Space for hope

Doug and I have been going to church (shocking!). It's a fairly progressive United Methodist church with things like a soup kitchen, food pantry, community garden, etc. and it's 100 times better than the church I grew up in. Anyway, for the last month they've been doing a Southern literature series on Sundays, tying in some piece of Southern writing to the sermon. This past Sunday they did a selection from Wendell Berry and the sermon was called 'Space for Hope'.

 

Considering the infertility issues we've been dealing with for so.long I'm always looking for hope. The sermon was nice and when I went home I thought about the literal space for hope I've been creating the last few months. In my craft room there's this:

The little red rocking chair that belonged to Doug's father, two 'blankies' from my childhood, some of my favorite Little Golden Books, a few really cute onesies and baby tees from Threadless and all the little knitted items I've been making for our someday-baby. This is quite literally my space for hope. I hope that these things will be used by our baby one day. There has to be an end (a happy one) to this rocky road eventually. 

I finished two more baby sweaters for my stash this weekend, the knitting had been done for a while but the button-sewing-on and the sleeve seaming wasn't finished. 

 

This the Cascade baby sweater knit in Madelinetosh Vintage in 'Baltic'. The buttons are naturally shed reindeer antler. I bought them in Denver last year at the alpaca show. 

 

This is the Maile sweater knit in The Yarn Gallery in 'Aztec' (also bought last year at the alpaca show). The yarn bled a lot when I was blocking it but it's super soft, it's a wool/bamboo superwash. The buttons are from Jo Ann's. This is the same sweater I made for our friends twins in February but I left off the flower pattern on the bottom to make it a little more gender neutral.

Since those things are finished, I started this baby blanket made with sock yarn leftovers. The pattern is Zig and Zag sock yarn pram blanket. I love this so much already, it'll probably be ongoing for awhile since I need more leftovers to knit with but it's a super easy pattern.

Needles and ART and feeling alone

We (my husband and I) have spent large sums of money attempting to have a baby. IUI, IVF w/ ICSI and Assisted Hatching, many vials of Follistim and HCG and Lupron and Clomid and progestrone in oil and progrestrone suppositories. I have several large plastic bags in my bathroom closet emblazoned with the ‘IVP Care’ logo, full of alcohol wipes, needle packages and boxes of have half-empty medicine. I also have a sharps container that holds the needle waste created by the IUI and IVF cycles. In my day to day world I don’t know anyone who has ever dealt with this mess of infertility treatments. All of the people in my world have had children the ‘old-fashioned’ way and have never in their wildest dreams considered the possibility of having to have their eggs/sperm harvested from their bodies and mixed together by embryologists in a fertility lab. Most of my friends and family have tried to be very supportive and sent prayers and good wishes to me but they don’t understand the reality of actually going through a cycle. The pain of a multiple negative pregnancy tests, sobbing in the bathroom at work because you got the phonecall, the heartbreak of realizing you may never have your own biological child. People try to be really helpful and say “have you thought about adoption?” And while it’s absolutely an option, we’re not in the place where it is our option yet. I don’t think they understand the grieving that one has to go through sometimes when dealing with IF failure. It makes me feel very alone in the world.

I read blogs of other women who are going through or have gone through the kinds of things I have – some with success and some without. I was looking at a blog earlier and found a link to this YouTube video about PIO injections. It struck me because it made me see, physically see, another woman dealing with what I’ve dealt with. I do feel alone because everyone I ‘know’ with IF is online but this video made them a little more real for me. I ‘know’ there are other couples all over the place having the same doctor’s appointments and ultrasounds and injections I am. There are other women crying in the bathroom on their lunch breaks and trying to keep their mascara from smudging so everyone doesn’t ask “what’s wrong?”

I keep thinking it’ll get easier, but it hasn’t yet. November will mark 4 years since our first RE visit and still no pregnancy. We have another RE appointment next week to go back and discuss doing more IUI’s, possibly with donor sperm. I can’t help but feel pessimistic about it though. More hemorrhaging of money, more 7:30AM ultrasounds and blood draws, more hormones and more disappointment. Oddly enough Doug is more optimistic than I am. Usually it’s the opposite, I’m the cheerleader and he’s the emo kid. I guess we’ll see who’s right and who isn’t.

hope.

I’ve always thrown around the idea of getting a tattoo. It’s one of those things that you just *can’t* wait to do until your 18, like voting, getting a credit card, smoking, etc. I don’t think any of my friends have tattoos, nor does anyone in my family (except my brother). By the time I turned 18 I wasn’t really thinking about tattoos, but in the last several years I started thinking about getting one again. There were two things that concerned me though; one is that I wanted it to be something meaningful, something I would want to have on my body forever. Two is that I wanted it in a location I could see and that would have minimal sagging/wrinkling over the years to come.

At one point I thought about getting a bee tattoo, not like a cartoon bumble bee, but a more refined, Napoleonic era bee. But I could never find just the right example of one. Then last week I saw a blog with a typographical tattoo, which led me to scan through Flickr for more examples of text tattoos. I got the idea that I would get the word ‘hope’ tattooed on my foot. I thought that would be a nice, optimistic word to get that would help encourage me when I get down about our baby troubles. So I looked for a nice font for a few hours and then it dawned on me I should just draw it out in my own handwriting. So I got a tiny sketch pad and wrote the word out in a few different variations until I found the perfect one.

I called my brother, who just got his second tattoo, and asked him for a recommendation. He told me about the artist who did his, who went to high school with us. I made an appointment with her for this past Sunday and so on Sunday afternoon Doug, my brother and I went over to Trilogy on Highland. The tattoo artist, Jessie, was great. She did such an awesome job. She was able to use my own writing and it turned out exactly like I had pictured it. It really didn’t hurt either, just a few stings. I absolutely love it and I can see it every time I look down at my feet. It’s a really nice reminder that no matter how disheartening infertility can be there’s still hope.

Let it be me

Sometimes you get a song stuck in your head and you keep singing and you have to listen to it to me it go away. I've had "Let It Be Me" by the Indigo Girls in my head since last night. The song's about injustice but I was thinking about it because of the chorus "let it be me." We were at a baby shower last night for a very nice couple and going to baby showers when you are facing the possibility of never having your own baby is not easy. It's painful. Especially when you are the only woman in the room who hasn't been pregnant and you don't know if you ever will be. So many people don't understand. They try to be comforting, which I appreciate, but I've almost become bitter about it. I used to have hope but after IVF my hope has slowly disappeared. I don't really know what we're going to do at this point. IVF is so extremely expensive and I'm doubtful it would work a second time. For now I'm just going to try to focus my energies on other things and attempt to regain some of that hope I used to have.