Somewhere today I abruptly turned the corner from “feeling fine and hopeful and happy to be where I am” to somewhere close to “angry, bitter, and wanting to throw things at the happy pregnant woman walking down the street”. Just like that, flip is switched.

I’ve been trying to isolate myself lately – staying off the baby topics, away from the pregnant chit-chat, away from the happy happy. I’m doing it because, first, it hurts and I don’t like hurting. Second, because it either gets me thinking about what I don’t have, or about what I will have; it gets me imagining scenarios and either getting really hopeful or really depressed, and honestly neither one of them is what I want right now. I cannot be that person right now. I don’t want to be angry and bitter, that is not what I want to carry around with me.

I know – or at least I hope very much – that one day this burden will lift from my shoulders and I will be able to open the floodgates and let all the joy in without the overwhelming bitterness. I had a brief taste of it in April, what it felt like to walk the world as a pregnant person again, as a happy, joyful person. It helps knowing that is waiting for me.

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I remarked to myself and to my therapist that this IVF feels so very much different from #3, the first one I did after Devin. The desperation is missing. The desire and longing are still there, always, but I don’t have that needy, urgent desperation digging fingernails into my back. For IVF #3 I was 9 months out from Devin’s birth. I think it was long enough that I felt so driven, so needy, but not long enough to gain any patience. Now I’m 18 months out. I just feel so much calmer, about everything. Calmer about my situation, calmer about the grief, calmer about the IVF. Even the lead-up for IVF #4 felt desperate, with Devin’s first birthday coming up. I had set an invisible, arbitrary goal. And I was failing.

Sometime after his first birthday I felt the grief and raging frustration settle down. It was spring. I remember looking around at spring arriving and feeling like something lifted from me.

All of 2008 is a cloud to me, a blur. I can tell you that I got my job that year, I can remember training and starting. I can remember meeting my boss for the first time. I can remember Christmas at BIL’s with BabyH. I remember March very clearly; some moments that month stand out in perfect relief in my memory. I remember laying awake at night staring at the ceiling, tears falling silently. I remember cleaning the entire house to the point of perfection. I remember helping Den paint, because we had lots of time, but our hearts and minds were shattered and all we could manage was to paint walls. I remember the memorial service, how I fidgeted and arranged and bought a new table just for that day to display his things. But ask me what I did between April and August and I honestly can’t remember a damn thing. I know I started working again at the non-profit in that time. I think I went there a few days a week. But what did I do the rest of my time? Where did I go? Who did I see? I remember nothing. Summer 2008 simply did not exist to me. It has been wiped out of my memory in a fog of grief and simply coping.

So spring 2009 felt like my new beginning. It felt like the sun had been gone for a long, long time, and I had finally opened my eyes and stepped back out into the world. I am sad to see the summer coming to an end; it hasn’t been long enough for me.

Next year I will probably have a totally different view of 2009, depending on how things turn out. But right now it feels so much better than last year, and as long as things continue in this general direction I will be okay.