a new year

The holidays are wrapped up and a semi-sense of order is returning to our household. We un-decorated the Christmas plant, put all the wrapping paper where it lives all year in the basement, and will eat the last 2 Christmas cookies in short order (the many chocolates will have to wait to be consumed as there are more of those than there are days in January). The Holidays were not as awful as some of have been in the past, and for that I am thankful. We were able to strike a balance between time at home and time with our families. The best part for me was to spent Christmas eve and Christmas day at home, cooking boeuf bourguignon for the first time in my life. Do you have any idea how satisfying it is to pour a whole bottle of Beaujolais into a dish? Very. I was a vegetarian for close to 15 years and recently decided to eat the occasional piece of meat, and this year's foray into cooking the French beef stew has made me appreciate the change even more (which is nice, since I often consume meat with a side dish of guilt for what I am doing to the planet and the animals. But that's another post).

I did a lot of walking yesterday, which afforded me time to reflect a little on 2011. What I came up with is that I felt a pretty constant sense of being under water. You can't hear or see very well underwater and everything happens in slow motion. This is funny considering all that transpired over the last year. The DE cycle, my PhD defense, the pregnancy, the miscarriage, the hectic job, the new job, the trip to Cuba, etc. There was so much happening in my outside life while on the inside, it seems I felt immersed (drowning at times) in a thick soup and slowed down in my thinking. As someone who wishes to be able to live in the present moment, I achieved that almost never this past year.

I must say at this point that I feel less terrible than I did from May 25 through to November. There is a lot to be thankful for in the past year, despite the hard blows. The support and love from our friends and family has been significant, including your support and friendship. William James told us that 'it is your friends who make your world'. I have wondered often this year how small my world could become as grief kept pulling me towards more isolation and less human contact. It was good to know that here (and with close irl friends), there were women who cared about me no matter what I wrote or didn't write. Even with the long lapses in between my posts, you came back and left me a comment or sent me an email to check in. To all of you, thank you.

I have to work tomorrow, Tuesday and Wednesday, and then we travel to SG for our Friday marathon appointment. When I talk about it, people tell me I seem very low key and wonder if I am feeling hopeful. As you have all experienced, the infertile's relationship to hope is a complex one. I am once again flirting with hope, but certainly not buying what he has to sell. Yet.

rock bottom moment

There is a metaphor I really like to use with patients in my work. It spoke to me very much in a time of crisis and it has continued to resonate to this day. It goes something like this:

When you jump into a deep swimming pool and you don't get all the way down to the floor of the pool, and you try to swim up, it's hard to do. Your body had momentum from the jump and reversing the direction to go up is very effortful. When you jump into the pool and get to the floor of the pool, you can push off and get back to the surface without much effort at all. Sometimes reaching the bottom helps you to get the momentum you need to get back up.

Now, don't think that I mean to say this is the actual rock bottom of my infertility and childlessness. I realize that things can get much, much worse from here. If nothing else, my experience thus far has taught me that lesson.

I was just having supper in my car a few minutes ago. Why? I was at work until 7:15pm and then wanted to spend time commenting on blogs and responding to email, so I had to visit the local mermaid-emblemed  coffee chain that provides free internet when you purchase a very expensive drink. Why would I not just do email from home? Well, I had to find another place to board in FTT for the last 7 weeks of my contract, and this place doesn't have internet access at the moment. Gak. So, instead of going home for supper, I got something from the gourmet grocery store adjacent to the coffee shop and ate in my car. Lentil soup and bow-tie pasta salad. And REM singing about the end of the world as I know it.

It's been a hard week. 3 days of 11+ hours at work and some crappy sleeps. That seems like the new normal, but it was on the heels of yet another very crappy weekend. And then Mr. A who could not sleep on Sunday night (it's usually me or Chicken who can't sleep on Sundays). He told me in the morning that he had been up all night thinking about 'life'. In the hour that I was at home on Monday morning (5:45-6:45am), I didn't have it in my to explore what was up. I just gave him a hug and then I had to go. When I called on Monday evening, he told me it was about us having children. He wondered whether we (me) were just too tired for children, whether we (me) were too depressed for children, and whether we (me) were too irritable for children. Oh fuck. Yes we are. But I don't know what the heck more I can do about it right now.

To be fair, he wasn't saying any of this in a blaming way. He was just telling me what he felt worried and anxious about. And he was looking to me to reassure him that things would get better. Based on my belief in impermanence, I do believe things will change. But I can't see a clear picture of how things will get better. I just have to hold out hope that they will. That seemed to help him, somehow. But it left me with a horrible sense of failure. He is right. I am tired, sad and irritable. Pretty much all weekend every weekend. All the chipper I have has to be saved for my patients, their families and my team members. My livelihood depends on it.
 
This evening, sitting in my car, eating my supper in the dark, I felt like I did not belong anywhere. I can't stand going to where I board. I can't stand being at work anymore for today. I'm too far from my home and I am worried about what is going to happen at home, what is going to happen if Mr. A doesn't want to keep trying to have children because he's not sure about my capacity as a parent. He did call me at work today to check-in and worried that he had made me feel bad with voicing his concerns on Monday. It was reassuring to talk a bit, but what he was raising was a worse case scenario for me. Maybe IF will also rob me of my marriage.*

My rock bottom moment in the car tonight felt similar somehow to another rock bottom moment I had when I was 20. I was admitted to the psychiatric hospital on December 13, and so spent most of the Holidays in hospital. I remember Being the only patient on the unit that Christmas eve, since all the other patients had LOA passes and I didn't. I remember wondering what my life had become that I was sitting on a bed in a psychiatric hospital, listening to Simon and Garfunkel on a Christmas eve. And as awful as that sounds, I remember feeling like it was a new beginning.

It's not that I want to call it at this point. That would be premature. But things felt awful just an hour ago in the car. And at the same time, the memory of Christmas eve in the hospital came back to me very vividly. They say shit happens. New beginnings also probably happen.


*For you Ani DiFranco fans out there, it makes me think of the line in her song Done Wrong: "how could you take almost everything and then come back for the rest"

Next Stop: Egg Donation

I have not talked about IF treatments since the update on our appointment of August 19. I think I've been avoiding thinking about it, and instead chose to stew over it because that feels so much better (!).

We have our next appointment on Friday, September 17. For that appointment, our donor will come with us to the clinic and will meet with our RE by herself. We will also meet the three of us with the RE to discuss all the steps involved in the egg donation. And of course, our donor will be treated to the magic wand, and I will have the sonohysterogram.

I believe that this appointment will make the prospect of the egg donation very real. For now, it has been hypothetical, with some brief moments of realizing that it was part of a shared reality among a few people who know. I think it's mostly when I hang out with our donor (she is a good friend of mine) and we speak about it that it becomes very real. Her resolve astounds me. There is no amount of scaring her with descriptions of needles and early morning drives. She is steadfast. She wants to do this.

Why has it been so hypothetical for me? We all know the answer: it is because of fear. The reckless prospect of hope is prohibitive to us who have failed at fertility treatments. Why would this work? Why would there be a baby in my uterus at the end of this process? I've come to understand my decision to go ahead with the egg donation as prevention from wallowing in regret in 5-10 years, when I sit there childless and feel like there could have been so much more I could have done. I do not want to give myself more ammunition to be beat myself down for not trying hard enough.

I find my heart cloaked in an opaque, velvety wrap that seems at once comfortable and smothering. The cloak becomes visible to me when I talk about the egg donation with my close friends and they light up with excitement and hope. All I want to do is run my hand gently across their face to make the excitement go away, like a mime changes his face by the brush of his hand. Thankfully, I happen to have the best friends in the whole entire world, so they can hold me in my fear of hope. My darling friend Dragonfly just looked at me lovingly from her little skype window on my mac and said "I'll be excited! You don't have to be excited. You can give that part to me". Bless her heart. That was just what I needed.

I thought about this potential baby on my walk to school this morning. I think it as a girl. I gave her a name and thought about carrying her for 9 months. I usually can't envision it. Like Jess talked about in her post, I have had mucho problemo visualizing this process coming to fruition. I am of the same opinion as she is, that for something to materialize, one must first create it in the mind. It makes me nervous that I have difficulty believing this will work.

I realize that my history does not permit me to believe in pregnancy very much. Never having ovulated, never having had a pregnancy scare when I was younger, let alone a BFP, it has become fiction in my mind. I had all sorts of hopes and dreams about being pregnant until the treatments failed last October and since then nothing. My unconscious doesn't really let those images come to the surface in the form of dreams, by day or by night. But I also find as I am reading your blogs that I am missing something so fundamental that most of you have: a cycle of some sort, a history of at one point having ovulated, an experience of early pregnancy, or something along those lines. In my case, it will be this friend's egg mixed with Mr. August's sperm, inserted into my (tiny, chronically under-stimulated) uterus, and a whack of estrogen and progesterone support. And from that, a baby is what we hope for an outcome. My logical side can't digest it very well.

What is left is that there is also part of me that knows it can happen. I have always responded to estrogen and progesterone, and for my last cycle at this time last year, the lining got all nice and thick, ready for an embryo. So through magic, or miracle, or the best of science, there is part of me that believes it could be successful. I just wonder if that is enough. Do I have to leave the safe platform of my fears and leap wholeheartedly, believing unequivocally that this process will work. Is it reasonable to be afraid, and does being afraid mean that it will fail? Ah, the superstitious workings of an infertile's brain. I tell ya.

Owls

I was browsing around the internet, looking for an appropriate image to decorate this barren(!)-looking blog and came across this beautiful image. I couldn't stop looking at it. It is SO beautiful. I followed its trail, in this strange and navigable cyberspace and came to the source. An artist named Cathy Nichols made it. See her stunning work at http://cathynichols.blogspot.com/ or find her on Etsy at http://www.etsy.com/shop/cathynichols

The experience I have when I look at this picture reminds me of the intensive yoga workshops I used to do with Hart Lazer. We'd spend 20 solid hours squeezed into a little weekend intensively back bending or twisting. The experience of contorting the body to such states of susceptibility sometimes caused significant emotional releases to occur. All for the purpose of letting go of what was trapped in our bodies, held there by habitual pattern holds. The workshops were often called 'yoga as a tool for self-transformation', which given my professional calling (clinical psychologist) was intriguing enough to keep me interested (not to mention how in yoga class I was finally breathing fully and countering the effects of my lifelong anxious chest breathing). And so those mysterious transformative effects started to happen. And then something occurred to me.

In Psychology in general and in therapy in particular, words are everything. This is also true for the modality in which I experience life most easily. I knew I wanted to be a shrink when I was 11 years old. I started writing a journal a year before that. The words have always been the tool. The expression of sorrow, joy, confusion most often came in words for me. Therapy is a word-based world. And I've spent lots of time on or next to the proverbial couch.

When I came to yoga, I found out that there was somewhere to go after the words stopped. I think I knew about it before I began yoga but it might have been more nebulous in my mind. I had felt transcendence in the wilderness, in the silence of the muted winter forest. But with this practice, I was presented with the opportunity of going somewhere where words lost their ascendancy. This is also what happens when art moves me, which is the case here.

And this brings me to the owls and my encounter with them. The words escape me. I think the owls reflect my hope in a way I cannot write about. My reckless, courageous hope for a little owl.