This was going
to be a post where I thanked all of you for your wisdom and insight and words
of encouragement, admonitions to listen to myself and take a break and eat my vegetables. This was going to be a post about
how after hitting an emotional wall on Friday, I crawled out of my infertility-cocoon[1]™
and spent the weekend with friends, unexpectedly and happily social, and that
by Sunday night, I was rejuvenated. I was ready to face whatever was ahead. I
was feeling replenished and relaxed and deep
breath now, even optimistic. I was even mentally noting some non-specific
symptoms – getting up to pee at least twice in the night, intermittent light
headedness and, ohdeargod, holy adult-onset-acne batman! – that might be the
earliest signs of Lord Voldemort, the Holocaust, the deficit
that-which-shall-not-be-named.
That is all
completely true; I am grateful to all of you for your spirit-boosting, I did have a great weekend and I did feel happy and refreshed.
That’s what this post was going to be about. But the universe – knowing that
such a post would be boring, trivial and full of absent minded reverie – intervened.
Because, say it with me now friends and strangers: Oh no, my period!
Every cycle we[2]
– you know, us, collectively, the infertility set <waves to the crowd> –
prepare ourselves for this moment. We are glass half empty people, we construct
barriers of self-protection on multiple fronts, we are pragmatic. We have read enough to know too much[3].
And so with each cycle we endeavor to keep our expectations low and we tell
ourselves that this time, this time,
we will take it in stride, we will move on to the next round, it will be okay.
And then with each defeat, we are completely, almost irrevocably, destroyed. We become, at least momentarily,
inconsolable. There is probably some crying, some grief eating, some
not-wanting-to-get-out-of-bed-the-next-morning-ing. But then, at some point, for me it usually comes the next day,
we pick ourselves up, somehow oblivious (almost) to the protracted defeat.
