Therapy is Stupid

It's been months, and I still can't say it.

I can say, "I'm," and I can say, "pregnant," but so far I haven't managed to say them in sequence. Instead I default to, "I'm 14 weeks." Or to close friends I say, "I had a transfer at the end of March, and so far things are going well."

Or in the case of telling my parents, I just handed them my most recent ultrasound pictures, and I let them figure it out.

Unfortunately for me, my therapist picked up on my evasion the other day, and within minutes, she was trying to make me parrot her words: "I'm pregnant, and I'm scared."

She tried to make me say it, but she failed, and instead I spent the hour explaining to her why therapy is bullshit. I developed a very sound, four-pronged argument:

1. The more I let myself feel, the harder I'll fall if something goes wrong, so denial is a sounder approach in this situation.
2. If the Buddhist goal is to practice non-attachment, then isn't my way better?
3. Why bother feeling one way or another if it won't change the outcome?
4. I don't want to.

She had rebuttals.

1. If I do end up "falling," then my denial will only make the fall harder. She argued that if something bad happens, then I'll have to process both the pregnancy and the pregnancy loss at the same time, and that would make the pain more profound.
2. Non-attachment doesn't mean not feeling. Non-attachment means accepting the situation for what it is - including my feelings.
3. It's true that feeling one way or another won't change the outcome, but it will inhibit the experience of a positive outcome. I can only feel as much joy as I can grief, so if I want to open my heart to happiness (and love and bonding), then I also have to open my heart to fear.
4. Of course I don't want to. That's because I'm pregnant and I'm scared.

Ugh. Stupid therapy.

Future Present Tense

I've always felt there was something eerie about the state of transition, and in trying to put my finger on it, I realized: it's not transition that I'm experiencing. It's suspension.

Suspension of time. Suspension of truth. Suspension of breath. All by a thread. Or perhaps something thicker.

I've set up permanent residence in this state of suspension, because here, a decidedly unBuddhist mindset allows me to hope for a future present with a different past.

Second hands don't tick here, and so yesterday and tomorrow are just parts of today. It hasn't been weeks since I've blogged. It hasn't been months since I've spoken to my pregnant and parenting friends. It hasn't been years since I started at my clinic. And it hasn't been nearly a decade since I bought my house with its fenced-in yard for the kids to play.

It hasn't.
(Yes, it has.)
It hasn't.
(Yes, it has.)
It hasn't.
(Yes, it has.)

This idiotic dance is what finally got me to discover the fabric of the noose: Nothing is happening in the third dimension, and therefore nothing can be happening in the fourth.

So there's the realization, and it's not eerie at all. It's just your basic, homespun denial wrapped in a Matrix film.

And with that a-ha, I have a choice: do I turn to face a new direction where purpose doesn't hinge on ifs, or do I wrap myself more tightly and take a nap?

Pro-Choice versus Pro-Life

I discovered a secret to life.

Or rather, I discovered fractions of a secret to life. The first half is that "choice yields unhappiness." The second half is that "choicelessness yields happiness." And the third half is that I'm doing it wrong.

At least these secrets are true according to the dozen or so TED Talks I've been watching lately. They say, for example, that if the only pair of jeans in the world were Levi 501s, then you'd either like jeans or you wouldn't like jeans, but your emotional connection to denim would pretty much end there. As it stands, though, you go into a department store and try on 5 different brands and 12 different styles in 4 different washes and 3 different sizes, and you leave with nothing except feeling short, fat, and out of sync with fashion. Hypothetically.

Translated into donor shopping, this would mean that instead of trying on 18 pairs of jeans, you pore through 5,000 donor profiles, and instead of leaving the store with self-esteem issues, you just pick someone.

That's what I did. She wasn't a perfect fit.

The TED folks would say that this is because I had 5,000 choices, which would naturally lead to 10,000,000 miles of expectation, which in turn would get me galaxies' worth of disappointment. (Measurements are approximate.)

Honestly, though: what are the odds that I would have found her perfect? As anyone who's sat across from me at dinner knows, I'm seriously picky, and that's just with things that go into my mouth. Imagine how much more particular I am about things that go into my vagina?

But the premise of this TED-sourced phenomenon is based on choice, and the truth is that I no longer have a choice of donors. I had a choice 6 months ago, and I made it, so what choice is making me unhappy now?

To help explain what I'm babbling about, I'm going to babble for a moment about something else: grief. Specifically about Elizabeth K übler-Ross's Five Stages of Grief. And most specifically about stage three.

I'm a master at negotiation. And by master, I mean idiot.

First, let me give you examples of how normal infertiles negotiate:
If only I could have a baby, I swear I'd go to church every day, or
If only I could have a baby, I'd work harder on my relationship.

Here's how I do it:
If only I could go back in time, I'd have tried to get pregnant when I was 30, or
If only I could go back in time, I wouldn't have done all those inseminations, or
If only I could go back in time, I wouldn't have "accidentally" had an orgasm 4 days after my second transfer, or
If only I could go back in time, I'd have chosen a different donor.

Yes, there's a part of me that literally believes I will find a time machine and use it to travel into my past so I can make other fertility choices. Let me be clear: the time machine isn't the variable that's up for negotiation. The time machine is a given. The part I'm trying to negotiate is exactly how far back the time machine will let me go.

Now, since selecting a donor was my most recent choice, it's most logical to negotiate for going back 6 months, because the possibility of successfully going back 10 years is obviously absurd.

And how does one pass the time while waiting for this time machine to manifest? One watches a dozen TED Talks about happiness and choicelessness. And in watching a dozen TED Talks about happiness and choicelessness, one inadvertently finds oneself getting grounded, being present, and breathing in the post-transfer, pre-pregnancy-test air.

Along the viewing way, I coincidentally happen to be dabbling with Kübler-Ross's fifth stage of grief: acceptance. I'm finding it a little easier to accept that this donor is going to be my children's genetic parent. Moreover, I'm actually accepting that I'd be lucky if this donor were my children's genetic parent (because the alternative would be an emotional and financial disaster). And mostover, I'm tired of the trying phase. I just want a baby. And this is the likeliest way it's going to happen.

The good news about my potential for happiness is that most of the fertility-related choices are behind me. Case in point: I didn't choose the embryo that was transferred last week. Someone else did. There were 6 frozen embryos, and some random embryologist chose one, thawed it, watched it develop, and then put it in the catheter that was inserted into my uterus.

This is the embryo I didn't choose:

This is the embryo I didn't choose that I nursed through bed rest, the embryo I didn't choose that may have successfully implanted, and the embryo I didn't choose that could have potentially grown by now into the size of a sesame seed.

It's also the embryo I didn't choose whose endurance I'm hoping will be revealed tomorrow morning when I take my first pregnancy test.

[Breathlessness.]

Fall from Grace

My grandmother was a woman of grace. She bore 11 children in a 2-bedroom home, cared for her husband through a decade of Alzheimer's, and lost her eyesight near the end of her life, and the only time I ever heard her complain was when I mixed the fruit salad with my hand instead of a spoon.



It actually wasn't until I was a teenager that I realized she'd had 11 children. Before that, I only knew my mom to have 9 siblings, but in poring through old pictures with my grandmother, I came across a photo of half a dozen pint-sized aunts and uncles sandwiching a toddler who I didn't recognize, and when I asked her about the mystery child, all she said was, "He was a boy." "What boy?" "A boy that was."

That was it. No yearning. No grief. Not an ounce of longing for the boy that was. Just a graceful nod to what is.

Now it would be romantic of me to imagine that my grandmother was inspired by some Buddhist philosophy of non-attachment on the path toward liberation from suffering, but closer to the truth would be to admit that she was - like most third-world women knocked-up at 15 by men twice their age - repressed. But I don't care. I still admire it. Her style was so elegantly dignified that nearly 20 years after her death, I remain haunted by the ease with which she could raise her chin, inhale a single breath, and turn her head toward whatever direction lay acceptance.

I am not this way. Unlike my grandmother, when I'm confronted by grief, I curl up into a ball of despair and wallow in my want. My donor egg IVF cycle fails, and I sob a small mountain of tissues until it peaks at an elevation that mirrors the depth of my sadness, and then I cry some more for shame that I could want anything so profoundly.

But that's the irony of the thing and the part I'm most ashamed of: I don't even really want a donor egg child; I'm only chasing this ghost because it's the next thing to hope for. So not only do I long, but I long for something that I want and don't want in equal measure. Desperation for a broken paddle in an ocean storm.

Was she stronger than me, my grandmother? Was she smarter? Wiser? Braver? Or was it instead that she gritted her teeth because she knew that her armor would crumble under the weight of a single tear? Whatever her secret, I yearn for that most of all because right now I'm lost in this canyon that divides what can't be with what might, and the vastness between the two is causing my trans-generational fall from grace to echo with an ever-fierce and violent crash.

In the meantime, I ask myself and I wonder, but nothing comes. There are no answers. No truths to be revealed. Just the occasional whoosh of my want as it flails about without composure. And the waiting. Always more waiting. Waiting for peace, waiting for my period, waiting for the bundle of something that could end up being joy.

Or perhaps just waiting for the crash. That might be good for me, too.

My Biological Clock Has One Hand Clapping. Sometimes.

So, I got caught in an undertow of grief the other day. I could try to defend myself by saying that I freaked out because my estrogen level is 2500 instead of the normal 150, but I'd rather just accept the fact that I freaked out because I freaked out.

Today is a good day, though, due mostly to my trying to keep in mind the following four things:

One. All donors are going to present themselves in a "buy me" kind of light, and this is something I should have anticipated. Instead I took my donor's profile at its word and developed expectations about her that later turned out to be untrue, and I realize now that this is one reason why intended parents (my husband included) don't want to meet their donors. But it's always been important to me that my future children have the choice of knowing their genetic parent, and despite the fact that I don't love my donor, I still think that meeting her was the brave and right thing to do. I have no regrets on that count.

Two. All breeding is a crapshoot, and there's no reason for me to think that my eggs would have produced better children than my donor's eggs will. So what if my donor is heavier than she said she was, that she's more photogenic than she is beautiful, and that she isn't brilliant. Women are born with 1 million eggs. Men produce over 400 billion sperm over their lifetimes. This means that N and my donor can breed a possible 400,000,000,000,000,000 different types of people. Right now thirteen of these four hundred quadrillion exist in the form of zygotes that are developing at my clinic's embryology lab. All I can do is hope that they're relatively good ones.

Three. Nurture over nature is a mantra that floats around on PVED quite a lot. That and epigenetics, which is the study that looks at the extent to which people's brain, body, and character are formed by elements other than genetic code. The other day, I posted my emotional crisis on PVED, and a dozen lovely PVEDers rallied around me saying things like, "My child is exactly like me in ways that I can't begin to explain. Don't worry too much about the donor. Your child will be yours." OK, PVED. I believe you. And I love you.

Four. When I first got into this infertility thing, I adopted a mantra:

My biological clock has one hand clapping.

This philosophy was meant to serve as an inspiration and reminder that this is first and foremost a process of self-reflection. Moreover, my success at the end of this experience wouldn't be a child but rather an awareness of who I am in the context of this challenge. This meant releasing expectations, accepting outcomes, and embracing my world as it was.

Over the past 5 years, I've failed to live up to my mantra more than I've succeeded. I still have hopes and expectations, and I don't always do the amount of reflective work that I should. My biological clock just isn't as Zen as I wish it was.

But in the wake of being bowled over by grief at the start of the week, I've tried my best to re-remember this philosophy. I've seen my brilliant therapist twice, I've let myself feel vulnerable around my friends and e-quaintances (yes, you!), and I've had such rich and sweet conversations with N that I've managed to fall in love with him all over again - yet again.

So, yes, I had a freak-out a few days ago because despite my best efforts, sometimes my biological clock goes cuckoo. But sometimes my biological clock actually does have one hand clapping, and today is a good day.

How to be Happily Childfree in 10,000 Easy Steps

Accepting a child-free life is something I've never tried, but I'm pretty sure that's more a consequence of weakness of character rather than determination to battle against fate.

It's possible that I may still have to learn these 10,000 steps to being happily childfree, so I'm comforted to know that when the time comes, I'll have inspiration.

Thank you, LifeWithoutBaby.

Un(en)titled

I don’t deserve this.

I don’t deserve my infertility or the years I spent struggling with the most complex grief I’ve ever known. God knows, there are worse tragedies in the world, but there’s something about the pain of infertility that is deepened by its inherently enduring hopefulness. It forbids you to let go. I spent over 4 years living in monthly anticipation that something good would happen. “Don’t give up,” it said. “There’s still one more thing to try.” So I hung on. And on. And on. And I didn’t deserve that.

I also didn't deserve my generous and loving family, the education I've had, or the summer camps I went to when I was young. I don’t deserve a nice house, the means to travel, or to eat out when I want. I don’t deserve a husband who is willing to work as hard as I am at making our relationship beautiful, nor do I deserve access to the therapy that helped us get here. I don’t deserve my above average intelligence, my great health, or a face that still gets me carded at 39. I don’t deserve a lifetime of good relationships, loads of dear friends, and (in case I haven’t mentioned) my incredible family.

I didn’t deserve any of these things because deservedness has nothing to do it. You get what you get. Some things are good; some things aren’t. That’s just the way it is.

It’s a simple truth, but it didn’t occur to me until now: I'm not entitled to fertility. Being unable to conceive at 35 was a stroke of bad luck, but considering the context of the rest of my life, it seems pretty fair. I am absurdly privileged, and there is no reason that I should be able to have children on top of all the embarrassing number of advantages that I've had – advantages for which I was never even been especially grateful.

Until infertility. Infertility mocked my expectations. After my first failed IVF, infertility made me stand in line behind a pregnant woman while I bought cat food. Infertility flooded my Facebook feed with chubby cheeks and onesies while I was bled out a miscarriage. It ridiculed my grief and was indifferent to my tears. It made me want and didn’t let me get. Infertility humbled me.

I didn’t deserve infertility, but it taught me to recognize and appreciate all the privileges I never earned. I am grateful for how it’s changed me, but I still won't say that I’m grateful for infertility itself, because for fuck’s sake, it hasn’t changed me that much.

Down Dog, Up Dog

After my second IVF, I got mad at my body. After years and years of taking amazing care of it, I was repaid with infertility at an unreasonably early age. I felt betrayed that my body would do this to me. And I was pissed.

"Listen, You," I said to my body. "Your infertility is bullshit, and you deserve to be punished. Now, I know how much you love doing yoga, but I don't care about you right now. Not to mention, doing yoga makes me feel closer to you, and that makes me feel even more vulnerable, and I feel bad enough already, so... You're grounded: no more yoga."

The punishment stuck for about a year. Well, mostly. I would occasionally cave, but for the most part, I kept to my word. And it was good. Well, maybe not exactly good, but it was fine. OK, so, not entirely fine. I did spiral a bit. And I grieved. A lot. But whatever. I said no yoga, and I meant no yoga.

And I kept my word until a few months ago. By the end of 2010, the anger was getting exhausting, and I figured it was time for me and my body to make amends. Plus I wasn't working, and I needed something to do, so I did yoga. At first a little, and then some more, and within a couple months I was practicing 5-6 days a week.

And it changed my life.

It was unexpected; I really just stood on that mat every day because I didn't have anything else going on. And it wasn't immediate, either, but after about 4 months of daily down dogs, I was altered.
I remember reading this New York Times article a while back about how meditation changes the brain. I believed it, but I never imagined what it could have felt like. Granted yoga isn't meditation -- it's meditative, which isn't the same thing -- but still, my brain was different.

A teensy part of me feels like outlining all the incredible ways that my mindset shifted, but I'm not going to. It's not anything that can be explained, anyhow. It's more of a mood. A sensation. A kind of a filter. Or maybe it's losing a filter. In any case, I'm not going to describe it.

But, it's seriously awesome.

Year of the Uterus

I stole my avatar from another WordPress.

In browsing images online (I can't remember what the exact query was), there it was: a Zen sand garden of a uterus.



It's not a uterus, though. The artist made it to honor the Year of the Ox, which closed out the Year of the Rat. The Rat was my year. Or at least I was born in a Rat year.

I'm not sure that means anything.