Frequently I have been catching myself thinking about how I have<\/i> to get pregnant this coming cycle. Because so-and-so is pregnant… or because this is our last embryo in storage… or because my 27th birthday is this year… or because the due date would be the last one before Devin’s second birthday. So many reasons I could list out, and in my heart it feels so real. This need<\/i>. Like I may just have a breakdown if I don’t.<\/p>\n
But then I remind myself, no. If I don’t get pregnant, I will be sad and angry, then I’ll pick myself up and keep going. Because that’s what I do. It’s the only thing TO do. Being pregnant sooner rather than later would be a wonderful thing, but it’s not going to make or break my life. I need to stop putting these ultimatums on myself. This is obviously going to take its own time and unfortunately there is only so much I can do to help it along. Stressing does not help.<\/p>\n
In one way infertility is worse than grief: instead of getting progressively better, it gets progressively worse. Every failed month you lose another chunk of your sanity and trust that it will somehow work out, and then you ask yourself, how far down the hole will I fall? Because that’s the scary part. Not that it failed this time, but that it might fail next time, too, and the time after that. When will it end? Will<\/i> it end?<\/p>\n
At least the loss is a loss no matter which way you spin it. Granted it’s the worst kind of pain I could possibly imagine, but you know it is the bottom of the well and it can only possibly get better from here or I will die. And it does. Every month it gets a little easier to bear. After a while you start realizing that you’re feeling better every month and you actually start believing that it will continue to feel a little better.<\/p>\n
But that irreversable permanence is the dagger in the heart, isn’t it. Going through infertility treatments you’re hoping that this<\/i> will be the last month of this crap, the last time sitting, praying on the bathroom floor over a little magic stick. There is hope that it will end. With grief the only hope is that one day it won’t hurt as much.<\/p>\n
I know which one I’d choose, if I had to. But they both suck royally.<\/p>\n
::<\/p>\n
I hear from people all the time, “I could never handle what you have.” The thing is, no one thinks they could survive a tragedy. No one really thinks to themselves, “If my baby died, I could deal with it.” It’s just that when it happens you have two choices: live or die. Living requires getting back up and moving. Maybe slowly, maybe in the wrong direction, but all of us end up getting back up at some point.<\/p>\n
I will mention that there are some people who believe that it happened to us because<\/i> we are strong. I don’t. I venture to guess most people don’t. It’s just plain bad luck – which means it could have been you, or her, or me. And, with very few exceptions, we all survive it. Just like people survive losing a spouse, survive fighting cancer, survive house fires and tornados.<\/p>\n
We are in an entitled age, where we think<\/i> nothing bad will happen to us. People get a positive pregnancy test and start planning the nursery. Not saying that it’s wrong – I sure did it, and I don’t regret it. But we just expect<\/i> things to go well. That wasn’t always the case. Babies used to die a lot<\/i> more often. So did children and adults. It was a shitty, but normal, part of life. We don’t often see people handle this kind of grief very often anymore – and when it does happen it’s not public. There exists a hush over the topic. A fear of this horrible thing that happens only to the terribly unlucky.<\/p>\n
I am very glad it happens less often. I am so very glad for the advances in medicine. I am much less impressed with the resulting confusion in society. No one knows what to do – our rituals are oftentimes outdated and confusing. And nobody thinks that they are strong enough to get through it.<\/p>\n
Humans are tough. We can survive a whole lot of shit thrown at us. Thankfully many of us will never have to deal with a terrible tragedy like this, but that doesn’t mean you are any less capable… just lucky.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Frequently I have been catching myself thinking about how I have to get pregnant this coming cycle. Because so-and-so is pregnant… or because this is our last embryo in storage… or because my 27th birthday is this year… or because the due date would be the last one before Devin’s second birthday. So many reasons […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[144,145,69,128,143],"class_list":["post-1896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-grief","tag-infertility1","tag-loss","tag-post-miscarriage","tag-strong"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1896","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=1896"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1896\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2103,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1896\/revisions\/2103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}