This Time Last Year

I am updating our photo album for the first time in nearly 8 months. In looking through the album, I am struck by how few pictures there are from Fall 2009 through Spring 2011. I sometimes look at pictures and can't place when they happened. Was that from 2010 or 2011? I remember events from Nugget's first year very clearly...but the years subsequent have been more difficult to place. It is almost as if I have some sort of amnesia for the 16 months we spent going through fertility treatments...as if I wasn't fully present in my body.

Last week, I went back and read the posts that I had written this time last year when I was in New Jersey for our fourth IVF cycle (third fresh cycle). I spent that week silent in a hotel that catered to business men in the middle of a winter snow storm leaving only for doctor's appointments and ravenous trips to Whole Foods. The cycle sucked as my cycles tend to do: only six follicles that resulted in two good looking embryos. Sitting alone in my hotel room, I had nothing to do but obsess about the cycle, our situation in life, and the hopelessness of it all.

I wrote some good sh*t. I guess I need a little melancholy to get in touch with my inner poet.

One of my favorite pieces from that period:

I feel so OUT OF PLACE. I have no friends, no colleagues, no business, no family in the region and feel as if I am conducting some sort of anthropological study of the humans here. Trying to figure out how to blend in despite feeling sorely misplaced. Which is really a larger parallel to finding my place in this fecund world where procreation is a choice not always a blessing. I miss my husband and, more than anything, I miss my little Nugget and his marker smudged palms.

While I feel less misplaced from the "fecund world," there are still moments when I feel ungrounded and realize how separate my perspective is from the majority of my peers. At the hospital with Baby Girl, the nurses kept making off-hand comments about "we'll see you next time" or "aren't you ready for a third?" Sometimes, I just smiled and nodded. Other times, I said that we had to work really hard to have our two children and the likelihood that we would be able to have a third was really slim.

With two children, I feel that my masquerade is complete; our infertility is sufficiently hidden. We have two children. Why should anyone guess that we had fertility issues? I find that I have become very private about our infertility. I don't want to offer the information. I know I shouldn't be embarrassed by it...but I am. To be honest, I've actually been avoiding returning to my running club because I'm pretty sure everyone knows why I haven't been training with them for the past two years. I just don't want to be the subject of whispers: "you know WHY she didn't run for us the past two years: she had to do IVF." As much as the judgement of others shouldn't matter and ultimately DOES NOT matter...for some reason I have become extremely paranoid about it. I know this falls into the category of "sh*t you are just going to have to SUCK UP and GET OVER." And, I know that will happen with time. I hope that will have to happen with time.

On February 2nd, 2011, while waiting for our embryologist report following retrieval, I wrote:
Dear Mr. Groundhog,
Will I get the news today that my winter is going to carry on forever? That I will never see spring. That our ability to have biological children is nill? Or, will I wake up tomorrow renewed, with hope for the future, and a chance for a child?
Please tell me, Mr. Groundhog. I can't stand the suspense. My heart is rapidly beating, I can't take a deep breath for the fear that is constricting my lungs.
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We were so hopeful for that cycle. After it failed, I spent the next two months on the sofa, barely breathing, never sleeping, defeated. If only I could go back in time and tell myself that I would be holding a precious Baby Girl in a year...but, had I not been through that dark period...I would not be the person I am today.