It appears this post I wrote weeks ago didn’t get posted. I wrote a lot so I’m going to go ahead and post it now! I’ll try to get to an update soon!
I am now 23 weeks. Once again it has been entirely too long since my last post! Part of this is laziness, part of this is busyness with holidays and life in general, partly because I used to write when I had insomnia from depression about infertility (now I still get insomnia nearly every time I have to get up in the middle of the night to pee but I still can’t bring myself to make the trek downstairs, I just lay there after my long walk – all ten feet or so – to the bathroom and back) and part of it, I suppose, is a little dose of guilt for those who I know still haven’t gotten what they want and still follow my blog – which, I warn you, may contain a few blurbs that come off as complaints or lack of appreciation in this post. Believe me, I don’t understand what’s going on any more than you do! Let me (try to) explain…
First of all, I am in a very good place now. The baby is moving a lot more, I am feeling very comfortable with the fact that this very well could result in a real life baby! I don’t know if I have somehow adopted an optimistic attitude that things will just work out or maybe I’m just resigned to the fact that whatever will happen will happen and there’s not much I can do (besides take care of myself in all the ways I know how) that will change that. Maybe it is because I had a very good, comfortable, very uneventful pregnancy and delivery the first time around and my brain is (sort of) forgetting all that we went through to conceive this baby. Yes, we did go through a lot more and yes we did wait a lot longer for this one but I think I am sort of blocking all that out and just enjoying the moment.
Do I still have aftermath from the infertility? Of course. I still don’t enjoy baby showers. My sister’s was last weekend -thankfully she has sisters-in-law in the same city that took care of organizing that. It wasn’t painful, like how I felt every time I simply received a baby shower invite (and immediately declined) but I just didn’t enjoy it. I was really pissed off that infertility robbed me of enjoying my only sister’s first pregnancy and her shower and took away the part of me that should’ve been gushing for her and all the cute baby stuff like all the other clueless people there. I was even annoyed at the attention they gave me – we are obviously very close in due dates and of course that’s special and neat and everyone commented on it. I was polite but just plain annoyed on the inside. Do I resent a part of me now being “one of them” (fertile people)?? Maybe that’s a bit deep and maybe I’m looking into this too much, could be just hormones…
I’m definitely not discounting hormones. I think they are a reason for so many of my conflicting feelings. They have to be because no one in their right mind could possibly be having the myriad of thoughts I’m having in the span of a week/day/hour! You are all probably going to think I’m nuts, jumping around on so many different tangents tonight, but this is sort of my journal so I’m just going to get it out there!
For pretty much most of my first trimester and a bit into the beginning of my second I kept waiting for the indescribable joy to kick in. Of course the initial discovery that the IVF worked was extreme joy and relief. And that would keep coming back every time I would tell someone the news. We told the immediate family (who then told extended family) almost right away and a couple really close friends (including my Resolve group ladies), a few more close friends that knew about the IVF after the first ultrasound at 7 weeks, then the rest of our friends around 10 or 11 weeks, mostly because I was pretty obviously showing at that point and our daughter had begun telling EVERYONE. Anyhow, my point is, it was hard for me to get into this pregnancy and I couldn’t understand why. Quick side note: I just re-read another secondary infertility blogger’s post about her second pregnancy vs. her first and her first paragraph was like I could have written it word for word so for those of you that may also follow her, a few points may sound a little repetitive because her post is fresh in my mind!
I honestly LOVED being pregnant the first time around. I had to wait a year to even start trying because my hubbs was deployed overseas then it took us just over another year to finally conceive. So I always chalked it up to being uber-appreciative of simply being able to get pregnant and be pregnant and vowed I would enjoy every minute (well, not exactly the vomiting but I even took solace in knowing that was typically a good sign!). I admit, besides the nausea and vomiting that lasted almost half the time I was pregnant, it really was an easy pregnancy. Even better, I had a fantastic delivery! I really was pretty cocky and would even tell myself I was so much more appreciative of pregnancy and childbirth than my other friends and most other people because I had gone through (a touch) of infertility and it was probably even a bit good for me. Silly me, I thought I was through with all that infertility jazz and I could go on to become a “normal” fertile person (you know, the stories about how someone’s sister/sis-in-law/cousin/friend, etc. had “troubles” getting pregnant the first time and then went on to have ten more kids because her body just knew what to do then) but was convinced I would still remember how difficult it could be and remain all the more sensitive for it. Anyhow (sorry for the tangent AGAIN), when we began trying this second time around, I was just as excited to be pregnant as I was to get that second baby in my arms. All I could remember was sunshine and butterflies and vomiting flower petals (ok, vomiting anything really doesn’t sound any better, but you get my point). Even through all the crap and heartbreak and depression of trying to conceive, I still kept clinging to the hope that I had to get pregnant because I was just so darn good at it the first time and I really just wanted to enjoy it again. Okay, now enter pregnancy. Enter hormones. Please remember I’m hormonal throughout this all and don’t hate me for my feelings.
I just couldn’t get into it.
Let me start by saying that my symptoms have really not been much worse than with my first. In fact, I didn’t vomit at all with this one, plus I have been able to eat whatever sounded good to me (I was on a Celiac’s gluten-free diet the first time; long story I may have blogged a little about before). There is something funky with my one hip, it seems to get misaligned a lot, causing extreme pain for a bit until it works itself out. I am in charge of my own home (lived with my parents almost my entire first pregnancy while waiting for our first house to sell), over five years older than before and already a mom so I blame those factors for the noticeable increase in fatigue with this one vs. the first. I don’t remember having this much insomnia throughout the entire pregnancy either. So there are things to complain about but nothing that’s really making me miserable. But no, I just couldn’t get into it. I felt so guilty that I had tried and complained for 3+ years, spent lots of money, treated my body as a pin cushion to get what I am so lucky to have gotten and now I was not excited. What. Is. Up. With. That?! Sure, when I said it, I got a pinprick of excitement. I had to keep telling myself I was pregnant to get that feeling, maybe I was just still in denial? Did three years of secondary infertility destroy my spirit? Was I let down somehow? Did I not really want this as much as I thought? What was wrong with me?? I tried to keep telling myself it had to be hormones. And in this pregnancy I have a child to take care of and am much busier with her, maybe I was just too busy to be excited? So these are all things that would go through my head on a daily/hourly/minute-to-minute basis. I felt terrible and didn’t want to do anything besides the bare minimum of my obligations. Then I remembered a phrase I often heard during my first pregnancy – “Oh! There’s just nothing like your first!” I asked my mom if she felt different with her second pregnancy vs. her first and tried to describe my feelings to her and she did not help. I love the woman and she is probably the most supportive person in my life, but she doesn’t get infertility. At all. All she got when I was going through it was that I was so unhappy and she wanted to fix it (thus, the IVF loan). She was always there for me to cry on and help watch Elle when I had an exceptionally bad day and even understood when I kept turning down baby showers and rolled my eyes when I heard of someone else being pregnant. But she thinks that now that I am pregnant it is all over and in the past (don’t get me started on the convo we just had last week about how I don’t still don’t like baby showers, she says she “doesn’t mind them” and I got snippy and said she was never infertile and she cheerfully replied, “well, you don’t have to worry about that anymore!” and I explained how it doesn’t go away, it’s kind of a form of PTSD or a state of being…). Ok, I got started, now I’m done; that was the conversation in a nutshell. Anyhow, back to when I first brought up this second pregnancy thing… She kind of made me feel worse that I wasn’t over the moon happy. She didn’t say anything outright hurtful and I don’t really remember what she said, but it was just not helpful. So I thought to ask some of my friends who have birthed more than one child in the recent past (okay, that’s almost all of them, I chose those I thought would be the most sensitive). Bingo, scored on the first play date! My friend, whose oldest is just three days older than my daughter, just had her third child, told me that she LOVED being pregnant the first time and both times since has just been kind of “blah.” I have since talked to other friends about this and they said the same thing. My mom even came back to the subject a couple weeks ago and said the more she thought about it, she did feel differently the second time around. This made me feel really good. It made me feel normal and validated.
I also realized that my looking forward to the end of this pregnancy isn’t a result of me not enjoying or appreciating the pregnancy but more of me being so excited to meet this new little one. This is another pretty recent breakthrough. In all of my trying to conceive and wanting to be pregnant, there were times when I questioned my motives. My daughter can drive me so crazy sometimes, was a baby what I really wanted or was it the pregnancy? Of course I wanted the baby, the pregnancy is icing on the cake for me. When I think of the newborn cuddles and all the new things they do I can hardly stand the wait!
Oh, I’m not forgetting the sleeplessness and diapers and inconveniences of a baby, those things are daunting for me to think about when I haven’t done them in quite some time. I also worry about my daughter. One of the things that made me so sad when we couldn’t conceive was that she wanted a sibling so badly. Now that things are becoming more real to her, she has been asking if we will still love her when the baby comes and all that jazz. She goes through times when she talks like a baby and says she doesn’t want to turn six, when before she said she “can’t wait to turn 6, then 7, then 8…” etc. I’m trying to not focus too much on “the baby,” stress how awesome she will be and all the cool things she can do that the baby won’t be able to do for a really long time and we’ll very gradually change her “toy room” back into a nursery but of course still worry. She’s such a sensitive kid. I know she’ll love being a big sister but she has had us all to herself for more than five years and I worry how she’ll handle the change.
Anyhow, overall, I am feeling much better emotionally. I am really excited about meeting this new one and even enjoying the actual pregnancy a lot more now that “it” (nope, not finding out the gender!) is moving around a lot more. No, it’s not all rainbows and butterflies but what is?!
I hope you all are doing well. I am keeping up on your blogs, I get the emails notifying me of new posts and I enjoy keeping up. I would comment more if I were at a computer but usually read them on my phone and I am usually too long-winded to comment via mobile! I wish only good things and am constantly hoping for those of you still trying for your happy endings and those trying to make peace with what is and those working through post-infertility prenatal feelings and all. I hope my post didn’t annoy or piss off anyone too much – but understand because I piss myself off a lot too! 😉
The Lucky Infertile 