Dominos Falling
Failure doesn’t just bring disappointment and sadness. It brings anger. I can feel it seething again in my head. The hope and possibility during the cycle really had helped damp it down… but it is back.
I have to be careful at work. Mostly I’m just quiet. I recognize the anger for what it is: bitterness, jealousy. I overhear coworkers talking to others about new babies, about pregnancy, and I just feel this nauseous pit in my stomach. It’s what I don’t have. How dare other people go on with their lives? How dare they have happy pregnancies and happy little babies, and never stumble?
Once in a while I’ll smile at a child – a genuine smile, forgetting my own life for a brief moment. But most of the time I try to just ignore them and do my work. I am not rude – at least, I hope not. I just politely speak with the adult and do what I am being paid to do.
I just want to be happy again. That is not to say I am not happy now – I am happy curled up with my husband watching a movie; I am happy watching my dog try to kill a toy in her inherently hilarious way. But it’s not the same kind of happy, is it. It’s not the kind that fills you up from the inside, that makes you glow. The kind that doesn’t leave you.
IVF will work, at some point… but who knows when. Time moves forward quickly, and I lose track. Yesterday I mentioned how last summer I got lost on foot in a neighboring city, finally calling my husband to come rescue me from wandering the streets. But then I realized, no, it was the summer I got pregnant. That was two summers ago. Last summer I was mourning. Last summer I can’t even remember.
And I can’t. I know in August I was hired by the bank, and I can remember training and creating this new life that I am now living. But before then? I don’t remember much. I worked a little. I slept a lot. I scrapbooked and wrote and cried. The whole chunk of the year, from March to August, is just a hazy mass. I feel like I missed a year of my life. 2008 will always be the year that wasn’t.
I always think about time: time to my next cycle, time to my next possible due date, time since Devin, time since we started. I’m obsessed with time. We have one more cycle before Devin’s birthday, since it will be a year past. A year of nothing, a year between pregnancies. And if this one doesn’t work the next cycle will probably be a February due date. Of 2010. Nearly 2 years since Devin was born. 2 years! That’s the spacing we wanted between living children. The spacing that would have been perfect, had Devin been born alive. But he wasn’t.
I think about me, how I’ll be 27 at least when the next child is born. Not old, by any stretch… but it’s certainly not what I imagined. I was 23 when we started, hoping for a baby born before I turned 24. I was so young, so naive. It would have been so different.
I can’t get away from the tree of life, the path that time takes. When we lost Devin I – like many others after a loss – would sit and trace back time. Was that the decision that led to the end? Was that? All these little, seemingly insignificant choices I made along the way. All the little twists and turns that life throws at you. So now I sit looking in the opposite direction, looking at what could be. That’s what infertility is, in a way. Every month, staring at several paths and wondering which one you’re going to go down this time. Will it be a pregancy or no? Will it be miscarriage or no? Twins or singleton? Girl or boy? Infinite possibilities.
And this is why I get scared. Why doing things like making a choice, a simple choice, can be so overwhelming. Take another pill, or stop? Yesterday, when forced to make that choice, I stared at all my medications, frozen for a second, wondering how this choice will change my path. It is not a matter of if, but how. In a way I am choosing my due date. October baby, or November? Maybe it wouldn’t matter either way. But maybe it will.
My life is a track of dominos. But I can never see how moving one will affect how they all fall.
My heart feels like yours…the time that has passed since we started…the days that I thought we would have had a baby by now…
I wish you a world of happiness to come and my prayers are with you
http://www.wondrafulbaby.blogspot.com/
You know, every time when I look at your posts I wonder – why doesn’t she compile all her beautiful posts and write a book? Even through all this, you remain a fantastic writer.
*sigh*
I wish I could give you something that would make you happy again :(
I had just turned 26 when we started TTC in June 2006. Now it’s been two and a half years, 34 cycles, and I’ll be at least 29 when I give birth – you know, *if* I ever get pregnant.
I teach high school. I see pregnant students every year. Why does some irresponsible 15 year old get a baby when I don’t? It makes me mad too.
*hugs*
Beautifully written post Nat.
*hugs*
I’m sorry Nat.
I feel for you, Natalie, I really do. And reading your blog has helped me enormously when it comes to relating to a couple of my IRL friends who are dealing with IVF as well, so I thank you for that. I have no words of advice, but sympathy. I stare at the calendar all of the time, willing it to move faster, yet it only seems to go slower.
Yes. To me, that’s one of the unseen weird and scary side effects of stillbirth. You realize, for the first time, how little control you really have over those “dominoes.” I used to think I could make them fall however I wanted, and now I know I don’t, which is the scary thing.
oh Natalie… this is so beautifully written that I feel like you’ve been sitting beside me TELLING me, not me reading it.
I’m much the same way about keeping time. I’m having in a position to worry (more than just the usual parental worry) about my 21 yr old son right now and I’ve been going over and over and over in my head how I missed this and it’s been driving me nuts… I start over thinking it and then I can’t stop. Maybe I need to go back to work, because that seems to give you a repreive from thinking about it sense your mind is occupied with work. You think it might help me?
Anyway, I’m keeping y’all in my prayers.
Time is the one thing I have been thinking alot about lately. Where has it gone? but then it feels like an eternity. I am so afraid of looking back and thinking that I have wasted so much time, being unfulfilled. My life and time is measured by IVF and the loss of my daughters, it is hard to measure it by much else, how did this happen?
I understand what you’re going through, not because I have endured the same pain as you, but because you say what you mean, what you feel. I hope doing that helps you. I know that you doing it helps others. It helps me.
KUP means Keep us posted.
Yup. I really never got the “well if I hadn’t have miscarried, I wouldn’t have you” line because if I hadn’t miscarried and babies didn’t die and all, I’d have three children, spaced out by two years. And that kills me. To look back and realize almost the entirety of my 30s was spent trying to build a family.
My ’07 was also a completely haze. Nothing happened in ’08, but at least I wasn’t in a complete fog.
Hang in there. The spotting thing must be driving you mad. I used to do that ON THE PILL. Made me wonder what the point was — of course I’m not getting pregnant, I’m having two f’ng periods a month!
The TIME issues never fails to escape me. If I remember right, you and I started to TTC around the same time – late 2005, right? In 2005 when The Man and I got married I had told his parents that we were going to have a 2008 baby so that they would be surprised when a 2006 kiddo arrived. Little did I know… Sometimes I feel utterly baffled that it will be AT LEAST 2010 before we have a child. I was 26 when we started this and I will be AT LEAST 30 before we’re holding a bay. And it’s more likely that it will be 2011 and I’ll be 31 since it’s going to take us at least a year to save enough money for an IVF cycle. And it kills me to know that my fertile myrtle mother who conceived me on her first cycle (at 25) and my sister on her second cycle (at 29), took two years to conceive my little brother (at 34). Everyone tells me that I’m young but the time just keeps slipping away. This year I change brackets on the REs’ success charts…
Yes…. November 2005 was my first cycle off the pill. It’s been a long time. :/