The Curve in My Shadow

As I pass car windows, store windows, and sometimes if I catch the light at the right angle while I am running, I can see the small curve in the base of my belly in my shadow. Evidence that life exists. That I am growing. That the baby is growing.

It is in these moments that I allow myself a small squelch of joy.

LOOK!

I'm pregnant.

15 weeks.

**************************************
My nausea, exhaustion, and depression have subsided. We are slowly becoming the people we once were, although changed. We make social plans; we're actually going to a concert tomorrow! I've started attacking interior design decisions that I have been neglecting for the past two years since we moved to our new house. I have had the energy to deal with Nugget's temper tantrums and am making attempts at discipline and potty training. Real parenting rather than passive watching from the couch stuck in the doldrums of my depression. I printed out pictures for his baby book that I haven't updated since last summer, realizing that I am missing large chunks of the past 1.5 years. Where was fall? Summer? Spring? There are NO pictures from spring.

I've made progress on RMNL:
--I bought a new camera lens
--I planned our summer vacation (Maine AND Portland OR--> Glacier National Park --> Seattle WA)
--I took the career aptitude test and am awaiting the results
--I started going to therapy again

But, all of these decisions seem so much EASIER now. I was so depressed before that even decisions about mundane minutia seemed out of my reach.

The anger and bitterness still flares. I still haven't spoken to my sister. My sister-in-law is due one week after I am and that rubs me the wrong way. I still struggle with feeling like a failure as a woman for not being able to conceive (despite knowing that my husband played a HUGE role in this equation). I feel behind on my life, even though most of my close friends are only now beginning to think about having children. It's just so hard to see others hurdling forward in life when I spent so much time and money trying to do the same thing they did in mere months. I keep telling myself to go back to 10,000 feet. To look back on the entirety of my life and realize that when I am 80 I'm not really going to care about my few years of struggle. Well, I hope that I don't regret that when I'm 80. Otherwise, I'll have had a pretty boring life.

A cute little clip from the paper today. Yes, baby, you are like WAY wanted. WAY WAY wanted.

RMNL (And Nuchal Tranlucency)

Living and working in a place where acronyms abound, my husband came up with a new initiative and ascribed it an appropriate epitaph: Running Mama's New Life (RMNL). The goal of this initiative is to help me find myself again. Over the past several years as infertility and getting pregnant has been the primary focus of my life, I find that who I am and what I want out of life have become obsolete questions. Besides getting pregnant and having another child, I'm not sure what I want to do with my life. I don't particularly enjoy my job, even though it is an AMAZING work environment for working moms. I spent much of the past year and a half just wanting to be happy and vowing that if I ever made it out of this IF experience that I would make sure my life had meaning. So much of what I do at work feels pointless and irrelevant...but perhaps that is the knowledge workers plight. So, the RMNL initiative is supposed to help me find myself again.

Current Goals of RMNL:
--Take career aptitude test (not just my perceptions of what I want in a job, but my ACTUAL abilities) and work with career counselor about what to do with my life;
--Get back in shape (as much as possible)
--Reconnect with my friends
--Travel!!!
--Work on self presentation: grow out hair, learn how to do hair, learn how to put on make-up, pay more attention to fashion (I'm not an UN-fashionable person, but it is usually an after-thought for me. I am too busy in the morning to actually put on make-up and do my hair and I'd like to take a little more care and consideration to my appearance so I don't end up looking like a frazzled mom that walks around in yoga clothes all the time)
--Take 2nd half of photography course and save up for a new camera

I know some of these are superficial, but maybe I've watched too many HGTV shows on how changing the external can impact our self-perception.

And.....

I had my nuchal tranlucency today. Baby was ROCKING out!!! The baby was JUMPING up and down and we had a wait a few minutes for the baby to calm down before we could do measurements. My downs and trisomy risks were that of a 20-year old...but after falling on the short side of statistics for too long...I could help but feel that a 1 in 6,185 risk for downs to be...a little low for my comfort. Maybe nothing can comfort me now.

But, slowly, I am feeling hope creep in.

My mother insists that it is time that I start telling family and friends that I am pregnant. But, I am not ready. I keep pushing back the deadline...maybe now I should wait until the baby is 24 weeks (viability). She says I am being "selfish" and that I need to share this joy with others in my family. She says my family has always been there for me (really? were they? I don't remember getting much support from anyone other than my mother and father) even if they didn't call. RIGHT. I have got to promise myself that I won't use guilt to manipulate when I am a mother!

Not Sure How to Re-engage

I would never say that I am an extroverted sort of person, but I love people, talking to people, learning about people, helping people solve their interpersonal problems. I'm the sort of person that talks to my neighbors, stops by my co-workers desk to catch up on their lives, frequently has lunch and dinner dates with girlfriends, rarely has a weekend with no plans to see friends.

Or, at least, that's the person I used to be.

Over the course of the past year, as we sunk deeper and deeper into the "IVF cave" and I felt the chasm between my struggles and those of everyone else I knew grow deeper, I stopped being sociable. We stopped making plans. I stopped returning my friends phone calls. I started closing the door to my office and stopped making eye contact with my co-workers in the hall-way.

Since we've gotten the positive pregnancy test, my husband has slowly been emerging from the "IVF cave," making plans with friends, going out of town for a bachelor weekend, and even telling people that we are pregnant. He is happy, elated that we are pregnant.

I still wake up in the morning sobbing to nightmares of miscarriages. I don't know how to re-engage with my life. I don't know how to start conversations with people that I stopped talking to last fall. I don't know how to connect with people that have not been through some sort of life harrowing, navel-gazing journey.

I am trying to reach out, but it feel awkward and uncomfortable.

Over the course of this journey, I have found that I can't really lean on most of my friends. Not that they didn't want to be supportive or didn't try, but they just said the wrong things ("you can always adopt") or didn't provide the support I needed. I find the list of people that I can depend on has winnowed down to less than a handful and, sometimes, not even they can make me feel less lonely.

I feel as if I am in a downward spiral of self-absorption and I don't know how to break myself out of the cycle.

Shouldn't I be happy? All I can do is hold my breath each time I go to the bathroom, expecting to see blood, expecting for this pregnancy to be over. Every other day I think my nausea has dissipated and think that I will miscarry at any moment. Part of me wonders if this will get better if I make it to my second trimester, but another part of me is terrified that this is my new normal: the fear and anxiety and depression and isolation will never leave me. I don't know how to pull myself out of this.

Underwater

You remember when you were a kid and you would race your friends to see how far they could swim underwater without coming up for air?

That's kind of what it feels like I am doing now.

Desperately trying to swim as far and as fast as I can, underwater, where all is silent and safe, asking please, please let me make it...not wanting to come up for air because the spell will be broken.

Supposedly, I am 9 weeks 1 day pregnant today. I had another good ultrasound on Tuesday and am still battling nausea, which is awesome in that it provides daily reassurance that I am still pregnant. I don't go back to the doctor until June 28th, which is scaring the beejezus out of me. It seems like such a long time to wait and see if everything is progressing as hoped.

Despite warnings from my doctor, I decided to rent a heartbeat monitor (http://www.babybeat.com/) to help me get through the next couple of months until I can feel the baby move. I seem to recall this happening fairly early with my son, maybe 16 or 17 weeks?

I am still struggling with anger and bitterness, and hope that with time it will dissipate as this pregnancy becomes more real.

But, it seems every day I hear about another terrible loss, further evidence that life is not safe.

Give some love to Built in Birth Control (http://www.builtinbirthcontrol.com/), who just lost her twins at 21 weeks, again. This is her second pregnancy loss of twins. It breaks my heart.

We have arm and leg buds

And a heartbeat of 165.

We've graduated to the OB.

Four more weeks in the first trimester, and maybe then I'll breathe a sigh of relief.

Give some support to Jennifer, she just had a devastating loss of her son Gavin at 18.5 weeks: http://doihavetobeadink.blogspot.com/

Shh: Running

So, I got tired of being afraid...

And, after our last ultrasound, I finally got enough courage to go for a short, SLOW jog on Friday, Sunday, and Today (Tuesday). I'm not sure how far I'm running: 4-5 miles? I'm not sure how fast I'm running: 10-12 minute pace?

But, I am running. While I am doing it, I have these moments where I wonder how anyone could think that running was bad for pregnancy? I'm barely moving. Seriously, grandma could run faster.

But, then I read about fellow blogger's horrible losses and I wonder if I am being smart.

I ran through my son's pregnancy. He was fine: full term, healthy, and full of energy.

I have a tendency to think that if bad things are going to happen, my running will not be the cause of them.

So, unless my ultrasound goes awry tomorrow, the plan is to continue running every other day until my current run (4-5 miles) feels comfortable. Then, I can up my distance to 6 miles every other day for a week and then I can start running 2 days in a row for 6 miles for a week. And, then...I'll just figure it out. I ran 30-60 miles a week during my pregnancy with my son. I'd hope that I could see that kind of mileage again, but I am not going to plan on it. I'm just going to hope that I can get out there again and run and feel alive and free.

An Anniversary Surprise

Back in February on Valentine's Day, after our 4th failed cycle, we were at the bottom of our cave of doom. That weekend we didn't leave the house. I didn't shower or change my clothes for 3 days. I could barely get off the couch.

One night my husband and I were huddled in bed trying to find hope for the future. We knew we'd be doing another cycle in March or April and decided that if we got positive results on that cycle, we would do something special for our anniversary in May to celebrate rejoining the land of the living.

That weekend, my husband, ever the optimist, in the midst of some of the darkest days of our lives, made reservations at a resort in WV in hopes that we would have something to celebrate.

And, celebrate we did.

This past weekend we went to said WV resort and hiked and swam and slept and ate and ate and ate and cried and laughed and celebrated the fact that our marriage has survived 7 years now through some of the darkest days in our lives.

It was a bittersweet weekend, though, because I also learned that my sister is pregnant with twins…Remember, the one with the EXACT same diagnosis as us (diminished ovarian reserve and low morphology) on her first try ever at getting pregnant. I know that her experience is unrelated to mine, but part of me can't help but feel like her pregnancy is just a middle finger from God, life, whatever telling me that I'm the infertile, unlucky one. Of course, this is ludicrous given that I am actually pregnant. But, I can't have faith in this pregnancy. I keep expecting something to go wrong, the other shoe to drop, because it has before and why should anything be different now. I feel so terribly guilty that I can't be happy or excited for her, but at the same time I am so angry that she got to benefit from my 2.5 years of infertility hell and got her diagnosis 3.5 years earlier than I did because they had more background information and knew what to look for.

In other news, I had another ultrasound today. Baby looks good: measuring 6 weeks, 6 days (right on target). Heartbeat was 138. One more ultrasound at the clinic next week and then…I get to move to my OBGyn. I also go the clear to start running…although my husband is limiting it until we meet with the OBGyn on June 7th.