Something to smile about

not being...

Well, I probably should stay silent, especially for those of you who will hear this here instead of from me personally. But, I guess that is, after all, the point of a blog: to communicate.

I am not pregnant. I see that there are thousands of people out there blogging about their infertility journey, and don't worry, I'm not about to do that. I just thought I'd say a few words about it today and move on.

I've felt, for the better part of the last twenty years, that I was not capable of having a biological child. I had no proof of that, but because I watched every other woman I knew get pregnant when they didn't want to, when they were on the pill and/or when they used condoms, I figured I couldn't possibly be that lucky, especially since I wasn't always as careful as I should have been. I also was a little afraid of children. Never sure about how to treat them. This encouraged me in my thinking, that I didn't have "maternal instincts."

Whatever the reason, this is what I've always believed. So, when I came to a point in my life that I liked the idea of having children, I looked at my medical and genetic history, and we decided on adoption. We didn't even try to get pregnant. That was four years ago.

With my adoptive parent story following that of many others, adoptions haven't worked out for us either, so finally we decided, okay, fine. We'll try to get pregnant. We'll deal with my medical problems; we'll make the necessary sacrifices.

And we tried. We tried for six months or so before we decided: maybe go see a professional.

Clearly, the doctor said after looking at my charts and figures, there is some sort of problem. Let's try IUI (insemination) with hormone therapy. So we did. Now, I admit, only one month's gone. However, the doctor called me not only to tell me the "bad news" today (not pregnant), but that after a month of taking all of these hormones, my levels are still not sufficient to maintain a pregnancy (and, by the way, not even close -- shockingly low). We need to go in for a "consultation" to talk about options.

I have no idea what options they will suggest.

All of this is to look at something that has little or nothing to do with pregnancy. That is my long standing struggle to believe what I "know" already. Years (and years and years) of therapy has shown me that I learned very early to overlook my intuition/self-knowledge/body (whatever you want to call it) because I needed to survive bad situations. Something like what sexual abuse survivors describe as out of body experiences: when we can't handle was is going on around us, we disassociate.

I became a master.

Yet those voices still speak to me. That interests me. How can I learn to listen to the voices I've spent my whole life ignoring? Even now that I see them to be correct, I doubt them.

What the brain wants, it replicates. I want a baby. I tell myself to keep trying. And it may well happen. I will keep trying. I just think it is fascinating that without any tests, no outward signs of problems, I've known all along that I was not fertile.

What else do I know and ignore?

Sorry about the silence

Still don't feel like speaking, but Conor has a few words I like:


"you know by now
you won't be getting in
All Souled Out!!! in heaven"

I'm a sucker for a pun.