A Sense of Urgency

Yesterday, well actually, really early yesterday morning my friend Erika wrote an incredibly thought provoking post. If you haven't read it, head on over and check it out. It really got me thinking about the differences in how I feel and how I'm dealing with our infertility now verses, say, a year ago. A lot has changed for me, but I think the biggest thing is the sense of urgency.

A year ago, we were in the midst of our very first clomid cycle. I had so much hope. I hadn't started reading other infertility blogs. If I had, maybe I would have seen that clomid isn't the "fix all" that it seemed to be. We had just completed the required third period before starting again after the miscarriage. We had just gotten the results back from the first semen analysis and received the "all looks normal" verdict. Everything was looking up for the first time since the miscarriage. And I was so ready.

Don't get me wrong, I'm SUPER ready now. But the last year has shown me that just because you want something doesn't always mean that you'll get that something. Every single time I took a home pregnancy test and saw only one pink line, or every time those first drops of blood showed up, I would lose it. I felt like my heart would rip out of my chest. I felt like I couldn't possibly get through the day. Every single cycle I would calculate just how old I would be for the next due date. Every month that we didn't get pregnant was another month lost, another month bringing me closer to the end, another reason that my family wouldn't look like I had planned. I saw 26 blow by, 27 has now quietly slipped by as well. My due date this cycle would be October 22, 2013… the day after my birthday. I will be 28 years old at the youngest before I am a mother. If you had told me that a year ago, I would have simply told you that was unacceptable. That we needed to do something about it. That we simply can't wait any longer.

Fast forward to now, and well, I've learned a lot. I would be ECSTATIC to get pregnant this month. But I would be equally ecstatic to get pregnant next month. I've come to terms with the fact that I will not carry and give birth to five children. We will never be able to afford IVF enough times to bring my "perfect family" home to me. So I've watched that dream sail on by. Now, I will count myself so very, richly blessed if I ever give birth to one child. I've seen too many people lose to infertility, heard how infertility ruined their lives, seen infertility ruin marriages. We would be some of the lucky ones if we beat infertility at all.  And knowing that I'm not going to be spacing children out every 18-30 months, knowing that I don't have to fit 5 in before I'm 35, well it's taken a sense of the urgency away.

That need to hurry everything up has also gone away as I've realized that having the sense of urgency doesn't actually help anything. It just makes me crazy. The feeling that if we don't get pregnant THIS MONTH all my dreams are ruined just made me feel awful about myself, about my life, about my failures. Removing the sense of urgency doesn't make me want a child any less, it just removes the pressure.

I didn't work to lose the sense of pressure, it has just happened with time. And in no way am I claiming perfection in this life of less pressure. My husband would say I have a long was to go. He asked me if we could take a month off from everything. Now would be the most opportune time to give in as we are barely  doing anything… it's practically nothing. I conceded and said we'd go a month without using OPK's. If we have sex, it will be because we want to, not because of a smiley face. But I told him I can't let go of the BBT charts. It's silly because that is probably the most useless  part of the whole thing. But I can't stand the idea of needing the information and not having it. What if some lightbulb goes off in my doctor's head and he asks for my chart? What if I have to tell him I didn't temp last month, so I have no idea if, or when, I ovulated? I would kick myself over and over for not taking 60 seconds each morning to temp.

See what I mean? The pressure is still there. I still worry about getting it all right so that we have the best odds each month. But the tea kettle's not whistling, the water is at a nice simmer. The pressure is way down and that is all because the sense of urgency has slowly diminished. I'm sure that if we ever make it to IVF, or if we have some other reason to feel that our odds are significantly better, the pressure will be sky high once again. I fully recognize that I can live in the less pressure life, in part, because we aren't cycling. But in the mean time, while we figure our crap out, while we work on our finances, while we choose our next steps, I've got to find a way to just live. And feeling like the world will fall from it's axis if I don't get pregnant this month is just more than I can handle.