Tired of Waiting

What follows is sort of raw, and more serious than anything I've written here so far, but it felt good to write.  I hesitated to publish it, but I want these feelings to be here.  Even if they stand in stark contrast to the usual humor I use to lighten this situation, they are how I feel right now and I want them here.

I find myself thinking more and more about adoption lately.  In some ways it seems like I'm just desperately looking for a "way out" of this infertility mess, or that I'm using it as a safety net to make the grief of each failed attempt easier to bear.  In others though, it seems right, like what we were meant to do, how our family was meant to be built.

At first I so desperately wanted to be pregnant, have a child that was equal parts me and my husband.  But as time made it more and more apparent that that would be far, far easier said than done, I feel the idea of a biological child becoming more and more intertwined with my body's persistent rejection of every desperate attempt we've made to conceive that child.

If we found that this month was successful and we'd finally achieved what we've been working and praying so hard for...  I don't know how I could move past my infertility.  I don't see how I could be anything but terrified.  I'm terrified of the unimaginable despair we would feel if after all this time we lost the first pregnancy we ever had.

I hate fertility treatments.  I never wanted to be in this position and while its obvious that no one does, I never imagined that faced with the inability to have a child I would subject myself to the kind of poking, prodding and manipulation that modern medicine has devised to make my body do something it so clearly does not want to do.  I'm terrified that the little life we fought so hard for, paid so much for... literally tore into this world in a way that feels so unnatural to me will live under the black cloud of what it took to get them here.  Or worse yet, thanks to our desperate attempt to pass our flawed gene pool down, fight these battles themselves one day.

I know in the war against infertility my tour of duty has been fairly short.  16 months seems laughable compared to those who've fought for years and years.  But I don't think I can do this very much longer.  I don't think I'm willing to step up treatment much more than we are doing right now or continue to pursue this once the insurance well dries up after our 6 allotted IUIs.

I'm horrified to say this but... sometimes I'm not sure I want to be pregnant.  Because being pregnant to me means endless months of synthetic hormones, side effects, transvaginal ultrasounds, injections and blood draws that mark my body with bruises to make sure I can't even look down at myself without knowing that I have failed at this.  Being pregnant means more lab values, more nervous visits with doctors, more big decisions.

Being pregnant means more fear, more grief, more worry, more loss.

What I do want, more than anything, is to share this beautiful life my husband and I have built together with a child.  To open our hearts to another soul, take this love that busts our home at its seams and shower it on a new life.

And I don't give two fucks anymore how that life got here.