Don't Count Your Eggs

A dot on the time line

Momo turned a year old yesterday.

A year.

It's been the shortest longest year of my life.

Sometimes, when I work with client's in my private practice (I'm a psychotherapist when I'm not covered in food and reading up on naps-- yup, still obsessed with naps), I do this timeline thing that I think helps put difficult times in perspective. We draw a line with birth on one end and present day on the other and start to fill in dots with important events (positive and negative). It helps to get a sense of life and things that might impact us and how we feel etc., but it also puts into perspective how a moment in time, even if that moment is a year or more, is really just a small section on this long line of events. If I did my own timeline, the dark infertility years would be a few dark circles on a longish line, with (hopefully) a decent amount of line to go. A timeline like this also makes you realize how fast it all happens, and is a reminder to enjoy every second of the good parts.

Momo just got her first dot. Well, I don't know. Maybe that's for her to decide later. But it was a significant dot/milestone for Noah and I. She can walk about 6 steps. She says dada all the time and mama when she's crying. A year ago yesterday she was stuck in my vag hole for four hours. The year before that she was a microscopic cell in a freezer and I was a ball of tears on a bed. And here she is on her birthday--nothing but wonder and joy and amazement. 

And all I can do is think about the timeline of our life and our journey to her. This incredible little person that was patiently waiting for her turn to break into the world. She's a force man, a total wild spirit who wakes up each morning with a smile on her face that's ready to take on and explore everything. 

The bad times feel like forever, but they won't be. The good times feel like a split second, so we have to savor. The journey to parenthood is often ugly, but at then end is a new beginning, and that's beautiful.

Sending love and luck to everyone still moving towards that new beginning. 

A dot on the time line

Momo turned a year old yesterday.

A year.

It's been the shortest longest year of my life.

Sometimes, when I work with client's in my private practice (I'm a psychotherapist when I'm not covered in food and reading up on naps-- yup, still obsessed with naps), I do this timeline thing that I think helps put difficult times in perspective. We draw a line with birth on one end and present day on the other and start to fill in dots with important events (positive and negative). It helps to get a sense of life and things that might impact us and how we feel etc., but it also puts into perspective how a moment in time, even if that moment is a year or more, is really just a small section on this long line of events. If I did my own timeline, the dark infertility years would be a few dark circles on a longish line, with (hopefully) a decent amount of line to go. A timeline like this also makes you realize how fast it all happens, and is a reminder to enjoy every second of the good parts.

Momo just got her first dot. Well, I don't know. Maybe that's for her to decide later. But it was a significant dot/milestone for Noah and I. She can walk about 6 steps. She says dada all the time and mama when she's crying. A year ago yesterday she was stuck in my vag hole for four hours. The year before that she was a microscopic cell in a freezer and I was a ball of tears on a bed. And here she is on her birthday--nothing but wonder and joy and amazement. 

And all I can do is think about the timeline of our life and our journey to her. This incredible little person that was patiently waiting for her turn to break into the world. She's a force man, a total wild spirit who wakes up each morning with a smile on her face that's ready to take on and explore everything. 

The bad times feel like forever, but they won't be. The good times feel like a split second, so we have to savor. The journey to parenthood is often ugly, but at then end is a new beginning, and that's beautiful.

Sending love and luck to everyone still moving towards that new beginning. 

What's the big deal of waiting another month?

I have a friend who is gearing up for IVF for number 2. Her baby is just over a year now, but it took several rounds and was literally the very last kinda wonky embryo they put in that took and became a perfect, beautiful healthy baby. Her diagnosis is "mushy eggs," as in they don't really know why she makes a lot of eggs but very few embryos. Maybe there is a sperm issue, maybe not. Different doctors say different things and at the end of the day she has more questions than answers, but if she wants to expand her family she's got to pull the trigger now. The clock is always ticking.

So she was supposed to start this week. She cleared a shelf in her house for the boxes of meds, and cleared space in her brain to process and accept and understand that this-- all that THIS entails-- was something she was going to TRY in hopes of another kid. Once you've been out of the game for a bit, I would imagine it might be hard to jump back in. The schedule, the appointments, the shots, the crossing of fingers and toes, the waiting...waiting...waiting. The cost, the hormones...maybe I should just stop now. But she had a great attitude. This was just something she has to do, let's just do it! 

When the time came earlier this week for her starting appointment, her doctor happened to be out of town. The nursing staff felt borderline incompetent and suddenly things just got weird. She didn't want to see another doc who she'd never met but she also didn't want to wait another month. What's one more month right? That's what I said. Lil ole incentive me. Another month is not what she had prepared for, and while nothing on IF Island is what we prepare for, the pushing back another month just felt really disappointing. Like she'd have to stare at that empty shelf and continue to wonder and question if this was going to work. It's somehow easier to be in something-- active. By doing shots and being monitored it feels like you're moving forward. Another month feels stagnant. 

I felt frustrated for her, but I also can't fathom doing an IVF round. Ever. Again. I can't fathom another needle to the rear, though I know that is probably in my not so distant future. But even harder I can't fathom the mind fuck that is infertility treatments. Hoping. Waiting. Wondering. Accepting. Letting go. Moving on. Being sad. Being happy. It's all so hard. 

I'm sending love to anyone deep in it. Like my dad said in his very sweet comment the other day, we are all happy that I didn't give up, but man it's rough. Take care of yourself. Take care of your partner. Take care of your heart. 

Seeing the Whole Journey

So I realized Noah and I both wrote a few posts that somehow didn't publish correctly and are somewhere floating in cyberspace. Noah's pretty peeved. I can hardly remember what I wrote about but I swear we haven't been so negligent to have only posted once last month...though...it kinda looks like that's exactly what happened. Apologies and promises to keep up better this month. Part of the reason why I think our posts didn't make the page is because both of our computers died... because we have been overworking them...because we have been working on our documentary... which is almost DONE! Our computers are over it. I'm going to post our new trailer and start dishing out some new scenes as soon as Noah gives me the ok. And the files because I have no idea how any of this works. 

Anyway, one thing I've found to be both therapeutic and eye opening has been the editing process. While I'm not doing any of the heavy lifting here, obviously, I do watch cuts and discuss choices the editor has made and weigh in on it all. It's hard when big events, or things that felt really big get cut because "it doesn't pan out." Or it's a minor blip in our journey. One scene we lost was a scene from Thanksgiving day a few years ago, where we thought everything was falling apart. And it was. And it did. It was such a seemingly huge moment for us. I was sick, literally sick to my stomach that my follicles weren't growing and ended up driving to Palm Springs hysterically crying the entire way and then threw up and went to sleep. And now that scene was on the chopping block and no one really bat an eyelash. But me. The IUIs we did have been shaved down to a 30 second montage. They were MONTHS of our lives, TONS of medication (I was on 8 vials of Menopur a day!) and of course the repeated torture of the 2WW. A 30. second. montage. But we needed to whittle 200 hours of footage over about four years down to under 90 minutes. So some things had to go.

What it made me realize is that everything that felt so important, so dire, so intense at the time ended up not being so in retrospect. But only in retrospect. Had I been able to see the big picture, to keep perspective, to see all that we did as steps on our journey to her, to our Momo, then maybe each event wouldn't have felt so life or death. But it did. It just really did. 

Being able to take a step back and watch all this has been such an interesting process. For both of us. Maybe I'll give Noah another shot at a Hubs post, though I think he's stilled pretty unhappy about his lost post from last week. For me, it has given me some space and distance and the ability to smile at what we did to find this baby. And now we can let go of some of these things, these procedures (OMG I'm almost laughing at how I thought the HSG I did was the worst thing that's ever happened to me), these scars because we can see the gestalt of it all. 

I wish that for everyone on the Island who feels like they're drowning in heartbreak. I wish we could all pull back and believe that even in moments of despair and so-called "failure," that things will eventually be ok. They have to be. When you're at the bottom, the only way to go is up. Hopefully. Sending lots of love.