Looking ahead to the looking back narrative

Thank you very much for your warm comments on my last post. I feel better: less stuck in that spiral for now, although I know I will revisit my grief. That's just the nature of the process. What I'll muse about today is inherently more positive.

I've observed (however unscientifically) that after harrowing journeys through the inferno of multiple failures at conceiving or gestating a child, a significant proportion of you have found success or are well on your way. A few of you are still in childless land and suffering. I am here with you and like you, doing everything I can to bring our child(ren) home. I've recently been thinking about how infertile women who now have a child or children once felt hopeless, thought it would never happen, suffered through a thousand disappointments and overwhelming anxiety. And then they got pregnant. Or got the call from the adoption agency. And then went though the pregnancy or met the birth family. And at some point brought their child home. It appears from my very naive reading of this bringing-home-of-one's-child that it "draws a line between so far and from now on"* Life will never be the same, they say. From reading your blogs, that's the sense I get, but you will correct me if I'm way off on this one.

So, in writing or talking with some of you recently, I've been wondering about the looking back. As I struggle through this terrible time, I find myself thinking about what I will think and feel about this period of my life once it is over. And how the bringing home of our child will change my sense of these awful years (told you this post was more positive: I am speaking as though I will actually bring a child home!). I have been articulating for myself and some of my close friends that this experience of infertility has changed me at my core. Right now, it doesn't feel like a welcomed change, or one that's made me a better human being. I feel like a diminished version of myself, and have felt this way for 3 years. I have found myself unskilled at compartmentalizing this experience, and have seen my failure at becoming a mother reach into and rattle the foundations of my marriage, my self-concept, my professional identity, my body image, my friendships, my social self and I could go on. Do I really think a baby is going to steady all of those pillars? No. I'm not an idiot. Will it prove to me that earthquakes can shake foundations but not make them crumble? That's one of the questions I ask myself. 

Clearly, having a baby doesn't erase the infertility. It probably changes one's relationship to it though. How will I look back on all of this? I don't know. What will be salvaged of my old self, pre-infertility? I'm not sure. Who the hell will I be once I'm not consumed by thoughts about treatment and time processing all of the emotions relating to this experience? I hope to find out.

In the mean time, CD1 is arriving on Thursday, which will ring in the start of the mock cycle. Dele.strogen IM injections here we come. And with reluctance, I have to do a HPT. I guess if we need to prove that a wheel is round, we will make it roll, but it's been demonstrated time and again. The wheel is round, my friends. Augusta's ovaries are closed for business.

Now, let us see about my uterus. It may be able to do what it needs to for the growing of a fetus. A girl can hope.


*Ani DiFranco, 78% H2O