Tiers of Joy

Admitting that I don't know what to write isn't the best way to up my readership, but what can I tell you? I have no fucking clue what to say.

No, I still don't trust that this is happening. No, I'm still not telling people. No, I'm still not excited. Nothing's going on, and no one wants to read about my continued reservedness, so what am I supposed to post?

I will tell you, however, that I'm not alone in this. Case in point: something a fellow PVED gal said over lunch last week.

I couldn't trust that I was pregnant until 20 weeks, and then I still couldn't get excited for several weeks more. Now I'm almost 34 weeks, and I'm still not at ease, but I am starting to believe that it might really happen.

I've heard other infertile women say similar things, so this timeline is the one I'm counting on. And since I'm 17 weeks today, I might be getting close.

But in the meantime, I got nothing, because you know what Bob Dylan says, ...

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.

Prospective Perspective

I have a question.

I always swore that I'd never consider egg donation. My reasons were that it'd be creepy, it'd feel false, and it'd be socially confusing. But after years of failed in-vitro treatments, my doctor said that the only way to get me pregnant was to use a donor's egg, and now here I sit with fingers crossed, Viagra in my vag, and hoping against hope that tomorrow's transfer takes.

So, have I lost perspective, or have I gained perspective?

And once these last cycles prove a bust, I'll no doubt follow the same trend down the adoption path - again something I swore I could never get into because how do you raise another woman's child and pretend it's your own? But still. When the time comes, I'll do it.

Are these moves of desperation, or is my experience allowing me to open up to other options that I wasn't previously ready for?

I don't know why this question is an important one for me. Maybe it's because I don't like to be reactionary, and I want to know that I'm making decisions with grounded perspective, but either way, it's been nagging me for months. I've been pondering it and imagining that I'd one day blog about my brilliant answers, but I don't have any brilliant answers. Just more questions.

Questions like: what the hell kind of M. C. Escher shit is going on in my head?

So if you have an answer, let me know, would you?

Festival of Lights at the End of the Tunnel

It wasn't the best Hanukkah for me. Lots of drama that's not worth getting into, so I won't, but in between the bouts of mayhem, there was an especially sweet moment.

My mother urged me yet again to think about adoption. She knows of some baby-manifesting lawyer who gives away infants, which means that (1) she clearly has no idea what she's talking about and (2) that she loves me.

Neither of these things is anything new, but then she said this:

Please think about adoption. Please. I know it's not what you wanted, but you'll love your baby so much, whoever it is. And you've been through so much. I know it's expensive, and I know you feel you can't afford it, but I'll help you. Please, let it be my Hanukkah gift to you, and your Hanukkah gift to us.

It was the "your Hanukkah gift to us" part that made me cry. It meant that she would love any kid that I would put in her lap, which was good for me to hear because I knew that, but I didn't really know that. It meant that she wanted grandchildren, and she didn't care if they didn't come from her, or didn't come from me, or did come from a shady attorney.

It surprised me to realize how much that question had been tickling my anxiety, but I feel so much more at peace now that it's quieted. Equally surprising is that I find I have a couple adoption questions for Mr. Baby Manifester, Esq. And I can see asking them, too. Although perhaps not quite just yet.

Pubic Relations

Today's conversation with my pussy.

Me: So, what? We're perimenopausal now? Seriously!? We're only 40!

My Pussy: [Inaudible.]

Me: No. Not menopause. Don't say menopause, because first of all, menopause comes later, and second of all, fuck you.

My Pussy: [Inaudible.]

Me: That's not funny. Don't try to be cute now, because I don't want to hear it. And I'll tell you something else: we are never going to have any symptoms of menopause -- not a one. Particularly anything that has to do with dryness of any sort. I hold my coochie to a higher standard, and that standard is not dry, goddammit!

My Pussy: [Inaudi--]

Me: And another thing! I'd better not find any gray hairs down there. No way, because that would be creepy and disgusting, and it's never going to happen. Especially not while I'm getting out of the shower. And toweling off. This morning.

My Pussy: [Inaudible.]

Me: No. No, it didn't. It didn't happen, and it's not going to happen. Ever! Do you hear me?!

My Pussy: ...

Me: Look, I'm sorry. I really am. I shouldn't have yelled at you. It's just that I'm finally getting around to forgiving you for all this infertility stuff, and now you're giving me menopause and gray pubes. Honestly, I don't understand why. Why do you have to rub it in like that?

My Pussy: [Inaudible.]

Me: Hahaha! OK, I have to admit. That one was funny. Oh, Pussy, how can I stay mad at you?

My Pussy: [Inaudible.]

Me: Yeah, well, you may be cute, but you're still getting waxed tomorrow.

~~~

A Betty White SNL sketch for those who can't get enough of dry muffins.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/147961

The Late Show

Last week's conversation with my clinic coordinator.

Me: I'm three weeks late, and still nothing.

CC: And you've taken a pregnancy test?

Me: Yes. Two. Both were negative. What do you think it could be?

CC: It's hard to say. We could schedule an ultrasound, if you want.

Me: What would that tell us?

CC: That it's a cyst, maybe?

Me: I've had cysts before, and they've never made me late. I just can't imagine what's going on.

CC: Well, it can sometimes happen that periods get thrown off because of natural hormonal changes that occur with age.

Me: Oh, that makes sense. [Long pause.] Wait. You mean menopause.

CC: Well, yes.

Me: ...

~~~

My period came at last. Four weeks late.

So I finally started birth control pills a couple days ago, which is good, but the delay pushes my biopsy from August to September, my transfer from October to November, and my baby from April 2008 to August 2013.

But it's OK, because it's summer, so I'm just going to relax and enjoy my popsicles and menopause.

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.

Sophie's Choice

People say that they love their adopted children as much as they do their biological children. That the connection between a mother and baby isn't inherently genetic, but that it's something that develops between two people: a woman who yearns to nurture and hold and bond, and a child that needs love and affection and care. They talk about how parents who have both biological and adopted children never think about which child came from where. Genetics don't matter. They love them both. And love makes a family.

I don't believe them.

I don't believe them because it can't possibly be true. There's a biogenetic impulse that makes us instinctively drawn to people that look like us. All examples of social bonding and interpersonal relationships have us searching for mirror images of ourselves. Granted this phenomenon has been at the core of every grotesque chapter of human history, and I agree that it's our social and cultural responsibility to challenge our propensity toward homogeneity, but that only serves to prove my point: everywhere from playgrounds to conference rooms to cemetery plots, we seek extensions of ourselves. We look for ourselves in our friends, we look for ourselves in our spouses, and we look for ourselves in our babies.

So when I say that I don't believe people who deny a difference between biological and adopted children, it's only because I know they're lying.

But I don't hold it against them. Of course they're going to say that. They have to say that. Any sentence that begins with "Let me tell you about my favorite daughter" will end with someone calling Child Protective Services because you aren't allowed to say that. Think about it, and be honest with yourself: have you ever loved any two things the same? No. You haven't. Because it's impossible.  Because two different things will, by definition, have differences, and those differences mean they're different and therefore not the same, and therefore you can't love them the same. And in the case of biological versus adopted children, 10 times out of 10 the child you look at with the deepest, most profound love in your eyes is the one who's looking back at you with the eyes he got from you.

So I don't want any part of the charade. I know that to adopt a child is to raise another woman's kid, and I'm not interested in raising another woman's kid. Pretending that it's mine. Changing diapers and feeding it and helping it with its homework when I know the reality is that that kid comes from someone else. It would be no more mine that it would be the nanny's, and I don't want to be the nanny, especially not to a child of a woman who doesn't even want that kid herself.

I wouldn't even be a mom. I'd be a "mom." Someone whose parentage would require legal documentation and whose role in the falsely-contstructed "family" could be challenged in a court of law. I'd fail a DNA maternity test. But then of course I wouldn't take a DNA maternity test because I'd never assert that I was the mother, because I wouldn't be the mother. I'd be the "mother."

Mother-ly. Mother-ish. Now, I happen to think that I'd be quite an adequate mother-ish figure. The next best thing to for child whose real mother didn't want it. And perhaps the child would be a passable substitute for the real child that I wished I could have.

But I'd know the truth. The real truth. The reality that - if I did adopt and then was lucky enough to magically get pregnant on my own - when faced with the decision to choose between those two kids, that I wouldn't hesitate: given Sophie's choice, I would save my real child and send the other one to the gas chamber.

Judge me if you want. Post comments below about how I'm a horrible, soulless person. I don't mind because I know that I'm voicing truth. And any person grieving the loss of having a genetic connection with a child - any woman facing adoption as the only means of acquiring kids - has asked herself: What am I going to miss out on that real mothers take for granted every day? Could I forgive this kid for being the distant-second-choice to the child I really wanted? Would I ever really love it?

So I'm not going to do it. Adoption isn't an option for me. I'll grieve and I'll cry and I'll continue to feel despair about my infertility, but purchasing another woman's child isn't my solution. And when people around me try to console my grief with "Why don't you just adopt?," I would tell them the truth:

Because when that child's pre-pubescent voice inevitably shouts, "You're not my real mom," my response will most definitely be, "Well, I never wanted you either, Kid."

~~~

Addendum, November 2011: Since posting this blog, I've written two others that - if you're horrified by what you just read - you might consider looking at. They're here and here.

Merlin

When I was 22, I got my own apartment, and I desperately wanted to mark this maturity with a meaningful acquisition.

I would get a kitten.

Like any dedicated Women's Studies major, I planned to get a girl kitten. She would have long, gray hair, and be gentle, and have soft paws that never showed their claws. I would call her Serena or Gaia or something similarly vaginally-inspired. And I would be her mother.

A week later, I got her, but because she kind of fell into my life, she had her imperfections: she was orange instead of gray, and she had short-hair instead of long. And two days after living together, her balls dropped.

And with that, Persephone became Merlin.



The gender adjustment was short, and I fell completely in love with him. I had never lived with a cat before, but I knew he was special. He made real eye contact with me. He listened when I talked. He slept with me every night, his nose against my cheek. We watched the movie Babe together from opening to end credits, four eyes glued to our 19-inch TV. It was all very romantic.

Merlin and I had been living together for 1 year when I bought him a mouse to kill. I had weighed the pros and cons heavily because I was a strict vegetarian, but I didn't think he'd ever caught anything on his own, so I figured giving him a mouse would boost his self-esteem. That, I felt, was my responsibility as his mother.

This turned out to be a very bad idea.

Merlin tortured that mouse mercilessly. The little rodent was tossed in the air and batted to the ground over and over, his poor soul punishingly wrung out of him bit by bit. After three hours of terror, the mouse finally died, at which point Merlin continued to play with his lifeless body for another two hours. And then he ate him.

Self-esteem was obviously not a problem.

This was the first of many animals that Merlin would torture, kill, and eat. Mice, squirrels, rats -- he loved them all, but his favorite was birds. I'm not sure if this was because of the challenge of catching them (I mean, seriously, how do you catch something that flies?), or because they were delicious (think of very small free-range chickens). To me, he was a sweet, loving boy, but there was no question, Merlin was a carnivorous beast.

Merlin and I had been living together for 5 years when I got married. Throughout our relationship ("our" meaning mine and Merlin's, of course) we had several others come in and out of our lives -- a boyfriend or two, other cats, a dog, a husband -- but no matter who the others were, it was clear to everyone that shared our roof which was the primary relationship of the household. I was his mother, and he was my boy, and that was that.

Merlin and I had been living together for 15 years when he was eaten by a coyote on my 38th birthday. At the end of a two-day search, I found his tail and tufts of his hair in the yard of a house across the street. Later the neighbor found more of him: a paw, his collar, some other parts. "He was licked pretty clean," my neighbor said. "I buried what was left, which wasn't much."

I didn't know that coyotes lived in the creek across the way, but I figure Merlin did. With all the critters he'd hunted, killed, and eaten, my boy was an integrated part of the local animal community. Merlin knew the risks, and he chose to roam among them, but I still really, truly, deeply hate those fucking coyotes.

~~~

Merlin's death was a blow. It came 3 months after my second failed IVF, and it threw me into a depth of darkness I could never have expected. I wept for hours and days and weeks on end, not just for him, but also for my fertility that I only then started to realize was as lost as he was.

It was apt, I suppose. My time with Merlin marked the chapter of my life that should have seen me become a parent but didn't. He was there for every swallowed birth control pill that kept me from ovulating. He was the water bottle on my belly during my periods that came every 28 days without embryonic interruption. And although I'll never know exactly when it was that my fertility ended (at 34? 32?), I do know that he was with me, sleeping with his nose against my cheek.

And I miss them both every day.



[Merlin ~ April 1995-April 2010]

50 Periods

I didn't want a baby.

It seemed like a lot of work, what with diapers, the not being able to go out to smoky bars, and the mother-in-law who was already telling me how I should dress my daughter. It was nothing I wanted.

This was back in 2000.

I'd been married for year, and my cousin, who was one of my bridesmaids, had just given an all-natural birth to an all-natural baby girl. And she was giddy about it.

So I navel-gazed for a moment, and my uterus winked at me. Sure, it could have been gas, but I like to think that it was my biological clock asking to lend it an ear. "You want a family, don't you?," it ticked. "A kid to share quiet moments with on Sunday mornings?," it tocked. "A way to show-up other moms in supermarket aisles with your superior parenting skills?"

I wasn't exactly convinced, but I was intrigued.

When I discussed it with N, he agreed: he didn't want a baby either. Awesome. But being the smart cookies that we were, we also agreed that (1) we would want children in the future, and (2) the only way to have children in the future was to have babies now. Or at least now-ish.

Thus the plan was hatched: 50 periods.

I don't know how we decided on 50, but 50 was the number we landed on. The deal was that after 50 periods, we would agree to trade contraceptively-induced quiet for playdates and poop.

But planning to want a baby can be tricky, especially when 50 periods is the exact same time that the two of you move across the county without jobs, a car, a home, friends, family, or a plan.

And it's super-duper tricky when your relationship starts to fall apart.