AF arrived in a blaze of glory this morning, after 3 anxious days of ambiguous, brown-spotted telegraphs. I start Clmid on Saturday – I’m excited and a little scared! I’m also sick – some kind of crazy allergy/flu symptom thing. Ugh. Tomorrow I present a paper at a conference so hopefully will sleep well tonight.
Further updates as events warrant.
BFN, courtesy of dr.’s office. Picked up Clmid prescription on the way home. Oddly, I felt relieved. Yet it also feels like I’m taking a big step forward.
Sometimes I wonder what it is I really want? To want, to hope, to desire all require an imagined state of being, an ability to envision a reality other than my current actual lived experience, and to see that reality as preferable. I love my life, I love my husband; but at the same time, I guess there is some measure in which both life and relationship with husband feel incomplete, unfinished. I think when my niece was born (my sister stayed with us for over a month after her husband died; my niece was 6 months old and took her first steps in my living room), it helped us both see and imagine what our life together would be like plus-one, and it looked tremendously appealing and fun. Does that mean that our life without that child is empty and meaningless? No, not really. Just different. Maybe we’re just bored with being just us. Maybe it really is all just biological urges.
I think the bit of relief I felt at the bfn had to do with feeling rushed, not feeling ready, not wanting my life to change just yet. And yet here I am, ttc for 27 months, in anguish just a week ago over time slipping away, over failure after failure. Why do I feel ok with it now? Shouldn’t I be wailing and gnashing my teeth?
But I’m not, at least not right now.
Last night, spotting. Not old brown, fresh pinky-red. Heart sinks, a little profanity is heard in the bathroom.
This morning, clean panty-liner, bbt still high…
HPTs left behind in VA.*
Morning wake-up call from the Bear; consultation: do I run out to the pharmacy, desperately holding my morning pee? Or leave the pee in a cup while I run the errand? Decision: wait and see what happens – I’ll know for sure either way soon enough. Decision influenced as much by the Bear as by my desire to stay in my pjs for another hour.
I think he likes to let hope live as long as possible; I don’t have as much patience with her.
My annual pap is this afternoon. I think I’ll wear the socks T-llama made for me 🙂
At this instance, the bottom line is that whatever happens, it’s still the longest darn LP I’ve had since I started keeping track. 13dpo! That’s freaking great!
*(What does it mean that I remembered to bring plenty of tampons? Last week I dreamed about tampons, piles and piles of tampons, more than I’d need in a lifetime.)
Oh well.
This week has been like the worst PMS I’ve ever had. Of course I’m hoping it’s NOT PMS, but rather the birthday sex coming home to roost, but I’m going to wait until Monday to find out. I haven’t been this cranky, tired, and hungry for such an extended period of time (a week!!!) since adolescence. Sucks that it’s on my spring break, too.
Brought a lot of work home with me; it’s mostly getting done. Freaking out about the amount of work that must get done before the end of the semester. Freaking out that my stress levels are probably depressing my progesterone even more.
I’m going to try to take a nap.
I finally figured out what was bothering me about the “Few Good Eggs” book; I feel like the “hurry hurry hurry” message tries to move the reader towards parenthood by stimulating fear and guilt. While I recognize that these are valid emotions with important roles to play in individual and social survival (if we didn’t fear what was truly dangerous, we’d be in trouble; if we didn’t feel guilty for wrongdoing – as defined by our immediate social context – society would not function very well), I know that I myself am far too often motivated by a surplus of one or the other emotion, when it isn’t really merited.
Ok that sentence was way too long. I guess I’m trying to weigh how valid the fear of never having children is, as well as the guilt for not having started trying sooner.
(nod to the Town Criers) 🙂
I just ran into a fellow Stirrup Queen who was out with her 3yo on this lovely warm day; she’s the one I mentioned recently experiencing secondary IF. I ran over to get an update since I hadn’t seen her in months and months. She said “well, we did 3 IUIs, and third time’s a charm!” They haven’t told people yet b/c she’s not very far along and they’re kind of holding their breath while waiting for the ultrasound. I had a momentary pang of doom in my heart, but my SSH rang a 10, just because she gives me hope.
I know I can’t hitch my chariot to someone else’s star, and hope’s a fickle friend, but for the moment I’m soaking in the spring and feeling the presence of the goddess (at least metaphorically!)
What is it about Spring? Or maybe it’s just PMS… I’ve been on an emotional roller coaster since Sunday. It probably didn’t help that Saturday was the 2-year anniversary of my brother-in-law’s sudden and unexplained death (leaving my sister with a 6-month-old daughter).
Sunday night I spent three hours at our local big chain bookstore reading the ONE book on IF that I found there, cover to cover. I am still ruminating over what I thought about it; the intended audience seems to be the upper-middle-class career woman. I was a bit put off by what I felt was the overarching message of “hurry hurry hurry now that you’ve selfishly squandered your fertile years building a career, you stupid selfish thing,” but I might be reading into it a little bit. I’m a teeny tiny bit prone to excessive guilt-tripping… in the way that Mt. Everest is a teeny tiny little hill…
I think what freaked me out more than anything was the association they point out between low progesterone and high chances of m/c. My official diagnosis is “unexplained,” but my progesterone is low-ish and my luteal phase short-ish, hence the Clmid in my future, so this really frightened me.
The other thing that happened while I was reading this book was a major freak-out over my recent birthday. Heck, I’m THIRTY FOUR now… this means I have TWELVE MONTHS before my expiration date…
I ended up going home, journaling furiously, then escaping to the bathroom to cry with the fan on so my husband couldn’t hear me. I took advantage of the moment to scrub the floor and tub, though.
Later, I cried in his arms some more and we talked about it. He made me laugh, as always. He’s so cute too when he puts on his “active listening” hat (he’s getting good at it!). He helped me identify my primary fear, which is: that we made a bad decision by postponing ttc, and that there’s no remedy now, and we have doomed ourselves to childlessness. He sounded more open about adoption than he has before, although he remains confident that IUI is going to work for us. His nickname around the house may be “Evil,” but Sunday night he was “Light.”
Baby Blues brought up the issue of what to do with that hurt that was unacknowledged or unintended or unknown by the person who inflicted it – when do you confront, when do you make yourself vulnerable to the possibility of being hurt even more, but also to the possibility of potential healing of self and relationship, by bringing it up?
What it made me think of immediately was a brief conversation at a Memorial Day BBQ last year; we were 5 months into diagnosis for IF, trying to schedule an HSG, and of course there were lots of little kids at the picnic. I was feeling particularly unsociable that day, so when the kids wanted to play in the house I went in with them to be the “grownup” supervisor. The parents were quite grateful. I’d been around these kids regularly since before ttc so it didn’t really bother me; it was the newborns outside that I wanted to avoid.
So one of the dads comes in to change his daughter’s diaper and looks at me knitting while I arbitrate disputes over toys. “You should get yourself one of these,” he says, indicating his child.
Slightly stunned, I say “Uh, looks like a lot of work,” which OF COURSE doesn’t reflect AT ALL my actual feeling about the prospect, but it was the first thing I could think of to just deflect the comment. Pretend I don’t want one.
“Oh, but it’s totally worth it,” he continues. “You don’t mind the work at all.”
I grunt noncommitally and that’s the end of the conversation.
I fumed over this for MONTHS. I thought about calling him up, e-mailing, something, just to say, “Look, you just need to think before you say something like that to someone. You have no idea whether they may be trying or not. You have no business making blanket recommendations about whether and when someone should have children. Besides, it’s NONE OF YOUR F****ING BUSINESS!!!” But I never did. I just avoided that particular social group for about five or six months.
Funny thing, after I started interacting with them again, I found out that 2 other women in the group are struggling with IF, one primary and the other secondary. We have a little IF support group now among the 3 of us. Neither is the wife of the guy who made that inappropriately personal comment (she went on to have another baby last fall). It’s just frustrating. I do wish I were more like Mands and others who are out of the IF closet. It takes a lot of courage, but perhaps it would help make people think before they speak.
On the other hand, I’ve read so many posts about That Friend who just never, ever, seems to catch on, no matter how much one tries.
When I see a mom I can’t imagine myself being (for whatever class, ethnic, or cultural reasons) there’s enough of a mental distance that it doesn’t affect me as much as when I see a mom that I not only can imagine myself being, but want to be or wish I was – and then I feel like a total and complete FREAK OF NATURE. Knitting blogs are going to be the death of me. The young hippie mom knitting away with her little one in a sling – man, that kills me. Similarly, my therapist told me that it would be totally normal and natural that I should hate pregnant women and want to steal other people’s babies, but I’ve found that I only want to steal babies of color. Bald little blue-eyed creatures generally fail to move me, but when we went to Guatemala in January I couldn’t tear my eyes away from all the little brown babies. I want one soooooooo bad. And I feel like, yes, a freak of nature for not having one already.
 | Mali on Transitions |
| ovh dedicated server on Handling It | |
 | Ronnie Butzen on Mine and not mine |
 | Francis Wierman on Mine and not mine |
 | Justine on Balance |
Movable Type 