39

In honor of my 39th birthday tomorrow (gulp), here are 39 things I am grateful for, in no particular order:

1. All of the stars from the TV show, Friends, are still (and will always be) older than me.

2. In fact, Courtney Cox is nearly 12 years older than me. And she looks killer in a bikini. I'm so going to be her when I grow up.

3. I am in a solid place career-wise. I can hold my own in a variety of situations and I am really good at buying time by bullshitting my way through things until I better understand them. I'm pretty sure that's what being an adult is all about.

4. My sweet Laney is still alive and well.

5. My parents are still alive and well (hush, I said these were in no particular order).

6. My husband buys me pretty things.

7. But I could totally buy them for myself if I wanted to. (Girl Power, Bitchez)

8. I am finally jumping through the remaining bureaucratic hoops to get my MFT license. (🙈)

9. I will one day turn my struggles to conceive into a personal mission to help other struggling women and men build their families in non-traditional ways.  

10. I am grateful for technology and it's role in helping me maintain friendships and learn from other's experiences.

11. I am also grateful that it's highly likely that I will own a flying car before I die.

12. I am currently sitting in first class.

13. On my way HOME

14. People are truly shocked when they learn my age. I'm finally appreciating this.

15. I'm on my way HOME. To my HUSBAND.

16. I'm going to Disney World tomorrow.

17. I saw both my niece and nephew come into this world.

18. And my baby brother.

19. Who is now 21 and in the Marines and still texts me and gives me the BEST hugs.

20. I will become a mother (God willing and the creek don't rise) this year.

21. I still have time to have two kids and then get my Courtney Cox body by Courtney Cox age (I have no idea why I am so obsessed with Courtney Cox and her age and her body).

22. I am totally embracing my age and refusing to attend any more concerts unless there are SEATS. 

23. My husband is taking me to see Wilco again in April. And there will be SEATS. And even a TABLE. To lay my DENTURES on. 

24. I am excited about totally adult things like getting my pool deck painted/stained next week. Woot.

25. I am so much more emotionally stable than I was 10 years ago. That's something for everyone to be grateful for.

Landed. To be continued...

The new normal

My husband and I have yet to pick a donor and I have already spent over $100 on children's books explaining donor-assisted reproduction in a fun, sweet, and most importantly, normative way. I am so grateful that there are so many books to choose from in the third-party reproduction genre. I know how critical it is for children to know the truth of how they came into the world and for that truth to be wrapped in love and empowerment.

This year is the 20th anniversary of the once very controversial book, Heather Has Two Mommies. When it was first published it was met with a flood of protest. The book was written at a request from two lesbian moms who wanted to help their daughter feel loved and empowered as she entered into preschool, knowing she would inevitably be faced with her own questions and questions from her peers about her family structure. 

I doubt the republication of this groundbreaking book will be met with the same level of ignorance and intolerance as it was 20 years ago. I know there will be some, but for the most part, I believe our society is moving in a positive direction when it comes to recognizing and embracing the wide variety of family structures that exist and are possible. And that is something to be celebrated. 

As a human race we must evolve beyond the notion of "traditional" and "non-traditional" families and instead take a more rational and scientific approach to family building. No longer should tradition be held as a measurement for whether or not a family is a "good" family or a "bad" family. Instead of using the immature valuations of good and bad and right and wrong we need to look to a measurement of health that relies on both qualitative and quantitative research. Does this family have stability in caregivers? Are all members, both children and adults, respected? Does this family practice empathy or is secrecy, silence, and judgement the rule? These are just a few of the questions that help to determine if a particular family structure is a healthy one. And the answers to these questions are not dependent upon whether or not the family structure is "traditional" or whether or not the children were conceived "naturally" or with the help of science (see Dolce and Gabbana controversy).

Family is everything. Families are the building blocks of our society. If families are healthy, then society flourishes. 

Healthy families, not merely traditional families, need to be our new normal. 

On being brave

I am not a fearful person in the traditional sense. I don't freak out over bugs and spiders. I will gladly go on a roller coaster or would happily skydive (if only I felt strongly enough about it to part with the money). And I don't get anxiety over traveling by myself, even in a foreign country. 

I am by no means a reckless person, but neither am I skittish one.

Research is king. And Brene is a boss.

I can be, however, an emotionally fearful person. I have a hefty fear of being vulnerable and I will work hard to try to avoid it. And when I can't avoid it, I struggle with a deep sense of shame.

But Life, she is clever, and she has a way of forcing you into vulnerable situations. While infertility has not been the Only Thing that has forced me into vulnerability (relationships do this to me all the time), it has certainly been The Biggest Thing and The Hardest Thing and The Longest Thing.

[that's what she said]

To be clear, no one has "shamed" me for not being able to get and stay pregnant. Not my husband, not my family, not my friends. The shame I feel is entirely self-inflicted.

I grew up with a mother who loved nothing more than being a mother. It was and is her most important role in life (though it could be argued that it has now been replaced, as it tends to happen, by being a grandmother). My mother verbalized her pride and gratitude around motherhood often. She was and is the Mother of All Mothers and I could not be more thankful for that and for her. But my weird little brain turned her pride and gratitude into self-judgement. If being a mother is the most important role in the world and I am unable to become a mother, then I have failed. My other accomplishments in life are empty and meaningless unless I am carrying, birthing, and raising a child. My mom would never have said such a thing or believed any of what I just wrote to be true. But deep in my brain, buried under rational thought, this is what I believe.

And then there is the shame of being self-involved. By its very nature, infertility throws you into a very self-absorbed place. Your attention goes inward to every sign and signal your body is or isn't giving you. And when your infertility includes endometriosis and a march towards premature ovarian failure, those signs and signals can be both physically uncomfortable and a total mind fuck. Near constant aching ovaries? Physically uncomfortable. Waking up multiple times a night drenched in sweat at the same time you are trying to "think positively" about your next IVF cycle?  Mind fuck.

And in addition to obsessing over signs and signals, there is the constant juggling of doctors appointments, the guilt of spending so much money on something you can't be sure will ever work, navigating questions about when you will start a family from well-meaning but clueless bosses, the list goes on and on.

For nearly five years I have been intensely self-absorbed. Logically, I know that I have done my best and that so much of the self-absorption is simply the nature of the cards I've been dealt. But that doesn't stop me from going into a full-on shame spiral whenever I am reminded how my body's inability to work as it should has dominated the first few years of my marriage. Or how it has, on many occasions, stolen my ability to be light-hearted and playful and instead left me a bit dark and disconnected. Even when I have purposefully set aside all family building conversations and endeavors for months at a time, in an effort to give my husband a much needed break from the ever-present weight of infertility, I have never been able to completely unhook from it. I drag it around with me wherever I go. There is no taking a vacation from your body.

I want to be a good mom. And a big part of being a good mom, I think, is working through this shame I have around my inability to produce a genetic offspring. I owe this to my future children. They deserve to come into this world unhindered by my emotional baggage. They need to be mothered by someone who is both brave enough to take them on roller coasters and brave enough to face her own vulnerability and emotional discomfort. And they certainly need to be raised by a mother who can handle the hard conversations about his/her/their existence without unwittingly passing on shame.

Dear children of my heart,
I cannot promise I will be perfect or have it all together, but I can and will promise that I will do everything in my power to keep you from unfairly inheriting my shame.

For example, I totally planned to exercise tonight. I packed my gym shoes and my workout clothes and everything. But, inexplicably, I arrived in Denver ahead of my luggage. Delta should deliver it to my hotel by 11pm tonight. I sure hope they do. If not, I will certainly be screwed tomorrow morning.

I needed this trip. It's an easy one, unlike my other Denver trips. One 3 hour presentation tomorrow. Another 3 hour presentation on Tuesday. And then home on Wednesday. No other meetings or deadlines. And no one traveling with me. Thank God.

I desperately needed this alone time.

I have felt like a raw nerve lately. Between trying to process the decision to no longer pursue treatments to have a genetic child and hearing the Jaws theme every time I remember that my 39th birthday (are you shitting me?) is fast approaching, my brain won't shut up and my heart feels like an open sore that I have to protect until it finally scabs over. And just as you start to walk funny when you have a wound that you don't want to get re-injured, I've been emotionally contorting myself in all sorts of strange ways to keep from getting triggered at inopportune times. At some point you start to look and feel ridiculous and I just need some time to breath and cry and find a way to make sense of it all.

I thought I was doing ok enough until I went to the clinic on Friday for my requisite hysteroscopy. I think this was my fourth endometrial biopsy in the last 5 years, the 3rd one with this clinic. The other procedures had been done under anesthesia but since I haven't had any polyps show up since my laproscopy several years ago, my doctor decided it wasn't necessary to put me under. It was physically uncomfortable, much more so than the other unmedicated one I had at a different clinic a year or so ago, but like everything else in this godforsaken journey, it was the emotional discomfort that was harder to deal with.

I got to work early on Friday so I could leave early for the appointment. I finished a deadline, had my one-on-ones with my staff, my one-on-one with my boss, and then made it to the clinic just in time for the procedure. As I waited to be called back into the operating room it suddenly began to dawn on me that the last time I was back on that side of the clinic, I woke up from anesthesia to be told that there were no eggs to retrieve. And the time before that I woke up to hear that we had pushed the medication a day too far and my one and only egg was over-done. But the time before that - well, that was a painfully happy memory. A memory of joking around with my husband in order to distract myself from the discomfort of a much-too-full bladder. Having to relieve myself just a bit in a bedpan on the operating table because the on call doc took his sweet time to arrive to transfer our "beautiful" and "perfect" embryo. And then days later, getting on a plane for a work trip knowing that it had worked. That our beautiful embryo was busy implanting. And then came the deluge of positive pregnancy tests, each one getting darker and darker. There was the joy and the wonder of finally, after all this time, finally something worked. We were cautiously celebrating a pregnancy once again.

But the joy was short lived. The pregnancy did not last. I cried a little. But not too much. I convinced myself it was a good sign. We were finally on the right track. We just needed to try again. And we did. But each try was more and more disappointing.

And then, on Friday, I found myself waiting in the little waiting room where my husband watched the embryo transfer on a screen. And then, later, I found myself on that same operating room table, legs in sterile booties and placed into stirrups, this time to prepare my body for a future embryo transfer. One that will include another "beautiful" and "perfect" embryo. Only this one will be one part my husband, and one part someone else.

I wasn't prepared for the wave of sadness, and anger, and anxiety that came over me. It was a frustrating reminder that no matter how much "work" I do to process and grieve and make sense of all of this, that sadness and anger and anxiety will never fully go away. It will lessen, I'm sure of it. But it will sneak back up on me whenever I hit next steps and new milestones. As much I wish I could have one, good, final cry and then proceed confidently into the future, I know that is unrealistic.

I am encouraged by the stories I read of other women, many of whom have had even longer and more painful journeys than I can even imagine, who have made it successfully to the other side. They describe a deep love and joy and overwhelming gratitude for their post infertility life and their non-traditional family that they fought so hard for. This is what gives me the courage to keep moving forward, despite feeling like a raw nerve. Or an oozing, gaping wound.

I've said it before, I am so grateful to live in a time where this method of family building is even an option. I'm also immensely grateful for the internet and its role in connecting people and sharing of stories.

To bring this long, rambling post to an end:

No, my life did not go as planned.

And I am currently working on the "that's ok" part.

Correction

We are moving straight to donor eggs.

No "one more try" with my own eggs.

It was a hard decision to make in that there is still a chance, slim as it may be, that I could squeeze a gentic offspring out of my tired and scarred ovaries.

And yet, it was an easy choice to make - once I let it sink in that I would no longer have to try to squeeze a genetic offspring out of my tired and scarred ovaries.

There can be such tremendous relief in letting go and giving up.

This doesn't mean that I'm not still grieving. Or that I don't have tearful or angry moments. I am. And I do. But that's nothing new. I've been grieving and angry and tearful for nearly five years. Not consecutively, thank goodness. But enough.

The difference is that now grief and anger and tears are softened by waves of relief. And glimpses of hope. And a hint of what life could be like without constant failure hanging over my head.

But I admit that I'm still struggling to feel any real confidence that this will lead to an actual, living child in the end. That still seems a bit risky of an idea to get too attached to. Though I think that is a pretty normal response. I'm guessing I won't feel confident until, I don't know, the first birthday?

There were a million small steps that led up to this decision. But if I had to point to one thing that got me over the hump, it would have to be the beautiful description of pregnancy below. I don't know who is the original author. It's one of those things that have been shared and reposted a million times on blogs and forums. I'm not even sure where exactly I came across this description for the first time. I just know that it healed my heart a tiny (huge) bit and helped me to feel immense gratitude that I live in a day and age where this is even possible:

Many believe the uterus is simply an incubator. Nothing could be further from the truth. The most important aspect of all pregnancies- including egg donation pregnancies- is that as the fetus grows, every cell in the developing body is built out of the pregnant mother’s body. Tissue from her uterine lining will contribute to the formation of the placenta, which will link her and her child. The fetus will use her body’s protein, then she will replace it. The fetus uses her sugars, calcium, nitrates, and fluids, and she will replace them. So, if you think of your dream child as your dream house, the genes provide merely a basic blueprint, the biological mother takes care of all the materials and construction, from the foundation right on up to the light fixtures. So, although her husband’s aunt Sara or the donor’s grandfather may have genetically programmed the shape of the new baby’s earlobe, the earlobe itself is the pregnant woman’s “flesh and blood.” That means the earlobe, along with the baby herself, grew from the recipient’s body. That is why she is the child’s biological mother. That is why this child is her biological child.