After IVF

I abandoned this blog. Sort of. I left it here to shrivel and die for nearly two years when I needed it most. When infertility kept punching me in the gut, I kept avoiding writing about it. I needed to write about it and I ignored it, because writing about it meant acknowledging it, forcing others to acknowledge it, and letting in a lot of potential support.

Support is scary when you're infertile. Supporters mean well, they really do, but they say silly things sometimes like "Just relax" or "It'll be okay" or "Yoga fixes everything." I don't need you to tell me these things. These things are not supportive.

(If you want to be supportive, ask me how I'm doing. If you know it's bad, say you're sorry and tell me you love me.)

Being infertile is hard, even without treatments, doctors, and bills. Being infertile sucks. It just does. It's a sick cycle of waiting endlessly for the next good thing to come along that'll make that moment not suck so much. It's hoping the good moments stick around for longer than a moment. It's pain, inside and out. It ruins marriages, depresses girls who never knew what depression was, and rips us each up from the inside out. Not everyone is lucky to get repaired on the other side of things.

But life never stops for us. Regardless of how bad the timing is on that negative pregnancy test, you'll still have to go to work the next day. Literally.

Even though treatment takes up time, money, and energy, I finally understand why couples put themselves through IUI after IUI, IVF after IVF. Why some women do as many as 5, 7, or 13 expensive cycles. After over 4 years of hoping to get pregnant and losing more hope every month, going through IVF finally made me feel like it was possible. For just a couple of weeks, I really believed I was going to get pregnant. I looked up when my due date would be, I imagined making space in our things for baby things, I was even cautiously excited about buying baby items for a shower I went to instead of begrudgingly picking up stuff I thought I'd never get for my own baby.

Infertility sucks and IVF is painful, but for the first time in a long time, I believed it could happen. It was painful, exhausting, stressful, and time-consuming, but I'll do it again. I'm still grieving this loss, but I know we made the right choice, and I feel closer to parenthood even now than I have in a long time.