Dreams and False Alarms

Someday's I just feel sappy all day long

My friend, the amazing Eva is a Mother! Her baby boy Jay is home, and I've seen a picture of her holding him, and you can just see the light shining right out of her. Lucky mama, lucky baby.

In other news, my donor passed her baseline, and that means I start my baby aspirin, 4mg of Folic Acid and Estrogen shot tonight. Our coordinator said it is thicker than PIO, so I'm a bit apprehensive, but hell, I'll taken a lot of shots in the old hips over the years!

It feels so good to be happy--that is why these friendships are so important, they remind us that even through all the pain that we can still be touched, and that other's happiness increases, not diminishes, our own.

Now if I could only get my hands on that baby! He looks so delicious!

Verklempt is the only word for it, Mike Myers be dammed

Verklempt, though popularized by Mike Myers, is actually a GREAT word for how I'm feeling right now: all choked up with emotion.

I was off the grid, and didn't read my dear friend Eva's post yesterday; she might be meeting her son today!

She is definitely going to meet the birth mom, and I think the baby, but there's always a few more steps, and nothing is certain until it is, but it is SO EXCITING!  Anyhow, I got an email and a picture from her this morning and I just about lost it. The baby is so alert and gorgeous. He has that 'newborn-as-prizefighter' puff, but even in that, you can see what a handsome and smart little guy he is.  You know how babies eyes can be unfocused and sort of blurry looking? Not him. Chrystal clear and looking right at the camera.  

If you are the praying sort, pray that if this is a match, that it goes off with out a hitch. Eva dear needs a little 'easy'  for once!

***

In 2 hours I'm having my baseline sono.  I'm a wreck. I've been holding myself in check, doing my usual not-quite-chicken-little best to manage my anxiety about what today will hold, and after seeing that baby, self is no longer in check.  

I have no illusions left. This doesn't have to work. It should work. It may work. But there are no guarantees. 

Inasmuch as I am coming off as sounding negative, there is a huge part of me that can't imagine that this WON'T work. All of the donors other recipients have gotten pregnant, both of my losses were chromosomal, so my ute is likely to be good (provided it bounces back from the lupron suppression), and yet, it is a risk.

My therapist reminded me yesterday that this is the anniversary of the cycle where I got pregnant with Sparky.  And not much after that is the anniversary of when we lost him.  In addition, it's only 2 weeks until the anniversary of losing Zoe, our sweet kitty. So to say this time of year is a bit fraught, is an understatement.

I'll do my level best to be positive. I'll update as soon as humanly possible.

Both sides now; or maybe soon.

When the going gets tough, this girl goes for Joni Mitchell.

Over the last week I've been thinking a lot about illusions. How important they are to us, our fantasies, our illusions about what is, what can be, what we contain within ourselves, what it means to retire an illusion, how vital we feel when our illusions are met with reality, and how crushing it feels to have an illusion disintegrate right before your eyes.

We've really been struggling with pulling the trigger on the donor. Hmm, I almost changed that, but really, it has felt like 'pulling the trigger' on ourselves.  We have both been wrestling the end of illusion that there is genetic child in our future, and it's a tough one for each of us to let loose of.  I wonder how different this process would be if were only incorporating one donor.  I know that before we knew about the translocation, in my wrestling with the move to donor eggs, I felt both jealous of, and comforted by, the illusion that my relationship to our child would be strengthened by his or her genetic tie to my husband. And when we thought that donor sperm might be our path, there was the illusion that because we would both have my genetic tie, and our tie to each other to cushion the rough spots.

There have been moments when I feel the desire to keen at the loss of my own fertility. I am reminded of how women describe the moment when they realize they are in menopause, and it is the end of the illusion of childbearing, and how for so many the sadness catches them by surprise.  I feel that now. At my saline sono, I was so bitter when the NP said "here is your follicle for this month." Instead of letting it pass I said "fat lot of good that will do me." Ugly bitter moment.

I know everyone thinks their situation is different, but indulge me for a moment. Ours is different. We are a heterosexual couple, choosing to make our family through donor gametes. We could adopt, we have chosen not to. Probably because of another illusion: if we choose the donors, we will have some sense of who the child might be. Of course, that is the biggest illusion of all. Even if we were to make love today and I got pregnant with our mutually genetic child, we could assign characteristics to that child based on our wish to see the links between us and them, but those are fantasies and illusions as well. We are all both the sum of our genetic makeup, and totally unique. 

It feels as if we are struggling with post modern realities in our very bodies.  And no matter what my mind can do with ideas, my body is less than modern, it is prehistoric (Husband may not see things this way, so I'm not speaking for him in this case.). There are moments when I cannot imagine how I can take this alien into my body. This little creature made from the genetic material of two strangers, who I/we have chosen because of our fantasy that they are enough like us to allow us enough of an illusion of sameness to facilitate the connection.  And then, I hold my friends babies, and kiss their sweet little heads, and field their sticky fingers on my face and neck, and I say "Yes, yes, I can do this. I can love any baby. I can love. Period."

I am scared. I am scared of being pregnant. I am scared to being a mother. I am scared of so much. I am scared of getting my hopes up again.  I'm scared that each little disconnection between me and our child will fuel my illusion that I wouldn't feel this way if this was our (even partially) genetic child.

I think this fear haunts me because I felt so different from my mother, and so insecure in our connection to each other. Even though we are good friends at this point, I still rarely allow myself to 'want my mother'.  Clearly, the illusion that a genetic child guarantees a connection is bull.  It is opening myself, to a genetic child or not, that creates that (healthy) illusion of connection between mother and child. 

Many of my friends who are mothers by more conventional means tell me that my fears of not being able to connect to my baby are not unusual. Indulge me in a bit of philosophizing here:

One of DW Winnicott's most important ideas is of the transitional object.  It is a concrete placeholder for the developmental transition between the "me" and "not me" that allows an illusion of connection to the mother when she is gone (the blanket, the binky, the stuffed animal etc). I wonder if, for all mothers and fathers, the genetic connection (mostly unconscious for the vast majority of those who conceive) serves as this transitional object to smooth the transition between being a non parent to being a parent; between the "me" and the "not me" of this totally separate human being. For example, my fears of being a mother and parent, and the way it will transform and disrupt my life, are normal. If we were to conceive a mutually genetic child, my illusion of sameness, or my fantasy that I will recognize myself or my husband in the child (the 'me' in Winnicott's theory), would serve as a transitional experience/object to soothe me as I make this developmental shift. In my case, the fact that it is a much more conscious illusion leaves me scrabbling and scratching to hold onto some illusion of sameness with the donor, be it in appearance, or outlook, and it is difficult to sustain.  This is all to say that perhaps my fears are less about the real baby, and more about myself and my fear that if I don't have the transitional mental space of an illusion of sameness, that I will fail to connect to the child.

So how do I create enough of a transitional object to transport me from this place to that one?  Well, nothing like good old awareness, eh?

What I want is to get to that place of being able to feel and hold 'both sides'. The side where I have my real losses, and grief and trauma, and the other side where I accept that my losses, grief and trauma are part of my package, and I don't fear that it will affect my mothering, and my greatest wish of all to be a  mother who fiercely loves her children, and whose children feel deeply loved.

On Friday I was remembering a girl I knew in high school who loved the story of her adoption: her parents and brothers went to the home for unwed mothers, and of all the babies there, they picked her. She exuded a sense of being loved and wanted and special--sort of like what it is like to find the love of your life. It seems impossible to be in a relationship with anyone else.  I know that there are more factors that went into her experience than just her family's attitude, but at the same time, that story always spoke so strongly to me of the power of being wanted and cherished.  That was something sorely lacking from my own entrance into my family.  I understand why (brother died, marriage already in disarray, mother depressed etc), but it has been my mission in life to welcome my child(ren) into the world wholeheartedly, even if only to assuage my own wounds.

So here we are, with our illusions in disrepair, our dreams a bit unscripted, and our hearts mired in confusion, searching for a guarantee of connection in the smallest of elements.

And yet, just in writing this, I feel clearer. Clearer about why I am struggling so hard to stay in my fantasies that don't serve my reality, and  reality feeling a little less daunting

.

The somewhat big-ish meeting with Dr Calm

The big news is, there is no big news just yet. Dr Calm doesn't have the pathology report yet, so she wasn't able to tell us WTF happened with Fishy (that is what we named this one, after the fact).  We did tell her that we didn't want to know the sex, and she made a note of that. Unless it is clear that it was related to Husband's translocation, we'll be looking at ye olde eggs as the culprit.

Also, my darling doctor friend looked up my harebrained Vitamin K theory and said this:

"Vitamin K is a cofactor which allows your liver to make certain blood clotting factors (actually factors that allow you to make blood clots AND ALSO factors that dissolve clot - keeping you in balance). There is no scientific data that I could find that suggests that having too much Vitamin K makes you hypercoaguable (while having too little Vitamin K definitely puts you at risk for bleeding as your body can not make its normal clotting proteins). The amount of clotting factors is highly regulated and no matter how many times over the recommended dose of Vitamin K you take, your liver won't make more clotting factors than you need.

Love again,

Your friendly neighborhood M.D."

And yet another omnipotent "I'm the cause of all bad things" theory bites the dust. It's ok. I wanted less reasons to blame myself.

So back to the visit: I was wanded, and my uterus is clear of clots (unlike last time, when there was one that was allegedly going to come out with my next period, but instead got me a hysteroscopy after an evening of hemorrhaging).  Also, all's quiet on the ovarian front, so I'm thinking we may not see a period until about 6 weeks from the D&C which was on 12/16, somewhere near the end of January.

I have to wait two cycles before I can do anything uterine related, so that is clearly March-ish.

Also, we decided to not go back on the DHEA. She isn't impressed, and I don't need another pill to take.

We talked about Donors in their program, and things of that ilk.

Basically, no matter what the pathology report says, the decision we make will be based on what we think we can bear. 

-If it was Husband's translocation, and my FSH is below 10, can we bear to do 3 more IUI's?

-If it was my egg, can be we bear to say "Well, at 39, the miscarriage rate is 20%, so let's roll the dice?"

-Or do we go to the bank, write the big check and say "Donor Eggs better work or were SOL on the pregnancy front."

We won't be able to put it all together for a few weeks, and in some ways, we'll just need to let it stew. Nothing like time to make things clearer, eh?

As anyone whose been reading this blog for any time knows, I like to stay one step ahead of the current situation.  My preparation for the meeting was to spend a an hour and half absorbing an adoption agency site that a friend directed me to (email me for the name, if you want it). I read over the letters to birth mothers, looked at the pictures, and found myself edging towards a funk.  We are not athletic. We don't come from cookie cutter happy families, we are not Christians, we don't live in a suburb, and we are not obsessed with cleaning products. Ok, the last one was from a profile that sort of freaked me out, the woman asks for cleaning supplies as gifts! I'm at least a little more approachable than that!

Anyhow, I started composing a letter to a birth mother in my head. At first, had more in common with David Sederis's Christmas Letter from the Pierce's, but as I went along, I realized, we are pretty awesome, and if I were a birth mother with a sense of humor, and a wish for an honest couple who loves, respects and LIKES one another, we'd be a shoe in. Try it. Try writing a letter to a birthmother, and you might just find out how awesome you are. 

So, it seems one must say something about 2009.

So here goes:

2009 was truly one of the absolute worst years of my life. It was the year I faced and worked through what it meant to lose this life long dream of easy motherhood, of being genetically related to our children, and the loss of my husband's genetic relationship to our children.  It was one of the Dark Nights of my Soul. And yet...and yet, it has strengthened me in ways I would never have allowed myself to imagine as I was in that cold hellish place. Also, I have made some amazing friends, and I have allowed others to see me at my most vulnerable, not so easy for me.

So, yes, 2009, don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. So long and thanks for all the growth. I hope 2010 is less personally...challenging, yes that is the word. 

A new kind of limbo

I don't know if I'm delusional, or dissociated, but I am not as slayed by this miscarriage as I was the last. Either that is good, or that is bad, I can't figure it out.

I know I was more willing to enjoy the moments where I felt happy, and careful to not project myself too far into the future. Maybe that helped, or again, maybe I'm to out of it to feel like I should. Or maybe, this is ok. I wish I knew.

Tomorrow we meet with Dr Calm. Either she will have results from the analysis, or not (or not ever, as it was with Sparky). I really hope she does, we need some sort of way to make a choice about what to do next.

One thing I intermittently obsess about is whether or not my calcium supplement might have killed the baby. I know, sounds crazy,but it had 500% of the vitamin K the of the RDA, and I have a minor clotting issue (one copy of MTFR gene) and vitamin K 'helps' with clotting. Ultimatly, unless Dr C comes back with "baby was fine, but we found huge blood clots" it's probably just another way for me to try to have some sense of control in this situation. I also feel like an ass for not reading the bottle. I never would have taken it if I looked at it, but alas I didn't. Shit. Ya know?

Husband and I don't want to know the sex of the baby--I guess it would make it too real for both of us. Maybe not letting him/her be real is our defense against being totally slayed by this.

We are looking at two donors. One has had 3 great cycles with varying numbers of embryos to freeze, and all cycles have resulted in babies (twins and singletons) and the other has 3 cycles, a 4th is under way, but even though she's had live births with all of the cycles, only one of the cycles has resulted in frozen embryos. Somehow to me this just doesn't seem good. Sure it could be a sperm issue--but all three? Ok, maybe couples with sperm issues are drawn to her...

Warning:Petty Details Mentioned that Make us look Shallow.

The choice seems clear based on previous cycle data, but there is an appearance issue--the donor's mother has olive skin, and Husband and I are fair (although he's got dark hair), and oddly enough we are worried about the child feeling as if they fit with us, if the they do have the olive skin. He told me about a former work co-worker of his whose parents both had fair skin, she had olive skin, and throughout her life people commented on it. Since we are able to choose, should we choose an option that doesn't create more attention? And then I think, no matter what, we can't choose what is going to happen, how the genes will combine.

Ultimatly, I just like the donor with FE's better--since it's all fantasy anyway, I have a sense of her as sweet, well our doctor said she was a sweet person, so maybe that is in there, but I 'like' her.

Also, as I said in my last post, we may find out that my husband actually got me pregnant through the usual means, and scientifically speaking, trying with my eggs isn't a crazy idea.

For us, the question is what can we stand. Can we stand to try with my eggs and withstand the terror through the amnio? Or do we need to stop this madness, spend all our moula on DE and just get on with it.

At this point, I don't want a baby from my eggs more than I want the DE baby. I just want a baby. I want to get on with the loving and growing and being a mother part of this mishigas.  I am very good at being infertile. One more miscarriage and I earn my "Habitual Aborter" badge (sorry, gallows humor).

So the new kind of limbo is about not being a mess, not being sure, but just being here all over again. I also feel absurdly hopeful. Why? I have no idea. I guess the dividend of all this loss and growth is that I can more quickly dispense with the sense of humiliation and shame that accompanies these reproductive failures.

I talked to an old friend that just adopted, and she pointed me towards her adoption agency which looks great. It works with singles, same sex couples and us types (I won't work with one that doesn't), and has a very approachable website. Also, I think I could write a statement now--We rock, give us your baby. Sounds about right, eh?

I also had a bit of a spiritual epiphany on while listening to Fresh Air on Dec 23. Greg Epstein, a Jewish Humanist Rabbi, has a new book called "Good without God" and here is what he said about death and loss, which really resonated with me, and what I have come to feel more clearly over these last 3 years:

"Mr. EPSTEIN: And if you think God is mystery, well mystery is not a great source of comfort in the face of death. You know, at least I didn't find the mystery to be all that comforting when my father died or when I lost other loved ones and what I was really wanting was not, you know, the presence of a mystery but the presence of people to love me and care for me. And that's what I try to offer in the face of death to the members of my own community, is the sense that, look, there is no justification for the tragedies that happen. There is no good reason that we could ever come up with for why the Holocaust happened, for why innocent children are ripped away from us every single day, every minute.

There's nothing that one could say that would say, oh, this makes it better. Or there - you'll be rewarded in haven. No, it's not sufficient. And what, to me, the only thing that we can say is that we care, we love, we acknowledge. Death is real. It's final. It takes tremendous, tremendous courage to cope with. And we have to love one another because that's what we get. We get this world, this one shot."

I know for many of you God and Jesus are a great comfort, for me, it has never felt real. The closest I could get was the Jesus was one really smart guy who was very right about a lot of things, but I don't find comfort in God or Jesus. For me, I find comfort in the love of my community that acknowledges and helps me to bear my pain and loss, and in helping others to bear their pain and loss. So thank you, from the bottom of my heart, each and every one of you who has shared my pain, buoyed me with your humor, your anger on my behalf, and your gentleness with my heart and losses. I could not have gotten to this new kind of limbo with out you, and I am profoundly grateful.

Surfacing, bobbing, gasping, blathering.

Friday was awful. It was that horrific crashing day when the progesterone really starts to plummet and your whole life flashes in front of your eyes while you wear 3D "your life is crap" glasses. Yeah, that good.

I raged at my therapist for telling me, earlier in the week, that I needed to rebuild my trust in my body, to which I politely replied, "Not until I have some reason to!"  I also said fuck a lot. A lot.  I said mean things about my 22 year old nice who just had her second child with her sort of boyfriend, who she allegedly doesn't like, and her  main goal in life to get tattoos and piercings. Oh, and don't even let me get started on the fact that she never even sent a thank you (even a verbal one through my mom who was at the baby shower) or a written note for the $100 Wal-Mart gift card I gave her--ya know, the place she buys her formula and diapers. For the moment, she can just suck it. Yeah. I'm feeling really nice.

Also, if you are my friend IRL, I can't imagine you will be able to take this any other way than to be hurt, but it is really painful for me to open your holiday cards. Please keep sending them, in the part of me that isn't burned into a little black cinder, it is nice to see how your children have grown, but the rest of me just weeps. Weeps at the sight of all of that adorable abundant child-ness.  If we don't have a baby by next year, I'm seriously considering sending a picture of our cats. I know I could just not look at them, but I want to. I want to be normal and happy, and enjoy other peoples happiness, but when you are coming off a miscarriage, or a failed IVF, it's just a little hard to be rational.

So back to Friday. I feel, and especially that day felt, like a colossal failure. My work, my business, my reproductive organs, my everything.  I just had no place in me that felt good at all. Ok, that isn't completely true, my husband, my marriage and my cats were exempt from that shit storm.

The reason I most likely miscarried is a chromosomal abnormality. It's the most common reason for a woman my age. Furthermore, husband and I thought I'd be ovulating a little later in my cycle than I did, and we were, shall we say, injudicious with our timing. So there is a possibility that for once, at the ripe old age of 39, I actually might have gotten pregnant by having sex with my husband. Hopefully the baby wasn't too far gone, like last time, and they'll be able to culture some of the cells. It would be good to know if it was the translocation, or just old eggs. No matter what the reason is, we still lost our baby, and choosing what to do next is daunting. If it was the translocation, do we take another whack at donor sperm and my eggs? If it wasn't do we chalk it up to regular 39 year old miscarriage (oy) risk, and try donor sperm, or do we just throw in the towel and go for DE.

Sprogblogger, proceed with caution...

AND THEN...what if that doesn't work. It doesn't work for 20% of people. Yes, I am allowed to think about that. We have been on the wrong side of every fucking statistic we've come up against, why should this be different. We can't afford to do shared risk--it's 31K plus meds, plus donor compensation. Yeah, we'd need a serious cash infusion to make that seem even reasonable. So when I said in my last post that DE was the bottom of the financial and emotional barrel, I didn't mean that we didn't value it, or even feel like it was our best bet, it's just that it's our last chance at pregnancy, and anytime "last" is in the equation, it takes on enormous weight. Of course, after we rob a few banks we could do adoption (even county adoption costs money--they don't just give those babies away).  Yes, I am feeling a little angry and bitter.

Yesterday was better, I did the laundry, I made some very thick bean soup, I baked some bread, and caught up on some movies and TV shows, attend at all times by at least 2 of my three cats.  Little furry bundles of love.  Many multi cat households struggle with the relationships between the kitties, but our kitties are very compatible. We have two boys and a girl. The girl kitty is 6 months old and so cuddly and playful. There are times when Husband and I just marvel at how lucky we got with this little one.

Today I am determined to get a tree. Part of my funk on Friday also feeling like I didn't have the energy to do it for us any more. Husband major holiday tradition involves Chinese food, not too hard to honor. Over the last three years I've tried to set the stage for welcoming a child into our home, I've made some stabs at holiday traditions, but they all get squashed under the weight of all of this fucking loss.  So, today I going to drag him away from his desk, where he sits to make the all important money for all this fruitless baby making mishigas, and try to have something resembling a good day.

And I'll probably cry some more. But oddly not for the baby itself, the way I did for Sparky, who seemed so real, so inevitable, but for all the faith I've lost; for all the time that has passed; for all of the fear I have about all of the next steps; and most of all, my fear that I'll never recover. That even if we do finally get our child, I'll always be this broken, sad shell of a mother.

Elaboration on "Wow" and "Clunk"

Thank so much to everyone who responded. In retrospect, it wasn't a very well thought out post, and it was more of a reaction to needing to share that such an odd thing had happened, but I hadn't reflected on it much (duh.)

Upon reflection I want to say this:

I believe strongly that every child deserves to be welcomed wholeheartedly into their family. Whether that is biological/genetic/surrogate, which ever, the key to me is being welcoming.  In the process of going through infertility I have had to work up to welcoming each potential child (IUI, IVF, DE, DS, DE/DS [still working on those last two]), and their origins, and the realities that their origins would impose upon them. This has been both painful and growth producing, and yet grief has been with us every step of the way. And yet, when we have grieved and prepared a place in our hearts and minds for each of these potential babies, we have felt joyful at the prospect of them. 

When I got the call yesterday, I had the sense that I was not prepared for this child. I hadn't prepared a place in my heart and mind for this child, and that was the bottom line. If we were in the process of preparing for adoption, and this opportunity had come up, I think we would have jumped at it. Who wouldn't want a sweet baby boy? I certainly do.

There are families all around, and even people my friend knows who have been preparing a place for a child through adoption, and to my mind, that is where this child will be welcomed. If we had said yes, it would have been with trepidation, and misgivings, and without really knowing if we were ready to welcome him.

Attachment is so complex, I won't try to parse it all out here, but as I said a few posts ago, there is no baby without a mother, and I was not prepared to be his mother. He was not my baby in my mind. He deserves that--a mother ready to imagine him, to know him, and to love him with all her heart and mind.