Throw it away, try it again

I have a real sense of detachment this month.  As if I'm not that concerned if I am or am not pregnant.  It's not that I don't care, I do, I'm just not as hyper sensitive and anxious about it this time.  It feels good and a little unnerving to be this way, I haven't been for longer than I can remember!

One test has come back and everything is normal, I am still, however, awaiting the results of my ultrasound.  I have great hope that it will be normal as well.  I see an Ob next week, and I'm a little nervous about that, just because I wonder what she'll say.  What kind of tests will she want to run, what will her opinion be about things so far?  That sort of stuff.  The clinic I'm going to is not a fertility clinic per-se but it does deal with a lot of women struggling to conceive, so that makes me feel a lot better.

We haven't started counseling or yoga yet, but I'm planning on calling the therapist today or tomorrow for an appointment.  Yoga may have to wait another week or so depending on our schedule.

Dan is really hurting with all the disappointment over the last month, and I feel so frustrated that I can do nothing to take it away.  It must have been how he has felt with me all these months.  Everyone who knows about this tells us that they believe we will have a child, and that is very encouraging; like God is sending the same signals to everyone to tell us!  I hope that this summer will end with the good news of my pregnancy; I hope so much!  But I am not allowing myself to look beyond that, not allowing my mind to make ultimatums about what will happen if I'm not pregnant by September.  I am getting better at this one day at a time thing, and even though I'm in the phase of my cycle right now where I will know soon whether I am or not pregnant I'm not counting the days...It's really weird come to think of it.  I like it.  I'm trying just to enjoy it and not think of it as a "sign" or something; though I think there is a part of me that does.

Maybe it's like how our acting teacher used to talk about "failed" acting exercises: if it doesn't work throw it out, do something else.  So, if this month doesn't work, we throw it out and try again.  Thank God I can look at it that way.  Because after this last time I wasn't sure if I could do it anymore.  Where does this tenacity come from?  This strength?  The only place I can think of is God, I sure as hell know it doesn't come from me!

Next steps

Well, in case you haven't heard we are not pregnant...again.  Found out the friday before Mothers' day, and let me tell you that was one difficult weekend!  We both took Friday and just vented our deep hurt, anger, fear and frustration; crying so hard that I had a wicked headache by the end of the day.  But that weekend was unavoidably busy for us, and I think that was the best thing.  I didn't have all that much time to wallow, to sit and cry and be angry.  I had things I had to do and places I had to be.  Sunday I did have a really good talk with my mom that involved tears, smudged makeup and promises of getting her more involved in the next phase we are embarking on this week: Fertility Testing.  

Yes, that's right, I am undergoing a pelvic ultrasound this week to find out if all my equipment works.  I am also trying to get in to see an Ob/Gyn to start further testing but so far the one I have called has not called me back; not a very good sign for reliability so I may try another.  Many blood tests are in my future since over half the basic blood tests (altogether totaling about nine or ten) have to be taken at specific times during my cycle, so in any given month I could have three or four different blood draws; and that's just for starters.  

Dan and I are hoping we don't have to go all high tech to have a baby, we are hoping we will conceive before the Dr. suggests intra-uterine insemination or any of the other half dozen or so expensive treatments.   We both have a strong gut feeling/hope that we won't need such measures, but we are also keeping in mind that we could be wrong.  If we are....well, we will just have to accept it.

The fact we have waited two years to begin this when most couples are starting it after six months of trying makes me feel a little like I'm glutton for punishment, but we really believed we wouldn't have to start down this road.  It's gonna be ok though, I know it.  So I get poked with needles, so Dan has to go to the clinic no man likes going to, so we may have to see a fertility specialist.  Ok.  We'll take each as they come.  

I'm trying not to think too far down the road, taking it one little test at a time; which is probably the healthiest thing I could do.

We've both decided to begin counseling with a counselor who specifically works with couples struggling with this, and we also decided to begin yoga together.  Both of these are highly recommended by most healthcare professionals in the fertility field as ways to decrease stress and find more intimacy as a couple that has nothing to do with the bedroom; which is great since that can become a source of stress in and of itself!

I spent some time with a friend who had a baby last week.  She needed some help, and I offered, preparing myself for a really hard couple of days.  But, much to my amazement, I was not overwhelmed with sadness, or jealousy.  Longing, yes.  Daydreams, yes.  And that was the good thing about it.  I would sit there, watching her hold her newborn, and think "Soon, next year even, this will be us.  I'll be in a bed like that, holding our newborn. Dan and I and our child.  Our little family." 

It hit me like I haven't let it in so long, that we will get there.  I let myself think that, believe that, and it lifted me up, it gave me confidence, it gave permission for a deeper patience to take root, for hope to spring up delicately within me.  And, for the first time maybe, I let myself believe that God wants us to have a baby; not just that He'll give us one, but that He wants that for us.  It sounds too simple to make a difference, but it was really profound for me.  

Letting myself daydream what it will be like to be in the hospital after our baby is born, what it will be like getting him/her home was huge for me!  I hadn't done that in so very, very long...maybe for a good year.  It made it seem like it was not only going to happen, but that maybe it's not so very far away.  If I say "Next year we'll be there."  that may seem far away to some, but it's not to me.  Next year we will have a baby, our baby. To allow myself to dream about that much less believe it is more than I though I'd be capable of after this last disappointment.  And at the risk of sounding cheesy and religious:  I don't think I could have gone there without God.  Somehow He planted it there and helped me step aside while it blossomed, this hope, this belief, this dream.  And I'm so glad He did.

How to survive the unanswered "Why?"

We are strange creatures.  It occurs to me; and not just recently, that we as people grow the most during times of great adversity and trial. Why?  I have no idea, you'll have to ask the Creator when you see Him/Her.  I read about or talk to people who have gone through really hard times and most say that though it was scary and difficult it was one of the best times of their lives because as they looked back they could see how much growth they experienced.  They almost give it a veneer of gold.  I can understand this.  Dan and I had a very challenging first year of marriage, mainly it was the adjustment of living with one another, getting used to each others' weird habits, how we fought (or tried to avoid conflict).  But part of it was also that we were extremely strapped for cash; I mean in a way that was often very scary.  We look back and see the growth there, see the value of it; though we both agree we would not voluntarily go back!  

I don't think there are simple answers for our suffering.  Sometimes it's unfair; oftentimes actually.  There's no clear answer for the that mega question that accompanies trials "WHY?"  A person could go mad from asking that question, because I'll tell ya, no matter what you may see in retrospect that lends meaning and value to your suffering, it never seems to fully answer that question, and in the silence we sometimes feel that God is just a mean bully with us as His toys to tear apart as He sees fit.

I've been tempted to think that, and I've told Him so.  But, afterwards I am inexplicably drawn to memories of the times He came through, the times I've felt loved by Him...I can't explain any of this, but it helps to know that in midst of all this crap He's loving me; and whatever you believe  in as Creator, God, an ultimate being, I have to believe that He/She is mostly love.  Love for us all in this messed up, broken world.  And that blows my mind.

I can't explain it, at least not without sounding so absolutely cheesy-churchy (and since I have a very low tolerance for such things I won't even go there!)  but that belief is what helps me trust Him, and thank Him; not necessarily for this hard time we are going through, but for this life I have.  I have so much to be thankful for!  

Is it easy to look at what we are going through like that?  No, it isn't.  There's a part of me that digs in my heels and wants to refuse to do it, but I also refuse to live in self pity and bitterness.  So, against some of my stronger emotions, I choose to live in gratitude.  Now, it doesn't mean I get it right all the time. No way!  I think I fall down and complain and get pissy far more often than I succeed in living this very Zen existence I have just described.  But my success to failure ratio is not what concerns God.  He is more concerned that I just keep fighting, I just keep getting up, I just keep choosing.  That is where the real victory comes from and as Tim Allen so appropriately said in "Galaxy Quest" (c'mon, you know the quote!) "Never give up! Never surrender!"  

Man is that hard for a perfectionist like me to do!

The window to jump out of

I'm watching the movie "Saved!"  If you haven't seen it....I'm not sure about recommending it, but I found it a combination of uncomfortable, entertaining and thought provoking all rolled into one.  There's a part where the mom and daughter are talking and the mom says "I just keep trying to remember that when God closes a door, He opens a window." the daughter's response is "Yeah, so you have something to jump out of."

I have to say, that's kind of how I've been feeling lately.   The thought of going through another month of this...I can't describe it.  I once read someone describing this process as applying for your dream job every month, getting in the top ten candidates and then being told "Sorry, we hired someone else."  Imagine that for a moment, every single month, over and over and over and over again.  The definition of insanity if you ask me and if that's the case with this process than I guess I am truly nuts! 

Don't get me wrong, I have no definite answer for how this cycle went, no for sure sign or whatever.  The emotional rollercoaster is wearing thin though.  I want to be more at peace and not go back and forth from excited hope to fearful sadness and back again.  And I'm getting better, I know I am.  But that doesn't mean I've "earned" my baby.  

One thing that hit both Dan and I this last week was how often we tend to try and bargain with God.  The thought that to get what I most desire I have to jump through certain hoops and believe perfectly is a false way to go about it.  P. Bill talked about how God doesn't want us to be perfect when we come to Him, He wants us to come weak, without any perfection of trust.  He wants us to come with a kernel, a trembling grain of sand amount of trust that we don't even know if we can maintain throughout the day.  That is what He can work with, and that is also reality.  I have faith, and I trust Him, but it's hard to maintain it, it's hard to not cry or be angry sometimes.  

 I've also been asking for help to stop worrying that if I don't cross every 't' and dot every 'i' that He won't give us our baby; because honestly I've started doing just that and it's not the way God is.  

And we are both asking for help to stop bargaining with God, which is more prevalent in how we view God answering prayers than we thought.   It'll take time to unlearn this, and I'm trying to be ok with that too.   It's all part of letting go of trying to control when we get our baby.  In all reality, it has little to do with us anyway.  Sure, we do all the stuff we are supposed to, but in the end He is the one who has to make the baby, who has to choose when to give it to us.  And I have to be honest, at first it was peaceful to see that; it still is half the time. The other half of it makes me angry, horribly, tearfully angry.   I don't get it, I try to find meaning in it all and lately I fail horribly.  I can't.  I feel like He's just being mean, that he doesn't care how much this hurts, how scary it is for me.  Even though I know that that's not true I don't know how much longer I can do this and letting it go (Jumping out that window) sounds good sometimes.   But, I don't think I can or will...even though it hurts a lot right now.

The Missing Woman

So, I have been trying to think of what to write.  Sometimes it's easier to pour out what I'm feeling than others, I suppose that's normal considering the subject matter of my blog.  I have felt pretty good all in all since realizing I wasn't pregnant.  It was more heartbreaking than usual this month because I had really, truly started to think I was.  But, the temperature dropped and the next day...well, you don't need all the details.  Let's just say I spent that day curled up on the couch, staring into my book or the mindless nothing that was on TV.  It was hard, harder because we had been starting to talk about how we would break the news to my parents and to his.  We were starting to dream out loud, a dangerous, wonderful thing.

I have a vivid memory from the those few days when I thought I was pregnant.  I had walked into the bathroom, and looked into the mirror.  I wasn't especially made up or wearing anything specifically pretty, but I had to catch my breath because there, staring back at me in the mirror was a woman I realized I had not seen in a very long time.  She was smiling, broad and unforced, her face glowing, her green eyes gleaming as if with a secret joy.  It was the me that had been missing for a long while; at least that's how it felt to me.  Don't get me wrong, I don't go around mopping all day long, I smile, I laugh, I joke, I do all those things. But this was different.  I realized in that moment that it was the smile of a woman unfettered by fear and sadness, who had just set down a burden she had been carrying for a very long time.  I had never realized until that moment, just what this process was doing to me, the life it had been leaching out of me.  

Yes, for all that I have been determined to view this positively, to find meaning in it, I also have felt like a road weary traveler who has been carrying a pack that is sometimes just too heavy.  I don't think it discredits all the meaning I have struggled to find in this, perhaps it makes it more powerful and precious.

It feels like a cruel joke in some ways, those few days of joy.  Like a starving man being ushered into a dinning hall, and being shown all the delicacies there for the taking, only to be tossed back outside with nothing in his belly.

I want that woman back, but I am struggling to find her in the midst of all this, the routine of fertility starting up again.  I have accepted with happiness the fact that my acupuncturist says the signs I was feeling is good, that it means the treatments are working.  I have steeled myself to see this next cycle as the "one", the time being ripe and ready.  And even as I believe that, and have found a measure of peace, I am plagued by tears the last few days.  Why?  I have no idea.

No one signed up for my life group at church, and maybe that's because they're scared, maybe there are half a dozen women there that know what I am feeling, that want to be in a group like this but are nervous to sign up.  Maybe.  But on the flip side of that I'm aggravated that they don't just call me, I won't publicize who they are for crying out loud!  It has made me feel even more isolated, more alone.  There is no one, absolutely NO ONE who knows what this feels like.  Who understands the way my mind goes back over everyday of my cycle when my temp drops, looking for the smallest thing that could have caused me not to conceive, and finding a dozen or so small, inconsequential things that don't mean anything in all reality, but that my mind and heart latch onto as a possible reason.  With that comes guilt, and a feeling of helplessness because in the end I realize that I don't know the why of it, that there is not one single thing I could point to that I could abstain from and it would make me pregnant.  I've cut out a lot, changed a lot, added a lot.  What more can I do?

I did run into an old friend and his wife at the mall this weekend, they had struggled for two years to conceive their adorable little boy.  It was a relief to talk with her, and for those fifteen minutes I felt I had a comrade, someone who had fought the battle and won.  The down side is they live over an hour away and are moving in a month.  But hey, it was something, right?

So for now, I do what I can. I meditate and pray, I try to be thankful for all the wonderful things in my life, I work on my novel, I work on film and TV projects, I take in the splendor of spring and hope our little one will make it's presence known soon so that the missing woman can come back again.

Train tracks

Just finished watching the movie "Under the Tuscan Sun." and there is this wonderful scene where Diane Lane is mourning the emptiness of her life, and the stupidity of renovating a house that's too big for her small life.  The man she's telling this to relates to her the story of how the railroad tracks over the Swiss Alps were built before there was ever a train that had been built to handle the steep climb, but they built the tracks believing one day it would happen.   It's used an a way to tell her to keep going, build for what you want in your life and someday it will arrive.  I was crying at the end of the movie, because she got what she wanted, her "train" came.  I was thinking of it in relation to all this.  My acupuncturist has told me that she sees so many women that come in wanting a baby for themselves, and that until the ego is put in it's proper place their baby can not come.  I have examined my own soul, and prayed and I don't think that's me; but I do believe that I had to come to a place where I felt secure enough in my acting career that the thought of having to take time off to make room in my life for a child was not such a scary enterprise.  I finally feel at that place.  I love to act, it is like air to me in some ways, the creative outlet is vital to the way I have been made to function as a person, and I don't think that God would create me with that and then expect me to put it permanently away. But I do think He had to bring me to a place where I would be willing and at peace with taking time away from it.  And I am there, for the first time it does not scare me as it once did.  God had to lay the tracks for our baby "train" to be able to ride smoothly on it.  Sometimes the things that happen in our lives that are so unfair, that make us cry and wince and yell in pain are the tracks being laid for our hearts desires, and sometimes that train doesn't look anything like what we would have made it to be, but it doesn't mean it will be less fulfilling.  If I know God, it will turn out to be more so.  

Accepting this is hard, and sometimes I don't want to. I want what I want and that's that.  But I have to look back on my life and see the times I didn't get what I wanted but what God wanted for me and I have to admit it's the difference between plain chocolate ice cream and triple fudge brownie ice cream.  One is pretty good, the other is sheer heaven in a bowl.

I decided, on a whim, to start a women's group in my church for those who have struggled with infertility.  At first I was scared, what do I really have to say to any of these women?  Now, though, I think that maybe this maternal love that is pouring out of me could not only be spent on my nieces and nephews and a sweet ten year old girl who lost her mother a few years back, but also on women who need a shoulder to cry on, need strong loving arms to hold them, and a soft voice to sooth their bruised heart.  Maybe I could help them laugh about the insanity of having their husbands give them hormone shots in their butts, or come to accept adoption as the "train" God laid the tracks for.  I don't know.  It's not a replacement for a baby, that's not what I'm saying because I believe I will be pregnant soon and will give birth to our wonderful, beautiful child.  But there are many aspects to a train, perhaps this group is one that I would not have chosen if I had not had these tracks laid for me.

The struggle to keep believing.

"In order for something new to be born into our lives, we must experience something unfamiliar."-Xiaolan Zhao, CMD, "Ancient Healing for Modern Women".  That quote really hit me the other day when I read it.  It's in the section this author has regarding childbirth, but it hit me in regard to what Dan and I have been experiencing in the last few years.  I'm not sure what new thing is being born out of the birth pangs of disappointment and heartache we have had over the last few years, but perhaps it's strength, or empathy for the women who experience this. Perhaps it will be greater appreciation for our little baby when it comes to us.  I don't know.  Maybe it's been the wonderful opportunities that I have had over the last year in my career, and the wonderful professional relationships we have both been able to form that will bear good fruit in the future.  I try to think of these things as I am faced with yet another month where I suspect I have lost the waiting game.  

That there is a reason for all this is something I am determined to believe.  But, even as I believe in my future baby, I am faced with the inability to see anything in my future except more and more failed attempts.   These days of hope starting to blossom only to whither under the harsh blow of another menstrual cycle seem to have no end.  I know that may sound like faithlessness to some, but I must restate that it's not that I don't believe; I very much do.  But there are times like this when it seems too far away to see, and what's in stark focus is the months of disappointment and a resounding "not yet" from God.  Not a "no", just a "not yet".  I believe one day soon I will hold my baby in my arms, I believe one day soon this will all end.  Sometimes, it is just hard to see it ending.  I suppose this is where I am right now, tomorrow it may be different, or next week, or next month (please God let it be different next month!)

Prayer and meditation does give me peace, enough to keep going each day, though sometimes I fall down and cry and yell, I don't think Jesus minds.  He expects it I think, He does, after all, know me quite well and I am nothing if not a person who is in touch with her emotions!