a little bit of news

Well here’s a piece of news that I thought I’d share, I hope you don’t mind.

 

Hopefully you remember my angel of a sister – formerly referred to just as C, but now you know her name is Callie – and my darling baby girl is named after her.

 

She got married in March.  And a week later found out she was pregnant!  We knew the girl was fertile, we just didn’t know how fertile she was – she only stopped taking the pill a few weeks before her wedding.  J

 

This is one pregnancy announcement that doesn’t make me the least bit jealous.  I’m so happy for her.   She gave me the most beautiful gift a sister could ever give – and I wish her all the happiness, and I would have never wished her to go through any of the anguish that I had to endure to get pregnant.  I think she’s a little shell shocked still – I think after all the talk of infertility that she had to endure from me, she probably figured that it’s not possible to get pregnant right away and assumed it would at least take her a few months.  But I’m so glad it didn’t, I’m so glad that she didn’t have to experience any of the monthly sadness that I had to experience.

 

Of course the silver lining to infertility is that by the time you finally get a baby, you’ve been thinking and planning for so long that you are totally ready for it – at least that was the case with me.  When you get pregnant right away and have spent very little time planning for it, it’s a little overwhelming.  Ah, but there are worse problems to have…

 

She’s been feeling pretty crummy – very similar in fact to how I felt the first trimester – just yucky and super tired all the time.  But she’s 11.5 weeks now and she’s just starting to feel a little better. 

 

When my babies were born, and on the one year anniversary of our egg retrieval, my wish for her was that she would have a baby of her own so that she could understand the love I feel for my precious babies.  So that she would feel this love and then she would really understand the magnitude of the gift she gave me.  I know that she knew what she was doing for me was huge, but I don’t think she could really understand how huge until she holds her own baby in her arms and knows that love that she will feel for it.  Then she will understand what she gave me, and she will understand how it’s a gift I can never repay.  And now that wish is coming true for us, and that makes me so happy.

 

Also I’m really curious to see just how much our babies will look alike.  It will be interesting. 

being "those people"

It's true. We've become "those people". You know - those people with hired help. People who pay other people to do things for them - like gardening, house cleaning, child rearing.

It happened gradually. First - I was too depressed to clean up my yard (infertility does that to you), which had become an overgrown disaster. So I combed craig.s list and found someone to do a one time yard clean up for me. And one time became two, which became a regular occurance. I partly justify it by telling everyone that she's really reasonably priced. (which she is - you'd be suprised if I told you)

But I always prided myself on the fact that I cleaned my own house. And my house was clean! But - when massively pregnant with twins, one has a hard time getting down on all fours to scrub bathroom floors. So my mother convinced me that it was time to hire some help for that. So I did. Now we have a housekeeper. (but she's reasonably priced too).

And then there's the nanny. She's not reasonably priced - but worth her weight in gold (and gold is expensive these days!).

Add it all up - and before you know it - we are those people - people who have all this household staff. We don't look like those kind of people, we don't act like those kind of people. I am not helpless - I am capable of doing for myself - I cook and sew and clean (the housekeeper comes every two weeks). I make baby food. I breastfeed twins darn it!

Ah - so you ask the obvious question - if we didn't have all this hired help - couldn't we maybe afford for me to quit my job and just do it all myself. Unfortunately no - I did the math. (waa, poor me - I know, I'll quit complaining now).

So we finally saw the movie Juno over the weekend.  I had heard from practically everyone what a great movie it was, and it finally made its way to the top of our net.flix queue.  So what did I think of it?  It’s a harder question than I might have thought.  It was funny, well written.  Great dialogue, the young girl actress is very cute and talented, and I like the way it was directed and edited. 

 

But I cried a lot.  And after the movie I went to bed feeling emotionally drained.  In a way that I haven’t felt in a long time.  It resurfaced a lot of feelings that I haven’t felt for a long time.  I went to bed feeling depressed and feeling drained the way I used to feel when we were struggling so hard.  It was amazing how just a movie could bring back those feelings so strongly that it left me feeling so emotionally drained. 

 

But there was something about the movie that really didn’t like - how the adoptive mother was portrayed.  They made her seem so uptight, like she was trying too hard to be perfect.  I kept thinking that they intended for people to not really like her through most of the movie, like she was going to be this overly perfect fake mother, in comparison to Juno who was such a free spirit.  Like she didn’t have any kind of sense of humor or sensitive side to her.  They made her seem cold and artificial.

 

It bothered me to see an infertile woman portrayed that way.  Because I felt like I could totally relate to her.  When you’ve been through years of heartbreak, you tend to stuff your feelings pretty far down inside so that people can’t see how you really feel.  Because displaying how you really feel is just too painful.  I can see how that could make you seem cold or unemotional, but in reality we are just the opposite – we want nothing more than to shower our love and emotion all over our child.  I just kept thinking that if we had ended up going the adoption route, I probably would have seemed a lot like her.  I would have wanted my home to seem perfect, I would have wanted my marriage to seem perfect, I would have wanted myself to seem perfect.  I would have wanted a birth mother to see us as the perfect choice to place her baby.  And it all probably would have come off as uptight.  I would have seemed uptight because I would have been trying so darn hard to not break down crying at every turn.  I wouldn’t have wanted a birth mother or an adoption agency to think that I was some kind of blubbering fool – so I would have probably stuffed my emotions so far down inside that you might have thought they didn’t exist. 

 

And then there was the whole thing with the husband, and did he really not want it, and was the wife just pushing this on him because maybe it would complete her image of a perfect little fake life.  That bothered me.

 

So I guess my concern about this movie is that I felt like this poor woman was probably seen by many viewers and cold and unemotional, and only those of us who have been in her shoes would know how she really felt, and know that it wasn’t true.  I think the movie made infertile parents look bad.  And that bothers me.  Aanother example of big and inaccurate generalizations that the media and Hollywood make about infertility.

 

 

my body

here's something I've had on my mind for a while.

Being pregnant made me feel proud of my body. It made me love my body. This is a profound change in my life, and worth noting.

I've never had a great body image. Always just a little over weight, always a little self conscious about my looks. I never thought I was particularly attractive, or dare I say, sexy. (My husband - to his wonderful credit - thinks I'm crazy for thinking this). I had freckles, and wore glasses. I was never athletic - always a little awkward. Self conscious about being tall. I slouched.

And then there was the infertility. I don't have to tell you all what this does to your body image. It made me hate my body. It was broken. It didn't work right. It couldn't do the one thing I thought I was always made to do. My body could not make me a mother. god that was depressing.

But when I was pregnant - it all changed. I loved my body, really for the first time in my life. I was proud of how I looked, I was proud of what my body was doing every day - nourishing and growing two babies! I loved looking in the mirror. I was proud to walk about the pool in a bikini, with my big pregnant belly out for all to see. I even said to my husband at the time of the bikini wearing - "hey, I paid a lot of money for this look, I plan to show it off!"

I still feel this way - breastfeeding two babies - the fact that my own body is making the milk that nourishes these babies every day. It is a wonderful miracle that I am profoundly proud of, will never take for granted, and is making memories that I will cherish for the rest of my life.

And then of course there's the weight loss - which goes a long way toward helping me continue to feel good about my body on the outside as well as the inside. Breastfeeding twins has been the greatest diet ever. I weight 30+ pounds less than when I got pregnant. So I'm pretty happy with the way I look these days (as long as I ignore the mushy and stretched out belly).

It's such a nice change in my life. To feel good about this body of mine. It's about time.

You never really stop trying, do you

I think I'm ovulating - I can feel that familiar little twinge on one side, and the familiar EWCM that I was trained to look for.

 

And even now, with two little babies at home, and the knowledge that any kind of natural pregnancy would be impossible, and also knowing that even though I would like to try again at some point now is really not the time...  But still my brain kicks into automatic TTC mode.  and I think - well, I'm ovulating, so I guess we better try tonight.  It's automatic. 

 

And it's just so strange - that after all that, the years of trying just created this habit that I can't break.

My memories are photographs

Expanding on a thought from my earlier post.  About my blurred memory.

When I close my eyes and try to remember those early days and weeks with the babies, what I see are photographs.  The photos from my digital camera.  I'll think I'm remembering something - a look, a moment - and then I realize that the image I am seeing is just one of my pictures.  So maybe I don't actually remember the moment, but I remember the photograph of it.  I wonder, if I didn't have those photos, would I have no images in my head at all?  Am I making any sense at all?

I get sad sometimes, realizing that I have so little actual memory of their birth and of the first few hours with them.  Is it because of all the pain meds?  or because of sleep deprivation?  or because the whole time was just so overwhelming that my brain couldn't process enough of it to store?  I don't know. 

Getting ahead of myself

I've been meaning to get back to blogging for a while.  But you know what they say about good intentions.  Ah well.  Here I am. Better late than never. I'm home sick with a cold today, so I have time to do this.

I went back to work for 4 days, and then I was gone for a week for my sister's wedding.  So that was an easy way to ease back into working.  Last week I was back at work again for real.  It's going ok so far, better than I expected.  The days go by fast.  Our nanny is still working out great.  I sometimes wonder if there isn't a little something wrong with me, that I'm not having such awful separation anxiety, but perhaps it has to do with how comfortable I feel with our childcare solution.  This week is our first week on our normal schedule - nanny Monday - Thursday, and then Jim and I will both work half day Friday and each take the kids for 1/2 day.  I feel good about the fact that they will be with us three days and with the nanny 4 days instead of 5.  But we'll see how we're able to manage the work schedule.

I've been thinking a lot lately about pregnancy, birth, and that little tiny infant stage.  I miss it all.  I really want another shot at being pregnant.  I don't want to have only experienced all this just once.  If I had two kids separately then I'd be ok stopping at 2, but I want the chance to be pregnant more than once.  Maybe that sounds ungrateful, maybe I should just be happy that I got to experience it once.  and don't get me wrong - I am grateful, so grateful.  I tried to savor every moment of my pregnancy, I tried to never complain.  I enjoyed being pregnant so much.  Sometimes at night I lay there with my eyes closed and I put my hand to my belly, and I try to remember what it felt like.

I miss that tiny little infant stage.  I feel like I don't remember much of it. Those first weeks and maybe even months are just a blur in my head.  I guess I was even more sleep deprived than I thought at the time, because I just don't remember much.  I want a chance to experience it again, and hopefully be present enough to really remember it.

And I know I need to get over it, but I still feel a little cheated about the c-section.  I really didn't want it.  I wanted to experience birth.  I feel like I missed out on something.  I know, people who have had it will tell me that I didn't miss anything.  But I think I did.  I'm not saying I would have had a full natural birth, I definitely would have gone for the epidural at some point, but I wanted to know what it felt like to go into labor, to have my body going through that process.  Having it all so scheduled just felt strange, and I feel like I missed out on something wonderful.  I would like another shot at that. 

but the debate - do we want three kids.  (Or four - what if I get pregnant with twins again??)  I love having twins.  I loved being pregnant with twins.  But four kids is a lot.  We have 6 frozen embryos.  and chances are good that we'd get twins again if we transferred two.  And I probably wouldn't get my shot at a natural birth, because I'd be surprised if the doc would do a VBAC with twins.  So transfer one?  that's possible. 

but I'm getting way ahead of myself.  I have to get my husband on board with doing it again.  And really I wouldn't do it for another year at least.  But this is just what's been on my mind lately.  I need to set it aside for a while.