Acceptance

The fifth stage of grief. I think I’m there. I truly believe that I am finally at the stage of acceptance. I’m not fighting fate anymore and I’m not feeling angry or upset at my situation. I have a strange calm and sense of peace. I’m beginning to accept that this IS my life, and I can’t change it, no matter what. It is what it is. It has taken me many many years of heartache, many lost relationships, too much negativity and bitterness to reach here. I don’t know what comes after acceptance, but I guess we will find that out.

I have been quiet for a few weeks in the blog world. Things have been going on in the real world, and some of those things have helped bring me to that calm place I’m in currently.

1) DH saw my last blog post, and realized how badly I was doing, and how much I needed him to step up and be there for me. And step up he did. He surprised me one day with a folder full of notes and comments from the calls he had been making to adoption agencies. It was so heartwarming to see that he was taking charge and doing the research. He brought me up to speed on his research, and we attended a couple of orientations too.

I have definitely had my doubts about adoption, and I’m sometimes not sure if I’m ready to move ahead with it, but I’m definitely in a much better place mentally about the process than I was even a few weeks ago. And in getting all the information through the research that DH has been doing, I am finding myself opening up to the idea even more.

I will write a complete post about my feelings, my doubts and how I’m trying to process them.

2) DH and I had some very deep discussions – amidst lots of tears and bared feelings about our opinions on adoption, and where our doubts were stemming from (this too requires a separate post), and we had some pretty intense revelations about each other and about us as a team. Just by talking to each other.

3) Jill wrote a couple of posts about the hypnotherapy sessions she went through, and her experience really intrigued me. Many of you have suggested that I see a therapist, or get onto medication. Somehow that didn’t seem to be the option of choice to me. When I read about hypnotherapy, it made sense. So I decided to take a session for myself. It’s been about a week now since my session, and I have to admit, I really think it is working. The objective we had set for my session was to “clean my slate”. I told the hypnotherapist that I had a lot of negativity and bitterness set in my mind and sub conscience, and I was beginning to have a very negative energy around any step I took. For example, for my last FET, for the most part, my attitude was “It’s not going to work anyway, let’s just get it over with”. I had stopped envisioning babies in our house. I had stopped even wanting to parent. And I knew I needed help. The hypnotherapist is located in CO, so our session was on the phone, and she then sent me an audio file that I have been listening to. It has been only a week, but I know it’s helping, because I have been feeling so calm since then. (This TOO requires a separate post!)

In my last post I was talking about options, and trying to decide which path to walk down. I think we sort of know now. We will sign up with an adoption agency (we’re not fully there yet, but are working towards it). Depending on how things go – we will figure out next year if we want to proceed with surrogacy or do one attempt at a fresh IVF here locally, or if we want to try one last FET with our remaining blastocysts. We will leave that decision to next year. I’m trying to give up on my need to have the next 10 years planned out inside my head. I’m trying to be in the moment and take it from there.

So far, so good. I hope I am able to continue feeling peaceful, because this sure feels nice. I was getting sick of being who I was becoming. This is a very concentrated effort to regain my life and enjoy living.

You can run, but you can never hide

It’s been a long time since my last post. I’ve been in a fuddled, confused state of mind, not feeling very communicative, not having much clarity of thought and word. Broken, tired and hopeless.

You can run but you can never hide from the reality of your life, can you? It always comes back to bite you in the rear. And reality could be in any form. You could take a firm decision to enjoy your long weekend and not think about life and IF, and you could get asked the “So when are you having kids” question right in the beginning of the weekend, when you’re happy and just slightly buzzed on nice strong mojitos. Or it could be in the form of the sight of an obviously newborn baby wailing loudly, and being rocked to silence by an obviously inexperienced dad in the park on a sunny afternoon. You walk silently by, and all you can do is reach out for your DH’s hand and squeeze it.

It’s been over a month since our BFN and it hasn’t been easy. On the outside, life has gone back to being routine. But the emptiness comes back to haunt us and taunt us every day. I feel disillusioned from most things in life – from my job to household chores to working out to even just relaxing. No fun in anything.

I guess my heart and mind needs an anchor or a goal to look forward to, and there is none right now. Of late I have been feeling like a balloon floating away into the sky. No destination, no goal, no plan, no “next steps”.

DH is a little bit in the “ostrich mode” – ie, dig your head in the sand and ignore the problem, hopefully it will go away. I realize he is tired of IF, and wants to lead a normal – hormone free, treatment free life for a while. I find myself closing off from him a little bit because I find him avoiding any discussions of next steps. At the same time, I don’t want to push him, because I don’t want him helping me with our next steps out of force from me. I want it to come from him. I don’t know when that will be.

And I alone don’t have the motivation to do anything on my own. There’s so much that needs attention, and I’m just not up to giving attention. My list grows daily:
1) Find a new job. I took this one because I needed a job at that time. I don’t like it, and clearly I don’t fit into the work environment. But I’m not motivated enough to do anything about it. I’m not even confident enough to do anything about it.
2) Get back to working out and living healthy. Obviously I need to. I need to be able to fit into my regular clothes. One can wear tents only for that long! But do I have the motivation to go to a gym? No points for guessing the answer to that one.
3) Get the house in order. I’m not even motivated enough to cook food any more. I’m happy canned soup and bread. The house needs cleaning and care. I’m not giving it any attention.
4) Feel worthy again. I don’t even know where to begin on this one.

I’m trying to figure out what to do next with my life, as far as IF is concerned. And I need your inputs. I know some of you have been in the situation I am in, and I’m hoping someone can give me some advice / suggestions on how to navigate the maze inside my head. But PLEASE don’t tell me to “just adopt” or something like that. There’s no “just” anymore – it doesn’t work that way.

I’m also listing my options down, because, who knows – just writing them out could bring me the clarity that I need.

So here are my options, and my thoughts / analysis:

I have 2 remaining frozen blasts. Not the best quality, but still, at least they’re there. And they are normal after PGD.

Option 1: Prep for FET again, and attempt another transfer?
Analysis/ Thoughts: I don’t trust my uterus. And I don’t feel confident to try another FET right now. I don’t know if I may feel differently after some time has elapsed. But for now, I feel “safer” knowing the blastocysts are frozen.

Option 2: Use a surrogate?
Analysis / Thoughts: We can’t afford a gestational carrier through an agency. It will take us a long time before we can gather that kind of money. Also, I’m scared because surrogacy is not guaranteed either. What if the surrogate gets a BFN or has a miscarriage or something? Would we be able to deal with that?
But on this topic, I do have some “hope”. I have a cousin who has offered to carry a baby for us. We are not jumping at the offer just yet, because I feel like she is offering herself to me out of extreme emotion. And while this decision is emotional, it also has to be thought through practically. For one, my cousin doesn’t even live in the same country as I do. She has two young children. And a job. And a life. There’s a lot to consider. But it does give me some hope to know that she has offered, and when the time is right, it will be a matter of working things out on the logistics front. This is an option that I don’t want to exercise any time soon. I guess because this is the only option right now that has any “hope” – and I want to have hope for as long as I can.

Option 3: Adopt?
Analysis / Thoughts: We started exploring the idea, and started talking to agencies, until DH decided he didn’t want to proceed just yet. Our finances need to be in order first, according to him. And while we get them in order, even researching adoption is not an option for him. I don’t agree with him on this, but I don’t want to take on the research on adoption on my own. For 2 reasons – 1) He obviously needs to be part of it, and if he’s not part of it, there’s no point me researching it at all. 2) I want him to take the lead on this research. I’m tired, and bitter, and seeing negative in everything I do. I need him to hold my hand and lead me forward. So I’m stuck on this one.

Option 4: Do another fresh IVF?
Analysis / Thoughts: We had decided that the CCRM IVF would be our last one. But now that we’re done with that, I find myself wondering if I should go back to my regular RE here who did get me BFPs 3 times, one for each IVF I did with him. I wonder if I should just rest my body a bit and try one more time locally here. I don’t have an answer to this one. Of course it would be out of pocket, and there’s the money situation again!

Option 5: Live Child “free”?
Analysis/ Thoughts: I have found myself questioning my intent several times recently. There was a time when I would see DH with friends’ babies, and my eyes would tear up thinking what a great dad he would make, and wishing I could have given him a baby. Of late, I see DH with friends’ kids, and I ask myself “Do I see him doing this on a sustained basis”? And the answer is always “No”. Perhaps it’s self - preservation, that I’ve been protecting my heart for so long that now it believes I don’t want a baby any more. Or perhaps it’s something deeper than that. So I ended up asking DH what he thought. My question was “Do we even want to parent anymore?”
At first his answer resonated with my doubts. He said he wasn’t sure. He said he had been thinking the same thing, and he too could no longer see himself running after kids.
Two days later we talked about it again. And we realized that we should parent. If we already feel like there’s no value in our lives today, how would we cope for the rest of our lives? How will I cope when my brother and his wife get pregnant, or when my sister gets pregnant? It’s one thing to cope with friends’ announcements, and a totally different thing to cope with your siblings’ announcements. So this option is almost wiped out. But I leave it on the slate because doubt comes back to me every now and then.

So there you have it – the whole 9 yards. Sorry the post is so long, and if you have come so far down the post to read till here, Thank You!

What would you do?