My dear chickens, I’m sorry for the relative blog silence over the past couple of weeks. I’ve still had a Cloud Of Blah hanging over me – just can’t seem to shake it. So I haven’t been writing anything lately because it would all be tinged with whininess and martyrdom and Poor-Pitiful-Me-ness, so I abstained rather than drag you down into The Suck with me.

But.
The thing is, this blog is my space to purge, to rant if I need to, to blindly wave my hand around out there and hope someone catches it and holds on. I’ve debated whether or not to post about this – would it be thought-provoking or just self-serving? – but I’ve already learned that holding it in for the past couple of weeks hasn’t made me feel any better, so I’ll get it off my chest in hopes that I can find some relief; that I can breathe easier and sleep better at night.


1. My birthday was yesterday, the same day as Mother’s Day.
When I got off The Pill last summer and J and I started trying to get pregnant, I looked ahead at this year’s calendar (planner that I am), saw that my 26th birthday and Mother’s Day coincided this year, and took it as a Good Sign. I had daydreams of handing my mom a surprise Happy Mother’s Day, Grandmother! card, a Hallmark commercial come to life. All I really wanted for my birthday was to be pregnant.
Instead, for 12 hours I cooked and cleaned and cooked again and cleaned again and cooked some more for
1) my parents, who fought on the way to come over and have lunch with us, so they sulked and pointedly ignored each other for 3 uncomfortable hours, and then
2) my in-laws for dinner (7 of us in all), and they would not leave until I turned off the TV, stood in front of them, and said “Good night!” at 9 p.m.
It was not the birthday I’d hoped for.

2. This is something I have not even told J.
My hormone treatments consisted of several different meds – Clomid, estrogen, progesterone – to induce/encourage different phases of my cycle. One of the last months I was doing it, after J and I had had our dutiful Babymaking Sex at the appointed times, I waited, I pee-tested on two different occasions, no dice. I went to the doctor, told the nurse I wasn’t pregnant, and she told me to continue with my Prometrium to induce a period. I did, and when my period started several days later, it was heavier than normal. Much heavier. Significantly heaver.
When I went back in to the doctor several days later, the physician’s assistant asked how my treatments were going – I told her about continuing the Prometrium, and she looked at me, then at the (same) nurse, shocked. “You should have come in for a blood test before you started the Prometrium again – you still could have been pregnant.” And her saying that out loud voiced my darkest fear, what I couldn’t even admit to myself – what I still can’t admit to myself. Maybe I did it. To myself. Because a stupid nurse made a stupid mistake.
I just walked out, numb, and cried the whole way home. When my next month of treatment failed to get me pregnant, I called the doctor’s office and told them I was taking a break.

And here we are.

It has taken me hours to get through writing this post. I really hope it brings me some comfort, because I don’t know what else to do.