I wasn't sure I was going to keep writing this blog--more like those two posts came at moments of real desperation and I needed to just get it out. But, i got a comment! So strange how the sense that this might be part of a community rather than just a sort of lone diary entry just for me made me want to keep going. I read blogs all the time and never really understood that it matters whether you comment or don't comment. I thought this was just for me and it is/was. It certainly makes me feel better. But, I think there is an element of having it be something that can reach others that is important, of course, that is for me too.

So, I got my period. I kind of knew it was coming, but like each of the other months, I had elements of hope up to the very very end.

I cried and cried when it came. It is amazing how it just floods over you. I was visiting my parents on the east coast and M. wasn't with me.
i sort of held it together all through dinner with my family (lots of other stuff going on there) and thought maybe I was ok. But the second I said goodnight and went up to my room and called M. I just couldn;'t stop crying. I think this month signifies a shift from trying to believing there might be a problem. Before, I felt like I was in the range of normal (my own bizarre arbitrary assessment of normal), but this marked the 1 year try. I have a terrific friend who is a doctor that pointed out to me that the average time it takes for couples to conceive is a year, which means some more some less...yeah...but after a year they give you the fabulous "unexplained infertility" moniker.

Oh well. Little parts of me worry that maybe maybe the problem is my anxiety around this. I know how offensive, ridiculous, medically impossible, throw-back to notions of nineteenth century hysteria that sounds...but I am neurotic, so of course I am now neurotic about my neuroses. So...that said, we were planning to do clomid and IUI this cycle but, we HAVE to be in Hawaii for a wedding right around ovulation (bummer, I know) so now I have secret hope that tropical hawaiian vacation sex will lead to baby...

So much for lowering my expectations and thus my anxiety.

Chances are we are heading towards IUI in August...

What history can teach us

I sort of did feel better after typing yesterday's blog. I told M about it and he kind of looked at me askance over pupusas in a very loud restaurant. It was one of those moments when i can see him struggling to try to know what it might be like to be inside my brain. I love that.

Like if I cry just because it is 7dpo and I feel nothing, even though of course you do not feel anything after 7dpo, every obsessive researcher on the TTC scene knows that. He gamely trys to follow along, as I question "Well, do I really really believe it? Maybe I sort of secretly, in a never admit it to anyone really outloud or even silently to myself at night in the dark kind of way think if I were pregnant I would know?" Then he shakes his head and says, "we really cannot know the answer to that."

I had a chemical pregnancy about 3 months ago. I managed to convince myself that I knew at the end of that cycle--maybe maybe my nipples were sore in a different way. But, if I knew, why did I still shake and wonder and then kind of know when the very faint line appeared that it would be gone within an hour.

I am excellent at rewriting my own TTC history you see! I am actually an historian by profession (sort of, sorry if too cryptic--a girl's gotta preserve some sense of anonymity when she spills the secret contents of her rushing thoughts!) and my specialty is to spin and twist bits and pieces of history together to create new academic arguments. It turns out Western history is MUCH more pliable than my personal fertility history. I can make all kinds of outcomes happen in the former arena, simply by lining up similarities, evidence, and overarching the bundle with some theory or pithy idea. With the latter, I have no control. And ahhh...therein lies the very annoying, ever frustrating rub. Hmm...I'd say it is not a great night of hopfulness in the M&M house (that's our house). I swear, I will be funny and hopeful tomorow. Oh no, I am even trying to spin my blog now!!! Yikers!

You see, in the end, history cannot really teach me in this instance how I will know I am pregnant without making it through the TWW. I really have never been pregnant, not REALLY. I have no basis from which to learn. What history can teach me is what has made this process tortorous and what has made it bearable and I need to learn to craft and spin my life in the direction of the bearable while I build new histories, that is, while I build a future.

Really frustrating

That's it. that is really all i have to say right now. I somehow just wanted a semi pseudo public place to say it. I am in my 8th month of ttc, just crossed into the second half of the two week wait. I spend hours and hours typing search terms like, "7dpo no signs, but pregnant" into google, just in the vain vain hope that some magical page will pop up that definitlevely tells me Hey, yes you ARE prgnant. This is nuts, I know. But this process has made me nuts. I am not publically nuts mind you. Just today my sister in law told me it was amazing how well I was handling this. I told her that she doesn't see and hear me when I am alone with my husband M. or myself. I think she thought I was kidding or at least being very self-deprectaing. I wasn't.

Instead of googling every tiny twinge and reporting every feeling that courses through both my body and mind to very patient but much less emotional than me, M. I think maybe I will write about every tiny twinge here. And I will gain some comfort? Or will at least get bored of the computer and my thoughts and go do something productive...like actual work.

If I had spent as much time working as I have spent researching, obsessing etc about trying to get pregnant, I would be very very on top of my job.

I do talk to my husband. I do talk to my friends. But really, this is going to be my space for unmitigated Kookiness. The place where i will write about boob tenderness, heartburn, and cramping. I will report on hope, hopelessness and maybe, just maybe will feel calmer about the whole thing.