Lemonade

It's time for me to take it up a notch. From feeling sorry for myself to making lemonade out of those awful lemons. It was probably last summer I started thinking about making lemonade. Lemonade out of lemons I've been handed for years.

I was talking to a friend last night when we got onto the subject of faith. Faith. I thought I had faith. I've known for awhile that my stock is low but now I'm starting to wonder if I ever had it. Enough of it. At a high enough level. And now it feels like way to much to ask of me. I've done that and believed and it didn't work and my whole world fell apart. I can't do that again. At least not this soon. I don't have the strength to ask for something that's not going to happen. Or possibly will happen, but in its own time, regardless of what I ask for or when I ask for it.

I told you my stock is low.



Lemons in a garden. Crete June 2009

Pent up feelings

I don't dare come out and tell everyone how I'm feeling right now. I used to be quite open but my friends told other people and I lost control of who knew. After a while, infertility and IVF-procedures was all I talked about because I felt like I owed it to people to answer all their questions and keep them updated, since I had told them about it in the first place. I know they let me talk about it for my own sake but I don't think it was good for me to always be reminded about my pain and hardships so one day I told them I didn't have the energy to talk about it anymore.

That was a few years ago and I am up to my eyeballs in thoughts and feelings that I need to share now. After I started this blog in May I've felt so much better. I'm still not sure if I want my friends to read it though. Correction. They are welcome to read it, as long as they don't know that they know me. Once it's out, I can't take it back.

It was much easier to talk about infertility than depression.

Sharing the pain

Dear Reader,

I am sorry for your pain. I am going on seven years now and was hoping to maybe get in touch with someone with similar experiences. On other sites I've mostly read about other women who have tried to have a baby for a couple of months or years and then got P. I am hoping to find a kindred soul who has been living with this for as long as me or longer. I am happy to hear that reading my posts makes you feel a little less alone. That is the reason I started writing about it!

Energy

Now that I've been grieving for so many years, I'm low on energy. So I have to start conserving energy and concentrate on building it up again. In order to do this, it's important to understand what I lose it on. Making decisions is a huge drainer. Even simple decisions like what to eat or even whether to eat or not takes loads of energy. Energy I just can't afford to spend. So I made a schedule telling me when to get up in the morning, when to eat, get dressed, etc. And I needed to follow it whether I felt like it or not. I was supposed to get up off the bed and take my sad thoughts with me to kitchen, even if I was crying. I also needed to rest more, but not just whenever. I needed to schedule more rest so I would still be able to go to bed at a reasonable time at night.

All of this has helped me gain control of my sad thoughts and feelings and eventually I started feeling better. I haven't cried much since last summer so I guess it's working. I have kept myself busy with travel, family, work, etc, which also keeps my mind off it.

Therapy II

I started seeing a psychologist in June. I wanted her to help me cope with the pain so I could start living again. I see her every few weeks and our sessions are really helping me feel better. I tell about my life and my thoughts and she tells me about how people in my situation typically react and feel and what might help. If I don't feel like talking, she'll tell me about something. I wish I'd written down more of her advice and my own thoughts.

Courage

Being a parent takes a lot of sacrifice. It also takes a lot of courage. I admire people who have children, and my admiration is unbounded for people who have large families and raise those families well.

But it also takes courage to be childless. It takes courage to endure the questions. It takes courage to endure the things that are said about you – both behind your back and to your face. It takes courage to cheerfully ignore the people who tell you that you’re childless because you’re “not relaxing,” and that if you only adopt a child you’ll soon have children of your own.

It takes courage for the women who go out and pursue a career after all attempts at childbearing have failed. It takes courage to stand up on Mother’s Day and take the flower so as not to hurt the feelings of anyone else.

From Meridian Magazine

I think I've always had a lot of courage. I did for many years but I don't anymore. The Lord will try me for as long as I can take it. So I stopped taking it.

And fell apart.

Anxiety

If you’re having a hard time coping with infertility, you’re not alone. Research has shown that the psychological stress experienced by women with infertility is similar to that of women coping with illnesses like cancer, HIV, and chronic pain. Infertility is not an easy disease to cope with.

To make things worse, you may hear from friends or family that your anxiety is causing the infertility. But this is not true. While researchers once thought that stress caused infertility, more recent studies do not make this connection.

From About.com

Thank you!!! I hate hearing this myth over and over and over again!!! I know it's not true for me since we weren't using contraceptions for a long time before we actually started longing for a baby. Plus my stress hormones are fine. People don't realize the implications of what they're saying and how irrational it is.

1. They don't think I feel bad enough already and put more blame on me?!
2. Do they really mean to say that only people who DO NOT want children actually get pregnant?!
3. If it were true, how is that supposed to help? Do they expect me to STOP longing to get pregnant? And if I actually managed to stop longing, how does that help? Should I be trying to get pregnant when I no longer want to have a baby?
4. And what do they know? Maybe I get pregnant all the time, but have multiple miscarriages? So people who miscarriage "kill" their babies because they want them so badly?

An open sore

Being childless is like having a great big open sore in your heart that never heals, compared to miscarrying or losing a child to death, where the healing process can begin immediately*. When you are childless your wound is open for the entire period you are (expected to be) fertile, up to about 25 years. It is only after that that the healing process can begin, that is, if you have any energy left for that. Not even when those 20 odd years have passed is it socially acceptable to mourn.

Mourn never experiencing motherhood. Mourn never being the most important person in someone else's life. Mourn never seeing yourself and your beloved in another person. Mourn all of the children that never will be a part of our family. Mourn every menstruation because it will never lead to a child. Mourn that your grief isn't accepted, so you can't show the grief you're carrying inside.

To always have to keep hoping. If you don't, maybe you mess it all up because you didn't want it bad enough.


*Of course this type of loss is to be taken extremely seriously and may never heal but society allows and expects you to grieve, which is not the case with infertility, which in many psychiatric textbooks is compared to losing a loved one to death.

Therapy

I've been waiting since last fall to see a shrink but since I can't seem to handle going to school or work while thinking about this, I've had to wait until school's out. So I made an appointment yesterday.

The question is whether I'll manage to say anything at the session or if I'm just going to sit there and cry for an hour. Maybe I should write the therapist a letter to hand over when I get there. The thought of blubbering and blowing my nose all over her office feels fine for some reason. It's more the thought of sitting there an hour and just crying instead of talking that bothers me. There's only one way to find out, though, isn't there.

I should have done this years ago when I could still handle living.

Grief

I feel like there's no one who understands the grief I carry in my heart. This blog is an attempt to finding someone I can identify with. Not for comfort or prophecies of a miracle - just to end my loneliness.

I decided to start blogging about it all today. This is essentially a diary written for me but maybe someone will be given a thought or two because of it. There is no point in doing this if I don't write my darkest thoughts of despair, wrung out of a tear wet snotty hanky. Don't expect a politically correct, romanticized picture of my torments. I intend to do my best to honestly share my most hideous thoughts with you.

All you need is some kleenex and compassion.

Childless

Childless.
Not a student.
Not a sister.
Not a runner.
Not a friend.
Not a mom.

Childless.

The beginning

We stopped using contraceptives eight years ago. It was a little scary because of our financial situation but we had faith that everything would work out and that it was the right thing to do. A year later we started to realize that we weren't going to get pregnant easily and became more goal oriented. A couple of years later we sought medical help for infertility.

Here I am, one IVF treatment and three "frozen left-overs" later, feeling despair.