Birth Plan

Aside from couples who get married in Vegas on the strength of one too many cocktails, G and I probably had one of the worst wedding nights imaginable.  Now that I think about it, those couples probably have pretty good wedding nights.  It’s just the next day that sucks.

Our wedding night started by my failing to pull up the parking break on our get-away car, with the result that it rolled down a steep embankment, smashed into a 150 year old stone wall, and then continued its journey into a busy street.  Thankfully, nobody was hurt, but the experience of being called by the cops in our room at the very beginning of, shall we say….festivities, was one that I am not eager to repeat.

Sad to say, there were no festivities that night.

When I got back to the room after being interviewed by the police, I found my brand new husband dressed and ready to go out for the evening.  Now, granted, this was our original plan and something that he had been looking forward to for weeks, but I was no longer in a partying mood.  He really wanted to go.  I really wanted to stay.  The end result was an epic battle that continued for the next three hours with no solution.  We ended up going out for dinner, but it wasn’t the party my husband wanted.  Sitting in a smoky bar-slash-restaurant eating wings and swilling beer, needless to say, wasn’t what I wanted, either.  By the end of the night, I think that we wanted, and both were thinking about, a divorce.

We had a no good very bad time. 

But then, we went to sleep and we got up in the morning, surprisingly next to each other.  We talked….and talked.  And we figured it out.  We came to the agreement that we had both been selfish.  This was not a good way to begin a marriage and that we could not let it continue.  Going forward, we had to put the other person first, whenever reasonable to do so. 

To cement this decision, we raised our index fingers to make a “number one” and then we took those same fingers and linked them together, turning our “number ones” into bridge between us.  Even though our fight on that night was the worst in our marriage, it exposed us to a fundamental truth that has helped us survive much greater challenges than a smushed car and a missed night partying with the boys.

When pregnant with the twins, I remembered that night.  I knew that, like our wedding night, the night that the twins were born would be important.  It would be a story of triumph, recognition and attachment that we would feel forever.  The experience would instantly cement me as a mother and validate me, after two long years of infertility, as a woman.  It would be the night of all nights. 

Needless to say, it didn’t work out that way.  Instead of what we wanted, we got an emergency c-section, a rushed and botched spinal which resulted in general anesthesia, and two premature babies in the NICU.  G sat alone for an hour outside the surgery, wondering if he had any immediate family left, while they worked me and the boys.  I didn’t see my sons until late the next day.   It was not what I imagined or wanted.

For a long time afterwards, any thought of the birth that I had infuriated me.  I couldn’t think about it without feeling a surge of red hot anger and pain grip the back of my neck. Despite the living, breathing, vital presence of the boys, I felt robbed by that birth, and in a very fundamental way. 

And then, very slowly and surely, something happened.  Maybe it was time, maybe it was my expanding love for the children, or maybe it was something else entirely, but the birth experience slowly stopped being that important.  As my memories of the boys accumulated, as I saw them eat and crawl and smile and bang their little hands on the table, the fact that I did not see them emerge from my body ceased to matter.  There existence was, and is, all.

We just don’t always know our bodies.  They can do crazy things to surprise us, like trying to die, just when we want them to live the most.  Having had the birth that I did and having had to live with that birth, my perspective is that perhaps we expect the birth of our children to do a little too much for us. 

My birth did not validate my womanhood; it did not provide me with a magical bonding experience; it did not, or perhaps it did, showcase the abilities of my body.  I’m not saying that these things never happen but that, when they do, we need to accept them for the gift that they are rather than expect them as a right.   Despite all that I expected birth to do for me emotionally, I needed to acknowledge at the level of bone and of blood that it really is about that living child – whether that child is in the nursery or in my arms. 

Believe me, it took a lot of wasted anger and regret to even approach this perspective, much the less try to articulate it.  I still struggle with it.  Ultimately, however,  I want to be in that place where that I can raise my index finger, twine it around the tiny hands of my sons to make a bridge, and let my sense of loss over their birth go as I fully realize that it really is, was, and will be, all about them.

If you managed to make it to the end of this epic post, the longest one I’ve ever written or probably ever will write….thank you, thank you for hanging in there with me, thank you for reading.

I wish it was just a bad haircut

You know that vague sort of sadness that you sometimes get?  Or maybe I'm the only one who does this, but I'm a little sad today.  Usually, when the vague sadness comes, it's not about little things that I can control, but about big things that I can't sway, no matter how hard I try.

It's not only that the babies are getting older, but the gradually dawning fact that our family seems to be complete.  On most days, I'm content with this not-quite-decision; however, the truth of the matter is that the decision was really made for us by a combination of factors:

Factor One:  Age
It was obvious from our two cycles, at least obvious to me, that my eggs were at the peetering out-last-gasp-stage.  The first cycle, they peetered out altogether.  During the second cycle, we had a piss-poor fertilization rate despite ICSI and only one egg actually implanted.  We have twins because that one egg split.  Our chances would be worse, I believe, a second time around.  Unless the clinic knows something that I don't know, we don't have any embryos "on ice."

Factor Two: Mentality
I handle stress extremely poorly.  I mean, freak out, loose all perspective, the world is ending, poorly.  I'm not sure that I would be able handle a third, fourth, or fifth IVF cycle which not only has implications for me and George, but for the twins as well. 

The discussion about the new guidelines for the number of embryos to transfer on Julie's site throws this all into relief.  Because of the risks and costs (social, personal, and financial) involved with twins, we would probably only transfer one embryo to hopefully have a single child.  Although some research suggests that transferring a single blastocyst does not negatively affect success rates, we've never had any embryos make it to the blastocyst stage and I do not believe the success rates with transferring a single embryo to be as high as transferring more than one.  So, it could take us a while, which would not be a good thing considering my mental state can best be described as "shakey" when we're cycling.

Also, the recovery from the twins has been hard.  Five weeks on bedrest plus paralysis from some unknown factor, probably the epidural, left me unable to walk.  It also left me fat --really nasty, no-muscle-tone, fat.  I was a shadow of myself until about five months after the twins were born.  Although part of me wants to be pregnant again and do it "right" this time, "right" being a non-high-risk pregnancy plus a vaginal delivery, there's no guarantee that this would happen. 

Factor Three: Exhaustion
Parenting twins is exhausting.  Plain and simple.  And, parenting twins is all we know.  So, when he thinks of doing this again, George looks back on our first three months and says not only "no" but "hell, no" and gazes at me like I've completely gone off my rocker.

So, we're done.  It's really the only decision that makes sense considering everything.  It made sense when we made it; it makes sense now.  Some people are lucky enough to just realize that their family is complete; for others, it's more of a negotiation.  Being infertile, our decision was and is a negotiation.  However, I'm still a little sad.

And that makes sense, too, doesn't it?

And just imagine, I was feeling guilty

I came across an article today with the headline "Study: Exercise Hinders Pregnancy for Women Using IVF" and was ...  relieved.   During our last IVF, I became quite the couch potato.  In fact, I was pretty potatoey during our failed IVF as well.  It wasn't just the sticking, but the bloating, the pinging, as well as the complete lack of both time and energy.

It was good to know that my couch potato strategy was actually a strategy.

But upon reading, I kinda hated the article. 

For one, it divided women into two groups:  "younger" women trying to conceive naturally as opposed to "people at an age where fertility might be an issue."  As far as I understood, the research was about women pursuing IVF, not your stereotypical I-was-working-too-hard-at-my-1,000-a-week-job-to-have-a-baby "older" women.  If there's one thing I've learned from reading infertile blogs, it's that inferility occurs for numerous reasons, some that nobody knows, that have nothing to do with age.

Second, it hypothesized that the reason why women do better if they don't exercise four hours a more per week can be linked to ye old cavemen days.  Apparently, women don't get pregnant so well when they're running away from nasty predators or engaging in other such "stressful activities."  This sounded an awful lot like "just relax" to me.

But while the article annoyed me, it didn't lead to the white-hot anger that it would have over a year ago.  Two years ago, I would have been writing vitriolic emails to ABC news, the study author, and Dr. Ina Cholst.   While I'm still tempted to do this, the vitriol just isn't as vitriolic anymore.

While I am and will always be infertile, I think it's a good thing that the everydayness, the point where infertility was my job and my life, is fading.  It leaves room for some other things.  And that's as it should be.

New Drug

There's nothing like the couple of days right after a good ultrasound, especially one that marks a milestone such as 20 weeks.  These days, before new doubt starts to creep in, are a new drug that keeps me waddling waltzing around the house with a grin on my face and a tendancy to burst into laughter at any given moment.  G never quite knows what to make of this change of affairs.

Usually the ultrasound effect fades after a few days without a trace.  This time, however, it's going to leave a mark and a slight dent in my wallet.

During our IVF treatments, I could barely look at baby things much the less purchase anything whose presence would only be a reminder of everything we lacked.  Throughout early pregnancy, I couldn't buy anything either because all I could think of was the pain those seemingly innocent little fuzzy things would bring if we miscarried.  After we passed the first trimester, baby things were still off limits, but for slightly different reasons.  Only a week ago, I ran out of Baby Gap, convinced that bringing onsies into the house would be an incomparable act of hubris, certain that the moment I allowed myself to accept and embrace the pregnancy that it would be taken away from me.

On walking past the Baby Gap post-ultrasound, however, I went in and saw the same blue and orange stripped onsies.  And I bought them.  I think that it was a mixture of feeling a little more confident and of suddenly seeing these things as cementing the babies into my life, of preparing a place for them, so that they would know that they were wanted.  Rather than shying away from the baby items for fear of future loss, I suddenly seem drawn to them, as a way of anchoring the two blurry shapes on the ultrasound machine into this world.

When home, I walked the onsies across our new carpet before bringing them up to the back bedroom and putting them into the computer desk drawer.  They're alone for now, but they might not be for long.