I went into all this infertility stuff with a wide-open heart. N and I had just gotten back together after being separated for a year, and - being more in love than ever - I felt armed and ready for a little hoop jumping. Not even just ready: when I realized that getting pregnant would require medical treatments, I was oddly excited.
Maybe it was the lessons we'd gained from therapy; I had thought that we were such a healthy couple when we first got together, and it turned out we were as damaged as any other. But we dealt with it. We worked hard. We cried, reflected, and made ourselves as vulnerable as can be, and then we came through the other side with a closeness that I didn't know was possible.
So what if we needed blood tests and hormone checks? I didn't even mind ovarian examinations, as long as I was waxed. And providing sperm samples satisfied whatever public sex fantasies we may have had, so that part was actually kinda fun - especially that we would always go to breakfast afterwards. It was all totally cool because these hoops would just make us more prepared parents.
I was wholly optimistic. In point of fact, I'd registered for this blog in 2007, but I never wrote a single post because I thought, "Well, I'm about to get pregnant, so blogging about my experience would be disrespectful to women who were really infertile."
My Zen lasted about 2.5 years.
In 2010, it started to occur to me: this actually might not happen. I might really be infertile. And that's when I started to get a little testy. Moody. Grumpy. Depressed. Despondent. Devastated. Even (and I find the words hard to type) kind of suicidal.
Which was weird because to be honest, I was kind of disgusted by women who were dramatic about their infertility. "Oh, my god. I can't get pregnant. I should just kill myself." Dude, seriously? It's a three step process: face the facts, grieve, and move on.
Well, yes, but that second step is a bitch.
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