A few days ago Husband and I noticed some suspicious brown smudges on our sheets, near the foot of the bed.
It was most likely chocolate from a smeary post treat toddler face. But it could be poop. As we have learned again and again over the past few years, it could always be poop.
Neither one of us chose to investigate further. We are still sleeping on the sheets.
I always get a little thrill when a post appears out of the blue from a blogger I like who has gone dark for months or years. I’ve blogged before on my feelings about cold turkey blog abandonment and it being akin to hanging up on someone mid-conversation, especially when one is left with some bullshit cliffhanger about a pregnancy, embryo transfer, medical issue… How did it turn out?!?! Hi, I’m C, world’s biggest hypocrite <waves>.
I don’t know why exactly, but I’ve been overcome of late with blog nostalgia. I’ve found myself scrolling when I should be working; revisiting old friends and their (your) stories. Lurking hard. Maybe it’s the time. I’m sliding into what would be the window of trying to conceive a third child, if that were going to happen, which it almost certainly is not. I’m feeling wistful and wondering how to leave it all behind; the pregnancy, nursing, the baby days. What will life look like without babies and toddlers, with big boys who need me less. The future is sort of a wide open question mark and it feels both liberating and scary, an odd sort of feeling I was not expecting at 37. And so here I am, 1 year and 11 months from my last blog post, waving hi and hoping to stay awhile this time, though I make no promises. Which brings me back to the question posed in June of 2017, “Who gets two healthy babies from two IUIs?” Apparently, me.
Yeah, I got that fucking lucky. B is 20 months old and hilarious – I’ve truly never met another baby with such a well developed sense of humor. He was born a little over 2 months after my last post at an enormous 10lbs 5oz, trumping even the largest size estimate by nearly a pound and proving that doctors who automatically schedule C sections for all big babies are full of crap, but also proving that uterine prolapse is a Very Real Thing. Sigh. He is prone to febrile seizures, which we’ve had quite a few of thanks to 4 year-old big brother’s school germs and attendant fevers, but many medical professionals have assured us that they are benign and he will grow out of them. I have a theory, in no way based in medical science, that the seizures and that high AFP result are in some way connected, like there is something just a bit different about B’s neurological makeup that causes his neurons to spaz out when they get too hot. Here’s hoping I never know because it never gets serious enough to merit deeper investigation.
Other than two growing boys, life has been sort of the same in that trite things-are-ever-changing kind of way. We bought a house and moved to a new part of the city, farther from friends and a lot of the stuff we like to do, but fulfilling many other needs like SPACE, at such a premium in these parts. Between working full time and raising kids, I often feel like I’m white knuckling my life, constantly on the precipice of complete chaos, but then again we are all mostly healthy, mostly washed, dressed and fed, and mostly functional on most days, so mostly it’s all good, just with an asterisk here and there. Day to day I swing wildly between hope and despair, but mostly I feel resigned to how royally fucked this country and the world are. He Who Must Not Be Named in the White House, trash at the bottom of the ocean, guns in schools, women’s rights and Black/people of color’s rights under siege. It’s disheartening to say the least. I am a big fan of sci fi literature and most of the time I just see us hurtling irrevocably toward one of the many dystopian futures I read about. I look at my guys and I am often overwhelmed; equal parts so, so incredibly guilty, sad and sorry for what they will inherit, and then glad that I will be gone from this earth before the worst of it happens. Isn’t that just awful?
Well! I didn’t set out for this post to end up as a bummer, but sometimes you start typing and unexpected stuff comes out. I have more I’d like to say and a freer schedule with the end of the school year approaching, so that bodes well, but again, no promises. I hope you’re all well out there in blogland, wherever you are, and be assured that if you still write, I still read. And if you stepped away from blogging one day to go live your life and the next time you turned around months or years had passed by, be assured I still think of you fondly.
She raised her head from her newspaper. She called out. Nothing. She walked to the fish, the lizards, the dogs and the cats. Nowhere. She reassured herself she wasn’t the hysterical type. She walked at only a slighter faster pace back around the circuit she had just completed, calling their names in a perfectly reasonable tone. Nothing, nowhere. She abandoned the buggy and moved quickly to the counter. She asked two people a very simple question to which they replied with an infuriating lack of urgency. She went back to the fish, and the lizards, shouting. She understood that her children were not kidnapped or murdered or likely to be further than fifty feet from where she was presently standing but running through this logical series of statements did nothing to halt the falling away of everything that now happened inside her. She peered over into the pit that separates people who have known intolerable pain from people who haven’t.
– Zadie Smith, NW
I’m going to skip the apology for disappearing and just dive right in if that’s cool. The explanation is really uninteresting anyway; really just working and living and all the regular stuff, and not being motivated to blog.* Onward!
To recap:
I’ll stop using bullets now.
I can’t fully describe the effect of getting that news. I was terrified, but also had a feeling of resignation. Of course. Of course it wasn’t that easy. After all, who gets 2 healthy babies from 2 IUIs? Oh, and did I mention, Mulva was also pregnant? Second month trying, due TEN DAYS before me. Of course we could not both get our babies, of course I would be the loser.
We got the news on a Friday; what followed was an anxious, teary weekend spent hugging our son and a meeting with a genetic counselor first thing Monday morning. The counselor, quite frankly, alarmed us more than anything with lots of talk of the worst case scenarios. The only way to know with (almost) total certainty what was going on would be an amnio, which of course carries its own risks. But there was a light – I am mixed race and in a constant state of High Dungeon when filling out medical forms. When only one box can be checked (notoriously the case with electronic forms), I check “Other” because screw them and their one-size-fits-all form for an ever more diverse world. See? High Dungeon. But this time it bit me in the ass, because Black women naturally have a significantly higher AFP than women of other races, with no increase in ONTDs (a lower incidence, in fact). The genetic counselor recommended that the tests always be calculated for the ethnicity that will return the highest values (advice for any other mixed mamas out there). She called the lab and had them recalculate the number. It came back at 2.26; Slight Elevation vs Significant Elevation. Slight Terror vs Significant Terror, I suppose? The GC was also able to get us in for an early anatomy ultrasound that morning. We held our breaths as the technician scanned our baby, looked closely at its spine, its brain, its tiny organs. Even though they aren’t allowed to give you any information, she made a lot of comforting noises and comments during the scan like, “Mmm hmm… that looks perfect,” which I appreciated beyond words. Then she left and we waited for the doctor, Significantly calmer than before. The doctor (who was wearing some enormous dark sunglasses, which was disconcerting) told us our baby looked perfect for that gestational age and we would come back for regular ultrasounds to keep an eye on things. Later that week, though the genetic counselor didn’t recommend it (I disagree with her reasoning, for the record), I went to a lab and got my blood drawn to re-run the AFP number. It came back at 1.72. Normal.
Since then we’ve had a detailed anatomy scan at 20+ weeks where all looked good, plus a couple of shorter growth scans – I’m almost 31 weeks and this baby appears to be a normally developing boy. I can’t say the ultrasounds or the normal AFP result have put my mind fully at ease – medical science has its limitations and until he is here safe and healthy in August, there will be a big question mark hanging over us. Husband’s first cousin had a baby boy in February with Spina Bifida – no red flags, no warning. You just never know.
We haven’t told our friends or families any of this. It was a mixture of not wanting to scare them unnecessarily and not wanting to answer endless questions of “Any news?” and “How are you doing?” (said with accompanying sad/pity face). I wonder now, if something does turn out to be amiss with our baby boy’s body or brain, how we will explain to them that no, it’s not a total surprise, we knew it was possible because you see there was all this drama back in March… I hope with my everything that we never have to have the conversation.
So that’s my story; the story I have to tell right now. I’ve looked into the pit. I hope I am so lucky as to merely step back, shaking and shaken, from the edge. 2 healthy babies from 2 IUIs? Please. Please. Please.
*I’m still around, I still read your blogs, I suck at commenting but definitely try to throw out Likes to all your great posts (such a cop out, I know). My very, very best to you all.
As someone who didn’t post anything for the better part of a year, I think I can officially don the moniker of Bad Blogger. I was noticing recently, though, that if I were to finish and post even a fraction of what I have in drafts, I would actually be rather prolific. Just one problem: most of that stuff has the potential to piss people off. It’s not so much that I shy away from controversy or writing things people may disagree with – I have a thick skin – but rather that I know there’s a smart, tactful, eloquent way to convey what I’m thinking and it seems like I just can’t strike a balance between saying what’s on my mind, yet not sounding preachy and self righteous, or smug, or like a total dick. Thus my drafts folder is an ever growing graveyard of partially written posts, abandoned in disgust or frustration. Some such topics are:
There’s a tendency in the IF community to rail against the unfairness of infertility, which is understandable and human. But bloggers always lose me when they bring up the friend/cousin/neighbor who is unemployed/on drugs/a terrible human being and has six kids that they don’t deserve. Deep, deep in my heart and bones – while I know that some people who have children are awful parents and others who can’t have them would be amazing parents, and that this is a shitty and sad state of affairs – I do not believe that a pregnancy or a baby is something one can deserve. Because who is keeping that tally and what are the criteria? Infinite patience? A certain (large) amount in the bank? A big house? We’re all going fall short in one area or another. Even in my saddest, most bitter pregnancy announcement moments, I never thought I deserved to have a baby whilst the other woman didn’t. This isn’t because I’m some great person (believe me, I am not) but because that kind of thinking just doesn’t make sense to my mind. I certainly wished it was me instead of the other woman, thought terrible and uncharitable thoughts about friends and family members, cried and raged like a petulant child… but that was more “wah wah woe is me” than an actual indictment of the unfairness of the Universe. Trite as it sounds, my default answer to such things is, who ever said life was fair? Because really, it’s not. Wanting something, working your ass off to get it and doing all the right stuff may tip the odds in your favor, but is still no guarantee that you’ll get your heart’s desire. There’s no such thing as fairness outside of organized sports, there’s just the shit that happens.
Why I can’t write about it:
Because every time I do, I slip down the slope into religion (because I know exactly “Who” a lot of people believe is keeping the tally of deserts) and then I’m in a whole other, terrible zone I don’t want to be in. You can’t argue faith and I’m not interested in trying, but someone could easily go there and then knowing me I’d have to respond and bam, blog war. So, no.
I think the excessive praise for women who go to the ends of the earth to breastfeed – from the simple herbs, teas, oats, cookies or beers, to pumping unto misery, and finally to non-FDA approved drugs from overseas – is just the disguised flip side of full on formula shaming and a way for some women to feel superior, rather than an empowering movement that encourages women to trust our bodies to nourish our children. Every time I read a post from a woman who sounds exhausted and sad because breastfeeding is so hard, every single reply seems to be something like “Ifyouneedtouseformulathatstotallyfinebecauseallthatmattersisthatyourbabyeats BUT YOU ARE SO AMAZING FOR DOING ALL THIS YOU ARE A MAMMARY WARRIOR!!!!!!!” Because in the little corner of Blog World I inhabit, we’re mostly on the liberal end of the spectrum, so people feel they have to start with giving lip service to the idea that formula is totally fine of course, because hey, we don’t judge other people’s choices! We are liberal and accepting! But when you read between the lines, the message is pretty clear: Do Everything You Possibly Can to Breastfeed No Matter What. If you do so and it doesn’t work out, we will congratulate you for your hard work, shake our heads in pity and say, “Well at least formula exists” and accept you, poor unfortunate soul, into our midst. If you simply choose not to breastfeed (the horror), we will politely avert our eyes and cough daintily, but not say much, all the while knowing that you have chosen to deprive your baby of something incredibly important because you are selfish cow, and we are better. The whole thing just burns me up. How about saying to a new mother with supply issues who is sad, overwhelmed, in pain and at her wits’ end, “You’ve tried every trick in the book, don’t feel like you have to order sketchy drugs off the internet; give your baby all the breast milk you can and supplement with formula. He’ll still get the benefits of being breastfed as well as a happy parent. Babies not only survive on formula, they thrive, just like on breast milk.” Maybe then we would actually have a community of support and choice, rather than just the appearance of one.
Why I can’t write about it:
Talk about a hot button issue. I haven’t posted this post for pretty obvious reasons. People get cah-razy over breastfeeding. The drama is real.
I actually had to put my money where my mouth was on this one. I’ve always felt this way, but when I went back to work after 4 months and couldn’t keep up with Mac, even pumping 3x a day, I was faced with the reality of giving my exclusively breastfed baby formula. It should have been easy, because I think formula is a perfectly good source of food for a baby, but it wasn’t. I cried, I had feelings of failure, I pumped more, I consumed oats and raspberry leaf tea and Mother’s Milk Plus and beer… I did all the things. And then I sat down and had a good think about why I was so resistant to giving my son formula if I thought formula was ok? Was it just ok for other babies, but not mine, because in reality I thought formula was substandard and only breast milk was actually good? Well, yeah, kinda sorta, but not because I actually believed that. I realized that I was caught up in the undercurrent of approval and superiority that surrounds breastfeeding, especially where I live in NYC (An aside: a good friend of mine who lives in a well-to-do hippie crunchy area of Brooklyn had a woman in her moms group confide that she was secretly supplementing her daughter with formula, but please not to tell the others. That’s some powerful shame right there.) What I was feeling was in part just run of the mill mother guilt for not being willing to do ANYTHING and EVERYTHING to provide my kid with the Gold Standard of nutrition, but also a sneakier feeling, one I liken to someone trying to make you feel bad about wearing inexpensive shoes or driving the “wrong” kind of car – basically make you feel less than. No longer being an exclusive breastfeeder meant no longer being part of the in-crowd on the “right” side of the all important breastfeeding issue. So I thought about it, and then I gave my son some formula, and he is healthy, happy and the most wonderful kid I know.
This is something that utterly baffles me. I don’t have FB – never have, and I don’t quite get the appeal – but if it’s something you enjoy then great, “Like” stuff in good health. But it seems to me that no one actually enjoys Facebook. From studies and articles like this one, to the creation of new terms like FOMO, to the anecdotal evidence of my own friends bitching, to the fact that a new “taking a break from FB” post appears in my reader multiple times per week, Facebook seems like a scourge upon the internet. But when I mention this radical option to whining friends, I invariably get some version of, “Oh, but it’s how I keep in touch with all my friends/family/people I went to kindergarten with and haven’t seen since!” No. Rejected. It is 2016 and there are so many ways to keep in touch with the important people in your life. SO MANY! Email, Skype, Facetime, countless chat and photosharing apps – it’s harder to be out of touch than in touch these days. And it’s probably those randoms from elementary school who are making you the most sad, since with real friends you might actually know about their rocky marriage, or kid’s behavior problems at school, or trouble getting pregnant, rather than just their perfectly manicured Facebook persona. Either trim the fat with extreme prejudice down to real friends and the family you actually like (hint: No one has 200 real friends. Nope, not 100 either), or better yet, just cancel it and take back your (online) life. Barring that, stop complaining about something you have 100% complete control over, it’s silly.
Why I can’t write about it:
This one’s on me. I find the Facebook-addiction phenomenon so mystifying and irritating that I can’t write about it in any kind of diplomatic way. The above was my best attempt and probably offensive to plenty of people. Eh.
There are more, of course – I have no shortage of opinions – but I think I’ll stop there and wait for the virtual torches and pitchforks to come a-callin’.
I started this post over two three FIVE months ago and return to it every so often with a sigh. I just don’t know how to get what’s in my head on to the screen anymore. So, as with all things that seem insurmountable, I suppose the answer is to just plow the fuck through. Also, to say Fuck a lot.
* All credit to Bunny for the title, and also for providing me with the insight that saved me again and again over those first few months. Lady, I already loved your blog, but now I want to marry it.
I read that post in 2011 and my son was born almost a full four years later but, thank Kabbalah Monster, those words had stuck in my head. My kid is healthy and delightful. My husband is kind, supportive, infinitely patient with the fact that sex is below “shave legs” on my list of priorities. I am lucky, lucky, lucky. And I spent the first several months after having my much wanted child at various levels of FUCKING DEPRESSED.
I spent a lot of my maternity leave at loose ends, at a loss for what to do with myself, with this new person I was in charge of, with the strange combination of no time and nothing-but-time I was living in. In hindsight, a lot of it had to do with being thrown into the the deep end of new-motherhood very quickly. Husband went back to work when baby Mac was five days old. I cried at the time, asked if he couldn’t stay home just one more day, but after taking off two days for labor/birth, it seemed necessary that he go back to work after just two days home with us. (Though my husband is pretty amazing, generally, this is something my mind keeps sticking on with a feeling approaching bitterness. He does have a very demanding job, no one in the company can really cover for him, and he works his ass off for us as a family. And yet… But I’ve decided I just need to let it go, and mostly have… unless I think about it too hard.) My mother came for the first couple of days after he went back, but she was still working at the time (has since retired and become our childcare, HUGE win), so exactly one week after delivering my first babe, I was alone in my apartment, overwhelmed and hormonal, and that was the deficit with which my maternity leave began. So even when life reached a bit more of an even keel, it never felt like I quite got on top of things.
My life before our son was born was very full, of friends, social activities, travel, fun time with husband, etc. I’m a social person, never been a loner type, and this new life hit me like a city bus. I floundered in the face of so many unstructured hours and found much of motherhood to be isolating. I’m going to be really honest, there were moments in those first months when I would finally, finally get the baby to sleep in his little rocker and then sit sobbing in the living room, asking myself if this was really what I traded our great life for? Was it really what I had pined for for so long? Did I make a huge mistake? Yeah, I know, ugly thoughts. And there were days – oh so many days – when the lack of sleep and sore boobs and parental anxiety felt like they were crushing me and I would wonder,”Is this PPD? Do I need to get help?” But even in the worst of it I would think back to Bunny’s post and the fact that I could still look at myself somewhat objectively, in my unwashed, unbrushed, literally-the-same-pair-of-shorts-and-tank-top-all-summer-long state, and say, yeah no shit you’re a mess girl, this is HARD. And the fact that I could take Mac for walks in the sunshine and drink a coffee and feel happy, if lonely, and just wish for a friend to share the afternoon with, and I’d think no, this can’t possibly be PPD, I’m just FUCKING DEPRESSED. After the fact, when I was able to talk about it, I checked in with all my friends who are moms (not to be confused with “Mom Friends” which I utterly failed at making – a fact I’m ultimately happy about – but that’s another post altogether) and they confirmed that yes, the first weeks and months are kind of a shit show and no one really talks about it (why, why, WHY?), but pretty much everyone is a fucked up mess. Can we get this in the pregnancy literature somewhere, please?
In the interest of getting this post POSTED already, I will bypass the detailed progression of all my many feeeeelings and sort of skip to the present day. Though I find myself conflicted about it, the thing that really brought me out of the funk and back to feeling like ME again, was coming back to work. A good friend (Mulva, for those of you who have read through that saga) asked me, on my first day, if it was weird to be back at work. I sat quietly for a moment thinking and was surprised at the answer that bubbled to the surface. It was not even a little weird. I have worked in the same place for over 8 years; there was nothing remotely strange or uncomfortable about sitting at my desk. In fact, it was pretty comforting – unlike the vast, un-quantifiable abyss that is motherhood, at work I actually knew when I was doing a good job! The suddenly abstract thought that I had a four month-old baby waiting at home, on the other hand, was very weird. And I’m sure it was also just a function of time, but being back in a place where I was just me and not a mother, plus adult conversation and a set daily routine, these things all helped to push me over the hump of Fucking Depressed to merely Lugubrious and finally on to something like happiness and contentment. The baby sleeps better (the importance of which cannot be overstated) and becomes more enchanting by the day, husband and I have found a rhythm in our parenting and with each other and I’ve started making time to exercise and do “me” stuff now and then. It’s all a work in progress, but the good outweighs the tough by a sizable margin.
I decided to go ahead and publish this in the wake of reading a few other bloggers’ very honest pregnancy and parenting posts recently. In case you’re having a really hard time, wondering why motherhood isn’t magical or why it’s so hard to cope months and months after having a baby, just know that you’re pretty normal (or I’m a freak, whatever, but hey, at least you’re not alone). I’m not so vain as to think this will necessarily stick with anyone the way Bunny’s post did with me over the years, but I figure it’s my duty to try to pay it forward at least a little. And of course, once you get past the tumult of infancy**, you get something like this, and it will blow your mind:
Photo Removed
I’ve been reading and rooting along with you ladies, though spotty on commenting, whether you’re still trying, pregnant, or on the other side. Wishing you all the best and a belated happy new year.
Posts coming in the (hopefully? possibly? maybe?) near future:
** Side note: I used to LOVE newborns. Then I had one. Give me an eight month-old any day!
I’ve been working on a new post for about forever and it’s coming soon(ish), but in the meantime, I’m three days back at my job post maternity leave and reading (yes, reading! I’ve missed reading! One perk of working motherhood) Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions. And I get off the train each morning feeling… just completely blown apart, but in a good way, if that makes sense. I’m a fairly closed off person who has never been good at sharing my feelings or expressing my emotional needs, even to myself – I didn’t realize how much so until I tried to get pregnant, and couldn’t. This character flaw has caused no small amount of strife in my relationships over the years. But Anne Lamott, the way she writes, she is my opposite; raw and open and missing all the stuff we learn to build around ourselves that protects us but also isolates us. Lamott writes about her son’s first year of life when she’s clean after years of addiction and decides to keep a pregnancy from a man who is vehemently opposed. She writes about her faith, which is usually a turn off for me but has brought me to tears multiple times. She captures these things that are unaccountably beautiful about having a baby and also things that are ugly and hard; the wonder and the joy and the terror and the strange daily heartbreak that is being a parent.
I don’t know if this is an endorsement or a warning – either every new mother should read this, or they should stay far, far away. But I just love her, because she writes things like this:
I am definitely aware of the huge wound that having a baby makes – in addition to the fact that your ya-ya gets so torn up. Before I got pregnant with Sam, I felt there wasn’t anything that could happen that would utterly destroy me. Terminal cancer would certainly be a setback, but I actually thought I could get through it. And I always felt that if something happened to Steve or Pammy, if they died, it would be over for me for a long time but that I’d somehow bounce back. In a very real sense, I felt that life could pretty much just hit me with her best shot, and if I lived, great, and if I died, well, then I could be with Dad and Jesus and not have to endure my erratic skin or George Bush any longer. But now I am fucked unto the Lord. Now there is something that could happen that I could not survive: I could lose Sam. I look down into his staggeringly lovely little face, and I can hardly breathe sometimes. He is all I have ever wanted, and my heart is so huge with love that I feel like it is about to go off. At the same time I feel that he has completely ruined my life, because I just didn’t used to care all that much.
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No one ever tells you about the tedium. (A friend of mine says it’s because of the age difference.) And no one ever tells you how crazy you’ll be, how mind-numbingly wasted you’ll be all the time. I had no idea. None. But just like when my brothers and I were trying to take care of our dad, it turns out that you’ve already gone ahead and done it before you realize you couldn’t possibly do it, not in a million years.
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It would be intolerable to call a friend, a new mother, when you were really feeling down and for her to say some weird aggressive shit like “Little Phil slept through the night yesterday, isn’t that marvelous since he’s only eight weeks old, and guess what, I’m already fitting back into my prepregnancy clothes.” You’d really have no choice but to hope for disaster to rain down on such a person.
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It’s so incredibly hard to let go of one’s passion for control. It seems like if you stop managing and controlling, everything will spin off into total pandemonium and it will be all your fault.
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What are you going to do? Life has got to be bigger than death, and love has got to be bigger than fear or this is all a total bust and we are all just going tourist class.
Amen, sister.
I’ve been composing posts in my head. Update posts, blog-ending posts, stream of consciousness posts, excuse posts and then, as the weeks passed by, posts of deep apology and regret. At this point though, over two months since I’ve managed to write a single word here, I have decided to scrap all that and just try to start fresh – simply and honestly. I am very, very sorry for disappearing. That sucks. I know it’s a controversial topic in the IF blog world, but I for one believe that a blog, one where you connect with readers and involve them in a dialogue, is in fact a conversation, and breaking off in the middle is just as rude as hanging up the phone on someone or walking away mid-sentence (because really, who wants to be friends with someone who does that?). I’ve thought about it just about every day for the last couple of months. And though I haven’t been commenting, I never stopped reading.
Here’s the rub: I have never really understood IF blogs, let alone my own blog, in the context of pregnancy. In the past, every time a blogger transitioned seamlessly from trying and treatments to bumpdates, I was always floored. Some wrote a quick post of warning or justification (“I deserve to enjoy this pregnancy!”), others just went from jubilant positive betas right into baby talk without skipping a beat. Now, please, before you crucify me, this is not an attack on anyone who has done or is doing this. There are women in my reader right now posting bumpdates (lots actually, which is pretty fantastic, congratulations to you all) – from before and after I was pregnant – and I haven’t unfollowed a single one. If that’s where someone wants to take their blog, that’s totally their prerogative, I have just always felt it’s not something I’m comfortable with for myself. At the same time, it’s not such a straightforward thing to get a positive test and go all Liz Lemon, “Shut it down!” on the ole blog. I like blogging, I like you guys, I’m invested in your stories. I’ve just felt strange/wrong/uncomfortable/out of place (you name it!) participating in the same way I did while going through IF, while pregnant. Like any advice or words of comfort I have to share are less valid than they used to be. I’m not sure quite how to get around these feelings, but I’m trying.
So that accounts for about seventy-five percent of why I’ve been so shitty at blog communication. I could belabor the point, but I think most of you out there get it, at least to some degree. The other twenty-five percent comes down to an old familiar saying – I just haven’t had anything nice to say. Pregnancy, as I’ll explain in a moment, is not going to be featured a whole lot on this blog from here on out, but here is a lowdown of the past 15 weeks:
At first it just seemed unreal and impossible. Pregnant felt like “pregnant”. Even after the very early ultrasound at my RE showing one sac, then the second ultrasound showing a heartbeat, then the third and fourth ultrasounds at the OB (yeast infection, spotting, general anxiety) and even after the NT scan at 11+ weeks showing a very baby-looking baby thing with all the requisite parts and pieces and a non-concerning nuchal fold, it remained unreal. What was real was the sickness and exhaustion. Nausea from morning to night, vomit in the shower, vomit at work (I contemplated giving up brushing my back molars on a semi-permanent basis), then laying on my couch like an invalid and falling asleep by 8pm. To distill this all down, I felt like crap. So I was essentially living in a world of feeling bad, physically, and feeling disconnected, mentally, from my alleged “pregnancy”. I had to forcefully remind myself, “You feel like this because you’re pregnant – this is a good thing!” And yes, there were moments when the sun shone through and it was like, oh, shit, wow…wow. But I’ll be honest, they were rare. Only in the last couple of weeks have I been able to embrace that yeah, ok, this might be happening. I’m showing, the news has been spread far and wide, husband talks about the kiddo, we own a couple of baby items. It might be real, and that is its own brand of scary.
As for the future, well, I still have a lot to say. There are myriad thoughts kicking around in the old brain box from before this all went down; thoughts and ideas that weren’t, surprisingly, blasted out of my head in a jet of gestational bliss. Yes, in the light of this new day some ideas I used to have have changed a bit, some things I feel more or less strongly about than I used to, and some questions and concerns have solidified, but my thoughts are far from being pregnancy-centric. I want to discuss this stuff with you, anyone still reading, that is (and by the way, so, so much love to those of you who have reached out and asked where the fuck I went to – I can’t express what an honoring, humbling feeling it gave me). One thing I’ve realized while blogging in my head over these past weeks is, not everything in my life or in my mind is about pregnancy; just as I hope that once the kid is here, not everything in my life will be about being a parent. So I’m going to keep (start) writing, because I truly enjoy it and because I want to stay in the conversation I started with all of you. But there won’t be any bumpdates, it’s just not how I roll.
If you don’t celebrate my entire catalog, a quick look at my first post will help this title make sense. And then maybe you won’t read any further, that’s cool, I get it.
There have been so many pregnancies announced in my reader over the last couple of weeks that I’ve been hesitant to write this. Coming at the tail end of such a deluge, I didn’t want it to be salt in anyone’s wounds. But I don’t know that waiting another week, or two, or four, or any amount of time will make it easier to hear for someone stuck in IF – I know it never did for me – so here goes.
The IUI worked. Beta #1: 120, Beta #2: 295, Ultrasound scheduled for next Monday at 5 weeks, 2 days. I was worried about having the u/s so early and not being able to detect a heartbeat, but am pretty interested to know how many of those 3 or 4 possible eggs fertilized/implanted, so I’m just going with it.
This is different than I thought it would be. After the initial excitement, it’s… a bit of a let down. Don’t get me wrong, I’m really happy, it’s just – there are lines on tests, numbers and doubling, some cramping – mostly everything is about the same. What it comes down to is, none of this feels real. I hung out with Mulva in all her 3rd trimester glory the other night, and thought to myself, “That is a pregnant woman. I am not a pregnant woman.” But apparently, right at this moment, I am.
This is a post I’ve been wanting to write for a long time, but something has always held me back. The story isn’t much in itself, just an anecdote really, but it makes me feel a bit strange…
The thing about New York City is, although there are eight million or so people living here, we’re all packed into a relatively small space, mileage-wise, and are living literally and figuratively on top of one another. I’ve given up being surprised when I run into people from any and all parts of my life – friends and acquaintances who live in other states or countries, people who I never expected to see again (and in some cases hoped not to) – it is both a perk and a downside of where we live. In light of this, I probably shouldn’t have been as thrown as I was.
About two years ago, there was a day husband and I spent with friends in a nearby park. It was a gorgeous afternoon and as we were leaving the park, tramping through a big field towards the exit, we passed many groups of people picnicking, playing frisbee, and just generally enjoying the day. Near the edge of the field, we passed one group made up of several couples with a bunch of small children running around. I looked and smiled at all the little cuties, (the way you do before you realize you’re going to have a hard time conceiving your own and begin avoiding them) and was going to walk on by, when one little boy almost stopped me in my tracks. He was around two years old, dark hair, skinny… and something about him was very, strangely familiar – I knew him. But I didn’t. I looked up into the group of adults and there was his mother, smiling and pregnant with #2, just as she’d shared on her blog. I knew this little boy because I’d read about the pregnancy that was lost before he came along; I had read about the failed cycles leading up to the successful one; I had read about the IUI that lead to his conception and I had read about the positive test that announced his existence to his elated, frightened parents. I whispered his blog name under my breath and my steps faltered as I tried to put all these thoughts together while simultaneously not overtly staring at mother and child.
It was a feeling of unreality; I’ve never experienced anything quite like it. These were hypothetical humans I was looking at, after all. I mean, I know all of you ladies out there are real people with real lives, but there is a certain abstracted quality to these blog connections, no? I read about your pregnancies, losses, and births; anniversaries, vacations and family dramas, and I know it’s all real, yet it’s still somehow theoretical – the difference between intellectually knowing something versus truly, viscerally knowing it. And then there was another aspect, that of crossing an invisible line, doing something I wasn’t supposed to be doing. I felt like I was violating this blogger’s privacy in a way, just by being a total stranger who was recognizing and watching her little family *. The ultimate voyeur.
In the end I didn’t stare (much), kept walking and went on with my day. There wasn’t anyone I could talk to about the experience; my blogsession was and is pretty much unknown to husband and my friends, and I can envision how that conversation would go, “So, I’ve been reading all these infertility blogs for, like, years and, see that kid over there? Well I’ve seen his picture on one of them and, as you might imagine, it’s pretty weird!” And as much as I’m glad to finally be able to tell the story to people who get it, I’ve had some reservations. It’s selfish, but I so enjoy bloggers who, even while blogging anonymously, are somewhat open with their lives. They often post photos of themselves that don’t show faces, or of trips they take, or baby pictures as their children change and grow. It’s pretty hypocritical, considering I don’t do any of those things and have no plans to start, but I didn’t want my encounter to scare people off from that openness, because being allowed to have a little peek into the lives of people whose stories I know so well is such a great part of the blog world. I can see how the real-life occurrence of an unknown person from the internet matching a picture on a blog to a little boy in the park could make a blogger uncomfortable and rethink what they choose to share, but I hope that isn’t the reaction of most people. I don’t think people generally surf IF blogs for nefarious purposes, and it was a really nice experience, albeit odd, to see that woman and her little boy and her belly, smiling and happy in the real world. I wish that for all of us.
* Although she did blog anonymously, she wasn’t secretive about where she lives – in fact it was in the title of her bog – and it’s very close to me, so I knew it was definitely them.
Just to get it out of the way, no I’m not pregnant. You may read on in safety.
I’ve been having a hard time coming here, mostly in regards to what I talked about in my last post. Anything I would’ve written in the past few weeks would have been some version of, “Trying is hard, not getting pregnant is hard, I never thought this would happen to me, how can this be my reality, every woman everywhere is pregnant in a cute summer dress” and so on. We all know that story, many of you much better than I, and who wants to read or write 600 more words of it? So I decided to spare us all.
I’ve been chugging along towards this IUI with a sort of grim determination. Until the last couple of days I wasn’t excited or nervous, just impatient and ready to do something other than have sex on days 10-16, which is apparently next to useless. There were a lot of frustrated tears early in the cycle when I got the call that insurance wouldn’t approve an unmedicated IUI, since we lack a “clearly defined” male-factor issue, and so I was required to take Clomid or else go out of pocket. Well fuck you very much insurance company, I will take the ovulation-inducing drug that I DON’T NEED and risk OHSS, multiples, and god knows what else down the road*, because I do not have hundreds and thousands of dollars to spend on this stuff. It’s not the Clomid I was even so upset about, really, it was just the loss of one more thing – one more thing I have no say in, in this shitty, shitty process – and the idea of some a-hole board of directors, or whatever it is, making inflexible rules that force me to either take a drug I don’t really need or cough up money I don’t really have. A big middle finger to all of that. We even rushed husband in for another semen analysis to see if we might get a result below the cutoff that would qualify us for natural IUI, but no dice, just the same right-on-the-border, meh 4% morphology. So I cried and raged and I took the damn Clomid.
Then two days ago, CD12, I had my first monitoring appointment and got to see all these crazy follicles on the screen, and I got a little excited. IF sucks, but I’m sorry, this part is fucking COOL. An ovary covered in black circles, each holding an egg, one of which will maybe become half your child? Most people never get to see that, and a frightening number definitely have no idea that it’s even how the whole thing works. I think it’s pretty badass. As scared as I am of multiples, I couldn’t help thinking that every one of those circles was a little chance at a new human being, who I would get to grow and birth and be the parent of, and how exciting that was. And yes, it is truly a testament to how unreal pregnancy is to me right now that I’m not feeling nervous, because based on my ultrasound yesterday, I had three follicles that are most definitely in the running at 16, 17 and 19, and two possibles at 12-13, all with two more days to grow. My E2 was 787, which, from what I read, is consistent with four mature eggs, but the possibility of getting pregnant at all feels so remote, I can’t really muster up any good anxiety about multiples. Pity, I’ll just have to make due with my other anxieties.
There is one thing in particular I’m very pleased about. In my grand tradition of going rogue, when the nurse called and told me I was going to take 100mg Clomid, I balked. I asked if it could just be 50mg, since ovulation has never been an issue, but she gave me the blanket, “We have the best results with 100mg,” and I didn’t feel like arguing. Ditto for emailing Ms. RE; I’m pretty sure she would have been fine with me taking the lower dose, especially since the original plan was to do an unmedicated cycle anyway, but goddammit, I just didn’t want to. It’s awful, I know, I should be transparent with my doctor, but in matters like 50 or 100mg of Clomid, or taking it days 3-7 vs 5-9, I just can’t be bothered. And now, given my 3-4 follicles potentially in the running, I’m feeling pretty damn happy about the decision, as with 100mg we could have been talking selective reduction, or just plain being cancelled for over-response. Rogue wins!
All this is just background, because what really brought me back to the blog was yesterday’s adventure. Those of you who are amused by my workplace OPK-peeing shenanigans might enjoy the fact that yesterday afternoon I gave myself my very first sub-q injection… in the bathroom at work. My IUI is scheduled for 1pm today, and although the nurse assured me that the window is 24-36 hours and taking the injection in the morning before work would be fine, I wanted to stay closer to the 24 hour mark. So yesterday around noon I headed to what is usually our quietest bathroom armed with Ovidrel, alcohol swabs and gauze pilfered from one of the classroom first aid kits, and my phone (to take a video for husband, of course). The top floor of our building is half open-air playground and half indoor event space, and during the week it’s usually nice and calm up there; even when the kids are playing outside, the conference room/bathroom area is usually empty and chill. Usually. Yesterday, however, I arrived to a room full of people setting up for a party, more or less right outside the door of the bathroom in which I planned to stab myself with a needle. But I felt like I had passed some invisible point of no return and, not to be deterred, I marched myself into the lavatory. The toilet paper dispenser served as my table (I did rub the top down with purell first. Sanitary!), and I set up my phone on the sink for optimal abdomen viewing. The whole thing went surprisingly fast – I had played it over a hundred times in my head, watched videos, read tips – and I was sort of on auto pilot. I swabbed the area, let it dry, took aim at the little sharpie bullseye I had drawn for myself, and after one or two false starts (did someone jiggle the handle of the bathroom door while I was taking aim at myself with a sharp object? Yes indeed!) and a deep breath, I jammed that sucker home like a boss. Injecting yourself with a needle? Oddly empowering. Who knew?
So that’s where I’m at, in a bit of h-IUI-bernation, trying to keep my chin up and be tough and not wallow here. Overall, things have been just fine, and in about 5 minutes, I’ll leave work, stroll the mile to my clinic, meet up with husband, and get inseminated. Crazy shit. So many pregnancies have shown up in the last few weeks amongst the blogs I follow. Good work ladies! I’m coming to join you.
* I know Clomid is considered very safe and has been used for many years, but I’m still wary of it. I feel like we need a couple of generations of women to use it and grow old, and the resulting babies to grow up, have babies of their own, and grow old, before I will call it fully tested. Plus, I’m being dramatic and self-indulgent, so there’s that.
indeterminatewait 