Posts from — March 2010

Last night, in addition to dreaming that my old friend Wade now looked like Apolo Ohno and that Wade/Apolo was inexplicably sleeping on my living room floor, I dreamed about babies.

Not just treatments–though part of the dream was setting up an appointment with the clinic–but that we also had the option to have children via sex.  At home.  In our own bed.  And–I feel very cheap adding this fact, but it’s our financial reality–we could have children for the low cost of a few co-pays.  The child might still cost the same after he has arrived, but beforehand, in my dream, we had the option of making small, semi-mindless charges to a credit card in twenty dollar increments.

And then I woke up.

Isn’t it so strange to think about sometimes?  That there are people who decide that they want to have a child in June, so they have sex in September or October, and nine months later, a full-term baby pops out.  And then they get to hold their child in the hospital and go home with said child and life continues on.  And that’s the norm.  I keep forgetting that it’s the norm for the majority of people because my friends shake out to over half of us having either done treatments or adopted or used donor gametes.  We run the gamut from biological infertility to situational infertility (GLBT or single parent by choice).

Beyond how we built our families, I have more friends who are like me who didn’t have the normal delivery-then-home experience.  I didn’t go seeking out infertile friends, but we have somehow found each other, both before trying to build our families and after.  It hits me sometimes that our norm is not the norm for other people.  That for the majority of the world, we are the anomaly, the women and men who can’t build their family without assistance.

But I forget that norm if I spend enough time around other infertile women.  I certainly forget it when I can blend outwardly with everyone else at the playgroup, at least until they get to the discussion about breastfeeding or how I ended up with twins.

Before we returned the clothing bags to the attic, I did end up going through them and in one, I found a series of tiny caps that we used in the NICU.  I couldn’t fit my fist inside.  My son’s head, at birth, was about the size of a satsuma.  As I was holding one, the Wolvog and ChickieNob both woke up and went to the bathroom for a drink of water.  I brought in the hat to show it to them and the ChickieNob said, “what a funny little hat.”  I tried to put it on the Wolvog’s head now, and it sat like a tiny, deflated pancake over a swirl of hair.  It was like a silver-dollar kepah.

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I have been doing the Infertile Oversmile this week.  It’s that smile you do with people who know all about the fact that your FSH makes you look like an 86-year-old, but you want them to know that you! are! okay! you! are! really! okay! with! everything! including! giving! away! your! favourite! bouncey! seat!

I find myself doing this smile with fertile and infertile people alike because it is too hard to reel myself back in once I start crying again.  I make it big and brilliant, which makes me feel a little like a robot.  An infertile, grieving robot who is trying her best not to make other people uncomfortable.

It’s a tiring smile to do and it feels dishonest.  It feels like I’m selling that phantasm-child short.  I feel like that child is owed something more than crying in private.  Except that he or she is not really owed anything at all because that’s the thing about phantasms–they are merely fantasies, ideas that feel incredibly real to us but have no physical counterpart.

But I’m grateful that I can cry on the phone with friends.  That I can come over here and vent this out with people who get it.  Thank you for the free therapy.

I will be okay.  I can sense how this will turn out–that a few weeks from now, I won’t even think about all those old items or who was supposed to use them until something makes the thoughts pop up again.  They are in the forefront of my mind right now because I need to deal with them.

I do fear that Disney will be somewhat ruined; that I’ll walk through the park thinking, “this is our consolation prize” much in the same way that contestants who win a blender probably think about the fact that they didn’t win the car on the Price is Right every time they have to make a smoothie.  How can you drink a shake of yogurt and strawberries and not choke on what could have been?

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I am working at the massive garage sale this weekend where I am selling the items and I am working the checkout line, which means that I will most likely see the families who purchase the phantasm-child’s backpack carrier and bouncey seats.  I tried to get a different job at the sale, but it’s hard to explain to the volunteer coordinator that you fear that you will throw yourself on the woman lugging out your old baby-proofing gate without coming across as completely insane.

My dream moment is that I am standing in line, helping take the tags off my old baby carrier, and the woman holding it admits that she is pregnant with her first child via treatments or that she is picking up these last items before she hits the road to meet the child she is matched to adopt.  We get into conversation and I don’t tell her that she is holding the carrier I used to walk around with the twins when they were a few months old, but I vicariously gain something from her smile because she’s daydreaming about how she is going to use this carrier to keep her child close as she cooks dinner.

And I’ll remember that I once smiled like that and I’ll shed this Infertile Oversmile soon and go back to my non-robot-like self.  Even if I’m not going to have her smile in the future, I got to have it once, and I will forever be grateful for that.

My sister-cousin passed along an excellent piece of advice:

Look at what is not serving you in your life, and then let it go.

The third definition of “to serve” according to Merriam-Webster: to be of use.

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For ten years, I have driven 40 minutes to get my eyebrows waxed.  There are perfectly reasonable locations closer to home, but I picked this woman a long time ago and I am, if nothing else, loyal.  We are also talking about my face when we are talking about my eyebrows, and there is little room for error.  I like to stick with what I know.

But 40 minutes there and 40 minutes back, and a half hour of having someone slather hot wax on my face means that getting my eyebrows done becomes my whole afternoon.  Couple that with the fact that she only works two days a week, one of those days rarely works for me at all, and she sometimes needs to cancel due to logistics and when I ask myself the question about whether something serves me, it really doesn’t.  Waxing ones eyebrows should not take the entire afternoon, precluding any other activity.

But I’m loyal and anxious about change.  So I sat on this fact for weeks, allowing my eyebrows to extend into a bushy mess.  And then one day, as I sat in the parking lot of the post office after picking up the mail, I decided that I had two choices.  I could go pick a random salon close to home and get it done immediately, or if I waited beyond lunch time, I might as well be a pussy and drive out to my normal person and use up the whole afternoon.  I sucked it up and drove to a nearby salon that looked pretty and clean.

The woman didn’t speak any English, but I was able to pantomime my way through what I wanted and how nervous I was about doing this.  I kept asking myself what the fuck I was thinking as I followed her into the back room.  This had all the possibility of being an experience ripe with regret.  I lay on the table and she dripped the hot wax on my face, and walked me through with baby steps, holding out a mirror with each rip so I could be reassured that my eyebrows would not come to resemble Robert Van Winkle’s.

I got up from the table, eight minutes later, with pretty eyebrows and a great deal more confidence in taking leaps.  Yes, this could have been a different post; it could have been disastrous.  But it wasn’t and I created a sustainable relationship with a woman who works five days a week a short drive from my home.  It serves me; it’s useful.

I thought about my old salon person the rest of the day.  It wasn’t regret because how could I trade an 18 minute excursion (including driving time) for a 110 minute excursion?  Maybe sadness for breaking my loyalty to a woman who served me well in the past.  It is not her fault that she has remained in the same place and I haven’t moved out to her yet despite the fact that years ago, we thought we’d be living close to her store by this point.

This week has been a lesson in learning to live where I am rather than living my life as if I could meld into a fantasy one at a moment’s notice.

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We have a very small home and I am constantly letting go of things to make room for what we need.  I spent the day decluttering both tangible and intangible items from my life.  I cleaned under my bathroom sink, filling two trash bags.  I went through random bags and piles in the kitchen.  I extracted myself from some volunteer work that was no longer serving me.  I deleted files and emails and trashed all sorts of useless items from my life.

Midway through the day, someone asked if they could borrow some baby clothes and I went down in the basement to search the boxes in the storage room before I sent Josh into the attic.  I was alone in the house and it was silent in the basement.  I opened the boxes and first was smiling remembering when the twins were small enough to fit into 0-3 month onesies.  I took out this gorgeous coat the Wolvog had barely worn and their first pair of Robeez.  I saved everything from their babyhood.

And that made sense four years ago when we started trying to add to our family.  There was no point in selling items or giving them away because we were going to need them again.  Into our tiny storage room went the double snap-n-go (because treatments carry a risk of twins, giving away twin stuff with the assumption that we’d have a singleton felt risky) and gates and carriers and toys.  We have six car seats, two booster high-chairs, three potty seats, and three baby carriers.

But as I stood in the storage room surveying the mess of items–too many to enable a person to actually get to the boxes in the back of the storage room–I realized that like my loyalty to the eyebrow woman, which started with a belief that we would one day be living in the town where she works (and therefore be convenient), I have been living this fantasy future where we’re using this equipment again.  But the reality is that it’s not serving me anymore.

I cried on the way to my meeting that night and emailed Josh as we discussed upcoming social events that I planned to get rid of all the baby items, starting with the things that we wouldn’t miss at all and ending with the stuff that we’d rather never have to repurchase.  I would cull out my favourite clothes and toys and sell the rest.  He didn’t write back to say whether he agreed or disagreed, but I still cried the whole ride home and when I walked in the house, he said, “talk to me.”

I could barely get out what I believed in that moment: we are never going to have another baby.

Saying it felt like walking into that new salon, scary and upsetting with a hint of “what the fuck am I doing” tied to the action.  It could end well or it could end poorly.  As we talked it out, trying to run with the changes we’ve been making as of late to get things that aren’t working for us out of our lives, we came to an understanding that getting rid of the items wasn’t an ending, but instead, it was an understanding.

We need to live with the facts as we know them today.  We have a small house and we have given up a lot of home real estate to a person who doesn’t exist, crowding the existing occupants into smaller spaces.  We cannot create a child without expensive assistance and we do not have the money to either do treatments or pay back a loan.  These things are just…things.  They’re not people, they’re not irreplaceable.  If life changes, we can return to Graco and Fisher Price and bring home newer versions of these items.  If life continues as is, we have room for the people who live in this house now.

This decision has gutted me and I’ve canceled things to clean out this house as quickly as possible.  I am a band-aid ripping sort of person and once the decision is made, I need to charge ahead and get it done or I will second guess myself and drown in doubt.  I have cried a lot these past few days.  I cried as I walked through the food store, cried as I walked in the house and caught site of the pumpkin seat and base we’re giving away, cried as I passed the bags of clothes Josh set up for me in the hallway so I can go through them.

We will take the money we make from selling these items and use the money for the trip to Disney World we’ve been trying to take for the last few years.  I told the twins our plan, smiling broadly to convey that this! is! a! good! thing! despite! our! tear-stained! faces! and they jumped on-board, bashing babies like a good sour grapes soldier (“it’s so good that we don’t have a baby!  Then our house would smell like poop and all we’d hear is the baby crying.  I don’t like babies at all!”).  And I agreed because it was easier: “you’re right.  Babies suck.  We are so damn lucky that we don’t have one in our house.”

I waited until I dropped them off at school to cry.

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I started in the closet in the guest room, dumping some items into a garbage bag and entering the ones we’d sell into a spreadsheet.

Dumping is a strange term because it sounds so unemotional.  We dump our garbage, we dump our dead-end jobs, we dump our boyfriends.  But there’s a lot of emotion behind the word.  Loading up the car with trash and snaking our way up the winding pathway to the dump can be a very freeing experience coupled with a sense of regret to be parted from long-held items.  As much as I was thrilled to walk away from a terrible job, I also felt a great deal of sadness as I drove away with my box of important papers beside me.  And please don’t get me started on how long I have mourned the end of a relationship, regardless of whether I was the dumper or the dumpee.

I hope these items find good homes.  I hope they make another family happy; they will most likely go to a fellow stirrup queen who has built her family via treatments therefore there is sweetness amid the bitter.  I am going to go live in the here and now and figure out how to stop thinking about the future when it makes me miss so much of the present.  I am going to take on new volunteer work; something that serves me.

And I’m leaving the door open to change, to waiting to see what happens next rather than trying to confidently guess what is behind curtain number two.

Directions: answer the question in the comment section. Then leave a comment on the blog of the commenter directly before you (so it’s a chain. #2 comments on #1, #3 comments on #2, etc). The first person who comments gets a free ride and does not need to leave any comments. The last person who comments gets…screwed. My answer is below the picture.

In case you can’t read it, the card states: WHAT COLOUR DO YOU THINK OF WHEN YOU THINK OF HAPPINESS?

For me, it would have to be orange. Or a deep red. Or an orange-y yellow.  Something bright.

What about you? And if you can give us the html colour number, all the better so we can check your choice out ourselves.

My computer can hold about 80 GBs of information and this week, I filled it up within 200 KBs of space (just in case you can’t do conversion math in your head, 80 GB are also 83886080 KB).  I didn’t even have enough memory to burn a disc because it couldn’t create the temporary files.  The machine kept giving me messages, like an overstuffed relative about to vomit after a Thanksgiving meal, and I kept shoveling in more pictures and more pictures until the machine said enough and then mashed its lips together.

So my father came over and fixed the problem because that’s what dad’s who are smart in computers do.  He created all sorts of new space for me on an external hard drive, cleaned out some unnecessary programs, and moved over all my photos.  The only thing left to do in order to reclaim my computer as a functioning machine was to delete the copies of my photos on the main drive.

But then I got nervous, regardless of the fact that I had all the pictures backed up on discs too.  I’m not sure how I got through the first 30 years of my life before I owned a digital camera, when all my photographs were simply printed on paper, the negatives kept in little plastic sleeves.  I didn’t create thousands of back-up versions of those photos and somehow survived.

But it was really nerve-wracking to hit delete.

Afterward, I went back to the check the space on the main drive and it’s half empty (40 GB), ready for me to refill it with 4 more years of photographs.

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The Weekly What If: You know how the photographs in Harry Potter continuously move?  They’re not set on a loop–the person is just seen milling about, scratching their nose, checking their watch, waving at you.  If you could have one photograph that you own move like that, which one would it be?  Describe the photograph.

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I wrote about the site Please Rob Me over at BlogHer.  I think it’s an important thing to think about–not a statement about where you should draw your privacy line (because it will be different for each person), but the fact that you should be cognizant of your comfort zone and operate inside of it.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the piece.

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And now, the blogs…

Parenthood for Me has a post about a dream she had where she appeared pregnant.  The post becomes a fascinating look at how the waking hours inform the sleeping hours yet emotionally, the two sides still remain divided and at odds.  It’s a great post that feels a bit other-worldly–as if you are in a dream.

Are We There Yet? has a post about searching for medical answers for her son, familiar territory for one who spent years searching for answers for herself.  She writes: “I’ve been like a warrior the past few weeks.  I’ve been battle ready.  A steely coat of armor protecting my heart.  My sword at the ready, my feet ready to run.  Last night, I laid it all down, and I raised my white flag.  I surrender.  I surrendered to the tears only one whose heart was breaking could.”  It is a gorgeous, moving, emotional post.

Tales of a Batty Nurse has a beautiful post about learning to like herself.  She writes: “The sort of crappy thoughts? Those are still there. But maybe in a bit less hurtful of a voice. Right now they feel like great motivation to bring about change. Mostly because I’m not liking where things are at right now. And I’m doing something about it.”  It is about dipping into your internal pools of bravery and moving yourself out of one mental space and into another.  Sometimes when we’re struggling with our own fears, we need to hear that other people have our backs even though we still need to take on the hardest burdens of the act.  I’d love it if everyone went over and let Battynurse know that we have her back.

Lastly, Thalia has a fantastic blogoversary post.  Beyond the fact that you should go over and congratulate her for hitting five years of blogging–an amazing feat–she also has musings on the state of our community, from its early years until now.  The whole post made me reminisce and smile.

The roundup to the Roundup: this is what it’s like to fill an entire computer.  Answer the Weekly What If.  Weigh in with your thoughts about Please Rob Me.  And lots of great posts to read.

Show and Tell is wasted on elementary schoolers. Join several dozen bloggers weekly to show off an item, tell a story, and get the attention of the class. In other words, this is Show and Tell 2.0. Everyone is welcome to join, even if you have never posted before and just found out about Show and Tell for the first time today. So yank out a photo of the worst bridesmaid’s dress you ever wore and tell us the story; show off the homemade soup you cooked last night; or tell us all about the scarf you made for your first knitting project. Details on how to participate are located at the bottom of this post.

Let’s begin.

I was supposed to be Vashti for Purim, but once I put on the costume a few minutes before we were supposed to leave the house, I realized that I was going to be freezing for the rest of the day.  I debated this out for a moment with Josh and I finally admitted that the only other costume I could think of was a slacker a la Reality Bites.  In other words, our life in the 90s.

Josh said he would dress up too.  I ran upstairs and put on a pair of torn jeans, a t-shirt layered over long underwear, and a flannel wrapped around my waist.  A dug out an old pair of steel-toed Docs and slumped down on the sofa while Josh went to change, moaning to the ChickieNob, “I’m so bored.”  Josh came back in a t-shirt that read “wage slave,” a flannel, stained jeans and Chucks.  We went out to my parent’s house to get some help with the ChickieNob’s costume which had pretty much taken over our lives for several days.

As we were walking down the stairs, my mother looked at my scuffed shoes and said, “Melissa!  Polish your shoes.  You look like a slob.”

“But it’s my costume,” I told her, unsure how she could miss the brilliance of my slacker outfit.  “They’re not my normal shoes.”

“How am I supposed to know that’s your costume when you pretty much dress like that all the time?”

Good question.  I would like it stated for the record that I only utilize 80% of this costume on a daily basis.  My jeans are never ripped on a normal day.  I haven’t had a flannel touch this body since 1997.  And I usually wear faux-fur boots, not Docs.  See, it was a costume–not my normal clothes.

When we got to shul, our friend looked at us and said, “you guys didn’t come in costume?”

“We’re in costume!” I exclaimed.  “This is a costume.  We’re 90s slackers.”

“But you look like this every single freakin’ day.”

Perhaps we were not as clever as we thought.

What are you showing today?

Click here or scroll down to the bottom of this post if this is your first time joining along (Important: link to the permalink for the post, not the main url for your blog and use your blog’s name, not your name. Links not going to a Show and Tell post will be deleted). The list is open from now until late Friday night and a new one is posted every week.