I'm a Donor Too

I donated all of my leftover Meno.pur to a couple who had no prescription coverage. I was so excited to know that I was helping someone else towards a shot at their dream and so relieved that the meds wouldn't just be going to waste in my closet. Still... it was surprisingly hard to drop off the boxes,  smile and walk away casually.

I've been holding those meds for months now, knowing I would never use them. I told Prof later, that it felt a little like giving away my "blankie".

God please, I hope their cycle works.

Why Didn't We Do That Sooner?

I suppose the truth is, we did it when we were ready in our hearts and not before. Thank you so much for your comments and tweets of support. It was an intense week, but a decision has been made and an appointment has been set for next week (OMG how fast did they get us in?!) to start the DEIVF process.

I just need my job to lay off with the crazy stress so I can actually soak this in...

One Week (Points to Consider)

I hate those stick figure collections people splash all over their rear windows, but yesterday they served a valid purpose. Prof and I went out for a coffee and pulled up behind one of these on our way home. Prof sighed and said, "I think about the kid thing all the time". Which got the conversation started. By the time we got home, we had acknowledged that we BOTH think about the kid thing pretty much constantly. To distraction. I knew he thought about it too, but somehow I didn't realize he thought about it as much as I do.

To recap, we have established that we are NOT afraid of:

• Using Donor Eggs to conceive
• Losing our relationship to Parenthood

And lo and behold, our thoughts and fears are still running along the same lines:

• Kids are expensive and we're just making ends meet as it is.
• DEIVF kids are even more expensive. Where does that money come from?
• This world is an ugly, scary place in which to launch a tiny little loved one.
• Our lifestyle would have to change dramatically (like you have NO idea how dramatically).
• How do parents get it all done?
• What if we hate being parents?

I think that last one is the real question here. The thing we're really afraid of discovering about ourselves after it's too late.

There's a piece of this puzzle that we can't see yet. I've seen a million and three comments about how everything changes once that baby arrives... specifically how new parents' attitudes toward their own offspring took them by surprise. Without any offspring of our own, we can't see the shape of that puzzle piece to know how it's going to fit into our existing picture.

So standing in the kitchen and tossing all of that out there, we came to two conclusions:

• If we don't do this because we're afraid of A/B/C, then we let the fear win and that's not our style.
• We're not getting any younger and this isn't going to get any easier by postponing it. We need to make a decision and move forward one way or another.

So Prof has proposed an idea. We will have a brief discussion about our thoughts on the subject every evening this week. Next Sunday, we will make a Plan. We even shook on it.

Ongoing Debate

I have reached a point where I accept that no matter what our eventual decision, no matter what our eventual outcome... there is no possible future in which I do not always carry with me some sadness and some resentment regarding my experience of infertility and my perceptions of the fertile world at large. I'm not saying I will be mired in grief and depression for the rest of my life, but this sadness and resentment is part of me now, sort of a household item. I'm looking forward to the time when it's packed in a trunk in the basement, rather out on the coffee table in the living room though.

If someone could wave a magic wand and guarantee that if I had sex with my husband, there would be a baby... I would do it. So why am I debating whether or not I still want to pursue further assisted reproduction, when I know that the treatments aren't my hang-up? Good question.

Letters to a Young Poet

I wanted to share a handful of quotes from Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet that have stuck with me over the years, and some of which repeatedly come to mind when I am in a difficult place. Perhaps I should re-read the entire book...

“The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.”

“We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.”

“Do not assume that he who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find these words” 

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

[The following is my favorite passage of the entire book. I have written it out by hand a number of times to reinforce my memory of it and I refer back to it whenever I am feeling suffocated by my fear of change.]

“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet