The Birds' Tale

Hi friends.  I've added a new page to this blog - see the link up there that says "our story?"  I wrote it for anyone who's wondered about the early days of our infertility journey, before I started writing about it.  And I wrote it for myself, to let all the words out so they can stop rattling around in my head.  If you're interested in the tale of Jenny and Mr Wren, you can click the link up top or this one here.

Another UnMother's Day

Awesome t-shirt idea from the Five Camels blog.
Hope they don't mind that I stole it cause I kind of love it.

Mother's Day is the infertile woman's day of reckoning. It presents a unique kind of torture to those of us who have been trying (and trying and trying) and failing (and failing and failing) to become a mother. Tomorrow will be my fifth consecutive I-am-NOT-a-Mother's-Day.

What Fresh Hell is This?

Oh hi, I'm back.

I stopped writing because for a long time I had no news to report.  Then, when I did have news to report, quite good news in fact, the very best news that an infertile bird can hope to get....well, I was afraid to write about it because I didn't want to jinx it and I didn't want to tell the internet that I was pregnant until I was sure it was going to stick, because I didn't want to liveblog my miscarriage, if that's what was going to happen.

It seems my instincts were sound.

The Best Friends I Never Met

Infertility killed my social life.

The Pinball Machine of Grief

I've been reading up on grief lately.  I knew there were five stages, and had always thought that you passed through them sequentially, like a train moving from station to station in a linear fashion.  All aboard!  Now leaving Anger, next stop: Bargaining.  (I'd like a ticket on the express train to Acceptance, please?)

Turns out it's not that simple.  Grief isn't like a train, it's more like a pinball machine.  You bounce around from one stage to another with very little control over the situation.  Sure, you can take your best shot and aim for the targets of stoicism and equanimity, but more often than not you end up getting thrown all over the place, knocked back and forth between rage, despair and denial.  You can slam those flippers and nudge the table all you want, that little silver ball has a mind of its own and you're just along for the ride. And grief lasts a lot longer than you expect it to:  just when you think your time is up and the game is over and you can walk away from the machine, you score a replay and start all over again.

(Does the fact that I just compared my grief to a pinball game reveal that my infertility issues may be age-related? )

Also, I had always thought that grief's bargaining stage was just about trying to make a deal with God, which never made much sense to me.  What, do people really try to negotiate having their loved ones brought back to life?  That sort of thing only happens in stories and never ends well.  Have they never read The Monkey's Paw? 

But no.  Bargaining also includes all the what-ifs and if-onlys, the "coulda, woulda, shoulda" thoughts, and the accompanying guilt.  Oh, I know all about that.  If only I had insisted on having those blood tests done a year ago.  What if I hadn't stopped taking progesterone when I did, would the baby still be alive?   My body is defective and this is all my fault.   Right now my pinball is mostly bouncing off the bumpers of hindsight, guilt, fury and blame, and every so often it slinghots straight down the middle, into the pit of depression and hopelessness.

Oh, and I coulda, woulda, shoulda been exactly 12 weeks pregnant today.

Oh Baby: It's Not You, It's Me

It's all my fault. 

We found out today that there was nothing wrong with our baby.  It was chromosomally normal.  (It is, however, still an "it," since the doctor didn't reveal the gender and we decided we didn't want to ask, because what's the point?)

It's like being in a neverending heavyweight boxing match.  Every time I start to get to my feet, I get knocked on my ass again.  I've been physically and emotionally pummeled beyond recognition.  The doctor had anticipated that the results would show a genetically abnormal embryo, and I was holding on to that hope.  It would mean that the miscarriage was not my fault, that I was capable of getting pregnant, and if we just could just get a healthy embryo then we could have a healthy pregnancy.

But no.  Something is wrong with me and we don't know what and that something killed my baby. 

I'm so frustrated I could scream.   My self-loathing knows no bounds.   My other-loathing is fairly boundless, too.  I'm angry at God, every pregnant woman on the planet, and especially my doctor.  Today he ordered a series of blood tests that I've been requesting for over a year.  Every other time I asked about them he said it was a waste of time and money.  Now, however, he thinks they are indicated.  If one of them turns out to be positive, and I have a clotting or other immunology issue that could have been addressed before now, possibly preventing this miscarriage from occurring....well, wouldn't that be just my luck?

I've filled in my infertility bingo card.  I've gotten one or more items in every column:  failed IUIs, failed IVFs, fibroids, chemical pregnancy, and now miscarriage/loss and likely immunological issues.  Bingo!  Did I win a baby yet?   No?   Fuck.  I'm so tempted to quit the game, just walk away from it all.  But by now I've invested so much (time, energy, money, emotions) that I really have to see it through to the bitter end.

Although, if I become any more bitter, I'm going to turn into a horseradish. 

I Don't Want to Talk About It



 I watched exactly 5 minutes of the film Jennifer's Body and
what I saw was this scene, where she projectile vomits a river of tar.

I don't want to talk about it.

If you knew me, that statement would give you an idea of just how bad things are.  I've seen my share of  traumas over the years and through it all: tragic haircuts, crushing heartbreaks, financial devastation, personal loss... I've never not wanted to talk about it.  I've never not NEEDED to talk about it.  It's what I do. It's how I get through and make sense of things.  I love a good story.  I love an audience.  I have almost no boundaries and usually tell people way more than they want to know in my desperate need to understand and be understood.

This is different. 

This, I can't talk about.  It's just too much.  I can't let out the pain, frustration, misery and heartache that is welling up inside me. If I did, I picture it like a scene from a horror movie, gallons of toxic black goo exploding out of me:  oily and malevolent, taking on a life of its own and consuming everything in its path.  No-one wants to see that. 

But I can't keep it bottled up inside, either.  I'm not a good bottler.  Can't keep all this pent up sludge hidden away in the dark corners of my soul.   Like a bad batch of homebrew fermenting unattended in the basement, the pressure can only build up for so long before things start exploding.  And no-one wants to see that, either.

So here I am, finally making good on my threat to start a blog.  I don't know what to expect.   I don't know who, if anyone, will read this and that may be beside the point:  I have to let it out somewhere.  Hopefully I will, overall, keep the toxic spewing to a minimum.  But I make no promises.  At least not while I'm dealing with THIS.....

What is THIS?  Oh, I don't want to talk about it.
............................................................................................

But I have to.  It happened and I have to find a way to deal with it.  I was pregnant and then I wasn't.  Life goes on.  Just....not for my baby.

We made it to 9 weeks.  Almost 1/4 of the way there. We beat amazing odds to get that far - the fertility doctor had predicted imminent early miscarriage just a few days after declaring me pregnant. But our little one was a fighter and held on long enough to develop arms and legs, fingers and toes, eyelids and ear canals, and a strong, steady heartbeat.  A heartbeat that we saw on the ultrasound when baby was the size of a grain of rice, then a kidney bean, then a raspberry, then a grape.

As it developed from grain to legume to fruit, the doctor called it our "miracle baby" and marveled at its on-target growth and perfect heartbeat and increased our odds of success from minuscule to hopeful. 

Until last Tuesday.   It was our first visit to the OB after successfully and triumphantly "graduating" from the fertility clinic the week before.  I was nine and a half weeks along, and baby should have been the size of a stuffed green olive.  But I had a bad feeling.  I had woken up in the middle of the night, rolled over onto my stomach and realized that, for the first time in over a month, that maneuver hadn't sent lightning bolts of pain shooting through my chest.

Three hours of obsessive Googling and breast-poking later, I was only slightly mollified.  Lots of people on the internet say that pregnancy symptoms decline at around 9-10 weeks and it's nothing to worry about.  But still, my boobs felt completely different.  Like a switch had been flipped and all the electricity that had been pulsing through them was completely turned off.

So I was worried about my little cocktail garnish, and prepared for the worst.  At least, I thought I was.

As it turns out, nothing can prepare you for having your ultrasound projected on a giant screen overhead and seeing, larger than life, your perfectly formed almost-baby, which actually LOOKS like a baby and not an amorphous blob for the first time ever, lying there motionless.  A still, silent, solid space where only 6 days earlier you had seen a pulsing beam of light and life beating inside its tiny chest.  A lifeless olive sunk to the bottom of the martini glass.

I can't get that image out of my mind and I DON'T want to talk about it.