As Real As It Gets

Yesterday, I stepped into reality.  I thought that I had already been realistic about our situation, but I wasn’t.  I had been caught up with pregnancy symptoms, the excitement of finally being pregnant, and the fear of losing the remaining baby.  Somehow those distractions kept the situation from really sinking in before.  But yesterday put an end to that.

At yesterday’s ultrasound – our 8 week and 1 day ultrasound – I saw our little peanut, only it doesn’t look like a peanut.  It has a distinct head and body.  There’s a dark spot in the skull that is the forming brain.   It has arm buds and leg buds and it was wiggling them during the ultrasound.  It is clearly a person…a two centimeter long person…but a person nonetheless.  And it has its own little 178 beats per minute heartbeat.  The Prince quipped, during the ultrasound, that Little Hamish must be a sprinter.   Cute...but I’m not comfortable calling the baby “Little Hamish,” anymore.  I can’t exactly explain why, but I think it is because the baby is no longer theoretical to me and that joke was okay when the baby wasn’t so real.  Now I am fully aware that there is an actual other human being growing inside of me and it is going to have its own identity and thought and needs.   And I’m freaking out a little bit.  Okay…I’m freaking out a lot.  I’m freaking out enough to need a new name for the baby.

Reading this, you may be thinking that I am crazy for not “knowing” this until week 8.  Don’t get me wrong.  I knew that there was a baby growing in my belly before yesterday’s ultrasound and I knew that it would continue to grow and develop.  But I didn’t become fully aware of the situation until yesterday.  Maybe I had been too blissful to think of the pregnancy in anything other than sugar-coated fluffiness.  Or, maybe I hadn’t allowed reality to sink in because I was stuck in my infertility mindset of waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Maybe I was just so in love with the idea of my baby, I didn’t want to make it “real” because real things can go away.  I don’t know why reality is hitting now, but it is an amazing and scary thing.  I have never felt so connected.  I have never felt so much responsibility.   I have never felt so much fear that my body is going to fail me.  It’s failed me so many times in the past, when I was trying to get to this place in my journey.  If it fails me again, with so much at stake, I don’t know if I will ever get over the betrayal.  But for now I will try to push those fears away and learn how to reconcile reality and “over the moon” love, because that is where I want to dwell for the rest of this pregnancy. 

In A Land Far Away...

I think that the second phrase at the beginning of most fairy tales -the phrase “in a land far away” - is used to distance the reader from the story.  After all, we know that fairy tales don’t mirror the world that we live in.  So if we are going to immerse ourselves into the tale and believe that it is possible, we need a way to explain the discrepancies between our world and the world in the tale.  “Ah…But it happened in a land far away” usually does the trick.

For a long time, I felt like the stories I heard about people getting pregnant must be happening in a “land far away,” because I certainly didn’t see them happening to me or the people around me.  But then one of my friends became that fabled “signed up for adoption after being told she couldn’t have a baby with her own eggs, only to find out she was pregnant” girl.  Another friend became the “failed to get pregnant after multiple ART procedures and then got pregnant naturally while relaxing on vacation” girl.  All of the urban pregnancy myths were coming true around me.  I even had one friend who had four failed IVF’s, then ate copious amounts of pineapple for weeks, and got pregnant.  I could no longer distance myself from the clichéd stories by believing that they were fanciful or that they didn’t happen in my world.  And without the “in a land far away” buffer, I was forced to face the reality that the miracle of motherhood happens everyday, all around me, not just in another place that may or may not exist.

Of course, I am happy for my friends, but their successes bring home the point that others are getting their miracles, while I’ve still never experienced a single positive pregnancy test.  All my pee sticks have only had one line, and I’ve been on vacations and “just relaxed” as much as the next gal.  I even ate pineapple until the song “If You Like Pina Coladas” made me nauseated.  No baby.  Which begs the question, if these great fertility fairy tales are coming true in my world, why aren’t they happening to me, too?

In addition to the self-pity and doubt that comes along with the removal of the “land far away” buffer, the fear of hope is also an unfortunate side effect.  That may sound like a weird statement – why would you fear hope?  But for me, hope has not been my friend in the past.  With great hope comes great disappointment if things don’t work out.  My issues with that go back to my last post, regarding “attachments to expectations.” 

My husband is so practical and logical.  He understands the odds of success involved each time we try a different approach to getting pregnant, and he somehow balances practicality with hopefulness.  He loves hearing that my friends have gotten pregnant after they struggled with infertility.  Somehow I think he figures their unconventional successes in as a factor that increases our odds of success.  I like to think that I am also a logical person, but I cannot achieve the balance that he can.  I throw myself into each ART cycle, each alternative therapy, each “natural” try, thinking that if I can just “believe enough” I will get my miracle, too.  When that doesn’t work, my husband takes the whole thing in stride while I become a blob of emotional goop.  I’ve taken hope to an unhealthy place and I am still trying to figure out where the tipping point lies between optimism and setting myself up for disappointment. 

I guess my ultimate point here is that sometimes, for me at least, ignorance is bliss.  I need the “in a land far away” buffer right now because my fertility journey is in such a scary and uncertain place.  While it is probably better to be grounded in reality, sometimes, when things get too scary or to sad, I need the temporary solace provided by the belief that a fairy tale is simply a fairy tale.