Reckless Hope

Last week, I went to a Derby party that one of my friends hosted. I made a cake to bring to the party, and while the recipe was not difficult, it was time-consuming. The batter was thick and heavy and had to be mixed by hand with a whisk rather than an electric mixer, and I made it at my parents' house, which meant that I could not sit down for the entirety of the process of making the cake and the glaze, because if I had, my parents' dog from hell would have eaten the ingredients. I also shaved my legs that day, for the first time of the summer. This meant that I was on my feet for essentially 4 solid hours, some of it spent contorting into impossible positions, which is something that would have exhausted me even before the arthritis.

By the time I got to the party, my feet and legs hurt every time I stood, and my arms and shoulders were sore from mixing the batter and having to hold the bowl out of the dog's reach while mixing it and pouring it into the pan. I spent much of the evening sitting in my friend's large, unfenced backyard, talking around the bonfire, and watching my friends' kids run around. When I went inside to watch the race, the living room was standing-room only, and my feet screamed in protest the entire time until I was able to sit again.

One of my friends has a toddler, a sweet little girl who will be 2 in a couple months. Since the yard was not fenced, and we had a fire going, she needed close supervision, and I was worn out just watching her parents chasing and corralling her.

The next morning, still sore and stiff, I had a bit of an existential crisis.

If that baby had been mine, there was no way I would have been able to supervise her effectively the night before.

So I wondered: is it already too late for me to have a baby? Is motherhood something I should just give up on?

These are not new questions to me, and when I cried over them for a little while that Sunday morning, it was not for the first time.

But then, a couple days later, I saw this:

Gilda Radner, of course, never had children. She struggled to get pregnant, had two miscarriages following fertility treatments, and then she died of ovarian cancer at the age of 42. And yet, she remained optimistic. When I pulled up the quote above, I found another from her autobiography, published just a couple years before her death: "I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity." These are not the words of someone who has thrown in the towel.

I have never been a gambler. My grandparents took me to a casino on my 21st birthday, and my grandpa loved to tell the story for years afterward of handing control of a slot machine he'd been playing over to me. He'd built up a balance of a couple hundred dollars, and he told me that I could continue playing, or I could cash out and keep the money. I didn't even have to think about it. I took the money and ran. If I had continued playing, I might have ended up with nothing - although, considering it wasn't my money to begin with, I wouldn't have been any worse off than when I started. At least by walking away, though, I ended up with a couple hundred dollars.

But if I'd continued playing, what if I'd hit the jackpot?

This is a pretty apt metaphor for how I live my life in general. I am, in general, a realist. I keep one foot on the ground at all times. I try to not ever get my hopes up, my prognosis is always guarded, and I'm only ever cautiously optimistic. It's something that I've always taken a little bit of pride in, to be honest. I wouldn't be caught unprepared if my hopes weren't realized.

Because hope is scary. Hope is fucking terrifying. It's going out on a limb, allowing yourself to be open and vulnerable, taking the risk that your dreams will fall flat. Pure, unqualified, unguarded hope is an enormous gamble.

But when I read that Gilda Radner quote, I had the most radical, earth-shaking thought:

Don't I have the right to be infinitely optimistic?

And it occurred to me that not getting my hopes up had never actually insulated me from pain and loss. It never made it better, when something didn't work out, that I'd tried to keep myself from wanting it too much. So it doesn't make sense, does it, to keep trying to tamp down on my hopes when it doesn't offer much protection anyway.

So I'm not going to do it anymore.

It's a huge shift in thinking for me, a whole new worldview, and it's not easy. Every time I think about the things I hope for, I have to silence the voice in my head that says, "Yes, but, what if...?" But I'm committed to making this change. I'm done with cautious optimism and guarded prognoses and not getting my hopes up. Maybe things won't work out, but then again, maybe I'll hit the jackpot.

I'm going to be infinitely optimistic. I'm going to be recklessly hopeful. And I invite you to join me.

(I'll probably still leave the slot machines for you to play, though.)

Seeing Red

This post is specifically for people who are interested in my infertility journey (which starts here). As this relates to infertility, I would advise you to draw the logical conclusion about the topic of this post based on the title, and decide before going any further whether you actually want to read on.

Still here?

(Hint: it's periods. This post is about periods.)

Continue reading at your own risk.

Anyway.

I have never known a woman who looks forward to a visit from Aunt Flo, regardless of any mitigating circumstances. As guests go, at her best, she is messy, smelly, and always outstays her welcome. Her visits are usually physically painful, and can make even the calmest woman an emotional, irrational mess. And for most women, she visits about once a month. The horror!

Within the infertility community, her visits take on additional horror.

To a woman who is struggling to get pregnant, a visit from Aunt Flo means that this is another month that she is not pregnant.

This is something that I never experienced, and not just because I lost my health and my savings and my income before I had a chance to try to get pregnant. But you can read all about that here.

I was never sure exactly what it would be like with clomid; whether I would have a period after an unsuccessful cycle or not. I had a vague idea that I would just have to depend on pregnancy tests, but I still don't know for sure. Even though I never experienced it, though, I can certainly empathize with how devastating it must be to see red month after month when you're trying to conceive.

But because I usually didn't have periods when I wasn't on the pill, visits from Aunt Flo were mostly a monthly source of aggravation and inconvenience for me when I was on the pill, and the furthest thing from my mind when I wasn't. They didn't seem to serve much purpose for me either way. In fact, if things had gone according to my plan back then, and I'd gotten pregnant and had a baby, I was planning to look into getting a partial hysterectomy (note to self: write future post on the reasons I hate that term) or endometrial ablation, because I didn't see the point of continuing to put up with my uterus's antics after it had served its purpose.

Of course, that's not what ended up happening. I ended up being forced to abandon the baby plan without ever having a chance to try.

But as I've written about before, despite the fact that I did not go back on the pill, something unexpected started happening in December of 2012: I started having periods. Not every month, but still with some level of regularity, approximately every three months.

That is, until this past October. Not that I had any idea at the time that something in my body was changing yet again.

In November, and then December, I thought it was a fluke. But now it's January. It's a new year.

And for four months straight now, I have had a regular, non-medicated 28-day cycle.

From what I've heard, I'm pretty sure this is rare even for women who have no fertility issues and have a generally regular cycle.

For me, it is nothing short of a miracle.

I don't even mind the mess and the smell and the cramps and the mood swings anymore.

Because after coming face to face with the possibility that my body would never function to its full potential, and now less than 2 months away from my 35th birthday (or as I have thought of it since I started this journey, my use-by date), seeing red means that there's still a chance that my body has the potential to do the one thing I've always wanted it to do: bring a child into the world.

And maybe, just maybe, it will be possible without fertility treatments.

For me, now, seeing red means hope.

Maybe 35 won't be so bad after all.

The End. And the Beginning.

(Warning: I'm going to talk about periods again. And again, it's not gratuitous and it's completely relevant, and I'm not going to go into graphic detail. But it's in here.)

Wow. So, this took way longer than I meant for it to. But maybe that's not a bad thing, right? I mean, I really explored all of this in-depth, and gave myself the time I needed to think through how to say what I needed to say.

So, here I am now. In graduate school, pursuing a career path that I meant to follow years ago, but I probably never would have taken that step if circumstances hadn't forced my hand. (Although, as I've pointed out before, there could have been easier ways for whoever is in charge to make the point that I wasn't where I was supposed to be - a lottery win to pay off my student loans and cover tuition, maybe? Especially considering that as it stands now, whatever increase in earnings I will have after graduation will be entirely consumed by student loan payments - which I have accepted that I will be paying until I die.)

In any case, career-wise, things are on track for me. I even have an exciting new project in the works that I hope will end up being a catalyst for huge changes in how service delivery is approached in the mental health and social service field. I have big ambitions, and a vision to follow through on those ambitions. I'm going places. And I can't even regret any of the time that I spent on other pursuits, because every single professional step I took informed what I am seeking to do today. I can see, clearly, how every moment of it was leading to this point.

If you'd told me ten years ago that this is where I would be at 34, and where I would be headed, I wouldn't have believed you.

I haven't accomplished everything that I dreamed for myself as a teenager or a young adult. Career ambitions were not really important to me. I saw myself as a wife and mother, not a single career woman.

But I have accomplished goals that it never occurred to me to set. And they are all things that, had I gotten married and had children before I was 30, I probably would never have done. I definitely would not be on the path that I am now. Because I would have settled into motherhood and not sought anything bigger for myself or in service to others.

But what of motherhood?

I still don't want it any less. I've gotten a little bit better at dealing with facebook pregnancy and birth announcements. I made it through the royal birth coverage without shedding a single tear. But I do still want a child more than anything else in the universe.

And I'm not sure if I will ever be able to go back to adoption, without having had a baby. Right now, I can say for certain that, to me, it would feel like settling for second best, and that would not be fair to any child placed in my care. Maybe five or ten years from now I'll feel differently, if a baby does not come to be in that time.

Of course, it would be completely irresponsible to try to get pregnant right now, even if I could afford the procedure. In school, unemployed, and living on student loans. I'm not stupid or selfish enough to plan to bring a baby into that kind of insecurity.

But I am rapidly approaching my 35th birthday, the use-by date after which my doctor told me I would have less than a 5% chance of conceiving. And I will be 36 before I graduate and re-enter the workforce.

The conventional wisdom with PCOS is that the chances of conceiving are better when you're younger. This is certainly what my doctor has told me more than once. However, in the midst of my struggles over the past two years, I found a small but growing body of research that challenges that assumption.

There was one study specifically, done in Sweden, that claims that women with PCOS may actually have better chances of conception the older they get. Other studies have also shown that the menstrual cycles of women with PCOS become more frequent and regular as they get older, which would appear to support the idea that the chances of conception would be higher.

When I lost my job, I lost my health insurance with it, and as such, I stopped taking birth control, which kept my cycles regular. I had 3 pill packs left, and I planned to use them every 3 or 4 months to have the minimum amount of periods to keep my uterus healthy.

To my intense surprise, I haven't needed to use any of those pill packs.

Last December, when my first spontaneous period started, I figured it was a fluke. But, just as well, I thought, because it was that much longer that I could put off using the birth control I had left.

The second time it happened, in March, I was a little more surprised. This was not something that happened with my body. Clearly, it wasn't a regular 28-day cycle, more of a 3-month cycle if it continued, but going less than a year between non-hormonal-birth-control-induced periods was pretty much unheard of for me.

When I didn't have another period in June, I wasn't surprised. The one in March must have been a fluke, too. And now my body was back to its normal PCOS-defective self.

But then, at the beginning July, it happened again.

I can't emphasize this enough: without being on the pill, I had never gone less than a year between periods, and now I'd had three in a seven-month time frame.

Two could have been a fluke, but three? Is it possible that my reproductive system is getting its shit under control?

Could it be that those studies are onto something, and I don't have to give up on having a baby someday after all?

I don't know. And as I've said before, I'm afraid to hope.

But I still do hope.

I'm not ready to give up on this yet. And maybe I don't have to.

I can't help feeling that, if I am able to have a baby someday, it will make up for all the ways that my body has failed me thus far. Making me feel like less of a woman, because it produces too much testosterone and fucks up my metabolism. Causing chronic pain and making everyday tasks more difficult. Making me feel like a young woman trapped in an old woman's body.

If my body is able to bring a healthy, full-term baby into the world, all of that will be forgiven.

So, I'll finish school, and see where things go from there.

Who knows what the future holds?