Putting Project Baby to Bed

See what I did there?  Putting baby to bed…

Anyway, yes, this is the post.  That post that we all thought would possibly come someday where I talk about us reaching the end of the road with trying to have children.  Well, here we are at the end of the road.  I probably shouldn’t say it like that, it’s not as though we’ve walked down this road that ends at a cliff where our lives come to an end.  Rather, we’ve come to an intersection where this road ends and it’s time for us to turn in another direction.  Who knows what is on this new road!

Ok shit, enough with the metaphors.  We have decided not to go forward with our final egg retrieval and that it’s time for us to move on with our lives.

This is a decision we made a little while ago but I’ve decided to wait a while before writing about it. Partly out of sheer laziness but also because there is a part of me that feels a lot more “nobody’s damn business” than I used to.  So I just simply wasn’t in a huge hurry to share.

Saying that 2013 was a difficult year would be putting it mildly.  I think it’s probably the most stressful and emotionally draining year of our entire marriage, and lemme tell ya, we’ve been through some shit over the years.  Nothing could have prepared me for just how much more difficult IVF was than the IUI.  I almost want to laugh when I look back at my posts about IUI because looking back it feels like it should have been a walk in the park.  I know it was all very real and difficult at the time, but by comparison, it was nothing.

Me with the drugs I took home from the hospital before our first round of IVF

The amount of drugs I was on during the IVF, the complications I had to deal with, not to mention the disappointment.  It was rough. Rough in a way that I can’t put into words.  It drained me of every bit of energy I had, every bit of motivation and fucks I had to give for anything.  Watching me dealing with the hormones, the pain of some of the procedures (thank you tilted pelvis!) and the sadness took an incredible toll on my husband.  We spent the entire year just passing that ball of anguish back and forth, taking turns trying to be strong for each other.

So where did that land us at the end of the year?

My husband was on sick / stress leave from work, due to the stress of the IVF combined with some serious, extremely badly timed issues with Vertigo.  We had two more IUI (eight in total), two egg retrievals and five embryo transfers under our belt – and no baby.  My weight hadn’t budged in a year, except up a kilo or three depending on where I was at in my cycle.

We were both exhausted, stressed and most of all confused.  We really weren’t sure what we wanted anymore or how much farther we wanted to go with it.

I won’t miss having to do this every day, not a single bit!

I had my last embryo transfer at the end of 2013 and I was so beaten down by that time that I remember sitting in the car on the way to the transfer, breaking down into tears and telling Xander that I just don’t know how I was going to get the strength to go through with it.  I didn’t mean just the mental strength, but the physical strength as well.  Embryo transfers never went well for me.  What is normally an uncomfortable but quick procedure for most women, thanks to my wonky placed cervix, was a procedure that had me in extreme pain for at least 20-30 minutes on the table.  It would require me to lay perfectly still so I’d have to just bite down and white knuckle it.  All of the other times I did fine, and kind of enjoyed the compliments on how well I held it together, but this last time?  I managed, but only just.  I just had nothing left in me to give and I left that room wondering how I would ever do it again if it didn’t work that time.

It didn’t work… and we agreed that we would take the Christmas and New Year holidays off and regroup in the new year.  We just needed the time and space to relax and gather ourselves before going back into it all again.

A self portrait I made in 2013 showing how crazy and isolated infertility can make you feel.

I was SO tired.  I ended up finding out that I had iron-deficiency anemia due to some blood loss I had during one of my egg retrievals, together with the amount of drugs causing me to have extreme periods each month as well.

It was over the Christmas holidays that we started talking.  I don’t even remember who said what, but it was like the floodgates opening.  Once it was said out loud, that we weren’t sure if we wanted to continue, it all came pouring out… all our doubts and fears, how our feelings have gradually changed, that we want different things.

Things suddenly got a lot more confusing!

You see, we are different people now than we were when this all began. Not only are we almost 15 years older, at the point in our lives where most ‘normal’ people stop wanting to have children, but so much else had changed as well.  When I lost the weight, an entirely new world opened up to me. All of these things that were never possible for me because of either my insecurity or physical limitations were now there just waiting for me.

Most of all?  Over all the time we’ve spent trying to have a child (the time it’s pretty much taken the rest of our friends to raise theirs), we’ve grown to enjoy and appreciate our freedom. Being able to take time for ourselves, stay in our pajamas all day if we want to, go out for dinner or to a movie when we feel like it.

When we were 25 and starting with this journey, if you had asked us if it was worth giving up our freedom and making the necessary sacrifices that come along with a baby, we would have said ABSOLUTELY!

At almost 40?  When we got completely real with ourselves?  The answer was no.

That was hard.  Being really honest with ourselves and giving ourselves permission to just not want it anymore was more difficult than you would think, and it certainly didn’t happen overnight.  It happened after many long, honest talks between the two of us, as well as a number of discussions with the therapist at our IVF clinic.

You’d be surprised how hard it is to let go of something, even if you don’t really want it anymore.  The time you’ve invested in it and the momentum you’ve built up almost feels like it is carrying you away with it regardless.  After so many years of planning, tracking things, daydreaming and everything else, you almost become like Pavlov’s Dog.  Everything is an automated response that happens without you really thinking.  Your brain tells you what you want and you respond accordingly.

A self portrait from 2013. A peek inside the mind of someone going through IVF.

It was almost as though we had some strange Stockholm Syndrome situation with our fertility.   Does that make any sense?  You know how when someone is kidnapped, after a while the situation becomes their new normal and even though on some level they know the kidnapper is bad and they don’t REALLY love them, they think they do, so they act as though they do… because they kind of believe it?

Yeah, that’s how I have felt for the last while.  Looking back, I think it has been quite a long time since I have really wanted a baby.  I’ve wanted to GET pregnant, I’ve wanted to feel what it was like to be pregnant, I’ve daydreamed of which of the thousands of BIG REVEAL moments I’d choose for telling my friends and family, wanted to take cool pregnancy photos, wanted to come up with a beautiful name, wanted to see what my baby would look like. I wanted all of those things.

What I didn’t want anymore?  Everything that came after that.   There was a time I did, a long time. Where I also daydreamed about my child when they were three, going to football games, school events, watching my child grow up, date and the grandchildren they’d give me.  I haven’t thought of those things for a very long time.

In fact, I dreaded them.  What was once daydreaming about my child when they were three, with their cute pigtails or baseball hats was this inner dread of snotty noses, supermarket tantrums, sleepless nights and endless need for attention.  Football games and school events were things I went from being excited about to thinking “Ugh, standing outside in the rain on a Saturday?  Yeah I’ll give that a miss!” and “Ugh, school.  Putting up with all those other annoying kids and their annoying moms. No thanks”.  Well, you get the point.  Is it age? Is it that I’ve just changed as a person?  Is it maybe something I’ve always felt and just didn’t want to admit?  I don’t know, I don’t think I’ll ever know.

Each time the evidence of another failed cycle would appear, the disappointment grew more and more crushing.  Over the past year, looking back, I’ve realized that most of my disappointment and frustration stemmed from just not wanting more procedures.  Rather than being devastated because I wasn’t getting a baby, I was pissed off that I was going to be stuck taking more hormones, getting poked and prodded more, put through more pain and probably all for nothing.  Fuuuuck that.

This all seriously needed to be addressed, because in spite of knowing deep down that I felt this way, I still continued on faithfully.  I was in love with an idea that I didn’t really love anymore because it’s what I’d been conditioned to do, what I’d trained myself to feel.  I was a prisoner and my infertility was keeping me captive!

One thing has never changed.  Whatever happens, we are in it together.

The beginning of this year, so far, has been a lot about us.  About me and Xander and what the future holds for us.  It hasn’t been like we’ve just dropped the IVF like a hot potato and skipped off merrily.  Nor has it been like we are in mourning for the child we wanted all those years.  It’s somewhere in between, a comfortably numb place with moments of confusion and sadness but also moments of happiness and hope.  We are adjusting, healing and planning.

I always thought that this journey was going to end in a crushing blow for us.  That we’d run out of treatments and we’d have that appointment where the doctors would tell us that there was simply nothing more they could do, that it was over.  That they’d send us home empty handed and feeling lost.  The moments where I could imagine us coming home with a baby ended many years ago.  I think deep down I knew it wasn’t going to happen for us for a very long time, but I continued on “just in case”, in order to save myself the self doubt later.

Taking this decision into our own hands, recognizing when enough is enough and making the choice to move on has been more empowering than I could ever have imagined.  I always thought that stopping meant quitting.  That it would just be one more thing I gave up on, but I don’t feel that way now.  We didn’t give up, we stood up for us, for what is best for us as a couple, our health and our future.  After years of uncertainty we took our future into our own hands and stopped leaving it up to chance. Now WE make the decisions, WE make the rules.  We can walk away from this confident that we put everything into this that we are comfortable with.

We’ve spent the years we had planned to spend raising a child trying to have one.  We’ve literally invested our blood, sweat and tears into this.  I have no regrets.  This has brought Xander and I closer than ever, it lead to me losing the weight and gaining self confidence, and we both still have many, many dreams for our future together.  Fun, freedom, exploring, learning… whatever we want.  I would do it all again because it lead me here.

So even though we still need some time to adjust to all of this coming to an end, it feels so much different than I expected.  I don’t feel like we are closing a door as much as opening new one.  A door to an entirely new life that the old me maybe never thought was possible… and that’s exciting.