Bo Turns One!

My "baby" is one!  We celebrated with a special cookie. 

See some of my favorite BoBo pics at the crafty cpa.

Six Posts for the Price of One

So, I've been away for awhile...I'm not really sure why.  But I'm going to try and make it up to you.  Here are six mini blog posts and/or observations I've made lately.

Post No. 1:  The Whisper
"Dateline Mysteries", "48 Hours Investigates", "Snapped", if its a television show about a person gettin' killed by their spouse, my husband is watching it. Disturbing? Yes, slightly. I think he watches because he likes the mystery story and not for ideas.  I hope.


Several months ago Tony was watching one of those types of shows and a murder victim's father described "the whisper".  I knew exactly what he was talking about. I hear the whisper too.

Let me paraphrase what he said, "I can go about my day. I can go to work. I can laugh. I can have fun. But the whisper of my child's murder is always there, and in the quiet moments of my life it is all I hear."

My whisper is infertility.

Post No 2:  Infertile, Interrupted
Part of why I haven't been posting is because I haven't had many positive things to say, not that I think this space should be reserved for wine and roses.  Part of me says, "This is real.  This is your life.  You should share no matter how depressive."  Part of me says, "You really should censor yourself a bit.  You gain nothing by spewing negativity into the Internet.  Keep it to yourself."

I have now accepted that I am unreasonably depressed, depressed beyond the situation.  It has consumed me.  I intend to do something pharmaceutical about it, but while I made time for endless infertility appointments, I can't seem to find the time for this appointment.

Post No 3: Damn, I Feel Like a Woman

In April I posted about my first visit back to my gyn and my absent period. Well, I hemmed and hawed about giving the blood sample she wanted before I started the Provera that would start my period. Finally at the end of May I gave the blood sample, started the Provera and paused; nothing happened, nada, uterine crickets.  After two weeks I called the gyn about my absent flow and was told that Provera could take up to ten weeks, call back after the forth of July. I'd never heard of that, but whatever...

Today, quite unexpectedly, I got my period. I know a lot of infertile women are used to irregular periods, but that was never me. I could set a clock (or maybe a calendar) by my period. No period for five months has been a little disconcerting. But now, here it is. I wonder if I have been successfully "reset" physically or if I will be irregular ever more.

Maybe I'll get reset mentally as well.  Watch this space...


Post No 4:  LL
Linsay Lohan's dad gives me the creeps.

Post No 5:  The Two Faces of Megan
Despite the whisper, despite the depression, Tony and I have been having a very active summer.  And we've started dreaming and planning again.  We haven't been able to dream and plan for a long time and it feels good to stretch that part of our brains again.  Most of these dreams and plans center around new landscaping, purchasing land and building a cabin, and early retirement schemes.  Secretly I still want to try a donor egg cycle.  Since each of these dreams and plans require money, they are somewhat mutually exclusive.  I feel like I'm living two dream lives.

Post No 6:  Nothing Special
My husband secretly loves the movie, "Steel Magnolias".  Sometimes I walk into the family room and catch him watching it on TV.  It's funny.  He likes, "Mona Lisa Smile" too.  I wonder if its a Julia Roberts thing, but he really doesn't watch any other of her movies.  It must be a female ensemble cast thing. 

So if you've seen the movie more than once, you know the line.  Diabetic Shelby has just told her mother that she is happily pregnant despite the health complications involved.  She says, "I'd rather have a few moments of wonderful *pause for dramatic effect* than a lifetime of nothing special." 

For some reason I was thinking of this scene a few weeks ago and I thought to myself.  That's going to be my life...a lifetime of nothing special.  Special is a relative term, so perhaps I was being a bit melodramatic; certainly something special can happen to me in my childless lifetime.  Special is anything I want to believe is special.  And a lifetime of nothing special also doesn't mean a bad lifetime necessarily.  But I still want to be a mom.  Maybe more than I did before.  Sigh.

Two Cards in my Purse

Right now I have two cards in my purse. They are both for my husband. The first one is a card I gave my husband on the day we finally made it to embryo transfer after two cancelled IVFs and one IVF resulting in no embryos to transfer. Inside I wrote, “No matter what happens…today we are a mommy and a daddy with the same hopes and dreams for our children that any parent has. Love, your baby girl (but hopefully not your only baby for long).” The day he opened it, he put it in my purse to take home and it hasn’t left since.


I can’t bear to throw it out. We were so happy that day. So hope filled. It was one of the best days of my life. But what do you do with a card like that? Where do you keep it?

The second card is a Father’s Day card I bought several weeks ago. It has a picture of a golden retriever on the front and I wrote a cute message from Bo inside. I have to admit that this card is slightly passive aggressive. Tony isn’t ready to say that he will ever want to pursue parenthood again (whatever that would mean). I’m not ready to say that I want to accept child free living for the rest of my life. We are in limbo. This is OK right now.

I bought the card in a small way to remind him that fatherhood is out there. I bought the card because I want a card from him saying, “When we are healed from the disappointment of five failed attempts at IVF, when we are ready, we’ll do whatever it takes to become parents…if that’s what we decide we want to do.”

I’ve happily carried this Father’s Day card around for weeks, ready to launch my passive aggressive assault.

But then earlier this week I reminded Tony (in a totally innocent, non-passive aggressive way…for real. I have no problem admitting when I’m being passive aggressive.) that Bo needed to go to day camp on Friday for the dog Father’s Day party. (I know Liz…we do some crazy crap for our dogs here in the States, but I hate for Bo to miss a party.) Tony was less than enthusiastic and snarked back something to the effect that he didn’t need to participate in some dumb dog Father’s Day party.

I’m so stupid. Why would I think that he needs a card (even one disguised as a cute message from our pup) to be reminded that he’s not a father? I know how he feels. On Mother’s Day my aunt sent an email to all the women in the family wishing everyone a happy day. She addressed it to everyone whether a mother, an aunt, a cousin, or a puppy mom. I wasn’t the only non-mom recipient of the email. She’s a non-mom herself. I felt conflicted though. On one hand I was happy to be included, but on the other hand I felt like the girl invited to the party by default because someone’s parent said that the whole class had to be invited.

And so, I think we will ignore Father’s Day this year. Both of our fathers have passed away. Tony’s not a father. We’ll just continue to celebrate each other as a loving couple with a fabulous dog, and eventually our ideas about parenthood will come together with time.

Facebook Status Today

my Facebook status today...

"The only good things in my life are my husband and my dog. Sometimes I feel incredibly lucky and sometimes I feel incredibly sad."

Do you think I'll get kicked off Facebook for admitting I'm sad?

...lots of posts rolling around in my head.  I've been enjoying the great weather we've been having!

Like a virgin...

...lapped for the very first time.

It's hard to believe that someone has conceived and birthed a child twice and I have nothing but plans to turn "the nursery" into my new office.

Sigh.

Where's my parade?

I have two close work friends that were diagnosed with breast cancer at a young age. Between the two of them I have attended a wine and cheese party where we were encouraged to shower one friend with gifts, made a meal for another friend's family (the week before one of my IVF retrievals), contributed to a fund to pay for one friend to have her house cleaned regularly, made phone calls, sent emails, and participated in other supportive activities.

I know I shouldn't compare infertility to someone with cancer. First of all, we aren't likely to die from infertility (although it feels like it most days). And our treatments are arguably less arduous (we don't lose our hair, just our minds).

But I can't help but think that it is unfair that most of us can't even get our Facebook "friends" to acknowledge our "infertility outings" on Facebook during Infertility Awareness Week. I can't help but think that it is unfair that most of us hide our infertility and cringe when an article about our struggles appears online because we know the comments from readers will be so painful.

Why shouldn't friends and family shower us with gifts and cook us dinner when stimulation meds are making us feel sluggish?

So what do you think? Am I out of line? And if not, how do we change this? Where did we go wrong?

Shouldn't the community of womanhood band together and fight for everyone to become a mother?

a different kind of love

When I was in my twenties a lady I worked with told me a story about the birth of her first child. She had endured something like twelve hours of difficult labor followed by an emergency c-section. When it was all over, baby in arms, her husband looked into her eyes and said, "I just fell in love with you all over again."

This story has haunted me lately. It's so difficult to know that I will never give my husband the gift of growing a child in my womb made of part of him and part of me. I will never give him the gift of laboring to bring that child into the world, and he will never look into my eyes and tell me that his love for me has been reborn.

*pause for sadness*

When my husband and I finally got off the treatment roller coaster I didn't recognize our marriage anymore. For a while infertility treatments made us stronger and drew us closer, but eventually the constant disappointment destroyed us. My depression grew stronger than our relationship. My husband became more and more frustrated because he could not solve this problem. He could not succeed as a husband and make me happy. I could not succeed as a wife and give him the child that I so desperately wanted to give. Infertility led to financial problems and destroyed our physical intimacy. We were broken.

I'm happy to say that we are rebuilding. I'm thrilled to report that our marriage is getting stronger. We are smiling, laughing, planning, touching, hugging, kissing, joking, and talking. We are starting to become "us" again.

But still that woman's story haunted me. Can we ever have the kind of love that two people have when they build a family together?

The answer is no. We can't have that love. We have something different. Tony and I walked through hell together. We may not have always been looking into each other's eyes while we walked, but we always held each other's hands. We did it together. Our hopes were raised together. Our souls were rocked together. Our dreams were destroyed together.

We are falling in love with each other all over again. And that love feels so special and so true. It didn't come from a place of joy where love is easy. It came from a place of despair. We had a choice and we chose us.

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