“When a woman fantasizes about her baby, she also fantasizes about how she will be as a mother, the two dreams mingle.” Sheila Kitzinger, Ourselves as Mothers
Not that he hasn't said it before, but M was going on about it more last night. In front of friends. So it was more worrisome than normal.
He was going on and on about how pregnant women are "unsexy" and "unattractive". I asked him when on earth these sentiments started. "Oh, forever" he says. Deep-seated. Great!
I asked him why they're just now coming up regularly in conversation. "Because we're getting closer to that." Great!
"But don't worry. You'll be fine!"~Nichole
And yet. . .
And yet, there are moments that skulk up on me - like it did today - when I have a sneaking suspicion that we are missing out on the amazing sublimity that comes with being parents. I can't quite put words on it. It's the sense that we're living an incomplete life. We're perfectly, if ignorantly, happy. We feel complete. But there's this missing element. The elephant in the room everyone else has already seemed to acknowledge, give a name, and make the honorary family pet.
Somedays we can't imagine our life with kids. The mundanity, stress, and demand of it scares us. REALLY scares us. That whole going from a couple to a family thing is a little unnerving. Like leaving your best friend to go study abroad. Or leaving for a mission. You'll come back to normal life eventually, but it will never ever be the same. No matter how much you hope. And in the meantime, you will miss it. Even as you eventually leave it all behind. And ultimately forget about it. After all, what else is nostalgia for?
I worry that we'll either hate it or love it. I'm betting on the love it one, which worries me almost as much as the "hate it" option, because I tend to second-guess myself - and if I love it I know I'll wonder why we waited so long. And then, I'll have to remind myself - like I have with SO many other things in my life - that I made this important decision a matter of prayer. That I prayed about it. That it wasn't just me. That this Big Decision involves the agency and choice of at least two other human beings - my husband and an imagined child.
Realizing this will help me have peace. That we did it when we believed it was best for us. And when we were supposed to.
~Nichole
M came home yesterday, full of stories of women at work trying to get pregnant and having multiple miscarriages and how he heard on the radio that Robitussin loosens the mucous membranes in the body (especially the ones important for fertility) and how this doc said a little Robitussin can improve fertility.
I talked briefly about how I hope I will be OK and not have to go through another ectopic pregnancy, and how I hope it happens quickly when we start to try.
He said "are you kidding!? I have super sperm!" and then proceeded to take a quick, verbal inventory of his own health and eating habits.
Needless to say, I sat there kind of shocked. This is honestly, without a doubt, the most open conversation he's ever had with me about conception/fertility/etc.
I said "Wow! You must really want to get me pregnant!" Probably not the best response (gauging by his "eh. . . " that followed), but I was too much in shock to be eloquent or even pull out an "awwww" or two.
Plus, sometimes I fear my tendency to overreact to his openness on the subject will scare him away.
Like when he approached me about a month ago and said "if that's going to be the baby's room (referring to the room next door to the office in which I was sitting at the time), I want to have that picture of the jungle animals on the wall." To which I responded, "Oh, OK. You mean the one we saw at the swap meet?" and followed it quickly with "awwww. I love you!"
His response? "That's just because I'm talking about having a stupid kid!" Crush! Bang! Boom! It felt like he had just handed me flowers, but before I could take them, he threw them on the ground and stomped all over them. I told him as much. It SO didn't faze him.
SO, last night's conversation was. . . very very surprising. Hence, my underreaction. I was trying to play it cool.
Whether or not I succeeded, only time will tell. For sure.
~Nichole
Right now, we're still in the "thinking" stages. Yes, I know that's not "how it works" but I'm a creature of habit and my husband practically grows roots where he's planted, so movement in any direction often takes us a while.
I had an unplanned pregnancy in January of 2007. At the time, I was overweight, undernourished, in a life fog, and lost in my own self. Honestly, the "unplanned" part of this pregnancy really got to me the most. Given that I'm such a "planner" it really threw me off and I was disappointed. But, within days I had adapted to the idea and was ready for it. So, to find out a week later that the pregnancy was ectopic and not viable was very very hard.
Right now I secretly fear a couple of things: that it'll happen again, that I won't get pregnant on the first or second shot (after having it happen on the first shot the last time), or that I'll miscarry. But mostly, I think the whole experience was just a swift kick in the rear for me to get on the right track, get myself ready and set out toward convincing my hub. Meanwhile, I have been reading an exhaustive amount of stuff related to all things pregnancy since that time (because I'm OCD like that!).
So. As of today, I've been taking folic acid every day for over a year. This week I started taking prenatal vitamins (in halves) every day. And a few months ago I began a "fitness routine" which consists of me "running" (jogging) and this past week I ramped it up to 5 times a week.
I have the mutually (?) agreed upon dangling carrot of October keeping me going. (Well, for me it's a dangling carrot. For him, I think it's more like a guillotine.)
I'm hoping to lose about 20 more pounds before then and to start things off really healthy this time.
~Nichole
I do not know what compels me to write about this today. The only other place I have gone to work through this crazy story is the quiet recesses of my journal. That and prayer.
I think I write it here, today, because I'm very very tired of thinking about it. Of having it spin about my brain, manifesting itself in odd little ways, like in the books I choose to read and in the shows I choose to watch. And if I'm not looking for it, it pops up in the unlikeliest of places (like in the book I'm reading now). And if I am looking for it, it eludes me. Like I said: very very tired.
It's been 16 months since the day I took that test to put my mind at ease, to dispel the niggling notion, the sneaking suspicion, the absolute fear - once and for all - that I might be pregnant. Rather than a dismissal, I got a confirmation. Right there in black and white. That was on a Monday.
I will not get into the gory details. Mostly because I just don't have the heart for it, even after all this time.
By Friday, I was warned that something might be wrong. I also found that I had changed. Dramatically. We had not planned, nor were did we have reason to expect this pregnancy. But it changed me. Within a week's time. Less, actually. I began rooting for it to succeed, in spite of the warnings, in spite of the doctorly advice and medical caution, in spite of the slippery slope it threatened to send our carefully planned life down. In less than a week's time, I went from being a woman to being a mother. I had redrawn the map of our future, and grafted that baby into it.
The next Monday, after the warned-of danger had failed to materialize over the weekend, I got an ultrasound. The tech translated the grainy visual for me: "empty". Right there in black and white. The pregnancy, wherever it was, never arrived at it's appointed place. They called it "not viable".
Tuesday afternoon, I got a shot in my butt. It made me sick. Body and soul. The following Monday the bleeding started. Drawing all the blood away from my heart and my brain. I muddled through the subsequent food cravings and aversions, the nausea, and weekly blood draws.
My doctor said I probably wouldn't have another ectopic pregnancy on the next try, but if I did, she'd force me to have an HSG test. That's what she said. She'd force me. But only after I went through it all over again.
I found another doctor and visited him this past January. He said "knowledge is power" and that he'd really like me to have the test just so we know. Turns out my health insurance won't cover any fertility treatment. I argued with the doc's office and my insurance provider that, technically, it's not fertility I'm concerned with.
What I'm concerned with is knowledge. Knowing. When I explained this, the doc's office really got it, I think they really did, but they couldn't do anything, and so half-heartedly agreed, at my request, to code it creatively so that it might, just maybe, fly under the radar of those insurance harpies, all the while warning me insurance still might not cover it. It's $600.
I canceled the test. We're not there yet anyway. Not in that place to be concerned about fertility. I'm in the junction that proceeds that place, where only vague curiosities abound. Hub is a few miles back.
And while half of me feels like all will be OK whenever we are in that place of really wanting to know, whenever we arrive there together, I also feel a little reckless. Like I should want to know about my fertility bad enough to come up with the cash. Or at least not let the question of money dissuade me so easily.
But mostly, I just feel really really tired of thinking about it. Of tracking my cycle, this monthly numbers obsession that began in the wake of post-ectopic heartache and uncertainty. Of wondering when, how, if it will happen. Whenever we're ready. And once we get to that place, if more heartache will ensue. The deepest depths. Body and soul.
So, I've recently resigned the subject to its former place: somewhere officially off my radar. But visions of that re-charted future are in everything I do. I cannot escape them. I am not the person I have been. And as much as I try to return to her, she does not exist. Instead, that mother pops up in dreams. In the early hours of Mother's Day morning. I wake up, the dream at the forefront of my bleary mind, suddently remembering what day it is and the first words out of my mouth are "ah crap"!
And I'm tired.
~Nichole