I Need to Just Vent

Feel free to skip this one, it’s just me venting. Some reasons why today was hard:

• I’m finally getting over being sick, but my husband seems to have caught what I had. This is completely selfish of me, but I’m annoyed that I was sick during the week while he was at work and now he’s sick on the weekend. He did a great job of taking care of me while he was home in the evenings, but all week I just really wanted him home during the day to take care of me and he couldn’t be. Now he’s sick and I will be taking care of him all weekend while also cramming in all the homework I was supposed to do at a leisurely pace over the past week (but couldn’t because I was delirious). And I’m much better, but still not completely over being sick. I expect the next two days to suck hard.
• This might sound crazy but I’m actually rather nervous about the personhood bill that passed in North Dakota this morning. This bill effectively outlaws IVF in the state. And while it’s likely to get overturned, it makes me nervous because there’s a base there that we could get stationed at. What if we find ourselves in the middle of fertility treatments and then we get sent there? If there’s a fertility clinic on the base then the state laws wouldn’t matter, but what if there’s not? I know it’s crazy for me to freak out about this for many, many reasons. But I went there.
• I went to a party tonight that my neighbor was having, one of those direct sales things for some purses. I knew I wasn’t going to buy anything but I just wanted to get out of the house and have some social time. I forgot that social time on base nearly always translates to non-stop baby/kid/birth/pregnancy talk. The woman selling was pregnant and one of the ladies brought her three month old. I was the only one there without any kids. It was painful. I drank more wine than I should have. I don’t know if I can handle another night like these. Next week is book club and I’m nervous that it’s going to happen again.

So yeah, I came home and my husband had fallen asleep on the sofa and not put dinner away like he promised he would and I’m tired and I’m just sad. I feel old and miserable and useless. I should probably just take some NyQuil and go to bed now, but I’ll probably stay up feeling sorry for myself for a while.

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Telling People

So I recently started making a list of blog topics to write about and this is one that I’ve really wanted to write about for a while. It’s also one of the more difficult because it involves revealing some things that I’m not proud of. So, one of the questions that I’ve had to ask myself a lot lately is who do I talk to about trying to conceive? This spans everything from how do I answer questions about having kids/wanting kids/trying for kids, telling people about my blog, or just telling people what’s going on. I have found if I tell people that we’ve been trying without success (especially without any detail because I don’t know them well enough) I hear some of the things on my do not say list. But what about the people I am close to?

I have a confession. I have not spoken to my mother or my sister about what’s going on. My mother knows that we’ve been trying, but that’s all. I haven’t even told my sister that much. Here are two women who should be the closest women in my life, who I love so very dearly, and who I want to talk to about all this. Yet I’m terrified of doing so. With my mom, it’s mostly because if I start talking to her about it I’m pretty sure she’s going to push me to talk to my sister. And things with my sister are complicated.

A little back-story: my husband and I got married less than five months after we met each other. We both knew very early on that this was it. We decided to get the legal marriage out of the way quickly due to many reasons related to his military career and the fact that I was an unemployed student living with my parents. So we had a courthouse wedding. We also knew that although my family is in the area and was able to come to the courthouse, his family was not. So we both wanted to have a second wedding later that was a celebration and a bringing of the two families together. What does this have to do with my sister? Well, the hubby and I met shortly after she got engaged to the man she’d been with for years and had already bought a house with and we were married several months before her wedding, with our Wedding 2.0, as we called it, coming a few months after hers. She felt that I stole her thunder a bit, although we specifically tried to plan things in a way that avoided taking anything away from her and her wedding. And then I made things worse at her wedding when I gave my toast. I won’t say what I said, but it retrospect it was careless and thoughtless and I understand why it hurt her. The LAST thing I wanted to do to my sister on her wedding day was cause her any pain.

A couple of months after her wedding she expressed that what I said hurt her. I apologized. Our relationship has not been the same since, at least not for me. I feel like I’m walking on eggshells around her much of the time. The issue of children makes this much more difficult for several reasons. As I’ve said, I haven’t always wanted to have children. My sister has. She once said she wanted a football team (to be fair she was dating a football player at the time). Just about as far back as I can remember my sister becoming a mother seemed an inevitability. My sister is about two years older than me. Any age related concerns I have, she must have as well. In addition, my sister has struggled with her weight for years. I’ve read enough about trying to conceive that I know that weight can greatly affect one’s ability to do so. I struggle with weight in my own way, but I’ve always been skinnier than my sister and weight has long been a topic we don’t really discuss.

So I don’t know how to discuss with her what’s been going on because I feel like if I get pregnant before her I will be taking something else away from her and I fear that if I even just tell her that I want to have kids it’s somehow going to hurt her. I know that really what I need to do is to just start the conversation, somehow. I really, desperately want to be able to talk to my sister about all this stuff. I just don’t know how to start this conversation. And I don’t want to make the rift between us any bigger. But not starting the conversation almost guarantees that it will get bigger.

I have found that since I started blogging I am generally more open with people in real life about what’s going on. Recently a woman I know who I’ve never quite clicked with was asking for advice for a friend of her’s who is in a similar situation to me. I told this woman I know about my blog and suggested the blogging community as a resource for support. This led to a conversation back and forth about things I never expected to talk to this woman about. It was nice but at the same time this conversation took place via Facebook but she and I aren’t actually even Facebook friends anymore.

The issue of telling people was brought up again for me today. The adoption forum I attended on base was a public forum. And a reporter from the base newspaper was there. They published an article about it on the front page of today’s paper. And I’m in the photo. I’m barely in it, you can only see part of my face and most people probably won’t know it’s me, yet I was not prepared for this. I didn’t realize she was taking any photos. I know that at a public event with a member of the press there is no expectation of privacy, yet I felt violated. The fact that I was there at all, much less the reasons behind it, was all so very private to me. I’m not ready to be totally public about it and I feel a bit like that was forced upon me today.

Talking about our difficulty conceiving has been a challenge for me in many ways. For most people, it’s simply none of their business. With others, I feel they simply would not understand. And then some are more complicated, like my sister. This is all part of why I’ve tried to keep this blog anonymous. I don’t post about it on Facebook, most people in my life don’t know it exists. I like it that way. I think.

In other news, my period is three days late but the home test is negative. I still have my appointment with my doctor on Monday. If my period hasn’t started by then he’ll probably order a blood test, but what I really want is that referral. Fingers crossed.

Tick Tick

Today is my birthday. 31. I feel somehow incredibly old and so very young all at the same time. My husband is two years younger than me (almost to the day) and it still feels weird to be in my 30s while he’s still in his 20s. It’s a silly technicality, but there it is. And with this birthday comes the reminder that I am getting older every day and what that means about trying to conceive.

My mother was 38 when she had me. Her mother was (I believe) 39 when she had her youngest child. These are both very good signs for me being able to have children for several more years. Yet my biological clock is ticking so loudly in my ear every night. I do not want to wait. I do not care that genetics suggests I could probably still have kids ten years from now. I don’t want to have kids ten years from now. I want to have them now.

In a phone conversation with a friend the other night we were talking about this. She is a couple years older than I am and has never had the urge to have kids. She previously felt that she would never want them but recently has been thinking more that she might, especially now that she is married to an amazing man who would make a wonderful father. For most of my 20s I was certain that I too would never want to have children. She and I discussed the shift, was it gradual or sudden? I couldn’t really answer that, I wasn’t sure. I just knew that it happened. I just knew that now there was nothing I wanted more. But now that I’m not in my 20s, I’m worried about being able to have children.

I’m also worried about being able to care for children as an older mom. I don’t have the kind of energy I had in my 20s, that much is made all the more clear every day on a college campus full of people 10 years younger than me. I want my children to be active, but what if I can’t keep up? As I mentioned, my mom was 38 when I was born. My dad was 47. All through school I was the kid with the old parents. My dad, never in the best of health, had a heart attack and quadruple bypass surgery when I was still in elementary school. For years one of my biggest fears was that my father would pass away before having the chance to walk me down the aisle. Fortunately, he’s still with us, but at nearly 80 his health is declining. I do not know how much longer I have with him or my mom.

The day after my phone conversation, I stumbled upon this article in which a young woman in her late 20s discusses how her mother’s advanced age has affected her. I can relate to so much of what she said, yet so much of the language makes me angry. Just the title “My Mom Was Too Old” makes me want to shake this girl who is apparently just a year or two younger than I. Too old? By whose standards? Too old because your mother’s mortality is something you have to think about before you feel ready? I don’t think we are ever ready to think about the mortality of our parents. My mom is nearly 70 and still struggling to deal with her own mother’s death, even after years of telling me that it could come at any time.

What the article really brought home for me was the fact that my biological clock is ticking so loudly, maybe, not so much because I fear not being able to have children when I’m older but because I remember the downsides to having older parents and I don’t want that for my kids. Yet here we are. I’m probably not going to be the oldest mom on the block, so many women are choosing to have kids later in life now. But I will still be one of the older moms, one of the ones who needs to sit down more. I’m already starting to find a lot of grey hairs. But I also know the awesome parts of having older parents. My mom did some crazy awesome shit when she was a single woman in her 20s and early 30s. She raised me to be independent and strong. She modeled sacrifice and so much love in the way she dealt with juggling work and children. People may have thought my dad was my grandpa, but he was every bit my daddy. And he not only walked me down the aisle, he helped me plan and execute an epic father-daughter dance that had everyone applauding. He may have had to ask a couple of groomsman to prepare to pick him up off the floor in case he fell during the dance (he didn’t), but out on that floor his age did not matter.

Yet I still do not know how I feel about this. Much like I’ve said since returning to school, part of me wishes I had done this when I was younger and had more energy, but I also know I was not ready when I was younger. I wasn’t ready to take school seriously and I sure as hell wasn’t ready to have and raise children. It is what it is now. One day older. One day closer to being a mom.

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