The Weekly What If: What if you could take one physical characteristic (your eye colour, your crooked nose, your flat ass, your flat stomach) and put it on another person.  Would you be kind and put your best trait on a friend who struggles with her love of the same body part?  Or would you make someone walk a mile in your shoes by placing your least favourite trait on the body of a person who needs to get a clue (hey, Kate Moss, welcome to my stomach flab post IF drugs)?

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I designed a onesie for a gift with HereWeGoaJen via her Little Star Shop.  It came out exactly how I pictured it in my head, the person loved it, and it was so damn easy.  Her stuff makes great gifts and is definitely priced too low (though don’t raise your prices yet because I still have more gifts to get!).

Just saying if you need a gift too.

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Even though I haven’t seen pictures of Corey Haim since I religiously bought 16 magazine at age 12 (with the exception of the scintillating spread on the two Coreys in People magazine last year detailing their feud), I was really sad when I heard that he died this week.  I flip flop between my favourite Corey Haim film being Lucas and The Lost Boys.  We quote more often from The Lost Boys in our house and we refer to it as Our Twilight (poor Wolvog often has us say to him a la Edward Herrmann, “Don’t ever invite a vampire into your house, you silly boy. It renders you powerless.”), but we also are prone to clapping at a very slow pace and building up to a normal clap like the end of Lucas.

Corey Haim was somewhat emblematic of a certain time period of films–the Breakfast Clubs and Pretty in Pinks and Lucas and Lost Boys.  What was your favourite film from that time period and which movie star’s picture hung in your locker?

It was Johnny Depp for me (21 Jump Street era) and Rob Lowe (especially in Class).

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And now, the blogs…

One Eye Open and Dreaming has a post about how different your life is from how you pictured it.  It is about knowing when you are done with family building and how that end might come at a different place than you pictured it when you started trying to have that first child.  She writes, “I don’t know what I am. Crazy? Ungrateful? Selfish? A friend told me that if I still think about doing another cycle then I’m not done and there’s nothing wrong with that. I sometimes wonder if she’s right.  I definitely didn’t expect this to be a part of my life.”  It was simply what I needed to read this week along with all of your comments on my post.

I was very moved by this post from Crazy Heart Stuff.  She explains, “As I trudged through the soul-sucking experiences of infertility and recurrent loss, I couldn’t see a light at the end of the tunnel.  I’d get frustrated when I read a blogger had achieved their dream of a baby, then still didn’t seem happy.  I am that person.  And for that, I am so so so sorry.”  It is a post about struggling with depression and anxiety after infertility and it’s an important read for anyone experiencing this too.

Baby, Borneo, or Bust has a damn good story about her husband’s Valentine’s Day surprise.  Can’t say much more than that or it will ruin the ending.

Awful But Functioning has a post that made me cry about a wish cloud and worry dolls.  It is about magical thinking and reality, about letting our children know that we worry too balanced with giving them a cushioned world.  I love her musings on the word “expecting.”  It’s a post that meanders through various thoughts, all beautiful, all heartbreaking.

Lastly, Hoping for Another Lovebug has a post about the infertility hangover.  She explains, “I feel as though I’ve been down for so long that I’m not sure how to be up again…The infertility hangover is more about the lasting effects of the all-consuming, constant depression that became a way of life during all the years we were trying to have another baby.”  It is an amazing post that I think everyone should read–run, don’t walk, your clicking finger over to her blog–and it’s just as much explaining how she got into this funk as explaining how she plans to get out.

The roundup to the Roundup: Answer the Weekly What If about body parts. Jen makes good gifts. Whose picture graced your locker? And lots of great blogs to read.

Cali had a post yesterday about her mum, how she starts each day, regardless of where she is in life, filled with hope.  Because today just might be the day.  The day that whatever she is waiting for (in this case, a job) comes through.

It waxes and wanes for me, based on how much potential I think the day actually holds.  I feel like I wake up each morning and weigh my day.  And sometimes, I am pleasantly surprised that more happens than I expected.  But a lot of the time, I’m disappointed that something I thought would occur doesn’t.  And how well I weighed the day before tends to factor into whether I wake up like Cali’s mum, full of hope for the day, or whether I feel cat-like and needy, hating that my emotions are influenced by the actions (or non-actions) of others.

It’s terrible to feel in limbo; as if nothing is within your control except removing the expectation from your mind.

My favourite book growing up (and still) was the Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster.  I think the reason the story grabbed me is because on an ordinary day, Milo comes home to find a present in his room.  He unwraps the gift and sets up the tollbooth to play with it, and then finds himself on this incredible adventure.  And that was sort of how I wanted to live my life, waking up each day like Cali’s mum with this understanding that something wonderful could happen during the day.  That all of us could be like Milo and receive an unexpected gift–though perhaps not a toy.  Good news is always welcome, but I consider it a gift when someone writes me a nice email or links to my blog from theirs.

But I seem to have lost that anything-could-happen mindset a bit along the way.

A friend once told me that the key to happiness is having no expectations.  That our expectations are what creates unhappiness.  That if I wasn’t waiting for anything (a child, good news, an email from a friend), I could never be disappointed, and I would simply delight in anything that came my way.

Which is all well and good, but you can’t divorce yourself from your personality.  I am so tied to my expectations that I have post-it notes to remind me what I’m waiting for just in case I forget.

Are you the type who wakes up with hope because something good could happen today (after all, it has to happen some time)? The type who wakes up filled with dread?  Or the type who weighs her day factoring in possible odds based on the last few days?  Or…something else entirely?

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.

Returning to the idea of colour, I am absolutely in love with paint samples.  Not paint; just paint samples.  I mean, I like paint on my walls, but I love picking up paint samples and keeping them on my desk.  Paint samples for the sake of paint samples–as their own entity and not as a means to helping make a decision.

Am I the only one who makes an outing out of going to the paint store and bringing home samples just to make herself happy?

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.

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.