Yesterday was one of those days.
We had been away for slightly over a week. I jokingly say that after every unsuccessful IVF, we have to take a holiday to recover from it, to remind ourselves that there is fun and beauty in this world. I'm only half joking.
Every day was cool, crisp weather, walking in the old green park and taking in the night noisy city scenes. It was escapism, but it was glorious. During the trip, I jettisoned my usual fertility-conscious routines. Short of noticing that, as Dr N had suggested at my last check-up, thanks to the too-effective Lupron from almost two months ago now, I did not seem to ovulate in this cycle, I felt immensely carefree and I wanted to stay there forever.
I thought about lots of things, few of them related to fertility or babies. There are mercifully few babies out and about in Europe anyway. I had time and space, to think about what we were going to do and I came to some conclusions.
First, I thought back about my life and I realized that I've always been the babysitter. I've always cherished family and been able to form relationships with children, and I know, however this ends, that living child-free is not an option for us both. I have many reservations about how we will pursue a family, about what risks or compromises it may entail. But I know that we will, even if it hurts.
Second, that I cannot fathom putting more drugs into my body. I already really resent the small doses and monitoring necessary for a transfer, let alone the large doses and egg retrieval required for an IVF. Would we try it a last time? Maybe, but it always seems like a last time, till it's not. I still do believe that with Z's low morphology and my poor quality eggs, it represents the best chance for us.
Would it eventually work? Maybe it would. The online world is full of stories of people succeeding on their 10th try. But I no longer felt enthusiastic about trying. I don't want to deal with the longer term effects of such medication. I don't want to give myself ovarian cancer, or even the large looming risk of. I want to live with less fear, even if that means less anticipation.
Third, we would defrost the remaining embryos for a 5-day transfer, God willing. But they were essentially lower quality than those that hadn't worked and to be honest, my heart is no longer in it because it's numb and disbelieving from the number of times we've been told it's negative.
In truth, I don't know what we will do after. I don't know which path we will take. I don't know what I will do with this enormous, sometimes crushing fear that it will always feel like this and be as lost a cause as this. Of course, I want to simply trust that it will work out, or that our luck would suddenly change.
I have tried many ways to sooth it, but it always comes back. I have tried to rationalize, to repair, to have faith, to be hedonistic even, I've tried both drifting and swimming against the tide, but it never closes that gaping hole that lies empty between present and future.
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Returning home after a trip is always a bit of a let-down. It feels like getting back to the grind, having to schedule doctor's appointments, TCM, start taking the million and one supplements. Adding to that tedium is the depressing reminder, when everything returns to its normal pace, that nothing has changed. We're still here, stuck in this rut, not knowing how or when we can resolve anything. The freedom of being away, from forgetting it all, disappears really quickly and you're left with a reality that you have to keep on ploughing toward your goal, or keep letting it go.
This time, I think the hyper-sensitivity was coupled with a few things. A bit of distress, that my cycle had been thrown completely out of whack. And disappointment from an important meeting I did during the trip, about an overseas work opportunity. Although I knew that opportunity was not perhaps at the right context or place, I desperately wanted to move away, to be anywhere but here, where I'd keep getting reminded by my peer group. And for that reason alone, I felt disappointed to confirm that it didn't represent any professional prospects for us. I wished we could just catch a break, rather than feel like we're struggling to realize opportunity.
So there I was, back in my first meeting of the day and I was with a colleague who is a year older than me and has three children, boys spaced two years apart each. At the last child, she gave the impression it was unplanned and an upset, although as I've come to learn, people don't always tell the truth about this, or sometimes, their version of emotion changes a lot faster than mine has in the last few years.
Suddenly I noticed, that she was visibly pregnant. This had crossed my mind a few times weeks ago — in fact, she was the exact same colleague I had the Freudian dream about, so I must have been putting it off for some time, thinking she couldn't surely be pregnant while still hefting around a babe in arms and two small boys besides. I didn't want to see it. But, sure enough, she is expecting, in fact, she is quite far — four months along. For the fourth time in slightly over 6 years.
I don't know why this made me feel so awful in the gut (it's certainly not that I want her four kids or that I don't sympathise with the challenges of having four kids), but it did.
It's not as if I walk around thinking she has a lot and I, a little. It's not that I blame either of us, or question God. But I guess it's that I've watched every single one of her four pregnancies, from just a few cubicles away. To give some idea of how long it's been, they chose for her first kid, the name I wanted to call our first child. After that, I thought joyfully and naively, to myself, that out of consideration, I would tell her first that we would like to use the same name.
That time never came. But her second, third and fourth pregnancies have. It's transitioned from happy for her at the first, to Again? at the second, to something akin to horror and despair at the sheer speed of the third and fourth, which both occurred while we'd been trying.
The second thing, is that I already have a pregnant colleague, and the colleague who left last year to pursue getting pregnant, is also expecting. Basically, this makes all the women in my team, past and present, older and younger, who are all currently pregnant. Just not me. They all conceived while I was on some form of birth control or infertility treatment, which I have been since March. When I had no real possibility of getting pregnant.
On the back of that, a friend told me that a dear friend, who held off children for years while she pursued setting up her own business, was pregnant. Because of her ambivalence and multiple interests, she had always seemed to me, one of the last bastions for married couple friends without children. And expecting again, was another mutual friend who'd left our workplace and had twins, just two years ago.
It made me recall a friend whose brother's Vietnamese girlfriend delivered the same week her stillborn baby would have been due. Sometimes I imagine this is what it's like, or wonder when it stops replaying in your head. Even in an environment of good news, the invisible can be tough, and ugly and sometimes it can be that way for a long time. And everyone has invisible traumas of some kind.
Still, somewhere in the middle of my thoughts — how one person could just be careless and be filled with life and light and time, while another could be so careful and yet filled just with repetitive heartbreak and off-kilter cycles, how one could be so close and so far, the dam broke. Blame the jet lag, or the anovulatory cycle, or the work disappointment, but once it began, it just spiralled downward, entirely out of control. As it tends to do from time to time.
The stuck feelings of bitterness, frustration, dread and fear, the blind hysteria and bad memories, swelled as I sat through the next two meetings, occasionally and unconsciously tearing. By the end of the day, when I fancied that I looked alright, I glanced in the bathroom mirror and realized I looked a fright, with my already tired eyes, now all rimmed in red. Hoo boy.
I feel sorry for my friends, sometimes. The ones who have to hear these rants again and again, who do their best to stop me from falling and after awhile, just go silent from the lack of things to say. When even I know I should just stop and think about something else.
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Sometimes I think my brain is wired very oddly now — I calibrate people by how long they've been married and how young they are, how much they love children. I figured this out the first time, when my 43 year old male boss had a second child after two initial miscarriages and it didn't hurt at all.
My friend whom I know loves her godchildren and is kind and honest? It stings a little bit because I don't like feeling left out and she gave me a sense of security in how I was, but I would never want her to procrastinate and go through what I'm going through. I happily bought her baby's clothes that I'd wanted for myself.
But the colleague who got married a year after we did, has three children and announces a fourth? The cousin who never wanted children and complained she couldn't change jobs because she got knocked up, then hosts a Sip and See for their baby whose 'cuteness is turning their world upside down', or the obese layabout college frenemy who's marrying his girlfriend because they're accidently expecting? Not so much.
It isn't sensible, I know this. It's jealous and judgemental and foolish, even though I have to say, that I don't love my colleagues any less. It isn't their fault that they have such abundant fertility. And there isn't a single one of them I don't wish well. But it doesn't stop me from needing to close my eyes at the sight of a pregnant woman. It's just too hard to contemplate, unless they tell me that they too, would have preferred a different timing.
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That's exactly what I told myself silently, trying to calm down. Get a grip. Nobody has children to spite you. Nobody makes themselves pregnant to be cruel. And not everyone has your history of troubles to be coping with. But I banked on that woman in the mirror, being brave and telling them all, to shut up and to get on with what they wanted me to do. I wonder if I would ever have the courage. I wonder if I would ever do it.
No, it won't. In a different, parallel universe, it doesn't even matter now. But it's never a reflection of the woman in the mirror. I want you to know that.
