The Unmother

"Call when you get your period. Or if you don't have it fourteen days from today. We'll bring you in for a blood test." Yay. No waiting for the second pink line. No more being tricked by those evil lying tests that keep telling me I'm pregnant just before or even after my period. Day 13 comes. Day 13 goes. No period. I want to shout with excitement. I know it's too early. But I also know that if my period arrives, I'm heading for a date with a camera up my hoo. I'm not looking forward to that. In fact, I dread it. My head feels woozy just thinking about it. Day 14 comes. I might be getting it. I feel like I might. But it doesn't come. No period. Night 14 comes... still no period. Too late to call the doctor for the blood test. Stop at the store, get another round of pregnancy tests. The name brand this time, no more store brand liars for this girl. Negative. But they know I ovulated, right? They told me so. 14 days. 14 days after ovulatio...

Month three of our window came and went. No baby. "Here's your referral. These are the two clinics we recommend you call." I went home in a daze. We'd failed. We weren't even parents yet and already we were drowning in our failure. April came and went. I didn't call. May came, and we talked. We had a lot going on, work to do at the house, jobs, life. It was time for a break. I was done tracking, timing, stressing. I'd call the clinic. Eventually. We decided it was time to stop putting everything else on hold. If I wanted to do something, we were no longer not scheduling things "in case I was 8 months pregnant" or "in case we have a newborn" if those events were months in the future. We were done being in this constant, painful waiting. This stasis was crap, and we were OVER IT! We adopted two dogs. Yes, two. Because we're insane, and anything worth doing is worth over doing.  And yeah, we knew if I got pregnant right aft...

After the holidays, we should have taken a break. But the devastation of the almost pregnancy made us want to succeed doubly. I wasn't ready to get back on the merry-go-round of horror, but we made the decision to proceed. I'd already been started on an initial drug cocktail of Metformin (which if you've ever been on, you know tears your stomach and intestines up like you've chugged a bottle of magnesium citrate) - it took me almost a month to find the right iteration of the meds, to fight with the insurance company to cover it, and to work myself up to the dosage that the doc wanted me at. I had also already been on pre-natal vitamins for six months, and off a lot of my other meds which help me control my fibromyalgia. Because those are drugs you cannot be on if you're pregnant. There are loads of things that for almost a decade I've used to help me keep my fibro in check that I was suddenly not supposed to do if I was potentially pregnant - heating pads on t...

Quick catch up - we'd been experiencing 6 months of infertility, and had started the work-up with the doctors, testing, tracking periods, taking ovulator indicators, etc. and I left last post off in the midst of the HSG test, where they stick things up your hoo-hah and squirt radioactive liquid into your Fallopian tubes... ( get the full scoop here ) I  barely  stayed conscious. They laid me back down. I closed my eyes. I focused on breathing. After a few, I tried to get upright again. This time went better. My blood pressure came back up. A vasovagal response. Vasovagal sycope is fainting as the result of a trigger. Some people have this response to the sight of blood. I've never been one of those. I used to be tougher than this, damn it. I swear. We talked about the results. All clear. There wasn't any blockage. Yay. I tried to be glad. I really did. The thought of going home from that test and trying to get pregnant that night, or even the next, was nausea-induc...

I've never not wanted to be a mother. Literally from the time I was 15, I wanted a child. I knew I had to wait. I knew that it was important for me to finish high school, to go off to college, to live a life, travel, figure out what I wanted to do with my life. So, I did. I went to college, I studied abroad, I went from college into Grad school, I found what I wanted to do with my life. I moved, I fell in love, I got married, I bought a house. I did all the things I was supposed to do - I lived. There are likely scads of people out there, young parents who had kids "too early" or at an inopportune time, before they were ready, before they had lived, or figured out their careers, or saw the world, or earned degrees. People who regret that they didn't wait. I promised myself if I was still single and childless at 30, I would look into a sperm donor and artificial insemination. Because I knew no matter what else was going on in my life, I wanted to be a mom. I needed...