Celebrating Ten Years

 I'm a little late celebrating, but Thursday was my 10 year Blogoversary. TEN! I missed it because Thursday was also the first day of school in person with the first cohort of students, so I am only now back in the realm of the living (just in time to get right back at it!). 2020 Pandemic teaching is really, really hard. And weird. 

But, that's not what this post is about! It is amazing to think of where I was ten years ago, and where I am today. So much happened in those ten years. 

My first post was September 10th, 2010. I had already done a year of medicated IUIs and was coming off my Summer of the First IVF, stunned that it failed. I'd kept our journey relatively quiet up until that point, so sure was I that we'd be successful early, but when the IVF that was supposed to be our silver bullet failed, I was left bereft and alone, and searching for community and an outlet. I was scared to share, but more scared to be alone and the chat boards were just not cutting it for me. My posts were mostly filled with hope and desperation, some jealousy, and hilariously a post titled, "Letting Go of The Plan." (That turned out to be the dragon I'd try to slay over and over and over.)

In the years to come there would be so, so many posts that were filled with hope and magical thinking. You can see the progression of my disbelief that this wasn't working out the way I'd planned paired paradoxically with the belief that if I just TRIED HARD ENOUGH, if I DID ALL THE THINGS, that I could control the outcome. 

2011 and 2012 were the years of loss. 2011 held my ectopic pregnancy that ended in emergency surgery and delayed the start of my new job, split between the middle school where I teach now and the 9th grade building. I was so insistent that I was okay that I came into the building, shuffling and in excruciating pain (Bryce carried my things for me), and my principal who is still my principal sent me home and got me a sub for the first week of school. It was both an incredibly kind and generous gesture that filled me with relief, and such a disappointment that yet another thing wasn't going how I'd envisioned it. It was the first time that I discovered support groups are great if you "graduate," but feel a little less supportive when you are stationary. 2012 was hard, hard, hard. I went into my 5th cycle after another failed attempt, and got the happy call. We had two weeks of feeling hopeful, and grateful, and like we could really see the other side of this hell. And then I miscarried. That loss was devastating because it was a lot lonelier than the ectopic, and made me feel a cumulative sorrow. I think that is when I started thinking, "oh shit. This might not work out." So we went forward with trying egg donor. I was done with mine, and the eggs are always the first culprit. It's really hard to go back and read these older posts when I know now that nothing was going to work, that my uterus was ultimately the culprit but it was an invisible culprit until they removed it last year. These were very, very sad years and the hardest of the IVF years. I did get nominated for a RESOLVE Hope Award for Best Blog, which was exciting (I didn't win, but it was sure amazing to be nominated). So many of my posts from this year are traumatic. I loved revisiting this one, because it still makes me laugh: I'm Glad I'm Not A Salmon.

Ah, 2013, the year of Egg Donor IVF. Spoiler alert: It did not work. I think you can see the magical thinking really going into an unhealthy place in this post about making a new plan. (See? I said I was "letting go of the plan" 3 years earlier, but the plan kept pulling me back in!) I could NOT believe that Donor Egg IVF didn't work, especially when we had a "proven donor" and I did all the things. This was the year where I realized that my time with IVF wasn't enjoyable and wasn't sustainable, and reminded me of other highly unpleasant experiences in my life. It was also the year we were like, "Um, this isn't working, but instead of moving forward and away from this shitshow, instead of listening to a doctor who started to suggest maybe this wasn't going to work for us after all, we're going to hightail it to second opinions and people who will tell us what we want to hear and give us that feeling of hope." In that sentence you should replace "we" with "I'm" because at this point I was driving the boat straight into an iceberg. I was wearing the pants and the pants were poisonous. But the seed of "maybe another path will be better" was planted. 

2014 was a shit, shit year. (Sensing a theme?) We went to a new clinic and while there was a valiant effort to try to make things work a) I was tired, b) the clinic was in Buffalo and an hour away in good weather, which was in short supply, and c) my body ended up frantically waving the white flag and when it was ignored, it lay face down on the bloody battleground. At the end of this year we decided to pursue domestic infant adoption, but the damage had been done. I didn't know it, but the stamina and reserves of emotional strength were very very low, and the cumulative trauma was very very high, and it was setting the stage for our disastrous run with adoption that lasted two years and ended in an autoimmune flare in my eye, an insanely high regimen of prednisone, and a breakdown.  But this year was also memorable, and I learned a few things. 1) I know my body, and woe to those who do not listen to me when I suggest that the plan in store is likely going to have bad results. 2) I had the capacity to be even more disciplined than I had been, and put myself in Egg Boot Camp, as we were using my eggs and half Bryce/half donor sperm for this year. I did a lot of extra things (spoiler, didn't work). I had a receptivity test that felt like a vegetable peeler going at it in my uterus (WITHOUT ANY ANESTHESIA), that didn't seem to show anything, but then I had a hysteroscopy (my 4th I think?) that resulted in findings of Asherman's scarring. And this is when I started buying my first adoption books. Because not so deep down, I knew this was no longer going to work. Oh, PS, this was the year there was a freak 7 feet of snow lake effect event in Buffalo, and while it didn't dump that much where my clinic was, it did shut down the thruway and make my drive two hours one way, not one. I did more than a few white-knuckled drives on the thruway this year, often in a lot of discomfort due to giant ovaries. Good times. 

2015. The devastating end of our IVF journey, and the hopeful start of our adoption journey. We were ALL IN! We were so hopeful! We were all, "It's not IF, it's WHEN!" We didn't realize that it would be harder emotionally than IVF. That cumulative trauma again. But the first year was embracing this new reality, was simultaneously putting our frozen embryos into Embryo Adoption, and having no profile opportunities but also having the sense that 2016 was going to be THE YEAR. We ended the year with so much hope for our FutureBaby. We had an Adoption Photo Shoot to show we were "expecting." I feel like this was the first positive year we'd had in a long, long time. I just want to hug the us in those pictures and keep them safe from what was to come. 

2016. Well, the profile calls started coming in, which was super exciting. But the answer was always no. Except once in July when we were chosen in a blind profile (we didn't know we were being considered) that ended before we even knew it was a hope -- the expectant mother chose to parent, but we didn't know much about it and took it more like, "hey, someone finally PICKED US!" We did start to get holes in our confidence, though. Why weren't people picking us? What was wrong with our life? Why was our homestudy social worker asking us in our renewal process what our thoughts were if this DIDN'T work out for us? Why were others who were in the process finding success and we were still left behind? Why were we ALWAYS LEFT BEHIND? This was a year that tested us, because Bryce and I were in different places with adoption, and my magical thinking made a comeback of epic proportions. The desperation meter was at an all time high. The "No-Thank-Yous" got harder to take. We did have a baby shower this year (two actually), and we set up our nursery so that we could be ready at a moment's notice. My favorite post from this year was this one: "I Want to See My Story." We felt so alone in our experience. I think it was towards the end of this year that I started to think about what it would look like to resolve child-free. We did do a tongue-in-cheek Second Waiting Adoption Shoot, which made me laugh and also spoke to our feeling of "okay, any time now..." So while we were struggling, we were also having a good time. Which is the story of our marriage, actually. 

2017. This was the tipping point, the absolutely terrible year. This was the year where none of our embryos made it with the couple who adopted them, this was the year where we went to sleep thinking we might be parents in the morning and then got a call at school that we weren't chosen after all and it broke me but I pretended to be okay and resilient and get back up again, LITERALLY when I hurt my elbow at a school ice-skating trip. It was a year of weird health issues, culminating in my scleritis attack in my eye that the Eye Institute at my local hospital said "could be caused by significant stress" and I just laughed, and laughed, and laughed, and then cried. After a spectacular week of awfulness, and a two week break from school because I wasn't functioning anymore, we decided to end our adoption journey. Which was the hardest thing we've ever done. To make that choice and have to say we can't do this anymore felt like the worst kind of failure. But Bryce called, and we did it. Oh wait, the hardest thing is tied with dismantling a nursery and packing it up in two cars to donate it. Yeah, that sucked. But the year ended with a beautiful trip to California, a "honeymoon" of sorts since we didn't take one, instead starting full force into infertility treatments. It ended with a lot of work, a lot of sadness, but also a lot of hope that finally we could have a life that wasn't predicated on waiting for a life to begin, but LIVING in the one we have. It was freeing. (But also really really hard and the sadness came in waves over and over every time I thought I was okay. I had to learn to be okay with not being okay.) 

But now, I have THREE YEARS of resolution under my belt. 

2018 - we bought a new house and said goodbye to the house that held all those years of pain. WE LOVE THIS NEW HOUSE. It was super symbolic, and a major part of the healing. It almost feels like it waited for us. There is no room in this house that was meant for something else. It fits our life NOW. 

2019 - I had a hysterectomy, which was hard to recover from but also insanely freeing and I was so glad to be rid of that organ of doom. I also got some answers: I had adenomyosis and my uterus likely wouldn't have successfully carried a baby, which was hard because it meant it was all for nothing, but also a relief because there was a sense of the WHY we were missing. We celebrated ten years of marriage, and creating a new life that we love. 

And then 2020...well, we all know that 2020 is a suckfest. But, I can say that you know you have a great marriage when the quarantining and lockdowning just cements that you truly love the one you're with and could pretty much be the last two people on Earth and that would be okay. In a way all this hoping for life to be one way and getting something totally different and unexpected really trained us for a global pandemic. 

Ten years. So, so much pain, but also so much joy. And strength. And resilience, even when it felt like that wasn't at all what we were doing. We have endured so much, and it's not to say that now everything is amazing and we're not impacted by the immense grief of all we lost. That is always a part of us, but it's not the CENTRAL part of us anymore. It's such a gift, to have most days spent feeling fortunate for the life we have now and not wishing and striving for something different. It took a long time to get here, and it's a continuous journey. I'm so grateful to have you with me -- the community through blogging has been a lifesaver. In a pretty literal sense, at times. I was helped so much by reading the blogs of others who came before me in making these difficult choices from situations that weren't our choice. To see that a life without children didn't have to be the horror story, the bad ending. They were the light guiding me to a place of acceptance and even joy. I can only hope to be the same for someone else. Thank you for sticking with me (or discovering me) during these ten years!