Category Archives: infertility

a clean, well-lighted place.

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One of the strangest things about my blogging experience is the fact that my close friends and family members seem to be learning about me from what they read here.

The internet can assume it knows all or knows nothing about who I actually am and what I go through, but I’m consistently surprised by what the people who actually know me… well, didn’t know.

How did I miss telling you about that? How did I manage to keep that to myself?

Wasn’t all of it obvious? Couldn’t you read that on my face?

No.

I can never figure out if my reticence is a quirk of the introverted side of my character, or a function of bad relationship scars I’ve sustained over the years. And the latter always makes me roll my eyes at myself. Letting your scars define you always sounds so self-indulgent and Garbo-esque.

But there it is.

Once burned, twice shy, I guess?

I think my struggle with infertility has made this strange disconnect more obvious to me in the last year. I’ll get emails or phone calls from people I talk to regularly saying, “I had no idea you were having such a hard time with that, ” or “Why didn’t you tell me that was so difficult for you?” after reading one of my entries.

And I don’t know what to say to that. How would I bring it up in conversation? How would I talk about it without being a downer? How do you dredge topics up in conversation when what you’re going through is in direct opposition to the experiences of the other person… and might make them feel strange? How do you communicate something hard and not feel the need to rush in and say, “But I’m fine, I’m fine. I swear, I’m fine.”

It’s the most awkward topic in the universe to me at times, too, because it combines the utter weirdness of speaking about one’s girl parts with the idea of grieving. Grieving girl parts.

Yeah. Not something that usually goes nicely with a latte, especially when the other person is bouncing a baby on their knee.

Or is, you know… a guy. Who has no girl parts.

Here, I can flesh things out and clear my head and say everything that needs to be said right then, and no one presses me for more or wonders later about the look in my eyes or feels guilty that they couldn’t relate to what I was going through at all. They don’t have to say anything back. They don’t even have to read it if they don’t want to. They can choose to know, or choose to keep some distance.

It does make me a bit of a chicken. Or a big chicken. But it’s a start, and it feels good.

There isn’t a place in my life beyond a small circle of friends and family where everything comes out. And even with those people, I tend to work out the deepest things in the deepest parts of myself, where my thoughts don’t bounce off one other like echoes in a canyon.

I guess to most people — people who can talk about something serious without stumbling madly over their words — it seems impossibly complicated or indulgent to feel your way through life like this.

But the more I write, the more I feel comfortable about bringing my thoughts into the light.

Maybe I’ll learn to do it out loud, eventually.

it is what it is.

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27

A year and a half ago, I was diagnosed as infertile by my endocrinologist, after a battery of tests and examinations and years of wondering why my body didn’t act like everyone else’s. I have an autoimmune disorder that created/contributes to the problem — a disorder which I’ve likely had for more than a decade. Maybe longer.

It wasn’t the kind of thing you’d think to get tested for, or look up on the internet by name. To this day, I don’t really understand what impact it will have on my life beyond the news I received that morning. I take hormones to restore my system that leave me feeling wonky a good portion of the time. I hope they’re doing more than that.

I know my risk of cancer is high. I know my risk of diabetes is high. I know my risk of osteoporosis is high.

“Risk” is the word that seems to keep coming up. That doesn’t really inspire digging on my part, as much as it should.

It is a part of me now, though, so I should probably ask more questions, and take more proactive action to deal with everything… if that’s possible.

I should.

I really should.

And I will.

To be honest, though, all I’ve really focused on since that day is the baby thing.

The no baby thing. The babylessness.

It’s hard to explain — unless you know me well, or have known me a long time — how much of a smack to the head that news was. Why it seemed ridiculous on top of hurtful.

Why I felt like someone had taken away some part of me that already existed, rather than just telling me something wouldn’t exist in the future.

I know there are problems people have that are so much worse. Problems so bad I would be thankful to have what I have in comparison. I wouldn’t even pretend to understand what those people go through.

It’s even harder to explain — regardless of how well you know me — why the grieving has come and gone the way it has. I suppose I shouldn’t say it ever went, but it has seemed more manageable and reasonable at times. In those moments, I can focus on thinking positively and make plans to be a different kind of parent.

Lately, though?

Not so reasonable.

I think I’ve spent a month now trying to be upset about anything but infertility, because I can’t really think of another problem in my life that doesn’t have a semi-obvious (if challenging) solution. It’s so much easier to be pissed off at something I can control or change, because that means there’s an end to the anger and sadness.

A limit to what seems limitless.

Granted, the people around me are likely confused as hell as to why I’m revisiting old frustrations, but when did I ever promise to be normal?

I just can’t do that anymore, though, because it stops being a coping mechanism and starts being dishonest fairly shortly after I begin. And I’m no fan of making my friends insane.

So.

I’m still pretty angry about the diagnosis. And sad. And a little confused as to why something that wasn’t wrong to want, something I would have been good at, something I had always dreamed of… well, why it would suddenly become so complicated.

And I know it’s not the end of the world.

I know I can still have kids.

I believe I will love my adopted kids exactly the same way I would have if I’d carried them inside me for nine months. Not to mention by the time a kid shows up, my overwhelming happiness will likely cause me to explode into a million tiny pieces.

I can also assure you I will do everything in my power to make sure my babies know they are the most special, spectacular, adorable, magnificent, gifted, slightly over-encouraged little ones on the face of the planet.

I know that nothing about infertility inhibits my ability to parent. Not even a little. I’ll do my best.

What it does do, however, is make me loathe my own body, and not just because it lacks the shape I wish it had. My body is in dire need of a thousand cosmetic and internal changes, but I’d trade all the reduced inches and tighter muscles I can come up with to have that one part of me work the way it should.

What it does do is make me irrationally frustrated at people who struggle with having a second child. Second. Child.

What it does do is pound on my heart without warning when I see photos of friends in hospital beds holding tiny, shriveled gnomes in giant, soft blankets. I see their exhaustion and I long for it so much it surprises me.

What it does do is make me love and hate mommyblogs all at once. And avoid the infertility ones like the plague.

What it does do is make me lie quietly for a second when I hear the upstairs baby wake up every morning in the room above my own. She has words now.

What it does do is make me look differently at relationships, since the adoption process is something my future boy will have to be more than okay with… which includes the expense and time it will take. Am I worth that? What can I do to be worth that?

What it does do is make me frost over when people tell me it’s not the end of the world. Of course it isn’t. Of course it isn’t. Only the end of the world is the end of the world, and if that was the only measure for grieving, then no one should be doing anything but smiling like the sun itself was shoved up their ass. Until the world ends, that is. Then get out your Kleenex.

What it does is different every day.

I’m not really okay with it, though.

Not right now.

Overall, I know things will be fine. I just don’t like waiting to see how they will turn out, or wondering what I’ll need to do to make my dreams come true on new terms.

I would not have predicted I’d still be struggling in this particular way, all these months later.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from the whole journey, it’s that nothing is predictable.

I want to be more honest about it, to write more about it, to do more to figure out how this thing has taken shape in my head. I worry that I’ll end up being indulgent or boring or alienating in walking through it more openly, though, especially if you came here for a list or a laugh or something that wasn’t… well, this.

But I guess it’s MegFowler.com and not TheEternalSunshineOfMegFowler.com.

Which is a URL I should own.

And a dream of being that is really only possible if I dig into the clouds right now.

So here goes.

dear hormones,

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It’s that time again, isn’t it, you crazy bastards.

Not that time.

But this time. The current time.

(Time, time time… see what’s become of me?)

This is the time when you wreak havoc on my entire system.

The time when you overheat me like a tiny blast furnace. The time when you make my head feel as though someone bludgeoned my temples with a meat tenderizer for an hour while I slept. The time when you make everything I normally enjoy eating appear radically unappetizing. The time when you cause me to turn bright red like a Japanese lantern bobbling from a wire. The time when my skin appears to develop multiple personalities, all of which hate me.

Oh, yes. The time.

Let me be honest with you, hormones: ANY TIME YOU WANT TO, LIKE, CHILL OUT?

WOULD BE AWESOME. SERIOUSLY.

Now, I know that you’re trying to return my 96 year-old, cane-using, Depends-wearing, World War Two-remembering, support hose-buying, prune-eating hormones into their normal 33-year old bouncy, baby-possible, barefoot selves. I do appreciate your efforts.

It’s just that the whole process has left me wrung out like a cheap dishrag more times than I can count.

But there’s something about a quadrupled cancer risk and tumbleweeds in my ovaries that keeps me hangin’ on.

Still.

Hormones.

Really. We could be a bit more sunny about this.

And I don’t mean making me FEEL LIKE I AM SITTING ON THE SURFACE OF THE SUN.

I’m just saying.

Love,

Meg