Painting Chef - Cheaper Than Therapy

Let me preface this by saying that no, this is not turning back into the “all my uterus, all the time” channel. I have not had, nor do I have looming, any appointments with the wonderful witch doctor. I’m still not where I need to be, in my head and in my heart, to jump back on that whole plan of cooking up a baby with the help of a skilled chemist, a little black magic, Patrick’s right hand and a VERY long syringe. (Too much? Too far? Yeah… probably. No worries, he’s totally a leftie)

But the other night I dreamt I was pregnant. Like… HUGELY pregnant. As in the amount of pregnant where random strangers are saying “HOLY CRAP! Does that HURT?” Also featured in the same dream? Star Wars-esque spaceships, a shopping mall and many, many bathrooms because all I apparently did while hugely pregnant was walk around the mall and pee. (This dream, by the way, led to a VERY mad dash to the bathroom at about 4 am this morning. No more second glass of water while sitting up in bed to read Kathy Griffin’s memoir because it is too damn funny to put down)

The reason I find this being massively pregnant dream (and I know I keep saying massively and hugely and all that but I’m telling you… I could NOT wrap my arms all the way around my stomach and the people in the mall and on the space ships (?) they were STARING! They were POINTING! They were offering to take me to the hospital!) so strange is that I can’t recall dreaming about being pregnant. EVER. Over the course of the past year while we were knee deep in fertility treatments, there were many cruel dreams where I would wake up thinking that I really HAD seen that positive pregnancy test in the middle of the night. I dreamt so many times about finding out I WAS pregnant. And then I would dream about going to the hospital to have a baby only to find out it was like… a cake. Or a goldfish.

People say that out dreams are our subconscious selves working shit out while we sleep… is that true? What am I trying to work out? Here my head is playing tricks on me when I thought I finally had everything figured out.

Then again, the night before this dream, I dreamt I was a head on a stick and I just sat up there on my stick yelling insults to everyone as they passed down below me. I attribute THAT one to either too much Kathy Griffin memoir or withdrawals from Nurse Jackie. It could go either way…

As my most recent decision in the whole Uterus Chronicles: Not Without my Fertility Meds: Too Many Needles Lifetime movie version of my life takes some time to sink in and wedge its way into my life and my world and my duodenum, I feel little pieces of me unclench and relax every single day. The breath I didn’t know I’d been holding for 14 months finally being exhaled.

Two weekends ago we finally got the boat out for the first time this summer and it was just perfect. I swear to you, I could feel the winter cobwebs just falling away. We zipped all up and down the lake and stopped in a beautiful little cove to float and just BE for a little while. Suddenly I noticed that the dull ache I hadn’t been able to shake for at least six months was gone.

Since making this decision, so many things have occurred to me as to why it is the right thing for me and for Patrick right now. As anyone who reads this website knows, I’m prone to expounding on how happy I am and that having a baby with Patrick would just be the icing on the cake. But over the past few months, that theory had lost steam and while I was taking the time to work in the garden and read in the sun and walk the dogs, I realized that I had started to be one of those women who believes they can’t be happy or complete or fulfilled without having a child. Who are those women? That’s not me! And my own happiness is too great a burden for a little person who, if they even actually existed, would routinely shit their own pants.

So I just decided to focus on my continued plan of waking back up to my own life. And then? In the most perfect timing in the world, we went to the beach with friends and it was divine. Do you know why? Because I did absolutely nothing but lie on the beach and read and float in the ocean and catch up with friends. I played with Belle on the beach and snuggled with my husband in bed. We slept late in the mornings and drank and played poker late into the night. We had a Wii bowling tournament. We drank wine and ate delicious food and just sat and talked and talked and talked. And not once did I think about my uterus. Not once did I bemoan the fact that I was childless.

I didn’t take pictures. I didn’t check email aside from what showed up on my Blackberry. I didn’t read blogs or look at Facebook. I didn’t pay attention to the sample sales that have become the crack of which I am trying to come clean. (Oh RueLaLa, how you taunt me!!) I didn’t browse infertility message boards. I didn’t worry (too much) about what was going on at the office. I was just completely and totally on vacation. And I think it was the perfect way to transition into this new way of thinking and of living my life. I came home to over 500 emails, only about 5 of which were truly relevant. Why do I keep so much crap running through my life?

So yes. I’ve been gone. I went on vacation. The only proof I have are my brown legs and one little camera phone picture. And that’s enough for me.

I’m not even that surprised. I’ve never been a pessimistic person, I can Pollyanna the shit out of a situation as long as my in-laws aren’t involved. But despite all the rainbows and unicorns that I’ve tried to blow up my own ass, I think things are… not good. My uterus? She is broken. I have a busted uterus and punk ass ovaries and they are just not getting with the program. They come so very close to cooperating and then they just… take a turn for the bad.

But even though the busted uterus and punk ass ovaries are the ones with the actual problems, it’s my heart that can’t take anymore right now. I have to stop. I have to step back. I can’t do this anymore right now. Every month, the hope and the promise that THIS TIME could be it, THIS TIME will be different. And then the grief at the end. Month after month after month. A fresh wound that never fully heals before it is ripped open yet again with a new loss.

I’m losing my ability to smile and to laugh. Every day I have a harder time separating this struggle from the rest of my life. There are so many things to smile about every single day. I have so much in my life. I’m a damn lucky girl and I know it. But its starting to get harder and harder to see all those things. Every time I look at the sky, I see a little less sun and a few more clouds. Every morning, it’s a little harder to get out of bed. Every afternoon it takes a little more strength to resist crawling back into bed and crying for an hour.

And that’s how I know it is time. Time to stop for a while. It’s time for me to remember who I was BEFORE all of this. I need to rediscover the girl who was fun and funny and loved her life. I need to get moving, I need to have the energy to be active. I need to get back to long afternoons over a bottle of wine with my husband. I want to reacquaint myself with the artist that lives inside me. I want to not worry about what time we have to be home because I have a shot that I have to take. I want to look at rooms in our house and not see an unused nursery; I want to not preface every sentence with “when we have kids” or “once this is a nursery”. I want to be done talking about my uterus and my ovaries on message boards on the internet. I want to purge my vocabulary of words like follicles, trigger shot, stimming, estradiol and IUI.

I started this leg of the journey with an open mind and an optimistic heart. I never imagined that it would end like this. But for now? This is what’s best for me. At some point I lost myself to the battle and I can’t be a good mother like this. I need joy back in my heart and the fire of loving life back in my soul. I want to be a mother who inspires her children to be passionate about life and the world. I want to teach by example, the overwhelming desire to drink it all in and savor every second of every day; I want to be a mother who can’t resist grabbing her child’s hand and diving in head first to everything that the world has to offer. I want them to not be able to resist dancing in the rain or the beauty of a thunderstorm from a covered porch. I want them to savor the music of hysterical, uncontrolled laughter or the exhaustion at the end of a day spent outside in beautiful sunshine.

But I lost all those things in me. And until I get them back, I can’t be the kind of mother my children will deserve. So, in the spirit of Kelly Taylor (SEE! The 90210 references! They have been LACKING!!) I choose me. I choose my own personal rehabilitation. I choose to restore the things I’ve lost in my own soul and spirit before I try to pass them on to someone else. I choose to rededicate my life to living by doing, not watching. I choose to say YES when I am weary, I choose to try instead of being scared, I choose adventure over comfort, new experiences over the familiar, outdoors instead of indoors, friends instead of the solitude to which I’ve grown so accustomed.

It will be back. I’ll have to come back to the treatments eventually. There is no magic pill and there are no miraculous cures. I’ll still be infertile. But I’ll be ME again. And that bitch would make a damn fine mother. I just need to find her, dust her off and remind her why she kicks so much ass. Because I’ve missed her.

The waiting is the hardest part
Everyday you see one more card
You take it on faith; you take it to the heart
The waiting is the hardest part.
~Tom Petty, “The Waiting”

Tom Petty wasn’t kidding. The waiting is the hardest part. When you are actually “in process” with fertility treatments there are things to do every day. Shots, ultrasounds, doctors appointments, couches to lay on, cakes to bake, fits to throw, arguments to start… oh… there I go again, getting carried away.

But once you hit the window known fondly as the dreaded “two week wait”, there is nothing to do but sit and wait and obsess and analyze every single second of every single day. Heartburn? Yep! But wait… is it the fetus or could it be the chili fries I scarfed down at lunch yesterday.

Sore boobs? Check. But are they sore because I’m knocked up? Or because I’m taking progesterone injections everyday that mimic almost EVERY SINGLE symptom of pregnancy? Or could they be sore because I spend every spare moment mashing on my boobs to SEE if they hurt?

Nausea? Gassy? Well… yes, actually. Pregnant? Who knows… (see aforementioned chili fries) Headache? Yes, as a matter of fact. Oh… look at that. I took my ponytail out and my scalp breathed a sigh of relief and immediately relaxed. Damn. Cramps south of the equator? Now that you mention it… yes. But are they because I’m harboring the miracle of life or do we have a chili fries trifecta?

There are a couple of things that are VERY bad for this whole “waiting” game. First of all? The internet in general. The internet is good for killing time but BAD for waiting to find out if you are pregnant. Because the internet? She has opinions. Also bad for waiting? The power to buy pregnancy tests in bulk on… all together now… THE INTERNET. Because thanks to the stash under my sink, I can now take a pregnancy test every single day. And then when every single day I walk dejectedly into the bedroom after said (NEGATIVE) pregnancy test, I can be greeted with my sweet, sweet Patrick just standing there and shaking his head at me. AT ME! Because I just HAD to take another pregnancy test. Is it too early for me to take a test… why yes, yes it is. There is no possibly way, in the physical universe that we occupy, that that test could be positive right now.

And yet… here we are… For some reason I feel like I should just KNOW. It seems like when something is this huge of a deal, I’m just going to KNOW that suddenly there is another little person (or two) setting up shop inside of me. But I literally have NO CLUE. I swing from one extreme to the other so fast that all I can tell you is that if there IS someone in there, I hope they brought their own Xanax. And chili fries…

I’m not good at rules. Or schedules. Or any type of specific writing assignment. I tend to just go wherever the wind blows me and call it a day. Now that I think about it, I’ve probably lived a majority of my life by that theory and I’m not going to promise that it’s always had good results.

But as you may have noticed as you be-bopped your merry way around the internet last week, it was National Infertility Awareness Week (NIAW) last week. Despite my large mouth and willingness to pretty much tell anyone anything and everything they never wanted to ever hear about my uterus, infertility is one of the epidemics that many, many people aren’t comfortable talking about. I get that, I do. I understand. Because I have people I won’t talk about it with too. And I have friends that don’t want to hear about it. The fear of judgment is huge. As is the case that any of us struggling with infertility know, for a fact, that NOBODY who hasn’t been in our shoes (and even people who have!!) is going to say the right thing. They are going to open their mouths and stab us right in the heart. It’s a fact and we live with it every day. So we protect ourselves by going underground.

The big question or writing prompt in the world of the internet for NIAW last week was “What if?” Just that… what if? And there have been some beautiful interpretations of that question that have humbled me, made me laugh and cry and have broken my heart all at the same time. I, on the other hand, have kind of silently meditated on that question for a few days until I decided what it really meant to me in my journey. And finally, last night, just as I was drifting off to sleep, I figured it out.

What if I were doing this alone? Not necessarily as a single person but alone as part of married couple. What if I weren’t lucky enough to have Patrick by my side through this struggle? What if I couldn’t talk to him about the highs and the lows? What if he weren’t there to catch every time I collapsed into a puddle of ugly tears? (I’m NOT a pretty crier…)

What if he weren’t there beside me, holding my hand, repeating his reassuring mantra of “whatever it takes, we’re in it together.” What if I couldn’t count on him to give me a shot every night? What if he didn’t try and understand what I was going through? What if he weren’t willing to listen to me deconstruct each step in painstaking detail? What if he didn’t ask me questions about what was next?

What if he didn’t understand how desperately I needed him to hold me close when it all falls apart again? What if he didn’t realize that each negative really did hurt more than the last? What if he weren’t there to help me up and dust me off and hold my hand while he encouraged me to try again if I felt strong enough? What if he didn’t realize that the only reason I am strong enough is because of him?

What if I were doing this alone.