Three more months have gone by without IUIs and also without success. These were months where my lining was out-of-sync with the follicle growth, and it wasn't optimal to intervene. The new year had passed, another year of the company yearbook calling for "who had kids this year" and "expectant mummies please let us know for next year" and being neither. We seemed to have hit this age in life where just about everyone around us was pregnant. My friends have been pregnant through the last decade. Even the lecherous 50-year-old man who'd come on to me when I was young and single was married with children. Our wedding caterer is pregnant. Kim Kardashian and Kanye West are pregnant, even Reggie Bush, Kim Kardashian's ex-bf, is also expecting with his new lover!
I had a small meltdown today, after my cousin told me she was expecting a second baby. It had been coming for awhile; for the last few days, I had been dealing with this unbearable feeling that, every day, someone either told me about or flashed pictures of a new baby, updated their status as "It's so hard to take care of a sick child when you're pregnant", or shared with me well-meaning blessings from their pastor (2013 will be the year of open wombs!) and secrets from their fengshui master on how he got 40-something-year-olds pregnant. (Find a three-pod peanut, open it and leave the entire nut inside your bedside table. For a girl, dry 7 and 4 pomegranate seeds in red packets and stuff them under the mattress where you and your husband's stomachs lie.)
She told me really gently, as she knows we've been trying, and I was really fine with that and genuinely, not even gingerly, Happy for her. But then I sat at my desk and dissolved into a disappointed, depressed, frustrated, irrational person. I thought about all the baby books and cloths that I'd bought, what seemed a mocking age ago, and which are now sitting in a spare cupboard in an empty room, and wanted to scream, "whhhhhhhhyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy? Whyyyyyyyyyyyyy is this happening?"
And I wanted to throw things, I wanted to quit my job, I wanted to abandon the housing renovations and, gosh, the strength of the emotion was just overwhelming. Everyone says it only does happen when you aren't under pressure, but how can you not think about something, or just be happy, when you feel like you want it so much?
Does the month ever come when you don't check? Or don't keep track? Is that when or how it happens? How do I not succumb to these once-a-month lows that I've been having? Both my husband and I think it's enough to make us want to just go for IVF and just go balls out at it.
At this point, although Dr N hasn't said anything, in my mind at least, I believe we have exhausted the IUI possibilities. One thing that has happened recently, which is bothering me also, is that I started to get slight ovulation bleeding — or rather, a stained discharge — from around the time of ovulation and onward. This did not happen in the IUI months, but rather over the two months without any medication, before and after. The other reasons for bleeding include a cyst or an ectopic pregnancy, both of which were ruled out.
I'm trying to avoid the gaps, and concentrate on the good fight and the real life. You know, the one with work and bills and upkeeping family and weight and not some metaphorical, ultrasonic emptiness. I had a long chat with a new mother, who told me that other than the baby, her life had been similarly filled with a sense of not knowing where she was going, or what to do with herself. Or really, in her thirties, what she was there for. This was only made worse by some post-partum depression and she'd been fighting it, it sounded like, with herself and with the husband. It has made me softer toward other people's struggles and tiredness, because I realize that once they do have that baby or child, they, like me, similarly have no choice about what they are feeling or what they have to do.
I've also spoken to women who have been much longer in this situation than we have and that's helped me get some perspective. But when the talking stops, when they leave, I'm still left there trying to make sense of it.
And I can't. At this point in our journey, I've over the hump of thinking, rationalising, resigning myself to being headed toward IVF and the knowledge that IVF will be multiple times the effort, pain, risk and failure. I fervently pray for a miracle. I've embraced some of the time, possibilities and financial freedoms that would come without children. I no longer bother putting aside lattes or my teh halia. I've also quietly acknowledged that maybe God's plan is for us to benefit a homeless, parent-less child because we have the capacity to love and nurture, without caring whether they were of our own DNA. I'm not as volatile, but I haven't figured out how to get rid of that envy and the emotional up and down.
