sucking her thumb in the closet, quietly panicking on the inside…still

My header picture up there? Spot-on right now if I had to offer a pictorial example of how I feel.

I have not written a substantial post in a long while. It is not because I don’t have anything to write. Just the opposite. I have tons to write, things about breastfeeding, infertility, and life in general. And while I want to put it all out there, need to put it out there, I feel muffled, I feel over exposed in some ways. Partly because this is a public blog I share with friends and family, and while I wanted that, it sometimes leads to awkwardness. I want to talk about our infertility, but I don’t want a call from great-aunt Bertha, (note:I have no such relative, this is just an example),  who tells me for the millionth time ‘oh you’ll be fine, just relax, God will provide’, or who will ask personal questions about my girly-bits, etc.

Here’s a clue to non-blog-community peeps, if I discuss it on this blog, I’m OK talking about it in real life. But if I don’t go into details it’s probably better not to ask probing questions unless I share first.

Because here is the sad and awful reality that I have been dealing with. We have been trying to get pregnant again for 9 months now. 9 months. 9 months of stick peeing, waiting hoping, maybe this month, maybe….No. I really thought because we got lucky with Stella, an unexpected pregnancy with no fertility treatments, that we would just get lucky again. That Stella was a sign that things were fixed after cycles of Clomid and failed IVF, we got Stella. A miracle.

We put off going to the fertility doctor, telling ourselves, ‘no, surely not this again, surely not infertility.’ We deluded ourselves, not wanting to see, not wanting to face potential treatments, not wanting to figure out the financing of treatments, and the timing when our clinic is 2 hours away.

Not again. Because we had a plan. We had a plan, that normal people take for granted. We were going to have Stella, then get pregnant again as quickly as possible, hopefully when Stella was about 6-9 months old. Then we would have two kids and we would focus on them, save for a possible adoption (something we’ve wanted to do forever) and relax about this whole infertility crap.

Something about ‘best-laid-plans’, I know. But it doesn’t make the sting of infertility any easier. We are in the ‘hurry-up and wait’ stage right now. Waiting for appointments, waiting for results, waiting, waiting, waiting. It’s the stage where you play a million ‘what-if’ scenarios with yourself. It’s the stage where you once again mourn the loss of the children you very much want, but are unable to have.

Luckily, I have had a distraction of late. And by distraction I mean, I’m pretty sure this thing I just committed to doing would be viewed as crazy by most people. But most people aren’t infertile, and this distraction, crazy as it is, is just crazy enough to keep me from losing it over the anger, disappointment, and fear of infertility.

I’ll write about this new distraction for my next post. For those of you still reading, no I’ve not become a total recluse, I’ve just been figuring out what I feel like sharing here, which will probably end up being mostly everything because that’s what I do, over-share and screw the awkwardness that might ensue. Thanks for sticking with me.