*warning: pregnancy update* Third trimester. Crazy, maybe this is actually going to happen this time. It's been really hard to wrap my brain around after all these years.
It's hard to get away from the place of FEAR that infertility places
you in. When you live in a place babies die, when you are the 1%
statistic time and time again, it's easy to keep Googling and to run
your own scaremonger local news feed in your head about everything that is about
to go wrong. I've chosen not to go there. I don't live in that place
anymore. I can't control that stuff. It took this much loss to figure that out.
It's also easy to live in the place of BITTERNESS that infertility places you in. It's easy to remember how so-and-so didn't even text. It's easy to focus on how people were out when things got tough, and now they suddenly think they deserve to be in my life now. I don't live there anymore either. Most people in my life couldn't deal with what I was going through, and I include myself and my husband in that category. Hell, only one or two met whatever unrealistic and constantly changing expectations I had at that moment. Maybe others were terrible, like I was to them for all those years to preserve myself. I choose not to live there either. Grief is not a reaction that can be judged kindly. There was no good answer. There was no good solution. Pregnancy has wiped this clean. I am letting it take away the bitterness. I choose to accept love given to me. I choose not to be bitter anymore.
You can't make it through what we went through and come out the same. I can remember way, way back, the first time I was pregnant, five years ago. On the second try. It wasn't even very long, but I had already bought all these books, researched everything down to the bath towels and the baby monitors, all of which is now obsolete. Dear god they release baby stuff all the time!
And so I found myself looking at a former version of myself in the sad Amazon wishlist of what used to be a very, very Type A person. Who the hell has time for all those books? I'm not that person anymore. We don't have most stuff yet. People will give us stuff, we can buy stuff. It's just stuff, I'm not worried. This is the kind of sentence old me would have panicked and judged. She would have called this bad parenting. She would find it ridiculous that I would put this off and don't have an oxygen meter or a changing table scale or something. But I know now that what matters is what I can't control, and I no longer seek out worry and problems.
I've released so much control, I've completely changed my life. I quit my corner office, expense account job, and I managed to make more money and control my own life. I'm pretty good at yoga, well, I used to be until the doctor made me quit.
The waiting room of a high risk MFM at a specialty hospital might be even worse than the waiting room at the IVF clinic. Most everyone drove in for hours or flew in, and is in waiting hell where babies die. I'm familiar with that place. Me, I just drove a few minutes and I'm feeling pretty good because I choose to. I know that with my blood clotting issues, this can go left at any moment. And we will deal with it. There's no point in being upset about what I can't change. I have done everything I can and gotten the best care I can. I have released control.
I finally feel what I longed for all these years. I feel like a mother. I feel like the universe is full of love and life. I have a marriage that has survived a journey many couldn't. And I know that whatever comes next we will handle. There are flashes where I am so grateful that it was so hard so that I would appreciate it so much and so that other problems would just seem silly. I have never been happier in my life.
