The Sex Chronicles

This month I will not be partaking in the two week wait….no, that ended the day I ovulated. Why do I get to skip out on the agonizing, stressful, hopeful and full of symptom-spotting that is the two week wait? Because we didn’t have sex.

Now, if you have been struggling with trying to conceive, you know how controlled your month is. You take your drugs on CD 2. You start using your OPK’s on CD 7. You continue peeing on sticks until you get your two dark lines. You have sex. Then you wait…..while doing everything under the sun so that when the TWW ends with your aunty showing up, you don’t have any “what if’s”…”What If I ate the whole pineapple instead of just the core” “what if I didn’t temp right…there was that one night I got up to pee at 2 a.m” “What If my LH surge happened on my lunch”. Now, missing the step “Have sex” it inconceivable for anyone who is trying to conceive, especially if the cycle is a 100mg of Clomid cycle.

We were at that stage of the positive tests, and it’s time to baby dance our little hearts out. The day before we had a positive OPK at lunch, and then it faded at dinner time when I retook. We had sex then, since I DID get a positive at lunch….. The next day, MORNING, LUNCH AND DINNER were the darkest positive OPKS I had ever seen. We hopped into bed, we got naked, we giggled a little bit, we tried, and a little while later, my husband exhaustively declared “I can’t“.

I don’t mean to demoralize my husband on a public form, that’s not the intent at all. It’s not his fault. But as a women who is on her third year of trying to conceive, on her first month taking the 100 mg of Clomid, and knowing her husband will be gone for the next 5 months…to hear “I just can’t” was the most paralyzing thing I think I have heard in a very long time, even more so than the “I have to move two states away, and will be gone for the next 5 months”.

What do you mean ‘you can’t?!’….. It was just too much for him. The three years of scheduled baby dancing, the completely unromantic-strictly procreating kind of sex, and the news that he would be relocating just caught up with him….of all the days, it caught up with him the day I got my positive OPKS.Okay life, you win….I’m tapping out and raising the white flag.

My husband and I laid there for an hour after trying for several, and talked about sex. He asked me “What happened to us? I miss the days when sex was sex….it wasn’t demanded of me and we didn’t have to do it under such pressure”…..I cried, because I know. I didn’t want it to come to this. It was never my intention. My intention was to drink too much wine one night and giggle while stripping all our clothes off and having the best sex of our lives, and then two weeks later realize i had an unexpected late period, which would make me want to test. I imagined I would scream in the bathroom and have my husband come running in. I imagined that I would tell him “OMG! We are going to have a baby!”, I imagined crying, and hugging and having sex right there because we would be so excited. I imagined it would be fun…..Not once, did I ever imagine that my husband would be laying next to me after trying to have sex for a couple of hours and saying “I just can’t…it’s not going to work” and me next to him crying because I know this month we will be out, and he will be gone for the next 5, and then we will have to start all over again when he gets back.

We ended up falling asleep, with the hope and intention that when we woke up, we could do it right away. The next morning came. We got up, I peed on an OPK, it was another dark dark positive! So we got naked and did the dance. We again tried for a couple of hours, of exhausting un-fun sex, and failed. My husband started getting irritated in himself, because he knows how critical this time was….and nothing. Not even an, “I’m close”.

Frustrated, and losing all home, we decided to “take a break” and go out to breakfast. It was our favorite little breakfast place, and Groupon had a coupon for it! We went and sat down….. while I was looking over my menu, and I hear this little voice from behind me say, “Peek A BOO! I see you”. I looked behind me to see this little girl, all of about 3 years old. Her hair in these super cute braids with little colorful clips at the end of each one of them. Her smile, as she stared and me, had the remnants of her french-toast she was still chewing. I smiled at her and said hello. She got out of her booth, ran up to our table, and showed off her neon-green skirt with purple leggings. I smiled, chocked a little bit, and the tears engulfed my face. I pulled out my pony-tail to let the hair fall over my face, and bent to “look” into my purse, while the water just poured out of my eyes, like the gutters of a house during a rain storm.

I couldn’t stop. I thought about that little girl, and how I would never get to experience dressing a 3 year old girl in those brights colors. I would never get to wipe the crumbs off her face and see my reflection in her features. My husband sat across the table and asked if I wanted to leave. Since the little girl was on her way out, I said no. The buss boys came and cleared the table, and the waitress brings  a young family to sit next to us, with a 3 month old baby. It took the same amount of time to recognize that it was a baby, for the tears to flood my face. This time, gasps came out. Changing diapers, putting on a cute Sunday dress….tucking her into her car seat and going out to breakfast with my little family, are only a couple things I won’t be experiencing at time soon.

So, we got home from breakfast with out doggie-bags because I couldn’t finish breakfast (It must have been Infant-Saturday there, because we were the only couple there without kids), any way….. I gave my husband some time, and said “want to try again?” and he looked me in the eye, with a kind of sadness like he was going to tell me someone had died, and said “It’s just not going to work. I can’t. I don’t know if its just too much pressure, or that my work is to stressful right now, but I can’t…I’m sorry”.

I tried everything. We tried games (Sexy house wives, anyone?), we tried cuddling, we tried ‘forget about making babys and lets just have fun’. We moved to THREE different rooms, including the couch in the living room, we even tried porn (oh yes….I even went there!)…..and nothing.

What do you do?! I can’t just take it manually….although I thought about it.

When did sex get to be like this? Why is it so much harder to have sex when it’s “time” then any other time. I swear the husband and I are off, because my Aunt comes into town and he can’t keep his hands off me…..but when I’m ovulating, I must be giving off a vibe that is, in the words of John Maher, “Sexual Napalm”.

I looked up adoptions last night, to see if it’s something we should start saving up for. The average cost of an adoption?! $30,000-$40,000….. As I am reading this, I am thinking about how I would work overtime. I’d pay off my student debt, and I would get a cheap car to be able to afford that….while I have friends who had their babies for FREE AND the government GIVES them month each month, because they are single moms.

What am I doing wrong?

Till Then,
Mrs. M

Acknowledging Apathy

Usually I hate being apathetic. I think emotions are good. Apathy, or indifference, always makes me sad, because it means that I didn’t care one way or another. Maybe it’s being burnt out of almost 36 months of TTC all by myself, and watching others around start on their 3rd & 4th.

I was so sure this month. I woke up with cramps SO bad on second day of positive OPK, and then on 6 dpo. I’ve had cramps on an off. I would wake up in the middle of the night because my boob’s were THROBBING in pain.I’ve gained weight. I have been a lot more edgy than normal. My husband told me he “feels something different about this month”…. 8 DPO came along, and ALL my symptoms were gone. So I’m guessing it was just the drop in a hormone. Then DPO 9 came along, and the boobs started hurting like crazy AGAIN! My nipples itched so bad last night (10 dpo) but I couldn’t scratch them because they were so tender I just wanted to cry.

I took a test. It was a BFN….I know it’s “early”, but I can also tell that  this is not my month. Apart from the ridiculously painful chest, everything is back to normal. My CM has returned to its Pre-Aunt Flo state. I’m not AS crabby as I had been.

So last night I was reading in my book, The Buddha Walks into a Bar, and It was explaining how it is important to have emotions, acknowledge them, and then drop it, you know, don’t get hung up on them. So feeling a little disheartened that I had a BFN ( but to exhausted to really care) I decided I would “acknowledge” what I was feeling. (I know this sounds really strange, but hear me out). I am not imagining my boobs hurting or the bile in my throat every night.  I know these aren’t “feelings”, but they are all real, as so is the feeling of hope I get when I feel these. Maybe they aren’t associated with being pregnant, but that doesn’t make them any more or less real. There is a lot going on physiologically when TTC, especially when you are on infertility drugs. These are going to be the same EVERY month. Almost 36 months of TTC, and each month, I have the acid reflux, the mood swings, the sore boobs,….. so why is it that every month, I make it in my head to be more than it is?  It’s chest pain. It’s estrogen. It’s part of my monthly cycle. It is what it is. That’s it. There is nothing wrong with symptom spotting, because we are hopeful. It will either happen, or it won’t happen. This is either my month, or it’s not. There is nothing I can do (besides taking the infertility meds). Asking my husband 1,000 times a day if my boobs look bigger now  (seriously, its like the Verizon commercial, ‘Do they look bigger now?’), or temping every morning after ovulation will not change whether I am physically pregnant or not, it is just going to change how hopeful and/or how disappointed I am going to be.

I think I understand what it means “acknowledge, and let go” of the feelings. Today I am okay. It wasn’t our month (again)…so what am I going to do?…Simple: I’ll try again next month, but this time, I won’t be SO damn hard on myself. It will happen or it wont. It’s that simple.

But what if it doesn’t? Will I be childless forever while I watch those around me get pregnant? No. I will be for a while, but then those babies we see now will be in elementary and in middle school, and eventually high school, and we will be among empty-nesters. I was telling my husband last night, that there are a lot of people who don’t have children (Julia Child!). One of my older friends never was able to have children, so her and her husband travel to Australia once a year AND go on a cruise once a year. I told my husband, our lives won’t be meaningless…. we will travel, and invest our time making  the world a better place for future generations (or at least try). Travel to Africa for a couple weeks in the summer to help build a school, teach English/Math in a 3rd world country for a summer. Go on archeological digs in South Dakota, and maybe we could discover something incredible that will be an anthropological mile stone.

There is so much to life out there, and as much as I would want to create one, I have to understand, that sometimes, it’s just not in the cards. We are in the early stages of Infertility (we haven’t done an IUI, gotten the tubes checked, or even tried IVF), so by all means, we are still going to continue to try, but if we try for the next 7 years (I’ll be 35  then), then I think it will be time for us to accept it, and live a life that might be different than what we anticipated.
I’m not religious. I don’t think there is a “plan” out there for me…. but as the Dalai Lama says “Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions“…This life is one that I created with my husband and I. We are a very happy couple, because we choose things to make us happy, even when people advise us otherwise. We love the planetariums and the Field Museum in Chicago. I had a lady tell me that “God created the Earth, and that is all you need to know. Don’t waste your time listening to false accusations the planetarium is trying to feed you”…. To each their own, but this is our own.

Anyway, I just felt like writing down my thoughts of the current mood. I wanted to find the “bright side” of infertility, and of course there isn’t one, but I wanted to make sure that I would, in fact, be okay, if feeling something grow in my belly, isn’t in the cards for me.

Till Then,
Mrs. M

“The more we care for the happiness of others, the greater our own sense of well-being becomes. Cultivating a close, warm-hearted feeling for others automatically puts the mind at ease. This helps remove whatever fears or insecurities we may have and gives us the strength to cope with any obstacles we encounter. It is the ultimate source of success in life.” – Dalai Lama

http://www.dalailama.com/messages/compassion