Blog the first

Hello world. My name is Rose, and I'm infertile.

And I'm pissed off about it.

I've been fighting the infertility demon for quite some time now. My husband and I got married in 2000, and have been trying to have kids ever since. I've been through every fertility treatment on the medical roster, and none has worked. Here I sit, age 46, with no kids. And I wanted them. Oh, how I wanted them. Babies to cuddle and care for, little ones to read to and play with, grade schoolers to help with homework and take to museums, tweens to teach about life, teenagers to counsel and guide, young adults to send off to college, weddings to plan, grandchildren to spoil. Mama. Mother. Matriarch. Me.

But it's time for me to face facts. I'm not a mama, and will never be one.

For a long time, people told me to keep hope alive, as Jesse Jackson used to say. Keep hoping. Just relax...you're stressing out about it too much. Eat asparagus (bananas, pineapple, various vitamins). Pray to the Virgin (the goddess, Saint Anthony, whoever). Here...take these clomid pills...you'll ovulate. Try IVF...it really can work. Your eggs are too old, so try IVF with donor eggs. Try to adopt...as soon as you adopt a child, you'll get pregnant for sure!

Oh, fuck all of that. None of it worked. Not even IVF with donor eggs, which my doctor assured me had an 80% chance of getting us a baby. You should have seen me, flipping through the donor book, holding on to all the hope that a weary woman can possess, finally choosing a donor whose baby picture closely resembled me when I was little. That last IVF, the one with eggs from the donor with the chocolate chip cookie eyes and shy smile, was the worst. I'd allowed myself to believe, believe, believe, more than I'd ever believed before. 80% chance of success, right? When I got the call, that blithe call from the nurse assistant who couldn't have cared less, that I was not pregnant yet again, it just about killed me. I kept seeing those sweet brown eyes in my dreams.

One devastation after another. One blow to the spirit, then another, and another, and another. Each felt like a punch to the solar plexus. Each felt like a body bruise that wouldn't heal.

So these days I look okay on the outside, but inside I'm all black and blue.

Hence this blog. I've got to get over the anger. I've got to find a way to healing. I've got to get to stage five, you know, ACCEPTANCE.

And reality dictates that I have no choice but to accept a childless existence as my fate. The fact is that my gynecologic biology was faulty from the beginning, and now after countless surgeries, probes, tests, etc., there isn't much of it left. I've suffered from ovarian cysts my whole life, and have borne three major surgeries because of them. I've also had blocked tubes, fibroids, and a hormone imbalance. Each time one of these got treated, I'd lose a body part. These days, I have one ovary and my uterus left. No tube connects the ovary and the uterus, so there's no chance of anything spontaneous happening.

Now I'm going through fucking menopause. Yep. Menopause. And if you think you're going to read a bunch of happy horseshit here about how I'm having my "power surge" and how I'm so happy to be preparing to enter "the most creative time of my life", find another blog. I'm even more pissed off now. I laid in bed two nights ago, suffering from my first bout with "night sweats" and feeling like I was going to melt into that little puddle of green goo, just like the Wicked Witch of the West. I know it's menopause and not summer's heat that's getting me. The AC was on full blast, as was the ceiling fan in my bedroom. And I haven't had a real period for almost a year. Yeah, I had a little teeny drip in March, but that was the last of it. Each month, I feel like I'm going to get it, all the PMS and bloating and everything, but then it doesn't come. I used to curse the auntie (curse the curse, haha). But these days I feel like she's abandoned me.

The endocrinologist I went to see in the fall of '06 told me that I was infertile because I was fat. And ya, at that time I was, very fat. No mention then of the fact that THREE IVFs may have contributed even a little to me putting on 100 pounds in six years. No one tells you about the effects that megadoses of hormones have on your body. Modern medicine, feh.

But since fall of '06, I've lost 90 of those 100 pounds. And what have I gotten for all my dieting, exercising, and other fucking self-discipline? My periods have stopped and I've entered the power surge world. Damn it all.

You might be sitting there reading this and thinking, this bitch certainly knows how to whine. I ain't whining, amiga. I'm royally pissed off. I can't believe this has happened to me. While I know the world has a million more pressing problems than my internal malfunctions, I have to live with myself. And I'm so angry about this, so angry at myself, so angry at the fact that for all my brains and accolades and success, I am bereft of basic femininity. I feel my infertility as a void in my spirit. A gaping giant hole in my soul.

Can I tell you that at times I've felt this anger so acutely that I've thought of suicide? There's a great big bridge near here that stretches over a beautiful, scenic bay. More than once, I've thought of what that scenery must look like as you're falling, falling, falling from that bridge. I've heard stories of people driving their cars up to the bridge summit, parking and pissing off all the other drivers, and then taking a flying leap over the top. A moment or two of sheer freedom from all that oppresses, before smash! crash! into the water and silence. Bodies wash up later, found by fishermen or pleasure boaters or the natural resources police.

But don't panic, amiga. I ain't killing myself. I'm blogging instead. Maybe someday I'll look back on this and say BLOGGING SAVED MY SOUL.

BLOGGING SAVED MY CHILDLESS, ACHING SOUL.

Keep hope alive.