*honey, let's have a baby!

*easily one of my most despised sentiments...for thousands of reasons...

****

ok so...we're doing another ivf. i've typed that a few times over the past two weeks, kinda not fully believing it. but there it is, in all its splendor...jesus christ...and an entire cycle's worth of meds. some of you (the few, the proud...yeah right) will recognize the line-up. i've seen the photo dozens of times, but still can't believe the one up there is MINE...AGAIN.

i've had a year to decide to try to get pregnant again, and also to decide why i would be a fool's ass in hell to try to get pregnant again. there are really good reasons- on the try side? the not try side? does it matter? there are NO ANSWERS. really, life and death, just simply NO ANSWERS...just what we end up doing/what ends up happening to us.

i feel crazy inside, but strangely calm. crazy, calm. faithless, serene.

at least now there can be an end. well, maybe not, probably not, NOT, but i can enjoy that thought for a minute, right? better yet, i should just try not to think at all. yeah, that's the ticket.

no words...

...except thank you, from the bottom of my broken heart.

http://namesinthesand.blogspot.com/

asshole!

once apon a time, when i was just infertile and not a dead baby mom, i followed infertility blogs.

well, i'm lying. i was in that fucked up state of being an infertile with children and (oops!) pregnant again.

because, you know, no matter how many times you carry life within your belly, if you've lived through infertility, you are always an infertile deep, deep in your bones.

anyway, there i was. pregnant (largely so) and following infertility blogs, staring at their positive pregnancy tests ( like i never saw two lines IN MY LIFE) and suffering with the ones who were blind for staring at their stark white tests...

there was one girl in-particular, one who achieved pregnancy after a few treatments. for some god-forsaken reason, i felt compelled to tell her about the guilt and general fucked up nature of pregnancy after infertility. cause, you know, pregnancy sucks ass in hell. and it especially sucks ass in hell when you worked your ass off to make it happen.

(i remember [way before the incident i'm telling about] telling soulmate friend, who was pregnant and complaining about trapped gas or whatever, while i was so desperately trying to become so, that AT LEAST SHE CAN GET PREGNANT. i feel like an ass to this day about that.)

anyway, i wanted to tell that woman to expect to feel guilty and confused about feeling shitty about the difficulty of pregnancy, despite asking (begging, sacrificing) for it. (right now, i wonder why the fuck i would stick my neck out like that. let people alone, no? to find out for themselves, no? i have no explanation for it.)

well, long story short, she was not very appreciative. she posted about blocking comments from assholes who wanted to rain on her two-lined test parade. i never technically found out if she was talking about me because i never commented again; the correspondence i'm referring to happened via email. i continued to follow her blog, and she subsequently experienced crippling hyperemesis. i wonder if she ever thought about my emails. i wonder if she ever understood what i was trying to tell her. i wonder if it ever clicked.

well, my long, drawn out point is, i still feel bad about it. i still feel bad about telling her about the dichotomy which is pregnancy after infertility way before she had reason to hear it. really, i'm surprised i even did it; i'm usually so opinions-off (or at least i like to humor myself that i am).

the real truth is, i was still in shock, depressed, suffering though an unexpected pregnancy after infertility and triplets via ivf. i was a mess. i had pre-partum depression. i was fucked up.

and i feel bad that i rained on someone else's parade.

small world

the other day, at work, amidst fetal heart tones echoing into our office, i read a chart that noted a patient had five miscarriages...at age 19. another patient that day was pregnant after a miscarriage her very last cycle...at 17. i share an office with the manager, and she suddenly said, in a voice all too recognizable (or at least what i imagine all our voices to sound like), "i should have been a young mother, too."

she went on to explain that she was married young and stationed far away with her military husband. she called them miscarriages. the reality is, i'm sharing an office with another dead baby mom...two dead baby boys at 6 months each. she went on to have two healthy boys who are now in their late teens...

but now, now that she also knows how i met our boss (ahem...in the ER with a dead baby in my belly), the discourse has changed a bit. when she talk to me, she often talks about her FOUR boys. she talks about how it happened, how she often thinks about what could have been if she was back in the states during (especially) her second pregnancy.

i don't think i have to say i was shocked, i guess still a bit shocked. there we sit, TWO dead baby moms in a big bustling OB office. i guess it slaps me into reality; i guess it shakes me out of my pitiful head. i don't have to tell you how many times i've heard the heart tones and felt like i heard a totally different sound than anyone else (in the world) in the office.

what's more, what made the discovery of her dead sons even more surprising, is that she'd been telling me about other, bigger, tragedies in her life...the BIG ones. her son was almost (and i mean skin of his teeth close) killed in a car accident at 16. a few months later, when he was just out of the woods, her niece (who lived with her at the time) was diagnosed with leukemia and died about a year later at 17. it's amazing what we as mothers have to endure and keep functioning (or pretend to).

meeting her has pushed me into a new place: RELATIVITY. here she is, two dead babies, her first two, and they play second to a whole other set of fucked up experiences. it begs the question, in my mind, if all i want is to move past this horrible fucked place of dead baby, what more horrible tragedy must befall me? knowing that anything is possible, how much longer can i entertain the doom-and-gloom? how much longer, in good conscience, can i allow my dead baby to take from my alive ones...not to mention from myself?

i don't have to wait for the next shitstorm, the next living hell.

i've felt a shift in my brain. not sure how long the flesh is going to take, but i am willing to let the residual dread live there instead of up front and center. it may be total and utter denial, but that's ok. for now.

cringe television

i was never the sensitive infertile. in fact, it was always husband who avoided friends with children, cried with pregnancy announcements, and turned the channel during diaper commercials. i, on the other hand, just made plans for cocktails with friends instead.

this new line of commercials though, i just can't watch. wtf? i can even appreciate the dark humor. what, am i getting sensitive in my old age? maybe it's the dead baby stuff. i don't know. and brooke...she went through infertility...is that why she finds it funny? i guess maybe at some point before september 9, 2007 i would have found it funny as hell. maybe.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDZSxFLcMVg

evaporation

i took a pregnancy test this morning, and although negative, i kept it.

OF COURSE I KEPT IT!! anyone KNOWS you can't throw those things out! it can tell you secrets later in the day when you pull it out and make yourself cross-eyed staring at it!!

tonight, there was a faint line. any other time in my life, that faint line would mean something. i mean, of the hundreds of sticks i've peed on, negative is blinding negative. there's an old wives' tale, an urban myth, of evaporation lines...DON'T READ TEST AFTER TEN MINUTES!

tonight, at this time in my life, that little tiny hope against hope is scaring the living shit out of me. who am i to have this work??? i don't deserve it.

tonight, that tiny little line is still a negative. tonight, that faint line is a big fat joke on me. tonight, i'm on the *lucky* side of the statistics, yet again.

tonight, there's no one i can call, no one i can tell...no one to mull it over with. there's too much that wouldn't be said, too many underlying implications. there's no one close enough that wouldn't pity my pitiful, hopeful goddamned self.

tomorrow, i will wake up and take another test that will crush me and laugh at me and call me a fucking asshole. this is my life. and the alternative? that is a possibility, after all.
it can't be.

****
eta: took another test, same story. it's still early, so it can go either way (theoretically). i'll know for sure in a few days...in the meantime, i'm still wondering WHY i want to do this again? i can make this all go away and take control of my life again...theoretically.

time

our first halloween in our new house. the kids were about a year and a half old. we had just contemplated having another child and decided no, we were happy the way we were. i was happy. i had three children, we had just bought a house, and i made kick-ass chicken costumes. all was right with the world.

****

halloween, 2007. about seven weeks after delivering a dead baby girl. thankfully, the kids really liked their "funny ghost" costumes; i was a real shit mom. i felt like everybody in town was thinking i just had a dead baby, and wasn't i just a nightmare. when i look at that face, all i see is hell.

****

this halloween. isn't THAT a charmed life? don't i look recovered? doesn't it seem like i've moved on? i certainly put much thought and effort into creating a family of superheroes...don't you like my Deadbaby Woman (good one, c!)? i just can't seem to reconcile my life. I JUST CAN'T. i want to be better, in many ways i AM better, but MY BABY DIED. how can i be better? i feel ruined inside, like a wrinkled up woman on her deathbed, seeming to welcome slipping away because she's just seen, experienced, too much. i just want peace.

here they are, my superheroes. i try to appreciate what i HAVE. green oceanboy, red firegirl, blue skyegirl. they save me (and make me crazy) every single day. it kills me, too, to think of what having a one year old in the mix would have been like. they would have loved her. i wonder if they would have fought with her as much as they do with each other. i wonder what her costume would have been this year. i wonder what's in store for me.

my elle, skyegirl. i was going to make her feathered bird wings, but thought of callum and made butterfly wings instead.

fly on, all our dead babies. fly on.

****

eta: husband is an extremely vigilant cameraman. he's been harrassing me with the camera since the beginning of time. despite my arguements, i'm really glad to have all the pictures now, even if it is just to think, "damn, look how fat i was!"

also eta: it came to me a minute ago that the magnificents are three of the four elements, and that my dead baby girl is earth, sitting on my nightstand. shit.