Don't Count Your Eggs

Why are the holidays so hard on IF Island?

They just are. 

Noah and I usually spend turkey day with his family up in Seattle. Thats' where we are now. Looking back on the last few Thanksgivings has given me some...I don't know, perspective in how very thankful I am this year.

Thanksgiving 2012 was the WORST. We were mid IVF cycle and things were quickly falling apart. Noah and I ate the equivalent of airplane food turkey at a hotel in Palms Springs (because we couldn't travel with our doctor appointment schedule) and imagined that Thanksgiving the following year would be different. Thanksgiving 2013 was different but not in a good way. Not in the way we were hoping for. The egg donation cycle we did with my sister the summer of 2013 was a bust, so by November we were still trying to figure things out. That was the time I "found" Momo and we went to meet with the clinic about embryo donation. It all seemed really... bizarre yet hopeful. Last Thanksgiving, 2014 I was on bed rest with Momo, and I couldn't believe she was becoming a person inside of me. I was terrified but thankful for every day she grew bigger and stronger. 

This year we are back in Seattle, with Momo. Now I can't imagine our lives and our family in any other way. Though it's exhausting and chaotic to travel or pretty much do anything with a curious 8 month old, she blows my mind every day and her existence makes me eternally thankful. 

Noah has a group of friends back home who all have kids. Some have one, some have three. Momo is the youngest. Tonight they all came over to crawl on top of each other chew each others toys, and I had a moment of overwhelming gratitude that we could be a part of this. I'm very much aware that many people who go home for the holidays have similar moments of friends and family and babies, yet surrounded by their loved ones they can't help but feel totally alone. Noah and I know that feeling-- that longing and sadness and we send love to everyone out there who is in that situation today.

All I can say is it might take time, years perhaps, but eventually things change. Eventually something has to give. Eventually you don't feel so lonely. 

Happy Thanksgiving. Wishing that regardless of where you are in your journey to parenthood that you can find something beautiful to be thankful for. 

Visiting our old stomping grounds

Yesterday, Noah and I took Momo to visit or RE. I'm always super aware of what bringing a baby into a fertility clinic might be like for people there, but we managed to find a time that wasn't too busy. On our drive over, I remembered all the drives we did to the clinic. The different seasons, the different years, the different situations, the different facial hair Noah had. I remembered the early morning drives for egg retrieval and then embryo transfers-- how quiet we both were as we drove through the early morning gray, silently praying that this was finally it. I remembered the way the front door to the clinic opened and how the clock behind the front desk always seemed to be stuck at 11 o'clock. The twilight zone. 

Today, I sat in the back seat with Momo on our drive. She held my finger and we chatted. I told her all about how the doc helped us get her and I held back tears of... I don't know what. Memory? The past? The amazing future I see strapped into a giant carseat? 

It was good to see the RE on these terms. It was a moment I never fathomed. The nursing staff was completely different. Their outfits were different. But the gal at the front desk was the same, and she welcomed us with a different smile. I can't even count the number of times I walked out of that office in tears. It seems like a life time ago. 

The doctor put his head to Momo's forehead and for a quick moment I could tell he got lost in her presence. He makes babies from scratch but I think rarely sees the end result. After ten weeks or so, once his job is done, we all "graduate" from the RE and take our nauseous, anxious selves to our OBGYN's office, pissed off at the lack of special attention we get.

Now Momo is almost 8 months old. She's crawling and standing and loves anything she's not supposed to have, because she's human. She has 4 1/2 teeth and a smile that melts away the years of struggle it took to get her.  I get lost in her presence every day, and when I reflect on the drive to the fertility clinic, on the giant orange folder I have full of IVF schedules and payment receipts, and early ultrasound pictures that never manifested to anything beyond that-- a picture, I think about how incredible the journey to parenthood is for some of us. How F-ing tough some of us have to be to find our baby. And I think about how when in the middle of the journey, when standing between two roads that diverge in a yellow wood, all we feel is lost. 

Lost eventually becomes found. Some way or another. 

The Beauty of Retrospect

Noah and I have been working on our documentary, and we hope to be in a good place with it but the end of the year. It's with an editor now who has been putting together the different acts, and last night Noah and I watched Act 1 and Act 2. Going through infertility and a "journey" to parenthood is insanity. But being able to watch back every moment of it-- every decision, every heartbreak, every moment of hope and excitement, is its own kind of insanity. In a good way. I think.

Noah just said, "I have a sense of calm about it all, watching the footage. It's because I know how it ends." I thought that hits the nail on the head. We found our ending, we found our baby, but for many years everything was up in the air and crashing down on our heads simultaneously. What stood out to me, watching the early days of IVF, was how convinced I was that it would just work. Why wouldn't it? If you do the meds and spend the money and have a good doc, it should work, right? Wrong. If you farm out eggs and then do it all over again, it should work, right? Wrong. Each time, each procedure I was so hopeful, and I don't regret that. What choice did I have? At times when things didn't work out as hoped, I know I felt...embarrassed or maybe stupid for feeling hopeful. But I shouldn't have. Noah and I gave the whole process everything we had, every time and the shock and sadness of coming up empty handed hurt in the exact same way, every time. 

And then something worked. It was suuuppper iffy for a while, but it worked. And now we can look back and see the timeline clearly. We can watch the ups and downs and reflect on the worst (hopefully) time in our lives as something we survived. But it was really hard to see it in this light while we were in it. 

We started interviewing other people who came out the other end of infertility with beautiful families, so we knew there would be an end, but it was nearly impossible to really believe when the onslaught of bad news felt constant. 

In a million years I couldn't have imagined the baby we got. I couldn't imagine how we both feel about her and how worth it she is. We don't have to imagine it, because we get to live in, and our time on IF Island is the constant reminder of how lucky we are, and our documentary is not just about infertility and making modern families and IVF, but it's about her.

While I was in grad school, there was a saying that the professors often told us. "Trust the process." Many a time I wanted to say F the process, because often times being in a process means being unsettled or being not yet where you want to be. Trusting the process of finding your family is one of the hardest things to figure out how to do. But if you're open to different options  (and have the means to pay for said options-- this is a topic for another post I'm working on) you will find your baby. 

Sending luck and love.