Time Passages

In my little blog profile underneath the bird icon, it says that one of the main things I deal with here at The Singing Bird is “turning 40.” It’s about time to address that because, well, I’m turning 40…on Monday.

And the first thing I want people to know about me and getting older is that I love to do it. I crave birthdays–other people’s, as well as my own. Not sure why, but I am truly a celebrator of “the birthday season.” For years (until this one, actually), I even celebrated my half-birthday: March 18th. Some of my friends even sent me cards for my half-birthday because I would frekken talk about it so much. Because, being the 0.5 mark, I would get to “round up” on that day. Because I LIKED getting older.

I suppose it’s because I have hung out with people older than me for most of my adult life that I enjoyed aging. My husband is 11 years older than me, and most of our friends fall somewhere in between. I stopped coloring my hair for a while, too, because, ya know, gray was cool. And I do have a lot of gray. One of my friends calls it “salt and pepper.” But it’s back to a nice toasty-reddish-brown these days.

Because, lately, for the first time, I haven’t wanted my birthday to arrive. Dread would be the more accurate way to describe my attitude to Monday. It’s not like Monday’s going to be radically altered from Sunday or Tuesday, or 40 radically altered from 39 or 41, right? Yet the world does seem to treat it as a line in the sand. More so than 30 or 35, which I didn’t even blink at.

Part of it is the reproductive thing. For women, 40 is that moment when, magically, and for better or worse, some hormonal wand is waved over your ovaries, causing them to begin the shriveling and dessicating process. Eggs abandon ship, endocrine levels fluctuate wildly, cycles get all skewy. Not really, of course. Not right away. Or maybe, already, years ago. But the culture–and my reproductive endocrinologist–would have you believe that the day you turn 40, the uterine wars begin.

Part of it is the cliche thing. You know, the mid-life crisis. Or the beginning of The Change. Or the “We Card Under 40 Here” sign. Or the “40 Is The New 30″ line. Or the idea of becoming a wise woman, a creative woman, as opposed to a pro-creative one. And, on the phone this morning, my father repeated to me that all-time winner of a cliche, “you’re only as old as you feel.” Or maybe it was, “you’re only as old as you think you are.” Well, fuck. I don’t FEEL wise. I don’t particularly FEEL creative these days. And I apparently missed the boat on being pro-creative. So, fuck, What. Am. I. Doing. Here?

Maybe it’s the metric system. Yeah, that’s right. The Metric System. That way of measuring the world by tens that they insisted to us in elementary school we were absolutely, positively going to need to know when we grew up. So, here’s how I figure it…right now, right this minute, at the age of 39, I can reach back in my mind to my twenties pretty easily. A mere 10 years ago…29. But come Monday, my twenties will recede like a bullet train into the distant past because then, my mind will reach back 10 years and think…30. My twenties will forever be walled off from the present moment by being on The Other Side of my thirties. Not that my twenties were any big whoop. I’m just sayin’: The decade hop no longer brings me back that far.

Speaking of my dad, he has a theory about aging. At least he did a while ago, when he first told me about his theory of “the glumph.” He must have been about 65 then. The Theory of The Glumph makes a lot of sense. He maintained that, day to day, we don’t really experience getting older. We are busy, we go about our lives, we succeed, we fail, we just generally jump through our hoops. But then, on certain days, in certain years, we have a “Glumph” moment. We suddenly realize, oh, shit. I’m older. I’m quite a bit older than the last time I Glumphed. How the fuck did that happen because as far as I knew I was riding along this life train and all-of-a-sudden, Glumph, I’m at a station I don’t recognize. (Please note: this is a paraphrase of my dad. My dad would never say “fuck.” Except in 1988 when the Redskins won the Superbowl. Then I do believe I heard him say, “Fucking unbelievable!” for the first and only time. But he had had some scotch.)

Maybe there’s really something to this 40 thing. Something special. Something remarkable. A reason why the fashion magazines delineate the clothing spreads into “What to Wear in Your 20-30s” versus “What to Wear in Your 40s” that stands apart from the commercial hype. As I try to adjust my attitude a bit in anticipation of the inevitable, I’ve been thinking about the number 40. It does have some mystical associations in our culture. But I found another blogger who says it much, much better than I was going to, so–with her blessing–I’m going to quote her instead. She has a blog called 1,167, which refers to the number of days she has left until she turns 40. In her welcome post, she explains it this way:

I know, at face value forty is just a number, not inherently any more or less significant than 39 or 41. But it is a number charged with meaning all the same. In the story of the Great Flood, it rained for 40 days and 40 nights. The Israelites wandered 40 years in the desert. Christ spent 40 days in the wilderness. In the Judeo-Christian culture, anyway, forty seems to mark the end of soujourn, a time of deliverance and re-emergence. It is the number of retrospection, and of looking ahead to the next epoch. A time to collect oneself.

It seems to be a liminal number. Like the bordertime between day and night, the turn of a season, or the edge of the woods. One of the thin places. Look at all the nervous energy it provokes in people. “Lordy, lordy, look who’s forty!” We sense the magic in the number, the sheerness of it. We bring to the occasion the same air of mockery and bravado with which we approach Halloween, another of the bordertimes.

She is also a poet. Poets like to think about time, like to think of it in metaphorical terms. After all, time–more than any other single construct–makes us human. Even more than language itself. The idea of 40 as a “thin place,” a place of sheerness, a border, appeals to me as a poet. I thought of my thirties (very unromantically) as a garage. A place to work on myself, a place of overhaul. I prefer this idea of 40, as a time to collect oneself. Is that ass-backwards? Probably.

And, despite likening one’s 40th birthday to encountering a thin place, I’ll be spending my birthday in one of the thickest places I can think of: Vegas. Not exactly fodder for retrospection and sheerness, unless you count what the Folies are wearing. However, R. has a trade show for the palm tree farm there next week, and so we’re combining the two events. I probably won’t post again until we get back.

But I will be looking at the moon on Sunday-Monday, as the Chinese Moon Festival, which falls every year on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month, falls this year on the eve of my 40th birthday. And maybe my daughter-of-the-future will be over there somewhere looking at the moon on Sunday night. So, I will be too.

Crossing Borders

Sometimes life serves you up a set of circumstances that causes you to challenge yourself in ways you never thought you would, to learn things about the world and yourself you never thought you would have to learn, and to do things you never thought you would have to do.

So it was that I found myself two mornings ago sitting underneath the umbrelled tables in front of the McDonalds at seven-thirty in the morning in Nogales, Arizona. In a few minutes, I would be picked up by a doctor I had never met before and driven across the international border to his clinic in Nogales, Mexico, a walk-up room above an unassuming street littered with store-front dentists and vendors selling fake Gucci sunglasses and, well, just generally littered.

In the van with R. and I would be a couple from the Bay Area (as they referred to it…being from the Chesapeake Bay area originally, I thought better of pointing out to them that there might be more than one), Mark and Kathy. We were two couples from two different states coming to a foreign country at the same time for the same reason: we were infertile and needed a treatment for recurrent miscarriage that the FDA in all its wisdom has determined to be “unreliable,” but which our (American) doctor–who is the leading specialist in the extremely specialized field of reproductive immunology–tells us we must have. So it was that we gathered in another doctor’s unassuming office above the unassuming street to exchange pleasantries before the procedure that we must have but that we cannot have back in our own country, in our own towns, near our own houses.

At first I think that it is nice to have another couple there. They are like us, even though they tell us that this is their second trip to the clinic. Their first treatment didn’t raise the leukocyte antibodies that need to be raised enough, so they are back again. I feel bad that they have to do this again. I am sure that they have experienced multiple miscarriages, as I have, which is the only reason to be there, after all. I am sure they are like me. Perhaps, also, being a bit out of my element, I am looking for familiarity. I want her to be like me. Then she mentions, casually, that they had a little girl a year ago, but “of course” they want to do it again. And I realize that, in fact, they are really not like me. Not like me at all. My stomach falls a little bit.

When it is our turn to go back to the exam room, R. takes the lead. It is his blood that the nurse will extract, 10 tubes in all, as R. lies back on an obstetrical bed between the ultrasound machine and the wall. The nurse, who the doctor has introduced to us as Maribel–”the same name as Maria Compagne in Spain”–has trouble operating the levers on the bed that raise and lower it. R. bounces around. I can tell he hates being on the bed. I silently wonder how he would feel about having to stick his feet in the stirrups, which, thankfully, I don’t have to do for this treatment.

After she’s done taking his blood, he sits up, intending to help her out by just hopping off quickly. She objects and makes him lie back down until she has raised the back and lowered the front to its original position. They speak in Spanish while she fumbles with the controls. I once again regret choosing to take French in high school. The doctor collects the vials and tells us to explore the town for a couple hours and then return.

We have been to Nogales before on purely sight-seeing trips and know our way around a little bit. We find a bakery and fill a bag with pastries and buy coffee and go sit in the plaza to eat our breakfast near this cool mural:

American tourists are generally very conspicuous in Nogales. But it is still early in the morning, before the Americans come to shop for trinkets and fill their prescriptions and get their teeth cleaned, and we are generally ignored, except by the pigeons. Pigeons are the same everywhere, I think. Later we do a little shopping at my favorite store in Nogales, where I buy some milagro art to add to my collection at home:

The pink fuzzy Mary is from Sante Fe. She is one of my favorites. The ball covered with milagros is my new purchase. Milagros are small metal (!) charms that are typically found in the shape of human body parts, but can also be animals, houses, cars, etc. In some Catholic countries (Mexico, Italy, India’s Goa region), you purchase the charms and pin them to a saint’s clothing (if your church houses a dead saint) or to a saint’s picture and ask for a prayer for that particular part of the body. Hearts are very popular.

I’m not Catholic, but I began collecting milagros about five years ago. And…yes…I do have a milagro in the shape of a baby that hangs from my keychain.

After two hours, we head back to the clinic. We go into the doctor’s office, sit across his desk from him, and he brings out two syringes full of clear serum, labeled #3 and #4. (Presumably, Mark and Kathy got vials marked #1 and #2.) This clear stuff is actually R.’s white blood cells, spun down from 10 tubes of the red stuff. I spread my forearms out on the desk, and the doctor injects me four times under the skin on each arm, emptying the syringes. It burns. It burns a lot. My skin puffs up a little.

This is all good, of course. The point of the treatment is to stimulate my immune system to react against R.’s blood/DNA. When I’m pregnant, my immune system can’t tell that the growing mass of cells is a developing baby because R.’s DNA isn’t differentiated enough from mine to register the baby as not my body, not my cells, not my DNA. So, my immune system attacks the growing baby as if it is a cancerous bunch of my own cells. The treatment (called LIT–Leukocyte Injection Therapy) is supposed to teach my body to “recognize” R.’s DNA as different from mine, so that when my body encounters it as part of the growing baby, it will know it is not a growing mass of my own cancer cells, but rather a baby, with a different bunch of DNA cells–and thus not attack it. Make sense? Yeah, it took me a while too.

Here is what one of my arms looks like just after the treatment:

When the doctor is done, R. hands him $600 in cash, which he pockets quickly without counting. It feels a bit like we’ve just completed a drug deal, which I guess, in a way, we have. Then we leave. We walk across the border, where we wave our passports at the Border Patrol guard who doesn’t even glance their way (probably not what you wanted to hear on September 11th), and back to our car, and back to the highway, and back to our life the way it was before. Except for these nasty-ass welts I have on my forearms. That now itch.

Challenges, it seems, often come and find you, rather than the other way around. Traveling to another country for a controversial fertility treatment that is outlawed by the FDA is not something I ever thought I’d do. When I first joined an online infertility support group last year, several of the board’s members would discuss the LIT treatments they were told by their doctor to go do. I would always skip over those postings. They didn’t apply to me: in 12 years of trying, I had never been pregnant and, therefore, had never miscarried, and I was operating on a strictly “need to know” basis. What I didn’t need to know, I wasn’t going to bother with.

But that’s the funny thing about the way things work. When push came to shove, I did need to know, and I did end up doing something I never thought I would (because I never thought I would have to).

And, frankly, adoption is the same way for me. It wasn’t something I considered seriously until I had to. Not that I did any agonizing hand-wringing about adoption when it did cross my radar screen. I was thoughtful about the complexities involved in adopting transnationally/racially, but I was immediately excited by the prospect too. I just never had thought about doing it until doing it became, potentially, my only way to parent. It was a challenge to my expectations that led me to adopt.

I think that’s often the way it goes. We get pushed into a learning experience, a growing experience. It’s not that we don’t want to be there, growing, changing, learning; it’s just that we aren’t always out there on the hunt for these sort of “teachable moments”–to borrow a colloquialism from the teaching world–because they aren’t the easiest things in the world. It isn’t easy to change. It isn’t easy to grow. That’s why it can be so wonderful.

Infertility pushed me to consider adoption. Miscarriages pushed me to consider alternative fertility treatments. This interminable wait for a referral may push me to consider a special needs adoption. And, although I know that a-parents who “switch” from non-special needs to special needs adoptions have a really bad rep in the IA community, I’d actually like to argue that their switch may be a part of their process, like choosing adoption in the first place may be a part of the process of coming to parent at all. Perhaps it’s not just a hypocritical grab at an expedited referral but, rather, a “teachable moment,” in which an impasse, a challenge to their expectations, causes them to re-think their choices. Causes them to grow.

I’ll write more about this subject of switching to a special needs adoption in the near future. Right now, I just wanted to throw it out there as something we’ve been thinking about, talking about. We were approved in our homestudy to adopt a special needs child because it’s what we wanted to do for our second adopted child from China. Now, it doesn’t look like we’ll get the chance to adopt a second time from China, given the length of the wait and our ages. So, we’re considering a new plan. Stay tuned.

And the IVF is still a go for January, if the LIT treatment and the other immunology treatments I’ve got scheduled, work. Life is certainly never dull.

Withdrawal of a different sort.

This past Friday, I withdrew from my IVF cycle. It was supposed to be the first scheduled day of injectibles (not stims, just Lupron, in case you know about IVF protocols), but I’ve been on BCPs for a month. We had planned on a late-August retrieval and transfer, but now we’re out (as Heidi Klum would say). Friday morning we had our phone consult with the Reproductive Immunologist in California, and he confirmed a lot of what I’d suspected: a number of autoimmune issues continue to pop up, and he wants us to start a bunch of new treatments (LIT, IVIG, Humira, Lexapro, Synthroid, in addition to the Lovenox/heparin, dexamethasone, and the progesterone I’ve already been doing during cycles. It will take a minimum of three months to complete some of these treatments that need to be done ahead of time, and the LIT requires a trip or two to Mexico since it’s not offered in this country. The RI did say that I present as a typical recurrent miscarriage patient, and he would conclude from my pathology results on the D&C tissue, that I was carrying a normal “conceptus” that experienced demise at the hands of Natural Killer cells, blood clotting, low leukocyte antibodies, or any combination of the above. So, now, my mind-shift has had to go from not able to get pregnant to not able to keep pregnant. The latter suddenly seems to be the greater problem.

Although all of this is overwhelming, I know that withdrawing from the cycle is the right thing to have done. I’ve been having a lot of localized pain in the lower abdomen, too, and I need to get it checked by my doctor this week. It’s been sort of driving me crazy. It’s just strange now to be heading to 40 in a month or so and know that none of this will be resolved. That was always some sort of cut-off date for me, as if the great gray abyss of the beyond-40 hours was too mysterious to consider planning for.

The Wait.

Now rumors have been swirling on Rumor Queen that the wait has been “confirmed” at 18 months and will grow past that. We are looking at a Summer 2008 Metcha Day, when I was hoping to have our daughter home by Christmas 2006. When we started we were told 6-7 months from LID to referral, then that increased to 12 months; now that we are waiting for a LID, it’s become a two-year process–or more. I know this sounds incredibly self-indulgent and self-pitying, but I am really beginning to feel jinxed, rather than just unlucky.

Last night, R. and I talked about options, including other adoption avenues, or maybe even DE. We have talked over the months about adopting a special needs kid. I was committed to going this route as our SECOND adoption, assuming that most S/N adoptions are slightly older kids and wanting the opportunity to parent an infant my first time around. It is always something that’s been in my mind, however, and it might be the way for us to go right now. It will allow us to parent a child sooner, and it will make a huge difference in a child’s life. We have the resources to provide whatever medical interventions would be necessary, and I have the time to devote completely to a child who might need speech or physical therapy or intense attention.

Using donor eggs (or donor eggs and donor sperm) is an option that I had dismissed…I didn’t want to contribute to the world population problem if we couldn’t have bio children, which is why we opted for adoption. But now it seems as if DE could actually be the best alternative to the waiting problem. These days the waiting problem seems to trump all other problems, which should demonstrate how small my world has become. After all, pregnancy is *JUST* nine months, and we could be totally done with the entire process in under a year, and still have a year to go on the adoption. That means a DE birth wouldn’t interfere with the Chinese adoption requirements of waiting a year between children. We’d have to update the homestudy, but we’d have to do that anyway given that the I-171H will run out way before Summer 2008. And, obviously, if we’re already committed to adopting, then using a donor’s DNA to create a child isn’t an obstacle for us–beyond, of course, the obstacle of getting pregnant and carrying to term. I am still not completely convinced that egg quality is our main infertility issue.

It is all very wearying. It is not clear what to do. As much as I want to be a mother and experience that relationship with a child, I am just amazed at the number of impediments I have met with. It is as if we’re being challenged to think even further outside the box, to defy convention even more than we thought we already were. I recognize that this experience could be a good thing for us, but it sure is frustrating. It’s as if these circumstances are hellbent on testing how far your mind/body/temperament/etc. is willing to go.

The Pain Olympics

Several years ago, this post The Pain Olympics became a huge hit in infertility blogland, discussed, reposted, debated, so forth. It still pops up from time to time (as it did recently on my high-FSH bulletin board) and has gained a minor cult following–certainly the term “the pain olympics” is a neologism that has stuck, at least among infertiles. The gist of the argument is that each person’s pain is subjective, unique–to them, to their circumstances–and therefore can not/should not be judged objectively. That is, there is no comparing pain. It all sucks, and we can not begin to try to ascertain whether one person’s loss or grief or predicament is worse (or better) than anyone else’s.

Bunk, I say. Hooey. This perspective SOUNDS good, it SOUNDS like a reasonable path to tread, but in my opinion this is the easy way out. It reminds me of when I would ask my students to enter some debate, and they would attempt to opt out by using a sort of radical relativism: well, we’re all different, so who knows? /well, he’s entitled to his opinion/ his opinion is just that, an opinion/ his opinion is his own, etc., etc. Now, don’t get me wrong. I consider myself a radical, and I consider myself a relativist insofar as I deeply distrust absolutes . . . but this sort of solipsism drives me up the wall. I suspect that those who trot it out are simply unwilling to do the hard thinking it would take to come up with some viable answers to questions like, How do we categorize pain? How do we experience pain? What sort of pain is the worst sort? How does a person’s processing of pain either maximize or minimize their experience of it? People who work in certain fields–bioethics comes to mind–are forced to do this sort of hard analysis all the time. What are the rest of us scared of?

I think we’re scared of admitting that our pain might, just might, be less pain than someone else’s. My deep suspicion is that we all want to win The Pain Olympics because then we are entitled to the sympathy and coddling that attends The Victim. In gaining victim status, we gain self-entitlement. This is why so often when you are in the midst of experiencing some pain–a death in the family, for example, or an illness–you suddenly are confronted with any number of people who want to tell you their similar or not-so-similar stories. I know what you’re going through…last year, my Aunt Matilda died of lung cancer and….

Some stories might be welcome, especially those that closely reflect your own pain or come from people who really DO know what you’re going through because they’ve gone through it too. But what often happens is that people who really have no idea about the extent of your pain try to claim that they, in fact, do. They can’t stand to lose The Pain Olympics. I would rather NOT validate the person who absolutely needs to be related to me in pain by saying, yes, I can see how your nine months of infertility and my 12 years of it make us soul-sisters in pain. Although I agree that everyone has experienced some loss and thus felt some degree of pain in life, not everyone has experienced the same amount of pain, and I think that should be acknowledged. It should not be a problem for someone to admit, I can’t possibly know what you’re feeling, or, This situation is worse for you than for me, and I’m sorry. Perhaps each of us IS a unique individual, but that uniqueness is not an absolution.

When my friend T. lost her baby girl at the age of five days, I could not imagine the horror she was going through. Even though T. had no trouble getting pregnant, planned it down to the week she was going on sabbatical, and I had been struggling to get pregnant for 11 years at that point with no luck, I recognized beyond a shadow of a doubt that her devastation was so much worse than mine. Period. And even when I ended up miscarrying two subsequent pregnancies–at five and at nine weeks–I still knew that her loss was so much greater than mine. And even when T. ended up delivering a healthy baby boy last month, and I still have nothing to show for my attempts to conceive, I would still argue that her pain has been worse.

I also know that I cringe when my friend M. threatens to throw herself off a bridge if she isn’t pregnant by the time she is 30, after only nine months of trying to conceive. Her sense of what’s earth-shattering when it comes to infertility galls me to a certain extent. There have been times when I have wanted to scream at her, Talk to me when you’re 39 and have been at this for 12 years and have at least two miscarriages under your belt. Then you can rant and rave and rend your hair. Yeah. Of course, I am extremely supportive of her because that is what sane people do when they are in community with other people. We do not point out that perhaps your negative pregnancy test this month is not the same as my miscarriage this month, even though you are carrying on as if it is. We simply smile and nod and go home and write on our blogs.

For me, it’s NOT impossible to make distinctions between the degrees of pain that people have experienced. If someone actually wants to try to compare infertility to cancer (and this happens all the time), then I assume there’s just something Wrong. With. Them. There is no way infertility compares to a potentially life-threatening, terminal disease. Argue all you want with me that infertility is “the death of a dream” and that “an unfulfilled life isn’t any sort of life at all.” Bunk. You are in the midst of struggling with the expectations you had for your life, which are not coming true, at least not in way you thought–you expected–they would. But you are consumed by your sense of victimization if you can’t see clear to acknowledge that your problems conceiving a child are NOT akin to losing your life.

Many women on the bulletin board I participate in make the rather clunky point again and again that secondary infertility (when you already have one bio child and are trying for another) is EXACTLY THE SAME as primary infertility. I have to admit, this one drives me crazy. I wish they would just post on the secondary infertility board and leave the rest of us alone. Because it is NOT the same. There is just no way. I accept and believe that these women experience tremendous pain that they can not create a sibling for their child, but my God, they HAVE a child! Hello??? Why can’t they just say, this really hurts, but it is categorically different from the hurt of not having any child at all?

Many women on the bulletin board I participate in are unmarried, unpartnered women, who would love to be in a fulfilling relationship such as I have, and also have a child. They don’t have a child (like me), but they don’t have a husband/partner either (unlike me). Their pain might very well be much, much worse than mine, given that information.

The original blogger of The Pain Olympics makes the eloquent point that “it’s not about where you fall on the Bell Curve. It’s about getting off the Bell Curve.” I appreciate her perspective, and it does sound very understanding. But if you read other entries in her blog–the one where her best friend has to remind her that some people (namely the childless best friend) are envious of her one child, for instance–it’s clear that the blogger recognizes that her pain is not as bad as some other people’s pain. Okay. Good. So, again I ask, why do we have the need to level the playing field? What do we gain from “getting off the Bell Curve” and claiming that pain is All One?

I fear that our refusal to quantify our experiences with pain originates in a profound sense of disconnection from each other. That the only way we can relate is if we all come from the same place, if we’re all on the same footing, so we create a false sense that we’re all United-in-Our-Pain. But that’s not true. We experience different levels of pain based on different experiences of it. We should be able to commiserate with each other despite those differences. It demands complex thinking to figure this out, an allegiance to complexity. It is not as simple as insisting that it’s all the same. It just isn’t. And it just shouldn’t be. I have more respect for the people who have been dealt more pain in this life than I have than to try to equate our experiences. Instead, I want to listen to them, so that I can learn.

By the way, the link I posted above contains a quiz, with cumulative points, to try to “objectively” assess your degree of pain when it comes to infertility. It’s satire, of course, since she is trying to make the point that such an objective assessment is impossible. But lots of people took the quiz, nonetheless. I scored 6,150. I took silver.

Eye, Appaloosa

I realize this title is a bit strange, but it came from a dream I had last night. It was very fresh in my mind when I woke up, so I remembered some of the language pieces. The dream included my friend M., who is just starting her first IVF cycle. She is only 30–a babe in the woods in IF circles–and has every chance in the world of succeeding. We are all very hopeful for her.

But the dream wasn’t about IF, at least, not on the surface; on the surface, it was about writing poetry–we are both poets. In the dream, we both had writer’s block (although probably a stand-in for infertility?). We hadn’t written for months (very true IRL in my case). Then her husband got a new job at Nebraska (true IRL) as their department poet, and she felt competitive and started writing furiously–typing while I collected her pages. There was a clock on the wall in the dream, and she turned out about 75 pages of beautiful poetry in an hour. I was reading the pages, and they were perfect, Ashberyesque poetry about the forest, rocks, river, animals. She divided them into three perfect sections–I can’t remember any specific lines, but they were edgy and raw and long, even though they invoked leaves and rocks and so forth. She told me I had to come up with a title for her, so here are the three that I invented in the dream for her:

Eye, Appaloosa
Cowhand, Traveller, Cow
The Gift of Green.

Interestingly enough, IRL she plans her poetry collections as colors; her first, The White Nightgown, is obviously white; the second she had just told me will be Verdigris because she sees it as a green book–so the third dream title must be a reference to that. The overwhelming color in the dream was green–the green trees in the forest. I was apparently “seeing” the poems as I was reading them in the dream. I just kept exclaiming that she had a whole book done in an hour. Clearly, the dream was manifesting my insecurities about not writing recently: I could never do that, I was thinking.

I have a feeling, however, that the dream was really about IF. After all, it was a creative act, M.’s writing an entire book of poetry. And there it was, perfect, not needing edits, all in an hour. And the overwhelming feeling I had was: I could never do that.

So much for being positive…

After having tried everything to get pregnant and stay pregnant this time, we still failed at it: the second ultrasound on April 21st showed no heartbeat. The baby (looking like a little cashew nut, or a comma) stopped growing at 8 wks., but I had no signs of miscarriage, so had a D&C at almost 10 wks. That was painless. It’s the other part–the part where I imagine throwing fine china at various walls–that hurts. Seeing the heartbeat (128 bpm) at the first ultrasound was AMAZING, and I guess that’s the reason this went on for so long, to give me that opportunity to see and hear the beat of her heart. Otherwise, I can only pray that pregnancies without a viable future end sooner rather than later. I miss her.

Fessing Up…

It’s time to come clean in blogland. When I thought about doing this blog, it was to document our adoption of a daughter from China. That process continues; we have our final homestudy visit scheduled in a week or so. We just put fences up all around the porch and deep-cleaned the carpets.

But it’s also true that I began this blog nearly a month ago, when we were in Las Vegas, encamped for 2 weeks at a hotel down the street from the IVF clinic, going through our second IVF procedure. I never mentioned it, partly because I wasn’t focused on it (believe it or not, I was pretty focused on the adoption), and partly because I believe it’s attracting bad juju to dissect this stuff while you’re in the midst of it. I was trying to practice a more zen way of handling subcutaneous shots, speculumated ultrasounds, blood draws, and aching ovaries.

Anyway. I am pregnant. Yep, that’s the big news. I actually had a + HPT on the 16th (my first ever double line) and then two betas confirmed it. My first beta, on the 16th, was 69–the RE said that was very high. He even had me worried about triplets for a couple days! Second beta, on the 18th, was 245. Still high numbers, more than doubling, but the RE thinks it’s twins, which I think is FANTASTIC. We’re really elated around here.

I have been trying to stay very positive, despite being haunted by the miscarriage. Today is the equivalent day to when I think I lost the pregnancy last time, although I didn’t start to bleed for three more days yet. I know this is a different pregnancy, the numbers are better, stronger, even accounting for the twins, and I have every chance in the world of delivering healthy babies. It’s just become so unreal to me over the course of a dozen years or so of trying (with some big gaps in there) that I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around it.

So…we still want to adopt. Even assuming the pregnancy goes to full term without complications. We are committed to the experience of adopting, and–as I’ve been saying all along–it’s a different room in the same house that is parenthood, and I want to live in that room too. It’s a much more expansive vision of my life when I include adoption in it and, having arrived there and having it feel like such a huge gift, I wouldn’t think of closing the door to it. Here’s to a full house!

I am feeling tired and have had some cramping (ligaments expanding), some headaches, a little bit of lightheadedness last Sunday and Monday, and some breast aching, although not as bad as the first time. I am grateful for this chance. So very grateful.

And now, you know about it too. How do you feel about Rowan and Madeline as names for girls? Or Owen and Samuel for boys? Unfortunately, if it’s a coed party in there, our favorite choices–Rowan and Owen–just aren’t going to cut it. We didn’t even recognize that they rhymed until we had already decided they were the faves. Oh, well. We are also mulling over Sophie (for my best friend), Georgia Rose, Calum (Callie), Kenna; and Benjamin for a boy. I used to be superstitious about discussing names at this very early point, but now I think it’s good to visualize what you want, good to feel the way NOW that you want to feel at the point you’ll be introducing your babies to their names for the first time.

Next time I’ll have to write about my visit with the intuitive reader. I’ve been holding out on you about that, too.