The Eternal Guest Room

The desperation creeps in. Slowly at first, gradually building, finally all-encompassing. You want a baby so bad you’re willing to try anything to get one. Anything.

First it’s harmless – silly stuff, really. The things everyone knows, everyone tells you, if you let them. Legs up after sex. Just relax – take a vacation, don’t even try for a month, just stop thinking about it. Get really drunk. Check, check, check.

Then it gets a little weirder, you search a little harder, spend a little money. Pineapple cores. Mucinex. Green tea. Red raspberry leaf. Special fertility vitamins. Baby aspirin. Grapefruit juice. Evening primrose oil. Maca. Etc., etc., etc.

Pick your cocktail. Someone tried this and someone else tried that, so you try them both, along with the rest. All of this possibly on top of fertility treatments and shots and pills.

And nothing happens. So you move on to the next phase: acupuncture, herbs, fertility spells, maybe even a chiropractor. The bills start piling up. But you can’t stop: this next thing might be THE thing.

You hear it and think it and say it over and over again: “I’ll try anything, anything at all,” because you’re desperate enough and you know it.

But you keep going, giving into the desperation, because this might be your magic bean, your golden ticket, your key to the whole screwy mess.

And then it isn’t.

So you try something else.

The desperation is consuming. It clings to you like you cling to it. It’s cruel; it gives false hope. It keeps you coming back for more. “Sure,” you say, “I’ll try that. After all, it won’t hurt anything.”

Just your bank account, and your spirit when it fails. It surely looks irrational and ridiculous from the outside. People will think I’m silly and wonder why I bother – many will wonder why we don’t “just” do IVF.

I had a warm spinach salad and a glass of warm water for dinner. Not because I wanted them, but because it might make some sort of difference.

I am desperate. I’ll try anything. Anything at all. I can’t even begin to explain it.

*Disclaimer: I haven’t actually tried all the things listed above – just most of them.

I am trying so, so hard to be ok. Of course, the harder I try, the more stuff seems to be thrown at me. Or at least that’s how it seems.

But I try not to dwell on those things. (Too much.) I take time to grieve them – get a pizza, have some wine, listen to sad music, don’t do any work for a day – and then try to move on. This weather is helping. Winter gets me down and Spring makes me breathe deeply again. I see the sun and hear the birds outside my window.

I know that we might still have a long road ahead. IVF keeps getting pushed back and back and back. But I can’t keep putting my life on hold and so I try to get on with it, and be ok.

Life is busy now, and that helps. I don’t really have time to be sad. A big part of my job is to focus on the happiness in other peoples’ lives, and that’s been hard these past years but I’m trying to get past that.

I’m also feeling hopeful. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing; at this point it helps me get through the days but I’m afraid that at another point it will grind them to a halt.

I’ve been listening to a fertility teleconference this week and they talk a lot about trying to gain control. I’ve felt out of control for years and there is comfort in trying to regain some of that. More on that in another post.

As soon as I figure out how to work my new scanner I’ll share my polyp pictures. They’re pretty interesting and actually may hold some answers. I know you’re excited to see the inside of my uterus! Who wouldn’t be?

I haven’t been posting much for awhile. Partly because I’m super busy these days, so it’s hard to find the time. But I’ve also had a hard time knowing what to say. I feel so stagnant. Saying the same things over and over. Having the same surgeries with the same outcome. Watching other people go through treatments while I sit and wait for the time to pass.

I thought I’d be going through IVF with a few people, but instead I watched them go through it. Some of them had success and others, sadly, didn’t. But I had hoped to be on the other side of it, not just continuing to wait and wonder. I even feel left behind by other “Infertiles” sometimes.

It’s kind of a hard time of year for me in general. It seems like everyone has babies in the Spring. The other day I saw the babies across the street sitting in their yard and remembered that it was last March that I saw the yard signs out announcing their arrival. Next week my niece turns three. She’s like a real person now – not just a little baby laying or crawling around, but an actual person who walks and talks and feeds herself. She even has a little sister now. It’s hard to watch other peoples’ kids turn another year older.

And the worst thing: the other day, one of my friends from my support group went in for her 10 week ultrasound and found that the baby had died. She had initially been pregnant with twins, but one stopped growing early on, and now the other has followed. My heart breaks for her. I can’t even imagine that pain and grief. Especially on top of IVF. It isn’t fair. No one should have to go through both; one is bad enough. Some days I feel like shaking my fists at the Universe, screaming at the top of my lungs that life is cruel and so unfair and how can things go so wrong?

It’s hard to know what to say about all these things; some days I feel like I want to say something, but I don’t know how or what. So the days just keep going by.

Please keep my friend in your thoughts and, if you have them, your prayers. She shouldn’t be going through this. I don’t know how much good thoughts or prayers really do, but I suppose it can’t hurt, and she could use all of them that she can get.

However you count it, it’s been a long time.

Today is one of those days I dread months in advance: our now-familiar annual anniversary of when we started trying to do this one simple, basic thing. How could it have been this hard or gone on this long?

I don’t really even know how I feel at this point. It’s still hard and I still hurt, but it’s a different kind of pain than it was in past years. I look back at our one and two year anniversaries and think “wow, that was nothing.” Two years is not that long. When I was in it, it was, but now I realize what an insignificant amount of time that is. You have a different mindset once you reach the two-year mark. I don’t want to minimize anyone’s pain who is still under two years, because it sucks, and I remember vividly, but once you get past that, it’s different.

Three years was tough. But four years is just surreal. I remember being at one and two years and thinking there was no way I could be one of those people still trying at three, four, and beyond. I didn’t see how they could go through so much grief for such a long time.

Of course, I understand now. 

There are so many children on my (mostly hidden) facebook feed that were born in those four years. Some people, my younger sister included, even have two. How is that fair?

Of course, the answer is that it isn’t. But of course we all know that life isn’t fair.

The pain used to be sharp and piercing - like getting cut with a knife or hitting your head on the corner of a shelf. Crying your eyes out and feeling intense pain and eventually pulling yourself together and taking some pain meds and going on with life. Now the pain is dulled but deeper; like a chronic ache that you’ve had for years that just won’t go away.  A stiffled howling inside that no one else can see or touch. Something that can’t be treated. Something so far beneath the surface that it’s just a part of who you are. Like a piece of yourself is missing. Like some part of you has died.

I am not who I used to be.

I haven’t dealt with these years very well overall. I’m trying to dig myself out of several holes now, but some of them are so deep that I don’t really see a way out.

I honestly thought this would be over by now, one way or another. I can’t believe we’re at 4 years but still at least 2 or – more likely, as I discovered doing some math over the weekend – 3 months away from doing IVF, and we’re willing to try a second round if the first doesn’t work. So we’re facing the possibility of being at or close to 5 years. And then what if I still can’t give up?

Because it’s almost like a drug and I sometimes feel like an addict. “Just one more try, just one last round, then I can stop, I swear, but I just need this thing so badly I can’t give it up.” And we do it again and again, expecting or at least hoping for different results, subjecting ourselves to pain every time. But I can’t let it go just yet.

And so we carry on. Will we see 5 years? Maybe, maybe not. The only thing I can say for sure is that I have no idea what the future will be. I just hope this next year will be kinder than the last four.

I write this post with hesitation. it’s a post I’ve attempted to write several times, but I never could quite phrase it the right way. I probably still can’t, but I think it’s time to give it a shot.

It’s a post about faith.

I feel like I should start from the beginning: I grew up with a church background. My dad has been a minister for the majority of my life. I went to church at least 3 times a week for most of my life. I believed. I had faith. I knew what I knew. I had no doubts. I went to church after I went to college; it was important, it was a part of me, it was something I believed in.

But then I became “an infertile”, and I began to doubt.

My faith has been shaken to the core.

My journey with infertility has, admittedly, coincided with an awakening, of sorts. I saw religious people that did not practice what they preached. I took an interest in politics, and the teachings in the bible often didn’t mesh with the politics of people in the church. I began to question everything.

But mostly I questioned what I had always been taught: that God is in control, that things will work out the way they should, that you need to have faith to get what you want, that everything happens for a reason.

I don’t believe that it does.

I want so badly to believe that what should be, should be. That what is meant to be, will be. That everything happens for a reason.

But I don’t believe it. Not at all.

And I don’t know that this is a belief that even coincides with religion, or with God, or with what have you – but for most people, they go hand in hand, so it’s hard to separate the two.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told people what we’re going through, only to get a response along the lines of “Well, when it’s supposed to happen, it will happen” or “things will work out the way they’re supposed to.”

Really?

I have issues with these lines of reasoning. If things happen for a reason, why are people given children when they abort them or leave them in a dumpster? Did God give these people pregnancies with the knowledge that the result would be a dead baby? Yet I can’t get pregnant? Me, who has been planning for years and who is fully prepared, it’s not the right time to give me a baby? But all those horrible, neglectful people are given babies? On purpose? For a reason?

I don’t buy it.

I believe that some things happen for a reason. Absolutely. But I also believe in Free Will. And I believe in Chance, or Coincidence, or whatever you want to call it.

As for my Faith – as I said before, it’s been shaken to the core. This is one of those things that makes you question everything. Everything.

There are some big life events that make you question your faith/spirituality/religion/whatever you want to call it, and infertility is one of them. Some peoples’ faith grows, and some peoples’ disappears. In all honesty, I don’t know yet where I fall on the spectrum.

But I know that right now I question everything. And I don’t know how I’m going to come out on the other end of this.

I know that I question, and that I doubt, and that I think very deeply and seriously about the whole thing. In the beginning, I prayed. We both did. But now we don’t. The closest I ever come to a prayer these days is when I’m in bed at night, lying in the dark, and my prayer is a pleading whisper: “Are you there?”

And right now, that’s all I have.

Wow – I was kind of shocked when I found out that I made it onto Mel’s Friday Blog Roundup at stirrup-queens.com. It’s always so amazing and comforting to me to hear that people identify so closely with the thoughts that I write about – and the great irony is that I nearly deleted that post when I woke up the next morning. But I think that’s how it goes, a lot of the time; the things we write that are the most honest are often the things that we wonder “should I have even written/said that?” and they are so often also the things that other people can most closely relate to.

I had a fabulous English professor in college who once said something brilliant; something along the lines of “people always talk about how different we all are, but that’s BS – we are all the same.”

And that stuck with me, because it’s so true. We may not talk about the deep, dark things very often, but when we do, we find that we’re not alone.

I spent most of last year in therapy, and at one appointment, she said something that changed my life. I told her that D didn’t really understand what I was going through, didn’t know the right things to say and do, and wasn’t supportive enough, even though I knew he tried. And she said:

“You can’t find your support in him. He’ll never completely understand what you’re going through. Guys are not the same as girls. You need to seek your support in other women.”

And she was right.

It was a hard thing to let go of – the idea that my husband could be everything I needed, that he could give me all the comfort I required, that he would be the one person that understood how hard it all was – but once I did, my life changed. I sought support on online forums and in real-life support groups and in fellow bloggers, and I found women that really, truly, completely, totally got it. I can speak freely to them, and they won’t judge me. They won’t give me trite catch-phrases that “everything will be ok, it will happen when it’s meant to, you just need to relax and it will happen.” They get it. Totally. Completely.

Of course, I treasure and value the people that are not on this road, the people in my “real life,” that try their hardest to offer support and words of encouragement. They may not always say the “right” thing, but they say the things that mean the world, that they are there for us, that they are thinking of us, even that they are praying for us, even though I haven’t prayed for us in a long, long time. These people and the things that they say mean more to me than I can even begin to express.

But I’ve also found this support network that understands, and that I can talk to. When I get bad news or good news or just feel crummy, I go to them first, because I know they understand. Little things, whereas before I’d be like “who would actually want to know this?” I now know who to tell, and they know what to say. When I first found out my sister had gone into labor, my heart ached, and I thought “who can I talk to? who would understand the way I feel, and not judge me for these feelings?” and the answer came to me: the women who were going through the same thing. And I told them, and they wrote back amazing, supportive things, and it changed my day and warmed my heart. After I picked my heart off of the floor, I posted here, and after that, I went on with life. But first, I went to my support group. And it made all the difference in the world.

I don’t actually know most of the women that I “talk” to. But I know they’re there, and I know they care, and I know they understand.

And that makes all the difference in the world.