Failure doesn’t just bring disappointment and sadness. It brings anger<\/i>. 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.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I just want to be happy<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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<\/i> children. The spacing that would have been perfect, had Devin been born alive. But he wasn’t.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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<\/i>, but how<\/i>. In a way I am choosing my due date. October baby, or November? Maybe it wouldn’t matter either way. But maybe it will.<\/p>\n
My life is a track of dominos. But I can never see how moving one will affect how they all fall.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[78],"class_list":["post-1468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-ivf-4"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1468"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1468\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1469,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1468\/revisions\/1469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}