Infertility

I'm not infertile, but I may as well be. My husband has a condition that would cause great harm to any children we may have, and therefore we have made the choice to use infertility treatments to avoid it. We are using donor sperm and in utero insemination.

We are now on our third cycle. Our insurance covers none of the fertility treatments, and we're already beginning to struggle. We are using the absolute cheapest form of fertility treatments available to us, and it still costs around $1500 every cycle. That may not sound like much, but in less than five months, we've spent nearly $5000 trying to get pregnant, unsuccesfully.

I feel like a failure. I look around, and I've lost count of how many women, friends, loved ones, and acquaintes have announced their pregnancies and brought babies into the world since I started lobbying to try for a baby, and now, when we are finally in a place to do that, I have failed. There was a polyp in my uterus, which acts like a natural IUD - it's almost impossible to get pregnant with that kind of obstruction. It was removed, painfully, but my doctor. Then, during the second cycle, the lining in my uterus was too thin, and there was no success there.

This evening, I will take a new medicine (the doctor believes that it's likely the Clomid, the fertility medicine I was on, might have caused the thinness of my uterine lining, so he changed the medicine) and try for the third time.

I have it easy. Many of my friends have had to do In vitro feritilization, which costs many times what my fertility treatments cost. Some of them have tried for years, not months, to get pregnant, and with no support from any insurance companies.

One of those friends found this video laying out the pain and struggle and calling for a change in the healthcare system, which provides medicine for free to men who want to get an erection, but won't support families struggling to have a child. The video is choppy, but emotional.
http://www.vimeo.com/11214833

A link to an article from Self Magazine:
http://www.self.com/health/2010/08/breaking-the-silence-on-infertility?currentPage=2

Dear Baby (1):

Dear Baby,

No. You have not been conceived yet, as far as I know. You have been in my thoughts for so long, and I have pictured you in so many ways and places that I have long since lost track of when I first started hoping for you.

Everything in my current life has been chosen in hopes of meeting you: my dog - extra friendly and non-territorial; my home - extra bedrooms for me to paint the walls with anything your heart desires; my car: with an extra big back seat, in hopes I would need the space for you.

I have bought items for you, and then given them away - only because I despaired of ever meeting you at all, and so many others around me have welcomed their babies already. Two years ago it was a baby blanket. Last year it was a full crib set (on sale!). This summer it was a book of murals for painting your walls.

I can see you. I have seen you in every possibility - a girl with my sister's giggle, a boy with your daddy's eyes, even twins. I have names chosen - all kinds of possibilities in case the one we had picked just doesn't fit. Colin, for the wide eyed one - Tyson, for the independant - Lily for the shy girl - Rosalie if I can get Daddy to consent.

I'll teach you to be polite even when you don't want to be, and to be thoughtful even when the person you are thinking of doesn't deserve it. I'll make sure to teach you all that I wish I had been taught. I'll play with you and rock you and sing to you, even though I'm a horrible singer.

I already love you. I can only hope you won't resist being loved as much as I did.

Love,
Momma

Paint chips

Not long ago, my best friend and I picked out paint chips. Although this was nearly a month ago, we have not painted one iota of our house since then. While my friend has nearly impeccable taste, I fear that my laziness probably out does even her good taste. I have forgotten many of her best recommendations, and the tape holding each one to the wall is started to fall off. The kitchen will be the first victim, I fear. There are some truly horrendous shades combinations of blue and orange, which eventually we will come to a concensus upon, and then promptly paint in the most frightening color combination in existence. I'm sure of it. Which is, of course, why we have not yet painted the kitchen.

The real purpose behind picking paint colors was self indulgence. Here, I can indulge in my childish dreams of babies in the house, giggling and running, up and down the hallway. We indulged in pinks, and greens, and yellows. I will build my baby a little playhouse, perhaps from http://knockoffwood.blogspot.com/ . While this might be dreadfully, terribly sad, this dream is far bigger than even my wedding day could have been. I dreamed of a having a baby in my arms since the first time I read a gut-wrenching story of a premie baby who almost didn't make it from Reader's Digest when I was twelve years old. Is that weird? I don't care; I've waited until I am quite a respectable age. My own mother even implied, not long ago, that I was "old" for having babies. Come now! If bloody Jennifer Lopez can have TWINS at 38, then I can certainly have a baby. I'm not even 32!

So, blog world, I'm picking colors for the nursery. I'm not buying anything, not to worry. I wouldn't want to jinx my future eggs or anything.

Saving the trees.

It's been a fascinating day. Yesterday I was so ill I just lay on the couch and practiced my moaning skills. So pitiful was I, in fact, that I could not pick up my brand new Kindle to read. (An item I have been coveting for over a year.)

Shall I tell you about the Kindle? I love it. I love that I can read all these books, many of them for free, and not have to worry about hunting it down, or lugging out boxes to find them, or the space it'll take up. We already have eleventy billion books, and about forty bookshelves to hold them, so I'll take it. We have so many bookshelves, in fact, that the books are actually piling themselves out onto the floor in protest. There are boxes of books, also, and books that keep inexplicably showing up in the mail like lost friends. "Oh hai. We're your old childhood books. We found you! hahahaha!" Mocking me.

Therefore, the Kindle is lovely. They mock me from a list, rather than in piles on my floor. I can take the list mocking. They do mock me, friends. Because the one draw back to my new toy is that I have so many books, I don't feel the need to finish the current one. Very often I will skip from book to book, and forget I had the other one to read, except for the nagging little voices, reminding me that I am, in fact, not finishing my books. Oh, the horror! I will be poorly educated if I don't finish my books! Oh, wait. Yeah, I have a Master's degree. But! unfinished books! But...BUT UNFINISHED BOOKS.

So yes, I do keep going back and reading a few pages of A Confederacy of Dunces out of simple guilt - I don't really like it - but by God, I will read it!

A further caveat to the joys of the Kindle is the fact that it cost so damn much. So much, in fact, that I coveted for over two years without buying it, and hid it from my poor husband for over a week after I did buy it. I would have hid it for longer, but he caught me trying to plug it in. Oh, the horror of spending $300 for an item that holds books! As if I don't have far more than 30 books in there already, and I didn't pay no damn $10 a piece for them, but I digress. Think of all the space I'm saving! And trees!

Why.

The true reason why we have not had children, even though we are fast approaching 31 and 35: my husband has cleidocranial dysplasia. This is a dominant bone disorder that can cause severe difficulties in any person that has it. My husband himself has gone through nearly a dozen surgeries and the accompanying pain, near death experiences and physical therapy. He has a "mild" case.

While I did not live through any of his pain (he had all of his surgeries, with an exception of two that are yet to come before we met) neither of us wants to see our children go through what he has gone through.

We both want children. We both know that's the last missing piece of our happy little lives, and I feel the pain particularly.

Thank goodness, there are options. There are also drawbacks to each option. Having examined them all, I feel such resentment sometimes toward those who can just have sex for a while and *boop* there's a pregnant woman!

Right now, finally, we have agreed that we can explore these options together. We have the money, to support and care for a child without struggling, which is what we wanted most.

Now. Shall we have donors? Shall we do Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD)? Should we adopt and risk a mother wanting to take the baby back?
We just don't know yet.

I think I have to be barking mad

to be an interesting blogger. Like, read dooce.com, or thebloggess. They're awesome. They're funny. They're fucking crazy. Especially the bloggess, but I just want to be her more. And I will always be me, the white bread vanilla chick who likes to go to dragoncon. Did I mention we're going to Dragoncon? Did I mention that i want to bring a baby dressed as Spock someday? Especially since Leonard Nimoy is going to be there? Oh, wouldn't it be fab. He totally would not be impressed, but that wouldn't make it any less fun, now, would it?

Saving Money

Make your own laundry detergent! This is the super cheapest thing on earth, and I'm actually pretty excited about it. My only fear is that my husband is going to look at me like I'm crazy.

Here's the blog post where it shows the guy saving over $50 on laundry detergent from The Simple Dollar.com:
http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2008/04/09/making-your-own-laundry-detergent-a-detailed-visual-guide/