Motherhood and other creative adventures
An East Indian friend of ours gave us this present to help us through our recent bummer times. Not only is it a sweet little gift, and a thoughtful expression of support, but it means so much to me when someone reaches out with love in a way that shares something significant to them. It seems somehow not only a gesture of love, but also of trust.
I missed Mother’s Day at church since we were out of town, so I got my Mother’s Day present from Atti last Sunday. I never saw myself as the super sentimental “save everything my baby touched” kind of mom, but when I saw this card I threw all my cynicism right out the window and teared right up.
I mean, look! My boys!
When we got home I headed straight for the fridge to put it up. Putting that magnet on the fridge seemed like such a monumental moment. I could see myself repeating that act over and over again, our lives together flashing forward in front of me. I saw the artwork, the report cards, the college acceptance letter, all stretching out in front of me as we leave his babyhood behind.
I was already welling up, overcome by the significance of such a simple gesture, and then I took a look at the magnet. There was no forethought, I just grabbed the first magnet that came to my hand, but I have spent years looking at this magnet every time I walked through the kitchen, and sighing.
The quote reads:
One must still have chaos inside oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
During all those years of infertility I really struggled with the thought that I would be a less than perfect mother. Unhappy childhood, bad modeling, blah blah blah, fears we all have to one degree or another, and I loved the imagery of this quote and the thought that we can all turn unpleasantness into beauty. That maybe some unpleasantness is necessary for beauty.
I stood there at the fridge and just watched my life come full circle. All those years of clinging to the thought on that little magnet to get me through, and there I was using that same magnet to hang my child’s Mother’s Day card.
Life just creates little poetic moments sometimes, doesn’t it.
My little miracle baby will be two years old in February. I kind of can’t handle it. I am so in love with this little kid, I want four more just like him. Which of course is kind of a problem.
The story is long and tortuous, so for all the readers who haven’t been here since the beginning, I’ll give you a nutshell version. I have endometriosis, Bear has male factor infertility, between the two of us we have a less than 5% chance of conceiving. Atti took us eight years, multiple surgeries, drugs, miscarriages, blah blah blah blah. The thought of opening that door again makes me physically sick, but the chance of reward is so. very. great. *
We’ve actually been trying for baby #2 since before Atticus even made it home from the hospital. With my condition, time is not my friend, and the chances of another pregnancy are much greater the closer you are to the last one. Of course things haven’t worked out that way and it might just be for the best, I kind of can’t even imagine how I would handle a newborn and Atticus at the same time. It would be like having twins except one was four times the size of the other one. It might make sense, but it still doesn’t do much to quell the panic I feel when I think about not getting to have another baby.
* Let me just say here for the benefit of any new readers. NOBODY SAY “JUST ADOPT”! I have many many friends who are foster parents and adoptive parents. There is no such thing as “just” adopting. How you get your family is a very personal thing and varies by a MILLION different variables. This is the way that we need to pursue right now. Thank you for your concern, and rant over.
I was kind of ignoring making any really proactive efforts, raising my baby, happy in my marriage, hoping and hoping and hoping that nature would take it’s course**, when finally my disease just wouldn’t let me live in denial any longer. The pain gets pretty darn intense. Like, can’t function, need to stay in bed because you have no strength in your legs but the pain is too much to stay still so you wander from room to room clinging to walls. Like, I was trying to describe the pain to Bear and he said it sounded like when he had a kidney stone. That kind of cuts through any attempts to pretend that things are just going to work out.
** HA! Yeah right!
I went to the doctor last month all geared up for a fight. Again, nutshell for new readers – I have a long unpleasant history with doctors who don’t take women’s pain issues seriously. Including being forced to see a psychiatrist who promptly told me to get a new doctor and have a nice life. So even though I have a folder full of medical records including pictures of my diseased organs, I haven’t really had reason to believe that I’m going to walk in and find someone who’s going to help me out. On my first visit I would have rated this new doctor about 75% good news, but since then I’d have to bump him up to 85% dream come true. Of course, I haven’t had to ask for pain pills yet, so that might make a difference.
After a little bit, but only a very little bit, of arm twisting, he put me on the medication that has proven the most effective in the past, plus he put me on a new medication that makes almost all the side effects go away. It’s been pretty awesome. The last time I did a course of this drug therapy I gained 40 pounds, was a total crank monster, and had night sweats and hot flashes that rivaled all my 50+ year old lady friends. This time, none of that.
Except on the first couple of days after the shot. I get one shot a month and for the few days after that I am just ridiculous. RIDICULOUS! Saturday night I made Bear put all the dinner preparations in the fridge and go to the store to get me chips and salsa and green olives. And then I spent all day yesterday crying. I’d sit there sobbing and saying, “I know this is totally unwarranted, I recognize I’m being irrational, but I can’t he-he-help it! :sob:” I cried because Bear wrote an email I really liked. I cried because my favorite podcast is having a live show. I cried because Atti cried.
I just keep reminding Bear that living with me in this state should make him extremely grateful I’m so even keel when left to my own devices. I never feel like I get enough praise when I get through a regular bout of PMS without him noticing. Maybe now he’ll see the way things could be and buy me presents of appreciation.
Even once we had Atticus, we never really got off the infertility roller coaster. In fact, we started trying for Baby #2 before Baby #1 even made it home from the hospital. Since Atti took eight years to conceive, we knew that time was not on our side. Oh how I laughed and laughed when the discharge nurse gave me a contraception lecture. Yeah, not really an issue, thanks though.
Over all those years I’ve done all the charting and graphs and measuring of mucus viscosity and waving burning sage over my womb, but right now the easiest thing for me to do is use one of those ridiculously expensive ovulation predictor kits. The kit cost me about $80 used off of ebay, and that’s at a discounted price to get over the mental ickiness of knowing someone else’s pee was inside a plastic wand that touched the inside of this contraption. But after eight years, you’ll deal with the ickiness and the cost just for a measure of convenience.
The predictor measures your hormone levels on a scale of 1 to 3, and on Monday it declared that this was the big night, complete with a little LCD picture of an empty womb with a little egg floating inside and a big fat flashing ‘3′. The big night does not come around every month, so this was a red letter day.
As luck would have it, Bear and I got in a **HUGE** fight on Monday. He’s a big muckety muck at work, work that is very important and has been steadily encroaching upon our family time for years now, I took umbrage to how it had been encroaching, blah blah blah, same fight couples around the world have been having since the first caveman wanted to go back out for another try at the mastodon while cavewoman whined about how she never gets to leave the cave anymore.
The problem with this is that we do not have one of those feisty marriages where people have a little fight and then enjoy the making up. We have a ridiculously sappy shmoopy woopy marriage. So when the blue moon shows up and we actually get cranky with each other, it takes us time to mope around and feel our feelings before we’re ready to come back for more ridiculous sap.
To make it through eight years of charts and graphs and doctors and the big fat ultrasound wand, you have to do all you can to protect your relationship from clinical insensitivity. It’s all too easy to wake up one morning and realize that you can’t remember when it happened but somewhere along the way your loving act of intimacy morphed into a medical procedure no more remarkable than a throat culture. It takes a careful balance to get the timing of optimal conception lined up with all the warm loving feelings that are supposed to be there. So on Monday, after the fight, when I discover that The Big Night was upon us, I called Bear and told him, “I don’t really know what to do. I’m a three.”
He didn’t have a ready response, being sensitive to my feelings and letting me make the call, so we dropped the subject and went on about our day. I brought it up a couple more times throughout the night. “What do you think Bear? I’m a three.” “I don’t really know what we should do, I’m a three.”
Finally he put his hand on my face, looked me in the eyes with all his earnest devotion and said, “I know I can’t get you back down to a zero tonight, but I’m hoping you can at least get down to a two.”
Wait, what? “What do you think I’m talking about?” “A three means you’re really mad, right? I wasn’t really familiar with the scale, but I figured it must be really bad if you assigned a number to it.”
For the past two weeks, I’ve been absolutely useless. It’s been all I could do to eat three meals a day and keep it down. I haven’t accomplished a single useful thing, and even when I try I get about two steps in and then the exhaustion just forces me back on to the couch.
I’ve been non-stop queasy. I haven’t thrown up yet, thank goodness, but instead I get completely nauseous after every meal. Every time I eat so much as a cookie I have to go lay down and be still for a few hours, and then it’s time to eat again. Bear’s had to do everything for me because all I can do is lay there and not throw up.
But mainly, I can’t do anything because I am an electric bundle of anxious nerves, and I spend most of my days wandering through the house worrying and wondering and praying and hoping and counting down the seconds until my eight week appointment to see if it’s going to work this time.
Today was the big day.
And I woke up to the phone ringing with a call from the doctor’s office canceling the appointment.
I immediately start weeping huge racking sobs as some anonymous girl tells me she has no information for me but she’ll leave a message for someone to call me which of course they don’t do.
I sat there with the phone in my hand rocking back and forth and crying until 11:30, and then I started making phone calls. 40 minutes later, I finally find someone who can help me after sobbing and explaining the whole sordid story to about six different people. Angel nurse Louise actually knew what was going on, so when I told her about the last miscarriage happening right about now in the pregnancy and that I was on the verge of jumping off the roof if someone didn’t tell me what was going on in my uterus, she tackled the nearest doctor and forced me into their schedule.
I’ll basically have to show up, strip down, get the lovely wand ultrasound, and hightail it out of the room before the next person comes in. But I don’t care. If I see a little flashing light showing the heartbeat, it will be worth it. And if not, at least I won’t have to be nauseous for much longer.
Can I just get away with saying ….Ug.
I feel like such hot crap. Luckily I haven’t been throwing up constantly like my poor friend Bev, but I have been constantly nauseous. Especially after I eat. Oh gosh. I’m here at 2:15 and still sick from eating breakfast at 10:30. It sucks.
I’ve also had a ton of sciatica pain. It is just the weirdest thing. All of a sudden I’ll get this shooting pain in my upper butt. It doesn’t feel like back pain, it feels like I’m being stabbed in the top of my butt. It just takes my breath away and if I don’t listen to the pain and lie down immediately, then it will just progress until I literally can’t walk.
I’m bored stupid because I have to spend most of my day laying down, and being too sick to even work on anything while I’m there. Instead I just flip channels and want to cry over the state of daytime TV.
Although it sucks, all these symptoms are very bittersweet. I felt great with Bookcase. I felt healthier than I ever had before, and they say that if you feel different symptoms, you can often expect a different outcome. So I’m remaining skeptically optimistic.
I have an appointment a week from today and then I’ll be eight weeks and we should be looking for a heartbeat. Maybe after that we’ll be able to drop our guard and be ecstatic.
Bear’s taken a couple days off of work, so we’re going to go sit at the beach and I’ll keep trying not to throw up. Gosh this entry sucks, but it’s all I can do to sit here long enough to type out these few staccato words. I just have to keep reminding myself: The nausea is my friend.
If this works out, I’ll be due April 23rd. Which makes me 6 weeks pregnant.
I’m so dang sick I can barely bring myself to even look at food. I’ve just been shoving it down my throat and then laying down for a few hours to deal with the queasiness.
I had a whole post in mind about our fertility options and what we were going to do and yadda yadda yadda, because this is the month that Bookcase would have been due, and I couldn’t help but notice that and obsess about the whole situation. Now I guess I won’t be needing that.
If I said I was just overjoyed, I’d be lying. My reaction has been pretty much, “Hmm. I wonder what’s going to happen with this.” I have my first appointment in two weeks, and that’s when we should be able to find out a few things. If I can just get a heartbeat, then I’ll rejoice. Right now I’m just afraid to cough.
Remember a while back when I whined about having a cold in August? What if this isn’t actually a cold? It’s not allergies, because I always get burning eyes first for allergies and my eyes have been fine. Plus I’ve been breaking out like crazy, I’m ravenously hungry all of a sudden, and I am absolutely exhausted. And don’t ask Bear about the mood swings. Please.
After I’d had the cold for about two weeks, Bear finally brought up the fact that when I was pregnant with Bookcase, I never got morning sickness, but I suffered relentlessly from pregnancy rhinitis. Son of a biscuit. Before he mentioned that, I was doing fine, just thinking I was having a monster case of PMS and things would resolve themselves shortly.
Now I can’t think of anything else. I’m afraid to take a test this soon in case it turns out to be a chemical pregnancy and this is all for nothing. Every time I get a symptom that could potentially be pregnancy related, we say that the Phantom Fetus is making me do it. Just in case I turn out to be completely psychosomatic and insane. I feel a little better going in at least knowing that’s a possibility.
A while back I got some hate mail about how negative my blog is. While I immediately wrote the person off as an internet crank, it did get me thinking that I need to make every effort to write about the great things that happen in life, instead of just using this as a public place to vent.
I’ve been thinking about that, and about why I blog at all, and what my goals are for the blog. I went back through my archives to kind of remind myself where I started, and holy cow that was a mistake. Long time readers, I don’t know what you saw in me to get you to stick around. Someone who loved me really should have taken my keyboard away when I was that heavily medicated. How did you make any sense out of what was going on in my life?
When I started I wrote about infertility and endometriosis, while I was on pain pills from the moment I woke up until the moment I went to sleep. Now my health is as good as it’s probably ever going to get, and I’m totally over infertility discussions. By that I just mean that I have no more energy to keep the hope alive. I’m starting to consider the fact that we may never have children. And I think everyone around us is thinking that too. Before the miscarriage everyone used to tell me all their in vitro stories. So and so did it after five years, somebody else did it and got twins, happy ending, happy ending, yadda yadda yadda. Now people skip the in vitro and miracle pregnancy stories and go straight to the adoption happy ending.
The thing is (oh gosh, do I really want to discuss this on the internet? Go go gadget flame retardant suit!) I don’t think adoption is for us. At least right now. My feelings are incredibly complicated on this, but the bottom line is that I’m not really a maternal person. I never want to hold the babies, I’m just starting to dig my nephew now that he’s four, I detest going to events where there will be more than three kids, and I even decided to not pursue my student teaching because I realized I really don’t like other peoples children.
Complicating things even further is how my faith is tied up in all this. We have been told countless times in blessings that we would have children in this life. I even had a blessing that said Bookcase was going to come to full term and be our child and everything would work out and then it didn’t. We’re trying so hard to follow what we believe God wants us to do and it’s just not happening. So I feel incredibly betrayed. I feel abandoned by the God that I’ve given my life to, and rejected by our theoretical children. The thought of filling out paperwork and begging for someone to deem us worthy, putting ourselves under scrutiny to see if we’re the right height and weight, have the right house and make the right money, potentially meeting birth mothers and getting our hopes up only to be rejected again…..I just, I just can’t.
Adoptive parents, please forgive me. I recognize that the covenants you have made to these children are life saving and I have no doubt that the rewards you have found in your family have made everything else worthwhile. I don’t mean to disparage adoption at all, I just don’t seem to have the strength that it requires right now.
So…I can’t really call this an infertility blog anymore, because to save my sanity I’ve had to just ignore that whole dilemma. And it’s not really a chronic illness blog anymore because I’m really doing pretty good on that front. So after a little thought, I realized I really wanted to move this blog into the craft/lifestyle category. No more dwelling on all the crap life hands me, I’m going to make pretty stuff and share it and have a happy, inspiring, look on the bright side blog.
And then we started hearing rumors that Bear may lose his job.
The building he runs is being sold to another company, and while we knew that there were no guarantees, we felt pretty sure that the new company would keep him around. Until we heard from two different sources within the company that they have a replacement already picked out.
You know how company rumors go, who knows who is a reliable source. Nothing we’re hearing from anywhere seems to make sense. All the other administrators for other buildings they’ve bought still have their jobs, and they pride themselves on keeping the original staff on board, and yet here are two people from the company who seem to have other ideas. We have no idea who to believe or what to count on. All we can do is try not to panic until we hear something concrete, and make sure that Bear’s resume is updated and sent out.
Last night Bear and I were crying together over the phone and he said to me, “A man should not lose his child and his job in six months.”
It’s kind of impossible to have a nice happy inspirational blog when your life just won’t cooperate.
Turns out, a lot. Especially if you vacation for a week with 16 women, 13 of whom are mothers and three of whom are nurses.
The last couple of years I’ve gone to Vegas with Bear’s family, I ended up having an unexpectedly great time. This time, was a little more of a struggle. I really worried about going so soon after the miscarriage. I say so soon and I immediately have to count back because in some ways it seems like years since then, but in reality it’s only been five months. Five months filled with all kinds of other setbacks that have kind of kept me flat on my back.
Anyhoo, I’ve always felt slightly awkward being one of the very few without kids (and the only married one without kids), and I was worried how I’d cope. When you get a dozen mothers together, the conversation is always going to revolve around one of three things: 1) Kids say the darnedest things, 2) Pregnancy/Birth stories, 3) Great shopping for kid stuff. And then after the discussion of great shopping for kid stuff we get up and go shopping. For kid stuff.
But then we go to dinner, and see a good show, so the awkwardness kind of evens out. And isn’t that really all you can ask for when you’re an infertile? My standards have dropped precipitously. Instead of belonging to the group, now I just hope for slightly more time when I’m not praying for a hole to open up and swallow me than time when I am.
This time though, the hole won. I don’t think for a second that anyone was being malicious when they kept bringing up dead babies. The conversations just seemed to organically flow that way. One minute they’re talking about overly entitled OB/GYN’s, and the next thing you know somebody knew a woman whose doctor threw her miscarried fetus in the trash. We’re talking about getting in a car accident, and then it turns into a woman who miscarried at 20 weeks and had to go into labor, sobbing through the whole thing.
I just sat back in my seat thinking, “Keep it together, keep it together, keep it together, keep it together…..”
When the fetus got thrown in the trash though, I couldn’t do it any longer. I just had to get up and leave the room. I really tried to hang because I didn’t want to make a thing out of it. I didn’t want anyone to feel as awkward as I did or drag the room down, I just could. not. take. one. more. second. I think only one person noticed, though. And of course she’s one of the only other ones without kids. And of course she’s single and 26 and gorgeous and having a great time. But hey, cold comfort is still comfort.