I am a Mother

Mother’s Day this year is different than it ever has been in the past. In the past, I’d never been pregnant. This year, I have been. I carried life for 7 weeks. I believe this makes me a mother, but where is my face in adds for mother’s day? Where is the right card to purchase to celebrate me?  What is the gift to be given?  

In previous years, mother’s day was focused on my own mother and honoring her. As I got married and hoped to start a family, it bothered me that we had not been successful with our attempts.  I remember a mother’s day from five years ago when my mom unknowingly said that she thought her gift was going to be the announcement of us making her a grandmother.  My face probably said it all. We were in the middle of trying to conceive, but had not had success.  I was frustrated, but not sad like I would become over the next several years.  To be fair to my mother, this was before we’d sought assistance from an RE and before we thought there might be an issue.  It was just what I am sure so many couples have heard from well-intentioned people who’d like to see the couple start a family. She never intended for those words to hurt me. She never intended for those words and that moment to surface in my memory every mother’s day since.

The industry that’s been built up around this day to honor our mothers can’t be blamed either for the hurt it causes me.  But because my form of motherhood is faceless and nameless, I feel a strong and resolute contempt for it this year.  It heightens the awareness that I’m not part of the mother’s club. It reminds me that I’ll just have to wait until Christmas to be honored and recognized by my husband with diamonds or flowers or some token that supposedly represents his adoring affection for me.  It shows me that I have failed in what is expected of the 20-30 year old target market because on mother’s day this year I won’t have toddlers and school-aged children who wake me with breakfast in bed and that I won’t mind cleaning up the mess they’ve made in the kitchen with x cleaning product simply because this gesture was so stinking sweet.  I am the unrecognized mother in our consumption driven society. 

Some may think I’m nuts for calling myself a mother. Like the guy who cut my hair several months ago who said, “at least you weren’t that far along” when I explained that I had been undergoing IVF, had been on hormones which I thought contributed to my dull and breaking hair, and had recently lost my pregnancy. I guess being only sort of pregnant in his eyes would probably make me only a sort of mother on mother’s day.  

Where does my rant leave me?  Because I don’t have any living children, I cannot find solace in cherishing them.  The pain of the missing member of our family is not somewhat eased with their joy and my wonderment at what was created through their existence. It isn’t so much of recognition I want from anyone, certainly not the companies who make their money off of what has become a consumer driven holiday. I think what I need is awareness.  The awareness that mother’s are made when they find life inside of them, regardless of whether that life survives. It certainly wasn’t something I was aware of prior to the loss I’ve experienced, so perhaps it isn’t fair to have contempt towards other clueless people.  Perhaps that awareness has to begin with me and others who have gone through what I have.

I believe strongly in the act of naming and how naming shifts narratives.  The narrative we are told about mothers is that their children surround and honor them every year on mother’s day. The narrative holds that we name women mothers when their children can be seen by others, or perhaps that was the narrative I believed before I became a mother. I believe this narrative and naming of mothers is too limited and incomplete. My son, Josiah Owen, made me a mother the moment his heart began to beat.  

 

Mistrust

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” Rumi

Somewhere in all of this I’ve lost trust in my body.  I have been fortunate enough to never go through what I saw many of my close friends and acquaintances go through.  As early as middle school, my best friend started putting smaller portions on her plate at dinner and then shuffling it around to make it look like she’d eaten, but in truth had barely touched it.  In high school I grew increasingly concerned about a close friend who no longer ate lunch with the rest of us, claiming she’d eat when she got to work that afternoon or home later that day.  In college it was a roommate who exercised excessively and severely cut back on calories. My first year teaching I confronted a colleague I was close to about her shrinking size when she was in a volatile relationship. As concerned as I was and as much encouragement as I gave, I was an outsider to their battle.

I still don’t understand it completely, having never walked in their shoes, but infertility has challenged my trust in my body.  I am working at regaining it and seeing my body for all of the wonder and beauty it possesses, regardless of the fact that it hasn’t done the one thing I’ve asked of it: nurture a life for nine months, keeping it safe and healthy.  In reading the self-help books after my miscarriage, I read the advice to not grow angry at myself and how I shouldn’t hold myself responsible for the loss.  At the time I didn’t. I was still working through the shock of having seen the baby thriving, his heartbeat chugging along at 115 bmp on the ultrasound still didn’t mesh with image only a week later of complete darkness and no evidence of life.  I was still working through how quickly things can go from truly miraculous to devastating. I wasn’t looking to place blame on anyone, at least not yet.

Now several months out from losing him, I admit that I’ve blamed my body.  Part of the reason I’ve stepped away from treatment was that I needed to heal, but I also needed to reconcile my relationship with my body.  For the first time in my life, I’ve loathed it. I’ve wanted to trade it for another one, one that would protect the life I want so desperately to bring into the world. I have a mistrust of it. How is it that I can create beautiful eggs and with the help of my husband, beautiful embryos, but my body won’t allow for them to thrive? Now with only three embryos left and one last transfer possible, I’m struggling to trust that my body will cooperate.

As part of my healing process, I’ve turned to other things I know I can do.  I decided to sign up for a race and start training.  I told my husband I needed something else to work towards besides baby making. I needed to work on trusting my body again. I needed to feel its strength. I needed to know I could rely on it to get me through a difficult challenge. I have also returned to my yoga practice.  Allowing myself to trust my body as I flow through poses and keep my balance. Working at getting out of my head and having my body to lead me. I’ve needed to see how beautiful it is, even if it is flawed. I’ve needed to appreciate it for all of what it can do and how it allows me to do things I truly love, instead of hating it.

I’m working at letting go of the fear and mistrust as we move closer to our next attempt. I’ll admit it is a daily battle.  Having gratitude and love for my body is hard when I feel I’ve been betrayed by it. It is wound that needs constant attention and mending. I’m working at making a choice.  In all of the things that I do, I can allow myself to believe the constant ticker of doubt that runs through my mind, or I can put my faith in my body to carry me through the last painful quarter-mile. I’m working at not allowing myself to strictly define who I am by what my body hasn’t been able to do, but by all of the possibilities it holds.

Perspective

I’ve been on a hiatus the past couple of weeks from writing.  The weeks leading up to winter break are some of the most stressful at work and then break came and well, so did life.  I also felt a little like I was throwing myself in this blog, reading other blogs, and becoming obsessed with connecting with others who are on this journey like we are, which also caused me to wonder if I was neglecting my husband and should be focused on making sure we were okay after the miscarriage.  In the middle of all of this, we got news that my stepfather has stage three lung cancer. Like I shared, I went home immediately after my D&C to be with my mom while my stepdad underwent a procedure to biopsy the nodules on his lungs. The tests came back positive for lung cancer and all of my focus shifted to them. He’s getting treatment and I get home to help when I can on the weekends. I am tossing around the idea of taking leave, but am waiting to see if things will get bad. So far they are able to manage the daily radiation and weekly chemo appointments without me being there and I’m continuing to work. Seems that the treatments are going well and my stepdad is feeling good. I pray that it will remain this way through his 43 days of treatment.

I went to church with my husband the Sunday before Christmas and as I sat listening to the story of Jesus’ birth, a story I have heard so many times before, it was as if I was hearing it for the first time. I’ve come to realize how different the world looks after IVF, after three failed attempts, after finding out that a loved one has cancer.  It would be easy to get down and allow myself to wallow in all of what has taken place. It would be easy to become bitter and angry, to question God, to get wrapped up in the impossibility of it all, because it can certainly feel impossible.

As I sat and listened to our minister retell the story, but focusing on the point of view of Mary and how she must have felt in that impossible moment, I came to see the miracles of the story in a way I’d never seen it before. As scared and frightened as she must have been, she faced her fears and kept faith.

I also recently read an article in the January 2013 Real Simple on how to come back from a crisis.  In it they suggest that you surround yourself with friends who know how to deal with various stages of the crisis. What I found most helpful for me and what helped me to keep things in perspective while I fought my inner battle with maintaining faith and hope in the face of all of the impossibility flooding my life was a quote towards the end of the article. “We cause ourselves more suffering when we tell ourselves that things shouldn’t be happening. ‘The truth is, there are wonderful things that happen in this life, and there are really sorrowful things that…life is like that.’”

We assume that pregnancy will come easily for us once we set our minds to making a family. I think I’ve struggled with accepting how easy it is for others and not for us. Now having had our last miscarriage, I feel like all I see are pregnant women and women with new babies. It hasn’t helped me accept what we’ve been given. In fact, I have probably suffered more because I’ve focused on the frustrations of  our journey in comparing it to others. I’m trying to remember that this is all part of our journey and to be grateful for how all of what’s happened has brought my husband and me closer together. He’s my rock and I know now that whatever we face, we face as a team.  Our journey may not be easy and it may not be what either of us imagined, but it is ours. Does keeping the faith become difficult? Sure. I got two baby announcements this week and guess what else decided to arrive? My period.  It’s been a really difficult week.  I just have to believe that for whatever reason we’ve been given this path, but I’m sure thankful we’ve got each other.

Met My Limit

Sleeping has been tough lately.  My mind races with all kinds of thoughts, mostly wondering about how our appointments will go on the 20th and the post-IVF consult with my RE on Jan 2nd. I wish that we could get our pathology results back before Christmas, but my RE is going out of town and the 2nd was the first appointment we could get to see her. The practice is huge, so I’m sure that another doctor could meet with us but I want to see what she has to say. While we have decided to take a break for a few months from treatment, I feel like knowing something from this loss will help me to process all of this over winter break and move forward in the new year. My mind bounces back and forth between all of these thoughts and the hours waste away. Soon, 4:40 AM has arrived and I feel like I’ve gotten 20 minutes of sleep.

I’m a high school teacher. I have about 160 students this year with class sizes at the highest I’ve ever seen in my 11 year career.  Working while going through treatment has been extremely difficult.  To compound this, I am also at a new school this year. This was to simplify things, but in a lot of ways it has made life possibly more stressful than they were last year. I’ve also found myself making constant comparisons to my old school. I taught there for 10 years and if you’ve done the math, that was pretty much my entire career. Things weren’t always easy, but it was a well ran school. Where I am now, there are a lot of policies stated, implemented, and changed again sometimes within a matter of days. I’ve felt incompetent. I’ve felt like I am not being considered as a professional. I’ve felt like support staff find ways to make their lives easier and pass what they don’t want to deal with on to the faculty.  It has been a rough year professionally. Combine that with our personal struggles with fertility and I’ve met my limit.

Getting ready this morning, I could feel myself getting overwhelmed. We haven’t set our budget for the month. For teachers, January is the longest month.  We get paid at the end of November and then three weeks later prior to the break. The next pay check doesn’t come until the end of January. Being off for the break, buying gifts, seeing friends, traveling to see family-it all adds up and you can find yourself in a pickle come mid-January.  So, this morning I have fixated on the budget.  I have also been composing a response to a parent. I’ve been sifting through all the papers yet to be graded. I’ve been going over where my three preps are and where we need to be by the end of each period that day.  My heart rate is elevated and I feel a shortening of breath.

I tell my husband that I’m overwhelmed. He knows and understands. He is as well.  He’s also a teacher. He’s also facing all of what I am professionally, but with no planning period. He’s also felt the devastation of our loss.  As we get closer and closer to school, our car feels like a confined space filled with stale air. Deep breath. I tell myself to focus on one period at a time until the day is over.

My planning period arrives and I go in search of a form I need for a fund-raiser. I see three different offices and three different answers to where this form can be found. I arrive finally to the bookkeeper. I stand in her doorway and wait for acknowledgement since she was speaking with another secretary. Finally acknowledged, I ask for the form and I am told I have to look on the server. I explain that others have told me she has the form. Impatiently, she points to a crate and says that the form is there but it is also on the server.  It is all I can do to not scream as I take the forms I need, turn on my heel, and speed out of the office.

One rude person in the course of the day, typically not such a big deal.  Rude person thrown in the middle of my life that I feel is completely out of control, and I’m ready to write my resignation letter. It is just too much.

On the way home, my husband says that there is an article in the New York Times about stress.  Tonight, it was the first thing I read when I got some down time after dinner. While she’s mostly talking about small anxieties, she frames it in a larger picture, how those smaller stressors and our responses to them can make it more difficult to handle catastrophe when it happens. She talks about emotional capital and how we allow ourselves to put too much energy into what she calls “extraneous catastrophes”- those things that “don’t deserve much of our emotional capital.”

I can’t change the way the school is ran. I can’t change how that rude bookkeeper reacts to a question I have. I can’t change having 165 students and very little time to evaluate all of their work. I don’t have to let one really rough semester define the remainder of my year, or the 11 years I’ve taught. I don’t have to put more emotional capital in than I have in my reserves, and right now I’m almost on empty.

Perhaps if my professional career was all that was taxing me, those things would be worth being fairly upset about. Right now, my professional self will have to take a back burner to my personal battles. In the meantime, I can try to find possible ways to manage these things when they happen. I can seek the help of those whose counsel I trust. I can relish in the moments I have working with a pretty awesome group of young people. I can continue to try and be a positive person in their lives and create a space where they are comfortable to take the risks I hope they’ll take in learning.

I guess it is sort of like that prayer: “God, give me grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, Courage to change the things which should be changed, and the Wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.”

Here is the link to the article.

Acupuncturist or Therapist?

I kept my appointment with my acupuncturist today.  With the last miscarriage, I was so scattered that I totally forgot I had the appointment until I was leaving work at 5:30, well after they’d closed. I scrambled to make the apologetic phone call and she answered it with grace and understanding.

I’d seen her the week prior before the ultrasound where no heartbeat was seen.  She and the receptionist were happy to see me as I crossed the threshold into the office. Last week I shared that the morning sickness, or feeling like I was constantly carsick, was taking a toll on me. She was eager to hear how I was feeling and whether my symptoms were getting better.  I hadn’t planned to have the conversation in the middle of the waiting room, but no one else was there and I just couldn’t pretend until I got back to the treatment room to share what had taken place in just a short 7 days.

They were both devastated and sincerely concerned, which I appreciate.  She asked about where that left us and what the RE had shared. I explained that we’d get the pathology back in a few weeks, so until then it was sort of a waiting game.  I shared concerns about my thyroid and how I wanted to be sure to have them run blood work on it and she agreed.  Then we headed back to the exam room.

As she began to place needles in various symmetrical locations on my body, she asked how my husband was doing and if we were talking.  What I intended to be a short explanation of how immediately we hadn’t been able to really talk, but that we were talking and dealing with it together, turned into a long detour about my parents’ health.

Friday following my D&C I had plans to go home. I’d made these plans well before we knew about the loss pregnancy. My mother called and shared that my step-father had a scan for other medical concerns, but in the process they found nodules on his lungs.  He’s smoked since he was fifteen and even with all the pleading in the world and hypnosis, he’s not been able to quit. He’s now 72.  My mother has early signs of dementia.  She started forgetting her words about two years ago.  Her longterm memory is great, but short term and simple words are a struggle.  I went home to sit with my mother in the waiting room and to help with bringing my stepfather home from the procedure.  I talk and talk about their health problems and my concerns for a good 25 minutes with my acupuncturist.  She listens intently to how they have purchased a dream retirement home, but have not made headway to actually move into it and sell their other home. How they live in limbo and neither is a home, a place of refuge and protection, but rather a burden they struggle to maintain. How they spend hours driving between these homes and the effect this non-move has had on their lives and social connections. She listens as I share how I’ve pleaded with my mother to get a specialist to treat her instead of her regular doctor. How my stepfather acknowledges the issue, but his depression and drinking have him and my mother trapped in an eternal state of stagnation and have left me beating my head against a very stubborn wall.

As I dry up, I realize that I simply wanted to say that I had to go home Friday to help my mother with my stepfather’s surgery, so my husband and I had just been able to really talk on Sunday. I feel guilty for unloading all of this on her. She’s my acupuncturist after all, not my therapist.  I apologize and she says, “you haven’t unloaded anything on me and there is no need to be sorry.”

I am thankful I didn’t cancel the appointment. I am grateful for this woman who heals me not only with eastern medicine, but also with grace and understanding.

How are you?

Seems like those three words should be words of comfort. Someone is concerned about you and they want to hear how you are. The difference lies in who is doing the asking. Close friend? Sure those are words of genuine interest and concern. Receptionist at the RE’s office the day of your D&C? Empty greeting.

It isn’t that she, or anyone else I encountered who I didn’t really know or who didn’t really know me and what was taking place for us that day, intended those words to be hollow and empty. I know it sounds crazy for me to take out my frustrations on a random stranger or chance acquaintance, but could she not see all of the blood had been drained from my face? Couldn’t she see that my heart was breaking and the rest of me was crumbling right there with it? Couldn’t she see it was all that I could do to put one foot in front of the other and walk into that office, the same office that had given me life and now was going to clean up what remained of that life? And to be fair, it wasn’t just her. It had been a build up of people from the moment we found out that we lost the heartbeat at the ultrasound on Tuesday.  As soon as we stepped from the exam room and made the appointment for the D&C, those words, “how are you?” became knives I wanted to throw.

On the day of our ultrasound I was 7 weeks and 3 days along, but our baby was 6 weeks and 5 days. It isn’t that we had taken for granted the miracle that was taking place inside of me. Having had a slight scare with bleeding around week 5, but a good ultrasound and no bleeding since, the signs weren’t there. The week prior, we’d seen our little peanut a second time and the RE was able to pick up a heartbeat at 115 bmp. When I climbed up on the exam table and the RE began the exam, I guess we both just expected to see a similar picture of the previous two times, maybe a bit bigger and with a stronger heartbeat. Instead, the RE’s face turns grey and she grows quiet. Our little peanut was difficult to see and find; even after a great search, no heartbeat was present. There were white lacey streamers in the gestational sac and the RE wasn’t sure, but felt that it could be blood.

I sat there, devoid of feeling, while she talked about our options. I call them options, but really there was only one. Her immediate suggestion was a D&C. There was talk of sending the tissue off for pathology. If it was chromosomal, we could check the other embryos. If it was something taking place within me, we could run tests and start different medications. This all washed over me. I was numb.

So by the time we made it to Thursday morning and I was signing in for my D&C, the words “how are you?” in a chipper voice and a smile didn’t have the effect that they should. I’d reached my limit with those words. I am not okay. I am not fine. I will not be okay today and I will not be okay tomorrow. 5 years from now or even 30 years from now, there will be a place in me that will never be okay.

The issue is that you can’t wear a sign around your neck that announces to those who have no idea what is going on for you under the surface how you are doing. We kept this pregnancy to ourselves for the most part. We’d only shared with our close friends who knew about our day to day journey with infertility and our parents and immediate family.  Beyond that, no one really knew we were expecting and of course I wasn’t showing. I think that in some ways that is the most difficult part. With the first pregnancy, we were open and shared it with people.  When it failed, we weren’t sure if we’d make the same choice again if we were able to have that choice. It was difficult to have to have a similar conversation with everyone when they asked about that failed pregnancy, and we didn’t want to go through that again-or so we thought. When we found out that this last round was successful, we kept it pretty close and were cautiously optimistic.  While I have been surrounded by those who know and I am eternally grateful for those people, I have had great difficulty acting like life is normal with those who don’t. I believe that is why those three words are so difficult for me to manage. It isn’t that I want to have people feel sorry for us or anything like that. I just need to be able to be honest with them when they ask, “how are you?”

Almost a year later…

So here we are about a year later from my first and last post. I should have been writing all along. I should do a lot of things that I just don’t seem to get to every day. That’s just life. So where are we almost a year later?

We’ve moved on to IVF. We’ve completed one fresh round and one frozen. The good news is that we know we can make great embryos. The difficulty is getting those embryos to want to hang out of nine months in my uterus. They retrieved 18 eggs, nine were fertilized and eight seemed to viable options.  We’ve taken a conservative approach and have only transferred one embryo at a time.  We didn’t get positive results with the fresh round, but did get a positive pregnancy test on the frozen round. Then my numbers dropped and we were back to where we started.

Now it is the beginning of November and we are waiting to see how this last frozen transfer will turn out. We transferred on Halloween. Hopefully we’ll get a treat instead of a trick.  We chose to only transfer one again this time. Talk about being under pressure. Our RE encouraged us to transfer two and I thought that I would until it came time to sign the forms. The difficulty is that you want a family and I know that the ultimate goal of the RE’s office is to make that happen for us if they can.  We joked with our RE about being on-call for baby sitting and helping us care for two babies at once. We’ve always joked about having twins. My mother is a twin and my husband’s father is a twin.  We sort of went into this four years ago expecting that we’d have twins. But then those forms were there and I was agonizing over what to put on those blank lines. “Thaw _______ to transfer _________.” “Thaw enough to transfer ________.”

I got angry first. What if I only ever wanted one child? Not only has this process altered everything I pictured about making a family with my husband would be like, but now I was being emotionally battered by deciding how many children I might get at the end of all this.  Then I got worried.

We sat one night outside our favorite local pizza place. It has a huge patio and is a great place to people watch.  This couple sat next to us with two newly born twins. They were tiny and I saw what our life might become with twins.  This couple seemed to have it together, don’t get me wrong. I just couldn’t seem to see us as them. It may seem like I should have thought all of this through before I signed up for IVF, but I thought I had.  I thought I had come to terms with the idea that we could end up with multiples, but there is something completely different about getting them naturally or through an IUI and purposefully putting two embryos back. At least for me it was different. I felt like I wasn’t ready to face the  possibilities for difficulty and risks that come with twins. 30% of multiples pregnancies end up with health issues.  I couldn’t imagine going through this journey to only put lives at risk. I also knew that there was no way we could afford having one or both in NICU.  Weighing the risks, I didn’t feel like it was the choice I could make for this round. We talked about it for hours several times. After talking, crying, reading, and praying, I felt that there were too many things about putting back two that made me uncomfortable. We went forward with one and promised each other we’d only look forward without doubts.

I’ve also had a hysteroscopy between IVF round two and three.  Our RE felt like it might give us some answers about why we were having difficulty. I’ll post more on that day later, since technically I had two within 72 hours of each other.  With the procedure, they removed polyps (which came back begnin-thank God!).  We’re hoping that this will help the embryo that is in there now find a great spot to latch on to and hang out for the next nine months. Keeping all of that in mind, we felt like going with one was the right thing for us right now. Keeping a one day at a time mindset is about the only way to stay sane with this process.

The waiting is tough and I think what makes it more difficult is that I can’t exercise. I walk to help clear my head. I do yoga to help center my thoughts. I can’t do either right now and I’m finding I have a lot of pent up energy. Today I got to feeling anxious and normally I’d just hook the dogs up to their leashes and head out the door. I had to settle for running errands and they had to settle for taking a ride in the car.

We go in on Saturday for our beta test.  Seven more days.

Take me for a walk?