Are we there yet?

If each petal on a flower were a dream, hope, or belief of how my life would go, then I have lost many.  Some were just a part of growing up, and others the result of the cards my life has dealt me.  This journey has me sitting and plucking petals.  Making sweet love to my husband and creating a child together…using an ovulation induction medication to create new life…being inseminated at my doctor’s office to procreate…and most recently braving the waters of IVF.  All petals that made their way to the base of the flower. 

While I still believe that the flower remains fragrant and beautiful, it’s missing some of what it used to have.  That’s me right now.  I guess I just need to know where to buy some M.iracle G.row, right?

The words of two kept dancing through my sleepless mind last night, “But you have Lucky.  He’s beautiful and he calls you mom.”  So true.  Yet, he is not a magical healer.  He doesn’t erase the fact that I, at the ripe old age of 28, have to look in the mirror and know that I am barren.  I am sterile.  I cannot create life.  That’s a very large pill to swallow.  It’s not that I don’t appreciate my circumstance with Lucky beyond measure.  I’m thankful for him every day.  This is more of an image readjustmant of myself.  It feels final.  Concrete.  Odd.  This doesn’t mean it is the end of our journey.  No.  This is just a huge blow personally.

What gets me by right now is having amazing family and friends.  My mother fielded all my phone calls yesterday, and called those who needed to know.  My husband and I sat cross legged on the floor of the bedroom, and I said, “It’s just a bit weird knowing that this will be your biological child, but not technically mine.  It’s not bad at all.  It’s just different.”  To which he sweetly responded, “We could use a sperm donor.  I don’t care.”  It made me smile, because I knew he was serious.  I love that man.  It’s moments like these that seperate the boys from the men.  Of course we wouldn’t use a sperm donor when his gametes work just fine.  It was a beautiful offer though.

So, now I have this need to make my house beautiful.  I didn’t think I would be moving back into it.  However, now there is no need for more space.  Another child is far off on our calendar (think a year, due to waiting lists.)  I’m trying to not view it as going back with our tails between our legs.  I keep telling myself this is good, because then the market will pick up!  I have the burning desire to make the place special.  To reinvent it.  Perhaps this runs deeper.  I’m not sure.

Today is a uniquely busy day.  Often I feel as if I am straddling and invisible line between two worlds.  I have a part of me in the adoption world and another in the world of assisted reproductive technology.  Neither has come to a full resolution.  We work whole hearted towards completing our son’s adoption, and yet nearly a year has gone by.  We also work tirelessly through infertility treatments.  It’s such a strange experience, and I often wish I knew of somebody who was or is in a similar situation.

Furthering the difference is that we are adopting through the f.oster c.are system.  Add another layer of difference is that we got a perfectly healthy newborn.  So, this often leaves me in such a strange place.  I believe I’ve dedicated myself to making this odd place my own little niche…my home…my reality.

Today I will fill out more forms to take another step towards completing our son’s adoption, go and get a quote for his first birthday cake, and get blood drawn and a follicle scan.  Everything is exciting all the way around.  The magnitude of everything going on has not hit me.  I guess I’m just floating through this experience and trying to take everything in.  My little boy is turning one in eleven days, but every day I live in fear that they will knock on my door to take him away.  My tummy feels like somebody took a Louisville Slugger to it, as Bravelle and Menopur have caused my skin to be super sensitive and quite sore.  Yet, I am lucky enough to hold my son for one more day and be given the opportunity to attempt to create him a little brother or sister.  So, I have no room for complaints.

I’m ready for days that move past the procreation stage of my life.  I’m ready to play with my children in the pool, watch them kick a soccer ball around the yard, and have big popsicle grins.  Yet, I still desperately try to cling to every minute with Lucky.  It’s like grasping for a single grain of sand.  Time is tricky like that.  It truly holds the trump card.

So, that’s just my thoughts from a rainy Monday morning.

Every once in a while you get to experience something that you just know is big.  It’s the kind of thing that you know is important, something you won’t soon forget.  That’s where I am now.  I know how big this experience is.  In-vitro is something that many women never get the chance to do.  My body almost robbed me of this opportunity.  Yet, despite it all, here I am.

Even though this experience is so large, I’m surprisingly zen about it.  I’m not sure where that comes from.  I’ve somehow managed to come to terms that these are the cards I’ve been dealt.  I can complain about them or do what I would normally do during any card game, play them the best I can.  Upon arriving at the baseline scan, Nurse Favorite asked me how I was doing.  “Great!” I responded with more optimism and sincerity than even I expected.  She asked if I was nervous about this process.  When I told her that I truly wasn’t, she told me I was the only one cycling that isn’t.  Interesting.  Why am I so strangely calm?  I have no clue.

So, I’m not sure what to say as of late.  Tomorrow I start stimming.  It will certainly be interesting to mix the meds, uncomfortable to inject myself more than once, but humbling to watch what can be done when science and biology combine.  I guess I’m just in awe of how technical, involved, emotional, and exciting this all is.

Well, off to catch some shut eye.