Two stirrup queens have spearheaded a letter writing campaign in order to raise awareness about infertility via the media.

Click here to read the cool idea and see how you can participate…

When I taught middle school, our private school had an electives program and kids could sign up for one elective each semester. I taught many of the electives on various years including etymology, anthropology, and–one of my personal favourites–women’s studies. Which is to say, women’s studies for middle schoolers. It’s like serving Gloria Steinam as a glass of milk rather than a cup of strong coffee.

We started out the class the same way every day. The girls would rush in and immediately whip out Maya Angelou’s poem, “Phenomenal Woman” and recite it together, growing increasing louder with each stanza until we shouted out the final lines. Did I mention that this was a private school?

I believed that poem.

I taught that poem to the girls and made them recite it every day because I wanted them to have confidence in themselves as women. I didn’t want them to try to form themselves into what they thought others wanted them to be. I wanted them to love themselves so intensely that they showed their strength in the the click of their heels, the bend of their hair, the palms of their hands, and the need of their care.

I taught this particular class after our wedding but before we started trying to conceive. When I read that poem aloud, I felt like it came up from somewhere deep inside of me. I was a fucking woman. With a uterus and ovaries and breasts. I was going to try to make a child soon. As much as I bitched about my period, I was glad that I was the one who was going to carry the child. I didn’t think that it would be bearable to be a man–to see life growing in your house and not be able to feel it from inside of you. When I recited that poem, I felt like a phenomenal woman. I felt like I was making a difference in the lives of my students. And I believed that I would soon be a mother and intimately influencing the life of a young child. Life was good.

Since I wrote that last post, especially after hearing my own thoughts echoed in the comments, I have been thinking about how does one return to being a phenomenal woman when what they considered to be part of their womanhood is taken away? Examine the poem–there is not one mention of being able to procreate. Not one mention of breastfeeding. For Maya Angelou, womanhood transcends the ability to utilize a uterus. It must because not every woman in this world will choose to carry a child and not every woman will be able to carry a child.

So why do I still feel like so much of my identity is tied up in my body’s foibles?

I started writing that last entry the night before when I came home from the Starbucks and read it aloud to Josh. He was completely horrified by my thoughts and spent the better part of an hour trying to convince me why I was wrong. It’s not a matter of being right or wrong. It’s a matter of this is how I feel. And no one can make me feel something different. It’s up to me to find that inner woman again and redefine her. I can have help on the journey (and your comments have helped tremendously), but the last few steps need to be taken by myself. I edited out some of the stronger self-hatred that was in the first version. One reason was that writing down those thoughts helped me to release some of that self-anger. The other was that Josh was truly horrified.

The question I posed to Josh was how he would feel if he was sterile (and aah0424 brought up this very point in her comment). Wouldn’t his self-esteem take a beating no matter how much I told him I loved him and I didn’t care? Would he feel like less of a man? At least initially? We are all works-in-progress, so hopefully we don’t remain in those stages of self-esteem. Hopefully we learn to accept our limitations and not have the weight of our limitations burden us indefinitely. It has not been long enough for me and I don’t have the gift of space and time. I’m still in the middle of wrestling with my body–at least fertilitywise. Until that portion of my life is finished, I think I will always been fighting that urge of feeling like a third sex.

My mother is an infertile woman and I never saw her as anything but a full woman. And she is my role model. I can honestly say that my mother is one of my closest friends and I have always looked to her when shaping myself as woman. If you had asked me before I started trying to build my family how I defined a woman, I would have remembered everything I learned from my mother: women hold themselves with grace. That they remain strong even in the face of crisis. That they are kind and take care of others and themselves. I would have said that a woman allows themselves to show emotion. That a woman brings beauty into the world.

I would have said that every woman is different therefore the definition is infinite.

It wasn’t until that ability to procreate without assistance was taken away from me that I
added the ability to carry a child and feed a child into the definition. But for so long, that has been the focus, therefore it has overpowered every other part of the definition.

I am really trying to rewrite my definition. It’s difficult to do when you are still part of the words you are trying to erase. I can tell you things that haven’t work: wearing a dress, putting on some make-up, shaving my legs. I have ruled out enough external changes to realize that this is solely an internal change. A shift in view. At some point, I know that I will become a phenomenal woman again. I will think of myself as solely a woman. And I may even look back at that entry and forget how much my self-esteem was hurting from all of this.

In this moment, it’s just nice to know that I’m not alone.

All the phenomenal stirrup-queens in the house stand up.

On a side note, thank you for all of the kind thoughts for my friend. When she’s ready, I’m going to ask her to read all of this support. She is not in a great space–it’s been a terrible roller coaster ride that is filled with tremendous guilt. She isnt really even at the point where she is putting one foot in front of the other. Loss is loss and it hurts no matter where you were in life prior to feeling the crash.

I was reading a book about third-party reproduction at Starbucks (I know, you’re thinking–that’s hot. That’s a girl who knows how to kick back and relax) when my cell phone rang. I answered it and heard my friend’s voice wavering on the other end of the line. “I think I’m pregnant,” she told me. “I took a pregnancy test and there’s a faint line.”

This was not, as you’ve probably guessed since her voice was wavering, a planned pregnancy. This was a by-fuck-I’m-on-the-pill pregnancy. This was an I-already-have-two-children-and-a-scorching-case-of-endometriosis pregnancy. This was an I-have-too-much-on-my-plate pregnancy. There are three people in the world who can tell me the details of their hyperfertility without receiving a sharp kick in the ovaries. She happens to be one of them. On my sliding scale, she rates an instant 10 even though she is not a stirrup queen. She is pretty much as far as you can get from stirrup queendom. There is an additional land out there–equally as fucked as the Land of If–that houses the women who have the pregnancies that we’re not intended to happen.

There is a part of me that sees it as two ends of the same spectrum–the loss of control, the feelings of panic, the burden and weight. There are even stirrup queens who visited this land prior to marriage or at another point in their life. And the panic and guilt and frustration and regret and anger they feel over infertility feels similar yet different to the same panic, guilt, frustration, regret, and anger they felt when they were on this other land. Some of you will argue that she is in a marriage and she does not have a real problem in relation to women who cannot get pregnant. But I sat at a Starbucks with her today and I saw a different picture.

She drove over, stopping at a CVS along the way, bringing with her the two previous pregnancy tests. During the time from when we hung up until the time that she showed up at the Starbucks, I had a stream of irrational fantasies that all ended with her falling in a heap in my arms and saying, “I can’t raise this child, Melissa. Please will you take this baby.”

Instant motherhood.

On a side note before I continue the story, before she called, I was reading about Agnes Rossi’s idea of feminisma–the female equivalent to machismo. And how we view ourselves as woman. Stacie and I have been having an interesting discussion about how breastfeeding gave her back that missing bit of feminisma and I didn’t get to have that. I couldn’t get pregnant without assistance, I couldn’t stay pregnant without assistance, I couldn’t carry to term (though fine, fine, fine, I delivered well), and then, to top it off, I didn’t produce prolactin so I couldn’t breastfeed. I am still trying to find my womanhood in all of this. You would think it would be simple. You would think that I would have felt like a woman having a child grow inside my body. But it didn’t work that way. I didn’t gather back my vision of myself as a woman from that. I’m still looking for it.

I can stretch it and say I have a “female” brain. I have “female” sensibilities. But when I look at all the parts that make me a woman–my breasts and my uterus, my ovaries and my cervix–I don’t feel very feminine. That was where my mind was when I received the phone call. And this is not to make my friend feel like crap if she happens on this entry. Just to explain the strength of my coveting.

She placed her pee sticks on the table and I examined them. There were two lines. On each. Faint lines, but clearly two lines. She didn’t know if she was really pregnant because with her two previous pregnancies, the second lines had been dark instantly. She took a third stick into the bathroom and peed on it. She brought it back out and I looked at my watch, noting the time. “If there isn’t a line in 10 minutes, the other two tests are just showing evaporation lines,” I told her.

I looked down at the new test.

It was already positive. Still faint, but instantly positive.

She started to cry. She wanted a third child, but not now. She has too much on her plate and she’s trying to take care of herself. And she cannot throw a third child into the mix. We talked about this pregnancy, trying to troubleshoot the problems with this pregnancy, make it manageable. The entire time we were speaking, I was staring at the tests. I was coveting those positive tests. I was pretending on-and-off that they were mine. I wanted to slide them closer to my side of the table.

I think what I was coveting wasn’t her pregnancy or this particular baby. What I was coveting in the moment was her fertility. Her ability to get pregnant while on birth control. A femininity so ferocious that it knocks synthetic hormones out of the way in order to utilize her ovaries and uterus. That is a fucking woman and watch her body roar. And after she gives birth, she will use her breasts to feed the baby. She will utilize every part that makes her a woman.

I know she may not feel this way from her perspective. She has endo and only one ovary. She has had numerous laps. She went on bedrest with both her previous pregnancies. She probably doesn’t see herself through my eyes. But from my point-of-view, despite everything happening in her body, she is hyperfertile. And it’s her fertility that makes her feminine. It makes her a woman. And it is what makes me feel like a third sex. Certainly not male, but not female either (and yes, I know I am mixing up biology and social constructs, but I can’t untangle the two in a single blog entry).

On my wedding day, I felt like such a woman in that white gown. I felt so feminine and pretty. I loved watching my husband cry from the enormity and beauty of the choice when he saw me for the first time. On my wedding day, I thought I would be pregnant within the year. I walked through that day with so much confidence–with so much femininity–my womanhood on my sleeve. I want to get back to that day when I felt sexual and sensual–Frida Kahlo’s Flower of Life.

I don’t just want another child, I want to feel feminine. And I don’t want someone else to make me feel feminine or tell me that I am feminine. I want to feel feminine. I want to feel like a woman. I want to feel so hardcore like a woman that I become religious about shaving my legs (and yes, I know that I am prescribing to a certain sliver of womanhood, but it’s the sliver I grew up thinking I would become). I want to be self-assured in my womanhood. I want my floating-uterus-a-la-ancient-Greece to influence the way I think and the way I speak and who I am. I feel disconnected from my uterus.

And the strange thing is that all of my friends who have gone through fertility treatments or adopted–they each have found their womanhood again. Either they have something that works as it should or they’ve created a femininity for themselves. They appear to me wholly female. It’s so stupid–and I can recognize my own stupidity. Maybe I’m holding myself to a standard that I hold no one else or maybe they’ve found a secret that I haven’t found yet. But what can I do? It’s how I feel when I consider my own feminisma.

She is going for her beta today. They are trying to wrap their minds around this child. They will make it work because they have to make it work. And I will keep checking off “female” on medical forms and surveys because I have to check off “female.” But I’m not feeling it right now.
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While I was rereading this entry, my friend called me with her beta results. The pregnancy is not viable. I feel like a complete asshole. My heart is breaking for her.

People are so fascinated by twins that they feel the need to stop me–a perfect stranger who doesn’t give off a please-talk-to-me vibe–at the mall and ask questions that always point to the same ends–do twins possess a unique bond? I’m talking about the secret-language-feeling-pain-in-your-elbow-when-your-twin-hurts-her-arm-fifteen-miles-away-completing-each-other’s-sentences sort of bond. The one that makes us wonder how a person could be magically linked to another person.

Pop two babies out of your hoohaa at once and people are bound to start thinking of them as one entity. Though we don’t use the term unless we are trying to avoid using their names (as you may have noticed, I never give personal info about the kids on this blog, hence why they are referred to by their situation in life), others use it liberally.

They do have a unique bond–not only their own secret language that I am attempting to break into (I can apparently use “taste my chegs!” correctly, but they turn up their nose whenever I try to use the word “bamp” in that way that Frenchmen cringe when I try to speak French), but also an ability to soothe each other that transcends anything I can do as their mother. When they were born, my son’s heart often beat too quickly. His sister had bradycardia and her heart beat would dip to dangerously low levels as her brain forgot to tell her heart to beat. Put them in the same isolette? All heart problems were erased. Their heartbeats regulated themselves and most of the time beat in unison as they slept pressed together. Pull them apart and put them in different isolettes? All heart issues would return. Guess who shared a crib when they came home on heart monitors?

They move together as one unit. With the exception of a few daily toy-stealing incidents, they take care of one another. They cry when the other one is hurt or sad. They magically and silently decide when it is time to switch two toys and call out simultaneously, “switch!” When they were babies, they soothed themselves by sucking on each other’s hand. Now, they soothe each other by rubbing each other’s heads.

It’s a bond that frankly makes me jealous. I love my husband, but we don’t move together like they do. We may share our own in-jokes that create a private language, but lying together doesn’t make our hearts beat in unison. He can rub my head when I’m crying, and even though I know he has my back and he’s standing beside me (both figuratively and literally), I still feel alone. I feel like a single unit that is attached to other units. Based on what I’ve observed through behaviour and words, I think my kids feel like a single unit together that are attached to outside units like Mommy and Daddy. They’re the megablock and I’m just the single Lego.

But did that coding come from being in the same womb at the same time? Or is that coding somehow part of the batch of eggs that are released? Some sort of chemical coating that gets poured on the eggs as they pop out of the follicle and make their journey down the fallopian tubes? How much about the human body do we not understand yet and how much of that comes into play when describing that special bond that twins share?

I ask this because sometimes when I ask how many children live in our house, my daughter answers “three.” There are only two. And the only thing I can think of is that either she is counting one of her dolls as the third child (or she is trying to torture me since she often likes to pat my stomach and say, “nope, Mommy can’t have a baby in there.”) or she is remembering her triplet that I miscarried around eight weeks. Is there a part of her heart that was coded with this bond to this missing person? I know it sounds like a strange question, but just think about how little we truly understand about the brain and emotions and those connections we make between two people.

A.R.T. has created this new wave of twinship. Generally, the definition of twins states that one mother gives birth to two or more children during the same pregnancy. But what do you call…

• (1) two children who were created via IVF where one embryo was transferred back to the biological mother, the other was transferred to a surrogate, both pregnancies miraculously took and now two children who were created at the same time are being carried in two different wombs. Yes–this is a situation I just read about. And if you say that these aren’t twins, are two children who grow inside two different wombs in the same body (a la Grey’s Anatomy a few weeks ago) twins?
• (2) what about embryos that are frozen after a successful fresh cycle and transferred years later? In other words, two embryos from the same cycle–one fresh and transferred immediately, the other frozen and transferred years later. Are those two children actually twins?
• (3) what about donor embryos? What if I have an embryo transferred into my womb and you have an embryo transferred into your womb (embryos created from eggs and sperm collected during the same cycle) and we both get pregnant and give birth. Are our kids twins?
• (4) One FET from two different batches of embryos that were created during two different fresh cycles where one or more embryos from each batch are transferred simultaneously. Therefore, the embryos were not created at the same time, but they are conceived, carried, and delivered simultaneously. Are these children twins?

If we don’t know how and when that unique bond is formed, is it possible to have sets of twins walking on this earth that don’t even know that they’re twins? Or have this secret longing for a person they don’t even know exists? I think that’s especially possible with the third scenario.

This whole question got raised the other day when we were watching Discovery Health and were confronted by this question: could you be your own twin?

Apparently, there is a little-known phenomenon that creates human chimeras. According to Wikipedia, a chimera is “an ordinary person or animal except that some of his or her parts actually came from his or her twin or from the mother. A chimera may arise either from identical twin fetuses (where it would be impossible to detect), or from dizygotic fetuses, which can be identified by chromosomal comparisons from various parts of the body. The number of cells derived from each fetus can vary from one part of the body to another, and often leads to characteristic mosaicism skin colouration in human chimeras. A chimera may be a hermaphrodite, composed of cells from a male twin and a female twin.”

The Discovery Health show was examining people who are found to have two sets of DNA. This, of course, sent me straight to Dr. Google (wondering all the time, am I my own twin? Am I my own twin, damnit!?!) where I found an additional article explaining this phenomenon and how there can be different types of chimeras:

“In medicine, [a chimera is] a person composed of two genetically distinct types of cells. Human chimeras were first discovered with the advent of blood typing when it was found that some people had more than one blood type. Most of them proved to be “blood chimeras” — non-identical twins who shared a blood supply in the uterus. Those who were not twins are thought to have blood cells from a twin that died early in gestation. Twin embryos often share a blood supply in the placenta, allowing blood stem cells to pass from one and settle in the bone marrow of the other. About 8% of non-identical twin pairs are chimeras. Many more people are microchimeras and carry smaller numbers of foreign blood cells that may have passed from m
other across the placenta, or persist from a blood transfusion. In vitro fertilization (IVF) is also contributing to the number of human chimeras. To improve success rates, two or more embryos are placed in the uterus so women who have IVF have more twin pregnancies than usual. More twins mean more chimeras.”

All of this is, of course, tied to A.R.T. and the increase in twins. But are there even more twins out there than we can possibly imagine? And are all these other scenarios giving birth to twins as well? In light of advances with science, do we need to start expanding the definition of twins or do these other scenarios need their own unqiue name?

Just something to think about in case you didn’t have enough on your mind today…

So, I was tagged by Teamwinks and Mandolyn to tell you six strange things about myself. Of course, my personal list stalled at three. When I mentioned this to my husband, his mouth dropped open and he said, “uh, I could fill in a few more, dear.” So here is a mix and ten points if you can tell the ones I was willing to admit vs. the ones he put on the list…

1. When I was little, I ate paper to “punish” my parents when I didn’t get my way. It didn’t really work. Sorry, Mum and Dad…

2. I have many food phobias. With some of them, I can’t eat food that has been on the same plate as these foods. For others, I can work my way around it. Almost all my food phobias are for white foods. Mayonnaise and cottage cheese are completely banned from my refrigerator. Even writing down those words makes me feel queasy.

3. I have a list of banned actors. I won’t watch movies that have them in it–even if the movie story sounds really good. Some people are on the banned list for good reason–for instance, Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise. Others randomly found there way on there and now I can’t overcome my dislike and take them off.

4. I tend to get stuck on one food and then eat it over and over again, meal after meal. For instance, one summer in grad school, the only thing I ate for every meal was a veggie sandwich.

5. I need to be kissed on both cheeks when someone is saying goodbye or I feel uneven. It bothers me tremendously.

6. I need to be surrounded by post-it note pads at all times. I write down all notes to myself on post-it notes (though shopping lists go on the back of old business cards).

I don’t even know who to tag because it feels like everyone has already done this one. But in case you haven’t–go back to your blog now and tell everyone six strange things about yourself.