn’t be up to me until the other side, but if I made it, well, that was another story.

I lived. I blogged it, with a sense of humor. I hibernated and then got crazy high on the glory of finally achieving what I’d been trying to achieve my entire life. I let Chez round me up into running and positivity like I’d never known it. I got high on life and stayed high on life until I was just plain high all the time. And then, because I was an addict convinced of her own invincibility, I came down. I came way, way down. And I came down hard. And all the running and all the clothes and the random whistles from strange men didn’t help when I couldn’t get pregnant and my marriage started to fall apart. I was a part of the world in a way I never had been and that meant living the disgusting ugly parts of life. Life isn’t disgusting and ugly when you’re not living it. It’s just gray. But I lived! I lived the parts where I did horrible things I’m still ashamed of. I lived parts where I tried, with what I thought was rationality, to break my husband’s heart. I found my way back. I don’t know how he found it himself not only to forgive me, but to ask me to stay with him, but he did. So I found that being a part of life, and living as a whole person, was harder than living had been before.

Christopher and I found our way out of the terrible darkness we’d worked into. We found a way to talk to each other again. And I still couldn’t get pregnant and still teetered too much on the edge of too high. And every month that went by that I bled, the worse it got. My innate ambition, not content with weight loss and half-marathons and every other thing, decided that not being able to get pregnant was just as much a character flaw as everything else. I lived life on a seesaw of confrontation and obliteration. Pursue a month with temperature charting, cervical mucus checking, doctors appointments, terrible tests and do it all in private and keep most of it to yourself. And then, on the outside and on the weekends, just keep partying. You can’t be mortified and grief-stricken and self-immolating if you’re blind drunk. But that wasn’t really pushing back at life, which would have been to really live, and be present in life. It was trying to find gray life again, life not lived. Because it really was easier.

And then it worked. I got pregnant. And I don’t want to say that that saved me, but at this point, I know that no matter how much I want to, consciously or unconsciously, return to that state of gray life, where I go through the motions and ride along on the currents and never live because living is too full of risk and pain and rejection and laughter and joy and love, I can’t. I can’t go back there. I can’t even toe the line. My daughter is counting on me. I’ll pay all the prices. I’ll do all the penances. That she is healthy and whole is a miracle, as it is for every single baby born. That she is happy and growing is a miracle, as it is. I can hardly take credit for any of it. She’s a child of God, just as I am. That He trusted me with her is its own miracle. So now my life is fully-lived. It is full of incredible risk, and pain, and rejection. It is more full of laughter and love and joy than I thought possible.

The process of growth and change I started four years ago isn’t over, I know. I look and act normal. Saturday, playing with my daughter, I thought of what would have been if I’d stopped this process at any point. I wouldn’t have endured the bad parts, that’s for certain. No suicidal ideation, no leaning off the cliff of adultery, no divorce lawyers, no infertility agony. None of that. But all of that is worth it for one tiny giggle from my daughter. Or even one of her smiles. I chose life and life chose me. I choose to live. And I’m going to keep it up, living. There is no end to the love I can hold.