#nofilter: on sharing, infertility, and accepting

^^ One of my favorite photos from when we were dating

I often fall asleep writing essays in my head.  Most of the time, these essays stay tucked away, never to be read by anyone, and sometimes never to even be written.  Lately, I've felt like writing more of these essays down on paper and even sharing some of them.  In the digital world, it can be hard to walk the tightrope between what is personal and what is public. Although I have a Facebook, instagram, Pinterest, and this blog, I usually lean toward keeping things personal, except of course for when it comes to the "happier" moments in life - birthdays, homemade desserts that actually turn out, vacations that look glamorous under a filter - you know, those kinds of things.  Tears, stress, anxiety, and the many mundane hours of the day are rarely shared in such public places such as instagram or Facebook, and for good reasons.  We share what we want to remember - revising our memories sometimes as we create them - and usually we'd rather remember (and have others see) our happier moments. However, for me, sometimes sharing and viewing all of the positive moments in our own and other's lives makes the hard things harder.  Although most of the time I enjoy the inspiration that comes from being constantly exposed to other's achievements and joys, sometimes, our hard things can feel more lonely as a result. With that being said, I decided to share one of those "essays" I wrote a few weeks ago in my head that ended up on paper. Sometimes sharing our positive moments helps us through difficult situations, and sometimes sharing our less positive moments helps, too. After two failed artificial inseminations, this is a case of the latter.  

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We did our first iui February 1, 2015. My RE said AF was supposed to arrive 14dpiui; instead, she came 15 dpiui, which gave me and my DH more hope than usual for 24 hours straight. During those 24 hours, I kept telling myself: PUPO.  Today marks CD8.  In translation: My “DH” (dear husband) and I are going through infertility treatments, and I’ve officially reached the point of obsessively reading online infertility forums. 

Besides learning a new language in acronyms, we’ve adopted words like clomid, letrozole, follicles, andrology, vericoceles, morphology, and motility into our daily lives over the last several years. 

To make a long story short, cumulatively between not preventing, sorta trying, and really trying, we’ve “tried” for over two years to get pregnant (thirty months, to be exact). Honestly, it didn’t become hard until about nine months ago when we learned there were anatomical things going on preventing us from getting pregnant on our own (unfortunately, it’s not “stress” like so many well-intentioned people assume).  Since then, our experience trying to get pregnant has become very different from what I expected it would be like – romantic, exciting, even naïve to some extent.  Instead, it’s become a carefully calculated science where we could literally get pregnant without even having to see each other in the same day.

Essentially, here’s how it works: Each month after being pumped full of hormones, I am basically poked and prodded for different things at different times throughout the month.  The first poking happens through an ultrasound, where instead of anxiously checking on a baby, we hope for at least one mature follicle, which is a sign of a mature egg about to ovulate.  A few days later, I’m given a trigger shot to ensure ovulation 36 hours before the insemination, and finally, a catheter to my uterus performs the insemination after Tanner, you know, does his thing.  After all is poked and prodded, we wait for two weeks, hoping for a “BFP” (big fat positive).  If we get a disappointing “BFN” (big fat negative), we feel sorry for ourselves for a couple of days, and then we start the process over. 

More annoying than the physical process of poking and prodding is the waiting, because it is like being in a constant state of limbo – except you know exactly what you want, which makes it that much harder to wait patiently.  Meanwhile, it seems like everyone you know is getting pregnant – and while you truly are happy for each one of them – it is also a reminder of your own desires that feel like they are becoming more and more unreachable, even if they are not. There’s just no way to know for sure. Besides, even if you could know, all your synthetically-charged hormonal emotions wouldn’t listen to logic anyway. Honestly, I do believe it will work out one way or another and we will be content with whatever that is, but that doesn’t always translate to a feeling of peace, and as much as I believe in the future, I believe in accepting and living whatever is happening in the present. And oftentimes the present is hopeful, but other times it’s disappointing, discouraging, or unfortunately, full of jealousy.  

One thing I’ve learned is that it is what it is until it is what we make of it, and right now, I haven’t made anything of it, so it is what it is.  We go to late night movies. We make dinner together. We stay up too late, and I sleep in too late. We plan trips on a whim. We spend hours watching Netflix. We eat out when we feel like it. We get brunch on Saturdays (and that’s the only reason we get out of bed).  We go on dates every night of the week. And as quickly as we’d swap a baby for our current way of life, what it is means doing our best at waiting by living in our present, even the hard parts.