Looks like I ovulated later than usual this month. It's hard to say exactly when, but it might well have been when Adam was out of town. Or maybe we just didn't get pregnant, for whatever reason.
I'm beginning to contemplate whether it would be smart for us to meet with an adoption agency when we move back home next month. Just to get some of the preliminary work underway. It might be that I'll get pregnant and it'll stick and all will be well. But I need to learn more about our options. Adoption takes time. And if we ever do manage to have a bio kid, we'd still want to adopt a second, if possible.
Meanwhile, we'll get back on the schedule that has worked for us in the past: sex every day in the 10-day fertile window (to allow for o-date variations).
On other news, I just flew home yesterday, after having completed all my job interviews. They went well. At least, I'm happy with how I did. If I don't get any job offers, I'll still know that I did my best. Meanwhile, I wonder what will happen if someone does make an offer. Can I handle a new job while also dealing with TTC and potential miscarriage? What if I do get pregnant? These jobs are all intense. Not pregnancy-friendly. They're also great opportunities. Career-defining opportunites. Do I let them pass me by on the off-chance that I end up with a baby that I want to be home with for a while? Could the stress of a new job hinder our attempts? I can't answer these questions until I know whether or not there's an offer at hand, but if that does happen, I'm going to have to decide quickly. Help.
Friday, June 15, 2007
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
"The world is a narrow bridge...
...the important thing is to not be afraid."
-Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav
-Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav
Friday, June 1, 2007
Wha?
My chart is fucked up this month. I thought I was seeing an ovulation spike yesterday, but it dropped again today. Meanwhile, the thermometer is giving me a different temp every time I take it. Just two minutes apart, these temps tend to go up steadily, even though I haven't gotten out of bed or even moved.
Just in case I have ovulated, I've started taking low-dose baby aspirin for the rest of this cycle. But I'm so very much in denial about what I'll also have to do if I actually get pregnant.
Just in case I have ovulated, I've started taking low-dose baby aspirin for the rest of this cycle. But I'm so very much in denial about what I'll also have to do if I actually get pregnant.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Meditation
I finished up my last day at work and am now officially an independent contractor. It's strange, having no office to go to, no place where I have to be. Unsettling. And there's a lot of contract work to do. At least I can do it sitting on my bed.
Adam and I took a long weekend in a resort town nearby. It was a charming place, as they always are, and unfancy. Mineral baths were cheap and clean, which really played to my egalitarian fantasies. Spas for everyone!
Lying in the bath, knowing I was near ovulation, I tuned in to something like sadness and unease. So I talked to those emotions the way my old therapist taught me: You give the feelings a persona (actually, you just let the image come to you. It's usually a younger version of yourself), and then talk to her in the voice of your most wise, compassionate self. It's a Sybilesque dialogue, a way to soothe the difficult emotions, and accept them as part of you, but not all of you.
I asked her (the image I got was of a younger me...early teens?) what was wrong. I got a deep sadness in my gut, and tears in my eyes. "I can't believe you're going to make me go through this again," she said, crying now. The miscarriages. I imagined gathering her up and telling her that I won't leave her alone this time. I pictured all the resources we had now, the ones we didn't have before. Being back home again. A safety net. I said I wouldn't abandon her like I did before, no matter how anxious or sad she gets. And I pictured all the different parts of me as a group that could surround her with love and safety. I resisted the part of me (it's always there) that saw the exercise as silly and indulgent.
It helped. But sometimes it's so hard to do this work while still living in the world. There's no space to stay tuned in like this. And yet I seem to need to do it. How?
Adam and I took a long weekend in a resort town nearby. It was a charming place, as they always are, and unfancy. Mineral baths were cheap and clean, which really played to my egalitarian fantasies. Spas for everyone!
Lying in the bath, knowing I was near ovulation, I tuned in to something like sadness and unease. So I talked to those emotions the way my old therapist taught me: You give the feelings a persona (actually, you just let the image come to you. It's usually a younger version of yourself), and then talk to her in the voice of your most wise, compassionate self. It's a Sybilesque dialogue, a way to soothe the difficult emotions, and accept them as part of you, but not all of you.
I asked her (the image I got was of a younger me...early teens?) what was wrong. I got a deep sadness in my gut, and tears in my eyes. "I can't believe you're going to make me go through this again," she said, crying now. The miscarriages. I imagined gathering her up and telling her that I won't leave her alone this time. I pictured all the resources we had now, the ones we didn't have before. Being back home again. A safety net. I said I wouldn't abandon her like I did before, no matter how anxious or sad she gets. And I pictured all the different parts of me as a group that could surround her with love and safety. I resisted the part of me (it's always there) that saw the exercise as silly and indulgent.
It helped. But sometimes it's so hard to do this work while still living in the world. There's no space to stay tuned in like this. And yet I seem to need to do it. How?
Saturday, May 26, 2007
To clarify
After I wrote my last post, it occurred to me that what I had written is exactly the sort of thing that would have freaked me out right after my first miscarriage. So I should just say here that it's not inevitable for a woman feel up feeling as though she's dragging around a dead part of herself after a pregnancy loss. What happened to me happened in the context of my life, my family history, the other losses that were happening concurrently, the fact that we were living 3000 miles away from family, a frustrating job situation, and my own tendency toward anxiety when times get really tough.
I do think that the nature of grief is different for these sorts of losses. But people are bound to feel it to widely varying degrees.
I do think that the nature of grief is different for these sorts of losses. But people are bound to feel it to widely varying degrees.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
The grief that we know
Rosepetal has sustained more losses this year than anyone should ever have to. She wrote so eloquently today about her grief. How she can't eat, how she feels like a shell of her former self. It got me thinking about one of the subtle, profound experiences of miscarriage and infant loss. It's hard to talk about this without sounding a little extreme, a little melodramatic. But it's worth a try, because there's something here that I wish I had understood at the time.
The process of birth is one of separation (and actually, reunion). In utero, the baby is part of you, made from your very body, and yet it is not you. It's a complex reality. Two realities, really, existing simultaneously. The baby is of your body. In many ways, you and the baby are one. Women sometimes describe giving birth and saying, "You mean, there was another person inside me all that time?" Similarly, when the baby is born, s/he doesn't yet grasp that the mother is a separate person. As the baby grows, so does the awareness of an individual identity. It's a gradual thing. Both mother and baby slowly begin to conceive of the other as unique, separate.
So when that baby dies, doesn't part of you die, too? And not just in the poetic sense (as in, "It's so sad I could die"). The part of you that was one with the baby is dead. You aren't alive the way you were before. You're walking wounded, but worse. Dragging this dead part of you, like a paralyzed limb, everywhere you go.
I was trying to explain this to my sister-in-law, who was trying to dismiss the loss. "Something died inside me," I told her, instinctively putting my hand on my abdomen. "My baby died inside me." And suddenly she winced in sympathetic pain and never minimized our loss again.
That is why this grief is so different. It's emotional and physical. Our bodies grieve this loss, not just our minds/hearts. It's almost as if we live in a liminal state between life and death. We feel like shells of our former selves because, in a sense, we are.
When I was at my worst, that sense of being close to death, of some part of me being dead, terrified me. I feared that I was on the verge of becoming suicidal...that with just a little more stress, something would break and overtake me and make me do something horrible. But that didn't happen. Thankfully, with help, I began to see that it wasn't suicidality, but something else. No less awful, but different. The death I was feeling wasn't some future thing to fear. It had already happened.
For a while after that, I wasn't so haunted by death, but still felt untethered, disconnected from the world. I remember hiking up my favorite hill one day and lying down in the sun at the top. Before my miscarriages, I had always had the feeling there that I was grounded, with the comforting warmth of the earth under my back. But now I felt as if I could just float away. The earth could just shake me off. Adam and my family were the only things that gave me context and tethered me to my life. I held on tightly to them.
Then, with time and help (Adam, therapy, family, Celexa), I began to have glimmers of feeling alive again. Those moments kept me going. I had moments of feeling like I belonged in this world. There would still be dark days, but they would be followed by days in which I felt that I felt connected, even rooted. I began to feel like myself. And then, in time, I began to believe in the future.
I am awed to know that, even after such darkness, life can still come back. It feels like a miracle. In fact, I can only feel safe talking about those dark days now that I know that they can recede. I used to think that resilience meant never falling down. Being unhurt by injury. But maybe that's not it. Maybe it's more about coming through to the other side.
The process of birth is one of separation (and actually, reunion). In utero, the baby is part of you, made from your very body, and yet it is not you. It's a complex reality. Two realities, really, existing simultaneously. The baby is of your body. In many ways, you and the baby are one. Women sometimes describe giving birth and saying, "You mean, there was another person inside me all that time?" Similarly, when the baby is born, s/he doesn't yet grasp that the mother is a separate person. As the baby grows, so does the awareness of an individual identity. It's a gradual thing. Both mother and baby slowly begin to conceive of the other as unique, separate.
So when that baby dies, doesn't part of you die, too? And not just in the poetic sense (as in, "It's so sad I could die"). The part of you that was one with the baby is dead. You aren't alive the way you were before. You're walking wounded, but worse. Dragging this dead part of you, like a paralyzed limb, everywhere you go.
I was trying to explain this to my sister-in-law, who was trying to dismiss the loss. "Something died inside me," I told her, instinctively putting my hand on my abdomen. "My baby died inside me." And suddenly she winced in sympathetic pain and never minimized our loss again.
That is why this grief is so different. It's emotional and physical. Our bodies grieve this loss, not just our minds/hearts. It's almost as if we live in a liminal state between life and death. We feel like shells of our former selves because, in a sense, we are.
When I was at my worst, that sense of being close to death, of some part of me being dead, terrified me. I feared that I was on the verge of becoming suicidal...that with just a little more stress, something would break and overtake me and make me do something horrible. But that didn't happen. Thankfully, with help, I began to see that it wasn't suicidality, but something else. No less awful, but different. The death I was feeling wasn't some future thing to fear. It had already happened.
For a while after that, I wasn't so haunted by death, but still felt untethered, disconnected from the world. I remember hiking up my favorite hill one day and lying down in the sun at the top. Before my miscarriages, I had always had the feeling there that I was grounded, with the comforting warmth of the earth under my back. But now I felt as if I could just float away. The earth could just shake me off. Adam and my family were the only things that gave me context and tethered me to my life. I held on tightly to them.
Then, with time and help (Adam, therapy, family, Celexa), I began to have glimmers of feeling alive again. Those moments kept me going. I had moments of feeling like I belonged in this world. There would still be dark days, but they would be followed by days in which I felt that I felt connected, even rooted. I began to feel like myself. And then, in time, I began to believe in the future.
I am awed to know that, even after such darkness, life can still come back. It feels like a miracle. In fact, I can only feel safe talking about those dark days now that I know that they can recede. I used to think that resilience meant never falling down. Being unhurt by injury. But maybe that's not it. Maybe it's more about coming through to the other side.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Time to get busy
It's CD10 and we're entering the window of fertility. Oh please let this work.
Meanwhile, for your entertainment...
http://cutethingsfallingasleep.blogspot.com
Meanwhile, for your entertainment...
http://cutethingsfallingasleep.blogspot.com
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