Dream a Little Dream...

As many of you know (because I’ve been complaining about it in all of my posts), I’ve had a cold for a long time.  I finally went to the doctor yesterday and was given an antibiotic and a cough syrup with codeine.  Normally, codeine doesn’t bother me but last night the medicine made my dreams really weird.  And they all involved the same theme – Babies/Pregnancy.  What a surprise!

In one dream, I was living with a lovely couple, admiring and playing with their baby (who was a few months old).  I desperately loved the baby, even though she wasn’t mine and I wasn’t related to her.  Then, for no particular reason, I gave her a piece of popcorn to eat.  Nothing bad happened, but her father yelled at me, saying “What were you thinking?  Don’t you know babies can choke on popcorn?”  Even after he calmed down, I felt so terrible about putting the baby in jeopardy.  I do know better, and I don’t know why I would do something so dangerous.  I kept saying I was sorry, secretly thinking “how stupid can you be?”

Clearly, this dream was about me struggling with the idea that I am not fit to be a mother, and that is why I am not able to get pregnant.  I know that is not the way it works, as is evidenced by all of the people who aren’t fit to be mothers who do get pregnant.  But no matter how many times I tell myself that I will be a good mother, and my infertility is not punishment for some sin I haven’t yet committed, my subconscious refuses to give this idea up. 

In another dream, I was getting my first ultrasound and I went home to tell my husband that I was pregnant (not sure why he didn’t know already, but whatever…it was a dream).  He said “Great.”  Then, he paced the floor and got sweaty.  He kept trying to pick a fight with me and eventually said “I can’t do this.  I thought it was what I wanted, but it isn’t.  I think you should terminate the pregnancy.”  My heart broke as I walked out the door, suitcase in hand, hoping he would change his mind when he calmed down.

That dream was also pretty easy to analyze, but no so easy to go through.  My husband and I have been getting into lots of little quarrels lately.  I secretly am certain that it is because we are close to heading into a new ART cycle.  My husband pushes me away emotionally whenever we start a cycle.  He is more moody than I am when I’m on the meds, but he is oblivious to the fact that he is behaving so badly, much less conscious of why he is behaving that way.  And although I know the constant bickering is about him steeling himself against the pain of another failure, and not about me…it hurts.  And it also makes me scared.  If his fear of what is to come makes him abandon me emotionally when we are just trying to get pregnant, what is going to happen when I actually get pregnant?  Is he going to freak out? 

There’s another way to analyze that dream, too.  Some psychologists theorize that we are actually every person in each of our dreams – every character is just a reflection of a piece of ourselves.  If that is the case, then this dream could also be about me being afraid that when I finally get pregnant and have a child, I am going to find that it isn’t everything I had hoped for.  I don’t ever say that out loud…as if that doubt’s very existence will keep me from getting pregnant.  But I do worry about changing my mind about what I want in life.  Lots of mothers tell me that they had no idea how hard motherhood would be and that as much as they love their children, they might do it differently if they had to do it over.  What if I become that person?  What if I have a baby only to wish that I didn’t have a baby?  Am I capable of that?  And knowing what women go through, what I’ve gone through, to have a baby…could I survive the guilt I would have if I felt that way?

I wish I could be a real fairy tale princess sometimes and just sleep in a deep sleep, only to wake up and find that all of my good dreams had come true and my bad dreams had been dealt with by someone else.  Real fairy tale princesses don’t get terrorized by their own psyche.  Real fairy tale princesses don’t wake up feeling guilty and afraid.  And real fairy tale princess don't have to fess-up, anonymously to friends they've never met, to having horrible doubts and fears.

Waking from the dream...

Last night, I was watching the movie, Inception, with my husband (for the third time) and a line I hadn’t paid much attention to before struck me as important, somehow.  In the movie, a character says “Well dreams, they feel real while we’re in them right?  It’s only when we wake up that we realize how things are actually strange.  Let me ask you a question, you never really remember the beginning of a dream, do you?  You always wind up right in the middle of what’s going on.”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that I have lost touch with reality to the point that I believe that I am actually in a dream right now.  But there is a similarity between the phenomenon being discussed by that character and some of my experiences with infertility.  And it’s the same phenomenon you see in fairy tales.  The characters’ lives, to the extent that they fall outside of the actual tale, are deemed irrelevant and are never addressed.  We don’t know what formed their motivations or how they ended up in their station in life.  We only know the role they play in that particular tale.  They wind up right in the middle of what’s going on, without any explanation of how it all began.  And after “happily ever after,” they fall off the grid.  Did Cinderella have acne as a child?  Did she ever have kids?  Did she get divorced?  Who knows because everything before “once upon a time” never happened and “happily ever after” is like waking up from a dream – Poof, it’s all gone from that point on…completely disconnected from the fairy tale.

So how does this apply to infertility?  Well, I have a lot of fertility friends and I feel so blessed to have them.  But I am realizing that we seem to be starting a friendship right in the middle of a shared journey and the focus is always on what is going on in our infertility struggles right then.  I don’t know much about most of their backgrounds or what their goals are after achieving motherhood.  I’m a Chatty Cathy (I’m sure you’re shocked given the brevity of my posts) and I think that most of them know very little about my life before infertility.  It’s as if we are stuck in a dream about infertility, together, and we will only realize how strange our relationships are after we get onto the other side of infertility.  I’ve noticed lately that when anyone asks me “How are you doing?”  I say “You mean like infertility-wise?”  It’s as if I can barely remember who I am outside of this journey.  And who meets someone a half hour before talking about where the progesterone suppositories go and the various ways to get them there.  At the time the conversation is going on, it seems totally normal.  It’s only after you step back that you realize how strange the situation is…like all filters regarding bodily functions and personal secrets get switched off, but all filters regarding everything mundane and normal get switched on.

And, like the line in the movie, it seems like people who get pregnant after dealing with infertility “wake up.”  The friends that I know the most about are the ones who have gotten pregnant.  After they get pregnant, I start hearing about their marriages and childhoods and careers.  Sometimes, I’m really surprised because who my friends really are barely resembles who I perceived them to be while we were both in “the dream.”  Once they are beyond the struggles of infertility, it seems strange to them to talk only about infertility related discussions, while I sometimes struggle with getting to a place where I am comfortable talking with them about anything else.  They are trying to extend their character beyond the pages of the fairy tale…as if there is actually a life after “happily ever after.” 

And then there’s the other end of the spectrum. Sometimes my fertility friends drop off the face of the earth once they are pregnant.  It is almost as if they view what they went through as a surreal nightmare that they can now wake up from and forget about because they have a baby in their arms.  I don’t blame them or judge them for that.  I imagine it might be hard to be reminded of the struggle of infertility when you have an opportunity to just embrace the joy of fertility.  But I wonder if the strangeness of our relationships assists them in cutting all ties.  I wonder if the fact that there is no beginning “getting to know you” stage to fertility friendships makes them easier to break off.

I have so many questions…and no real answers right now.  All I know is that I want “happily ever after,” but I don’t want to lose everything I’ve gained since “Once upon a time.”  I want to take the lessons and friends with me, and I don’t want to become irrelevant once the journey through infertility ends.  I don’t want to start a new story.  I want to build on the one I already have.