I have had several occasions to think that I should shut down or make private this blog, which began as a way for me to record mad, sad or bad moments, to expel them, as it were, from my physical mind onto paper, and as a way to record things we've been through. It was also a way to share our journey with friends and cousins who are abroad or whom we don't see often. For those friends who are closer, it's a rehash of incidents and grouses they've already heard about first-hand, so I never assumed they would read it.
However, the traffic through the blog has been increasing, at a pretty quick rate. On one hand, I'm more than glad if it can be a resource to other women who are doing research and hopefully help them to save time and grief in their own journey. On the other, I've also had awkward questions from colleagues who've stumbled onto it, or friends who've had no discretion about recommending it to acquaintances whom I hardly know and who aren't in similar situations, which I then, unfortunately, heard gossiped about third-hand.
Today, though, I also had the experience of being very glad for other supportive and vocal online voices. I had been mulling over something for the last couple of days and feeling morose because my post-ovulation temperatures in this cycle have been erratic and incredibly low. For a few days after the positive OPK (ovulation predictor test stick), I could not even pinpoint the ovulation, as the temperatures were so low and inconsistent. No sooner had they registered a creeping three-day rise, but they plunged below the baseline temperature and continued to do so for many days, rising and falling above a meagre 36.18 — usually, for me, a definite pre-ovulation temperature.
The temperatures never rose very high at all, dipping and rising sharply so that the chart looked more like a dartboard than a graph, and to a degree that I'd never experienced in two years of temping. I don't know whether to put it down to some travel (but all short-distance, no time-change travel), more running, or more IVF rescheduling-induced stress, but those all seem very simplistic and unlikely reasons to me. I actually feel stronger and healthier than I have in a while.
Sometimes, it is very ironic: the more you watch something, the more haywire it goes. And although it shouldn't bother you (after all, the reasons it might be so — like low progesterone in this cycle — are entirely out of your control, or your 'feel'), it makes you feel pretty wretched, purely, I guess, because you are watching.
Somewhere through this cycle, I read a link that an acquaintance posted on Facebook. I know — that is how all bad stories start. This link was an article about how gay people should not get married and adopt children, because to give a child two mothers or fathers was to etch deprivation on their hearts, because children naturally need a father-and-mother pairing. It was purportedly written by a gay author — so this friend claimed — so it was not her own over-the-fence commentary.
In short, it was subjective and judgemental, full of short-sighted and sweeping assumptions. It was not mean; rather, it was the sort of cruelty of entitlement and good fortune that evoked the sentiment of what people deserve, or that there is a natural order in what different people deserve, even if they had no say in their differences to begin with. It was, for the protection of the children, because she so loved her children. Tellingly, it had been shared by three uber-Christian right-wing acquaintances that I often think have more prejudices than they have compassion (or sometimes perspective), but who are, of course, plenty fertile.
It was the sort of thing I should have left alone, because it was none of my business and because bringing up an opposing argument would have been a waste of breath. Really, I don't believe that either of us had any idea of what we were arguing about, because we aren't qualified, nor in that exact situation personally. But did I do that? No, I did not. I wrote back with a snippy comment, which, of course, unleashed a torrent of aggressive self-defence and morality from her end.
Why couldn't I side-step that easy and, honestly, irrelevant landmine, I wondered. Any more than I could deal cheerfully with today — in the space of a few hours, having two babies invited over by separate members of my family, for lunch and dinner (one an IVF baby/couple who had succeeded, which can be maddening). Then I logged in to the blog [Don't Count Your Eggs], and reading her clear, concise writing on Becoming a Better You and Knowing Your Triggers, I almost shed a tear, because it was so familiar, so relevant and so comforting to me, because it encapsulated everything that I had been feeling.
Sometimes this whole process is so not normal, you wonder if what you feel is normal, and it helps to know you aren't the only one feeling this way. She wrote about how infertility can upset the psychological balance of who we are and personality traits become super-sized as we scramble to cope with the uncertainty and intensity of the experience. That coping with something out of your control can change you, especially from the fear that you could be holding on to (whether this was fear of another failed round, fear of spending tens of thousands of dollars to find out more awful things, fear of pain, etc.).
Like her, I have spent my thirties trying to have a child. Most of the time I can be sanguine about this; I can nod and smile, or go for a run, and in moments of deliciousness, or when I'm happy, it doesn't feel, as she said, that we are behind in terms of developmental milestones, we aren't crazy for trying all that science and technology has to offer, we aren't broken. We are just two people who love each other and want to have a family. It gets harder when the outside world starts to seep in, and we have to actually have the strength to be frequently reminded of how much our lives have been consumed by this, and how much of our emotional, physical and financial resources have been spent on this. We have to find the courage and joy in being different when it's a situation that makes no sense.
It can feel like someone dying of cancer, being made to frolic with cancer remission survivors. At some level, you would expect them to be hyper-sensitive instead of being able to 'let go'. Her writing about recognizing your triggers, therefore, really resonated with me also. Some triggers are obvious, like people who say their pregnancy was an 'accident' or 'happened again'. Some are less obvious, like the lucky socks she wore at her embryo transfer which turned out not to be so lucky, after all. I understood that feeling, the frequent reminders of an emptiness when you look back in time, or the child mementos that you have long hidden away in drawers.
It made me think of this house that is near mine. It is a beautiful house, set down from the road, so that you drive your car into the second floor of the home. The thing about this house is, I had a serious ex-boyfriend whom I dated for five long years, and after the first year, while I was away for school, he cheated not once, but twice. When he finally confessed, or rather, when it was dragged out of him, he told me that it had first happened at a drunken party, in a house owned by a mutual friend. This particular house. In the bathroom, when she was coming out and he, going in.
Earlier that day, I remembered, he had called me, the phoneline full of static excitement about this party he was helping to plan — the crowds, the booze, even the cushions hand-sewn by the host's girlfriend, from fabric they had bought at Spotlight, a craft store I liked to visit. And so, in the depth of winter in Boston, I imagined in Singapore, all the details he described, these cushions, colourful and velvety, strewn all over the basement floor.
And later, the details he hadn't described, because he hadn't yet known what he would do. It's been so many years now that the facts are muddied and adrift in the past. Both of us, I think, would say we understood and have been better for having moved on. He is married with two children, and the host, married to a different girl, with his own children, and this house, long rented and perhaps sold. None of it matters; in fact, it's almost like it never happened. But every time I run past its bamboo fence, it's a non-obvious trigger. I am reacting to something that I never really witnessed or felt, because I still feel a little haunted by this non-existent memory, and pained by the human capacity to hurt even those whom we love.
[Don't Count Your Eggs] wrote that one of her non-obvious triggers was having a strong reaction to the idea of being deserving. Not necessarily in the sense that others, or gay people, don't deserve to get pregnant and be parents, but that we, who have suffered and invested so much, deserve one too. It's not that only people who suffer deserve a baby; it just reminds us of how long and hard our journey has been, and brings up the fear of not knowing when and how it is going to end. And not just us, but a lot of people deserve to have something work for them too. People deserve to do better, don't deserve to have their marriage fail, or public policies that don't enable them to live the way they are or marry whom they love. Life just doesn't always work that way.
I have some idea why I had a strong reaction in particular toward the gay parenting article. On an elementary level, it is because, in my uglier moments, I too tend to misuse the word deserve — I look at people who are older, or less able, or severely overweight, and I ask myself how come they have no problems conceiving, why they deserve to have children so easily and not us. This overlooks the simple and obvious point that no one really deserves anything, neither peace nor pain. But another, not so obvious, reason is the way the experience of infertility has changed me. One of my loveliest and most well-meaning friends, who is onto her third, accidental child, really tries to align herself to understand and support all we are going through. An example of this is that one day, she forwarded me an article of an Afghanistan war veteran's young widow's love story and she asked whether it felt more painful than a break-up or a death of a loved one. Ah, bless, I thought, it is really brave to try to engage a friend struggling with infertility. Sometimes I think you need a shrink-level degree to figure out when they are off or on!
But no, I replied, smiling wryly. In a break-up, you are still whole and in a death, it only happens once. Truth be told, in most break-ups it takes quite a few months to even get to the point where you can admit you were wrong, too, or that anything might be the matter with you. Generally, both don't change the way you live. Finding out that you may never, or can't, get pregnant is more akin to finding out you're gay. It will fundamentally change the way you live and the life you thought that you would have. No matter how positive you want to be, it will limit your options in the life you choose to live. Instead of a family or love, you will feel judged and tested on your fitness, responsibility and what you deserve. You will ask yourself what you could have done differently, or why it had to be you.
Far more than a break-up or a death, it will change you internally and make you feel lost as yourself. Lost as to what to do with yourself, lost as to how to find comfort. I had a friend with a special needs child tell me that she understood, because sometimes she felt that, no matter how great things were going just then, there was always a persistent and terrible sadness that never went away. It will make new people love you, and some old friends leave you, either because they can't take how you are or you can't take how they are. It will make you question what you hold important and you may agree to compromises, seek out new aspirations, and accept love in ways you never thought possible and in ways other people still don't think possible, or are just perhaps, glad to have avoided. You will feel a definite compassion — that not every difference happens for a reason, or as an opportunity for learning or conformity. No one deserves for life to be a certain way.
And sometimes, the abject blindness to this — either hiding behind a religious belief, or the arrogance a picture-perfect life affords you, or just not being able to understand and accept something you haven't personally experienced — during a time when I'm exhausted or fed up or confused, or have 'hormones brewing up a nasty stew in my blood', brings out the frustration and resentment that has accumulated over the past couple of years. And that's a trigger that I need to learn to better recognize and deactivate.
