Weekend Cheers and Jeers

Cheers that we had three people come and look at our house this weekend. I go back and forth between wanting to start packing things up to ready for a move and holding off in case we can't get our house sold. We are aggressively priced, but you just never know what will (or won't) happen in this market.

Cheers that Tony took the baby bassinet purchased three years ago when we were pregnant for eight weeks to Goodwill this weekend. It really didn't bother me much. There are other baby things I have purchased that are much more sentimental to me and would be harder to let go. I'm glad it is going to a place where someone can use it. Had it been up to me I would have chopped it up with an axe and burnt it in the backyard.

Jeers that I didn't get off the sofa much this weekend despite my best laid plans. I did however get a burst of energy Sunday evening. I scrubbed the corners of the wood floors on my hands and knees, shined up the kitchen cabinets, and made lunch salads for the week. I hope this is a sign of more energetic pursuits to come.

Cheers on all the wonderful comments I have been getting on my blog and in emails. This has been a hard time for me as I feel a bit as though I have let people down. I know it is hard for those still in the fight to read about my story. I am the nightmare. I am the one with infertility that could not be treated. Thanks for sticking with me. I also feel like I have tapped into a whole other world of folks who are in the exact same spot as me.

Jeers that the Olympics are over. There is nothing better to do when you are depressed than watch a long curling match. I don't understand it at all, but I find it mesmerizing and the northern accents of the commentators are quite soothing.

That's it. More cheers than jeers. I guess that's a good sign.

Ground Zero

I haven't really started child-free living yet. I'm child-free, but I'm not living.

My days consist of waking in the morning and going to work. Spending way too much time on the Internet while at work between doing what needs to be done in order to keep my job and appearing somewhat engaged. Coming home and changing clothes. Sitting on the sofa all night and alternating between watching TV, surfing the Internet, and playing Minesweeper. Then it's off to bed.

Sadness. Despair. Depression.

Sadness. Despair. Depression.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Today I looked around at my life.

My marriage has been changed by this journey and not for the better. We have always been a happy, laid back, and fun loving couple. That was "our thing". We didn't take much seriously. I'm wondering what it will take for us to get that back. I feel more insecure in my marriage than I have ever felt.

I have not put much effort into my job for over a year now. People don't seem to have noticed much (except possibly a couple coworkers), but it has made me very paranoid about being laid off or fired. Since there have been layoffs and firings a plenty in my office lately, my work life basically sucks. Every rumor or piece of gossip sends me into a paranoid tailspin of checking my dwindling savings account and calculating how long we could survive without my salary.

I am not speaking to my family. My mother is quite frankly a mother. She could never understand what I am going through. She also has an uncanny ability to say the exact wrong thing at the exact wrong time. I can't risk that right now. My sister will most probably be a mother soon and most probably without much effort. Because, quite frankly...that just seems to be how my life works. I am preemptively not speaking to her because a pregnancy announcement would put me over the edge.

I am fatter than I have ever been. My clothes are not fitting. I gained an amazing amount of weight this last cycle, but I can't bear to step on the scale to tally it up. All I want to eat is McDonald's sausage egg and cheese biscuits and ice cream. I have been doing this frequently.

This is ground zero. This is my bottom. There is nowhere to go, but up.

Right?

I don't like to think of my life as tragic, but I have had enough tragedy in my life to know that only time will make things better. I will never be OK about this, but in time I will be better.

I think I will let myself continue to wallow until the weekend, then it will be time to pick myself up, dust myself off, and start moving on.

Here I come. I'm almost ready. Let's go. I just have to get off the couch...

If I Were To Interview Myself Today

Are you really done trying to have a child?

Before this cycle the answer was yes, we are done. Now the answer is maybe. We are definitely done trying to conceive a child with my eggs. I am OK with this and have been for a long time. I don’t think my genetic material is particularly special and I personally believe that nurture plays a bigger role than nature. We have only continued with my eggs for this long because it was the most cost effective option for us. I have had insurance to cover procedures up to this point (not that we haven’t spent tens of thousands of dollars of our own money.) If I could have applied that insurance to a donor eggs cycle I would have done so this last cycle.

However, even though we are very open to moving forward with donor eggs, we have decided to try child free living first. I feel very blessed that at age thirty two donor eggs are a viable option for me for several years. We are going to take advantage of that luxury and try child free living for a year or two. Then we will make a decision. If we are OK with it, we will continue on living sans bebe. If we are not OK with it then we will explore other treatment options like donor eggs.

What about adoption?

If someone would place a baby in my arms right now and ask me to raise it I would love and nurture that child like no one’s business. But I know it’s not that easy. We had a taste of the adoption experience when we started the process of becoming foster parents several months ago. At that time we realized that we could not continue cycling and become foster parents at the same time and dropped out. However, we went through enough of the home study experience to realize that adoption is freaking hard, just as hard as IVF cycling and I don’t think we have the strength right now.

Also, my husband’s heart is not open to open or international adoption which I know would make the process that much harder. I personally believe in open adoption. Since we are so far apart on this issue I think that adoption is not right for us right now.

Do you feel like a quitter?

Absolutely. I believe that if you really want a baby you will get there one way or another. I really want a baby, so why am I quitting? I struggle with this a lot. Part of the reason that I am quitting is that my husband no longer wants to continue, part of the reason is financial, part of the reason is that I feel in my gut that this is the right decision for me right now. However, for my own sanity I have to think of this as an extended year or two year long break. Right now I just can’t admit that I’m done.

We did not get our dream come true, but our nightmare has ended and that feels good.

So what is the plan?

We are very committed to giving child free living a try. Our four-bedroom-perfect-for-kids house is officially on the market and we are looking for smaller homes in a historic district in a bad school district. Once we move, Bo will get a brother, which is something that my extremely social dog needs desperately. I have also looked at this as an opportunity to really examine my life and choices. Am I in the right career? How will I leave a legacy if I don’t have children? What opportunities are open to me that might not be open if I had children? How soon can I retire?

I’m actually somewhat excited about answering these questions.

You sound so upbeat and together about this. What is your secret?

Don’t believe a word of it. I am a mess inside. I’m sad. I’m angry. I cry. I emailed my family telling them that I didn’t want to speak to anyone right now, possibly for a few months. Tony thinks I need to be on antidepressants and I don’t necessarily disagree. I just refuse to let this ruin my life so I am trying to find something-anything good and positive to hang on to. My attitude changes minute by minute. I’m totally in the grief cycle and hanging on for dear life.

Are you still going to blog?

Yep. I think that my story still has merit. It’s a different story now and it won’t be the right story for everyone, but I hope some folks will still be interested.

Insult, Meet Injury

So after the negative pregnancy test on Friday, I started bleeding. Not spotting…bleeding. Not just bleeding, but bleeding more than I have in months and months. In a perverse way I’m almost proud of how much my body does not want to be pregnant; expelling uterine lining and embryos a full three days before my beta.

I didn’t really know what to do when the bleeding started so quickly and violently, so I kept up with my Prometrium and Endometrium suppositories. I kept telling myself that if the bleeding doesn’t stop by *insert time* I’ll stop taking the medicine. But I just couldn’t stop myself.

I wasn’t going to go to my blood draw this morning, sort of a final middle finger to the whole medical establishment. However, last night I started having stabbing abdominal pains that made me wonder if I might have gone ectopic. So I went. They are calling Tony with the results and I know he won’t tell me while I’m at work. He’s currently not answering his office line.

I can’t believe that the closest we ever got to being parents was after four months of trying on our own. For four blissful weeks we thought we were going to be a family with a mommy, daddy, and baby not knowing that the mass of baby-like cells that caused the pregnancy test to turn positive had stopped developing weeks earlier.

We’ve spent almost three years chasing that high and never got any closer, never even got that close again.

We found out last week that we had nothing to freeze.

Fuck.

Update: I'm officially negative.

I Need A Miracle

7dp5dt and I tested negative.

I don't understand why this is not meant to work for us.

We are good people.

We would make good parents.

My husband and I are falling apart.

The Ladybug Story

My father passed away when I was twenty-one. We were close, or as close as you can get to an extreme workaholic with a really screwed up upbringing.

Several years after he passed on I had a dream about him. He was sitting on a park bench and I sat beside him. He told me that everything was going to be OK. I forget now why I needed to be told that everything was going to be OK, but I remember waking up and knowing that he was right.

The next morning there was a steel penny on my front table. (Pennies are generally made of copper, but during one of the World Wars they needed the copper for wartime production and made pennies out of steel.) I have no idea where this steel penny came from. I knew it was a sign from my father. He was a coin collector.

This weekend I had a conversation with my dad. I don't do this often, but I asked him if he had any sort of influence over things like conception could he please make sure that this cycle worked. (I talked to Tony's dad too, who I never met and who also has passed away).

This morning I woke up and went downstairs. On my kitchen counter next to my prometrium bottle there was a ladybug, a sign of good luck.

I hope my dad sent it. I hope it's his way of telling me that it will be OK.

I guess in a way it will be OK, no matter what.

Three

We transferred three early blasts today.

We thought about transferring four, but Tony was too chicken (or the voice of reason?)

It's out of our hands and into my womb.

Hoping for the best.