Still Here

Yes, i am still around. And, there's nothing new to report, but i think that's great news. That means, since April or even before, i have been living childfree and happy. I have not had a single slide back into infertile woes. I'm still kind of shocked by it. I see people with babies, and i dont have "what about me" thoughts or feelings. Not a one. And this from the girl who not so long ago had those thoughts every single second of her life.

It's taken a long long time to get to this place, a place i never thought imaginable. I never thought i would be able to give up the wish of having a baby of my own or getting pregnant. But, somewhere along the line in the past fews months, somehow, i did. I wish i could tell you the formula, or exactly, precisely how this came to pass, but i cannot say precisely exactly how. It has a lot to do with making peace with the past, overcoming post traumatic stress, and learning to live in the now--all of which have no formulas.

I still mourn my traumatic childhood, but the more i do, the better i feel about now, regardless of whether my now does or does not have children. It's irrelevant. Let me rephrase that--it's not an essential component to my ultimate happiness.

Thank God.

Questions About Period, Help!

This may sound obvious to some, but i am quite at a loss, and doctor google can turn a girl into quite the hypochondriac. But, here's my problem. For the past few periods, my period has been (sorry to gross y'all out) clotted. You know what i mean? When you're about to flush the toilet you're suddenly taken aback by masses and clots floating around?... again, sorry about the gross out. But, then this month, same situation, except my period seems to have been cut in half down to 4-5 days instead of the usual 8-10. I'm on my fifth day and it's down to one measly very dark discharge.

The only other thing going on is a yeast infection, which i've been treating with acidophilus. I'm not on bcp.

Any ideas anyone as to what's going? I was just at the doctor's office before my period (for the yeast infection) and i feel silly going back, yet again.

Update

Just a quick update to let y'all know that dh is doing well and is cancer free, thank God. I, however, am not doing so well, hence the delayed posting. I have a brand spanking new case of post traumatic stress, complete with the regular irregular heartbeat, which the doctor said was "nothing." I hope it's still nothing when my heart stops!

You see, right before the surgery i suddenly realized that my husband COULD DIE and that i would then be seriously ALL ALONE for the rest of the MY LIFE, which, who knows, could be another FIFTY FREAKIN YEARS! God!

So, of course, in my frenzied freak out, i asked my husband, honey, um, like, what would I do if anything happened to you??!?! Memememememememe. Yeah, so basically, I was like, if you died on the operating table, I will be one lonely woman living out the remainder of her life by her lonesome! Ok, but I didn’t exactly put it that way. Instead, i asked, will you haunt when you're gone? He said, I can only haunt the basement because there are rules to haunting, you know. Needless to say, i started making plans to move to the basement.

Uh, yeah, not one of my finer moments. I dont know how he managed to survive my freakout. But so here we are. I will post more about the results a little later, once i come off PTSD.

Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

So, i am up very late on the eve of my husband's surgery and i am a little anxious. Coping with said anxiety has involved the ingestion of mountains of glutenous food and chocolate along with watching hours and hours of movies while only breaking to speed read two romance novels a day. Yesterday i was trying to figure out a way to watch a movie and read a novel at the same time. I want to escape into movieland and i want my senses to be completely absorbed. I dont want to be me at this moment. I dont want to think about my life, or what my life might be like if anything happened to my husband. What would become of me? memememe. Suddenly, i am very concerned about facing the rest of my life without him.

And what a long lonely life that would be. I am happily estranged from my father and not very close to my mother. These tenuous ties have also strained the links between me and my siblings (thanks mom and dad!).

Nonetheless, i am surprised about the amount of anxiety i have over this surgery tomorrow. This is the surgery on the 4 cm lump found in my husband's thyroid, the cancerousness of which is to be determined once it's taken out. I did not have this much anxiety over the two surgeries he had last year over his nether regions. Maybe i was a little too drugged up for that or too excited with hope, the worst opiate of all.

So, here i am, past midnight, reading novels and now writing. Surgery is tomorrow at some point past 10am. He is to be discharged the day after, God willing.

I think, though, that my anxiety speaks to deep, unrevealed desires. I truly desire a different sort of life. I know this and have known this. I didnt realize how desperately it claws at me just beneath the surface.

And, this other sort of life has nothing to do with children. It's unbelieveable and shocking, but true. In fact, we have been remarkably well living childfree these past two months. I haven't blogged much of it lately because i frankly couldnt believe myself. I was waiting for the shoe to drop. The deluge to begin. The cycle to start over. But it hasnt. I am not only living child free, i am free of the hope of it. Can you imagine that? I simply don't care anymore....it's even simpler than that because that statement implies rancor, but i'm not angry. In fact, i am happy to be childfree. I have discovered that there are so many things i want to do and explore and learn (now that i've finally given myself the complete permission to do so), that i wouldnt really have time for a child's needs right now. So if anything, i am relieved to be free of any parental duties.

This relief didnt just suddenly occur, but is more a result of finally overcoming a traumatic childhood. I have been suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome since i was a child, and before that, i was deeply depressed (FUN childhood). In therapy, i learned the skills i needed to cope with post traumatic stress but believed that i might forever be "coping" with it, given that much of it occurred before memory set in.

Recently, i have come to completely understand the source of my childhood traumas and, instead of feeling angry, i feel relieved. I always knew something was up and that my emotions related to something, and i finally learned that i was right. I was right in my sadness, right in my heartbreak, right in my depression, and right in my anger--though i was never quite sure what i was right about. I had thought it had much to do with being childless. In fact, it has nothing to do with that. And that knowledge has set me free--free of the fantasy that my own children would fix my broken childhood. But all the pieces are finally in place now and i am finally unbroken. It is possible become whole again, after all.

It is interesting to me that throughout all these years of wanting, desperately wanting and hoping for a baby, i never could really bring myself to pray for it with any ferverence (except in this last bizarre year of IVF, where prayer was the only antidote to my hormonal insanities). I believe that on some deep level, i always understood that an actual baby was not what i truly wanted.

What i wanted was my own babyhood back, and righted. What i wanted was to feel whole--to feel contentment in the moment, to know happiness. I finally have the peace that i have been waiting for all my life.

Now, i worry that it will be shattered tomorrow. And i suppose that worry is natural under the circumstances. It's probably the lingering effects of post traumatic stress talking.

Old habits, baby. If you dont kill them, you will die a slow death of million little anxieties!

The Secret

No, i aint holdin out on y'all. But, apparently, there is a "secret." Did y'all hear about this? According to this book, the secret to life is that "like attracts like." That is, whatever you want you can have, if you just think positively. If you think you can, you will. Whatever is in your life, is there because you willed it...

Ahem, aside from the fact that the book is written for a first grader, complete with large print and colored thick paper, i believe that i have completely debunked the theory that you can will into your life whatever you want so long as you "think" about it long enough. I thought about having children for more than 25 years, especially the last 15. Towards the end, i was thinking about it every single second of the every day. It was getting kind of clinical, and i didnt realize it until one day i suddenly couldnt breathe. I thought i was dying. After a rush to the emergency room and gazillion tests, it was nothing but a panic attack. The ER doctor pulled up a chair next to me and quietly asked "is there something bothering you?" No, nothing. I was fine. I wasnt stressed or unhappy. I had a good job. The only thing, if anything, is that i thought about having a baby ... Every. Single. Second.

So, i had to give that up. It was either that or stop breathing at random. And since having a baby was impossible anyway without basic inhalation and exhalation, i had to choose breathing. Selfish me.

The moral is, the Secret sucks (the book, that is). Yeah, it works (for others, i assume), but not always. It's not simply a matter of will it and so be it. That's oversimplifying the issue just a smidge, don't you think?

My husband returned the book to the bookstore. If you know us, you know that we would rather throw something away before we went through the hassle of returning anything. And, we are pack rats never throw anything away. When asked about the reason for the return, dh said, "It didn't work."

Fertile Infertiles

Is the world of infertiles shrinking? I just clicked on a majority of my links here and discovered that a majority of the links are to blogs of suddenly fertile infertiles.

I need to do a little housekeeping, i suppose.

In the meantime, we learned that dh has a growth in his thyroid that needs to get taken out. They won't know for sure if its cancer until they pull it out, sometime in the next month. The biopsy was inconclusive.

Further, the wonderfully perfect job that dh got as editor of top tiered University Journal of a major Science publication just got pulled from under him because the Journal of a major Science publication decided to part company with the top tiered University and its editors. So, in addition to maybe having cancer, he's also out of a job. Let's just kick a man while he's down, why dont we.

I say that sardonically, of course. Seriously, i dont actually feel sardonic or bitter. In fact, i thank God for all things.

I feel that we've been blessed to have discovered this growth. It's asymptomatic. The only reason we did discover it was because dh needed a chest x-ray before he did the surgeries before the ivf. Those x-rays showed a growth in the thyroid. Otherwise, he would never have known that he had a 4 cm growth.

It's funny because one of the reasons i didnt want to do ivf was precisely because if anything happened to dh during the surgery, i wasnt sure i could live with myself. Now, i never imagined that it could, quite possibly, have saved his life.

So, yes, i thank God for all things.

Two Weeks On

So, i'm on the upswing of feelings lately. I guess a body gets bored of the bleak and dreary. Or, as i said, it's my cycle, two weeks up and two weeks down.

In the meantime, i signed up for piano lessons. I want to get into some creative outlets that don't involve so much let down, like writing. I got a rejection letter the other day from one of the major agencies in hollywood that said something to the effect of "Here's your query letter back. We didnt read it and dont have any intention of reading it and should we produce a movie with similar themes, please know that that wasnt because we read it or got the idea from you." Fatheads.

It just makes you want to quit that craft altogether.

Anyway, i'm not here to get down about the craft. I'm here really to talk about my recent adventures with other people's babies. My friend had her baby and i visited them in the hospital. And, i didnt have a single solitary jealous second. I did not go off into the "aww, isnt she cute and wont your life be perfect now" fantasy. Instead, i connected with the reality of her situation. She just gave birth to her second child. She's probably exhausted beyond belief. But, that's irrelevant because there's this baby she just got that's completely dependent upon her for the next twenty years. Good bye sleep. Good bye rest. Good bye old life. Hello stress.

And it's her second child. So she has to go home and negotiate things with the first one, who is an irrational mini-adult at 3 years old, speaking like a ten year old but feeling like a toddler who still very much wants mommy's attention and always resented that her mother worked and that she was sent off to babysitting and now preschool. Yeah, and now there's a second child to be equally "neglected." Psht, what's the point? That's not fun.

And then yesterday, i went out to eat with my sister and brother and a combined total of 4 kids under 6, two of which were 4 months old. And most of the time i felt, someone, please stop the crying babies! And, would someone stop those kids from running around and playing the restaurant piano? They could accidentally trip a waiter or something. I did not, for a single second, think, man, i wish one of these were mine. No. Not at all. I feel apathetic. There's nothing appealing about squealing babies who demand your constant attention.

So, that's where i am. Getting settled in this childless life. For now, it's what i want. I'm finally beginning to see that it's the life God gave me, and it's the life i want, gratefully.

I may still want children in some recesses of my heart. But at least, i'm getting back to feeling that there are other things i can want as well. And life is good whether you have chocolate cake or fresh strawberry pie--it's not all about the chocolate!