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Steph and V-dude Danny ride the Top Thrill Dragster while on official adoption business trip.
Everything these days turns into a metaphor for infertility or adoption. Nothing is exempt, even our early morning garage sale-ing adventure (followed by bacon, and eggs of course). The thing about garage sales is you have no idea what’s going to be out there, what you’ll find or even what you’ll want.
V-dude Danny accompanied us on the adventure, after making sure he wouldn’t be interrupting girl time. Alisa valiantly drove and put up with Danny and I shouting and pointing every time we saw one of the coveted posterboard signs. She turned on a pin like a pro.
But then, aren’t we training ourselves to do just that every day we take on infertility and adoption? With my adoption process I feel like there’s always something coming around the corner. I’m learning new things all the time. It’s quite exciting actually. It’s fun to imagine the bedtime story I’ll tell my child about how they came to be with us. How we flew across the world to come and get them. There are so many factors I can’t possibly predict, so I kind of just have to keep following the signs and trust that I’ll know what to do when I get there.
Which brings me back to garage sales, really there’s a point hidden in here somewhere. There’s just no way to know when you follow a garage sale sign, if what lies ahead will be disaapointing, hold a hidden treasure or whether you’ll spend ten minutes trying to figure out if someone’s old duct taped mirror would look good in your bathroom. You can’t set off to garage sales looking for a specific outcome or item because you will only be disapointed. You just have to trust that you’ll know what you want when you see it, like the krimping iron set we found. Or conversely that you’ll know what to pass up, such as a set of Girls Gone Wild videos and Penthouse lighter/knife combo.
And even, if after all that time, and all those u-turns and confusing neighborhoods all I come away with is two rolls of wrapping paper, well that’s okay too, because I got to spend a few hours giggling with a couple of my favorite people.
Yeehaw! Last night we won the local trivia night! With a little help from our friends and a lot of help from Alisa’s dad who knew things like who wrote the Pink Panther theme song. We beat the other teams by ten points, so as Ed aptly put it, if we’d been missing just one member of our seven person team, we wouldn’t have won.
Slim margins aside, I have to say it felt good to win at something. I often felt like a huge loser at the game of fertility. I still do sometimes feel like a big fat evolutionary failure whose body can’t do the one thing it was biologically put on this earth to do (ie. be fruitful and multiply). Something I thought would be as easy as rolling over in bed.
Trivia night at times felt like a mini version of the struggle. Many of the questions are the sort that are right on the tip of your tongue. They seem so easy. I know this! I should know this! Urgh, why can’t I think of it?
It’s incredibly frustrating when you can’t get it but the answer fills in your brain as soon as you hear it (Damn, I knew that one!) But the release and joy when you find out your answer was right is complete. And the thrill of victory that swept through me as we received our $30 Kazbor’s Bar and Grill gift certificate made me wonder what it will feel like when we finally “win” a bigger prize.
Infertility and Adoption are not fast rides---but this is.
Speaking of soaring, Saturday, Alisa and I decided on a semi-whim to go skydiving to kick off National Infertility Awareness Week. Weeeeeeeee! It’s amazing, like flying, really, really fast (120 mph to be exact). I can’t imagine a bigger thrill (except of course meeting the baby that is supposedly waiting for me out there somewhere).
Probably my favorite part of the day was when the parachute opened and my skydive instrcutor, Art, handed me a beer to enjoy while soaring 10,000 feet above the St John’s River. I toasted Alisa as she sailed by in her own parachute–a surreal moment if there ever was one–and then held onto my Bud Lite for dear life lest I drop it and kill someone. (Seriously, I can’t believe he trusted me with that, the girl who tripped on her way to the prop plane.)
Until the next adventure, Cheers!
Yesterday, after our lovely day of browsing and lunching on a porch, I dyed my hair purple (not all of it). I thought, what a lovely thing to be conceived of a mother with purple hair (unless you plan on growing up to be conservative and work in a bank).
So, I am issuing an open casting call. All souls of the universe who would like to be born to a woman with purple hair, who rides roller coasters, plans protests, jumps out of planes, and writes funny stories about women who steal…come on down.
So last week (was it that long ago) we stuffed ourselves with raw fish, then took a stroll around beautiful botanical gardens. Walking through rows of new growth, budding flowers and sneezing through tree sex, one can’t help but think of the process of life creation.
Peg and Fran, bless this Sushi we are about to put into our unpregnant bellies
The thing is, I don’t feel connected to it. I wholeheartedly wish that I did. I wish that I could see my body as yet another flower that will inevitably be pollanated, but I just don’t know. It’s so much more than the birds and the bees. It’s like, ok kids, let me tell you about the birds and the bees, but also about the bills and the fees and the doctor’s and the needles and the tubes….I understand that lots of people decide to have a baby and then get pregnant. And everything is beautiful. But I feel so far removed from that sort of thinking. I try so hard not be jealous. Really I do. But it’s difficult.
I’ve heard people say that if you get pregnant it all just washes away. Does it? Your last post gave me an idea. How wonderful to have that weekend as a conception weekend. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. I know that the V-list is about being able to (hopefully) tell our children they were born at a time of adventure and beauty. No matter what procedural option I choose, Danny and I are going to do something amazing, so we can tell our hypothetical kids, you were conceived the weekend we
a) entered ourselves into a Liberace look-a-like contest
b) scuba dived the great barrier reef
c) camped out underneath a meteor shower
Thank you for the secret note you left me at the inferility clinic! It was a bright spot to my otherwise grim visit to Magnolia Park. Dr. W said, “Well, your ultrasound was…um…quite dramatic.” The cysts on my ovaries are apparently tennis ball sized and have cousins that are happily hanging onto my fallopian tubes like nasty little monkeys. The entire family of them are filled with gooey poison which seeps into my gut. And the good news? He thinks taking the cysts out could actually COMPROMISE the fertility of my eggs. Seriously, can I not have ONE element that works correctly?
I left a quick note to you (under many watchful eyes). And at the checkout I saw a flyer for a new mom party. Braggarts! I can’t wait to put our V-list party flyer right next to it and assure women that at OUR party there will be no stinky diapers or swapping of ultrasound images. (unless they are ultrasounds of cysts or follicles.)
I keep trying to take a deep breath and see this all as a lesson in patience. I should know by now that in this world the game changes daily, so the Bad News Bears have to roll with the punches. One of these days I will learn how to do that. I’m pretty sure the key lies in riding a mechanical bull, drinking gin from a flask or eating one of the cupcakes you made. I’ll start with that one…
I do not control the universe (as previously thought in my teenage years). After our day of riding roller coasters I can’t stop thinking about what a perfect metephor roller coasters are for our predicament. And not only in the obvious way that doing assisted reproduction is definately a ride, but also, you just have to strap yourself in, bear down and hope for the best. The only thing you really have control of is whether you scream or hold your breath, open or close your eyes. You can’t force the end result, you just have to lean into the turns when they come and try not to fall out. Okay, I think my metaphor may have fallen apart (like my reproductive organs! HA!). When we first started trying to get pregnant two years ago? three? (I’ve lost count now). I thought that if I just read about the right time to get it on I’d be able to make everything go according to my plan. But that’s not how things turned out and why I’m now seeking adventure in the form of giant metal thrill rides.
I like how Alisa put it in her last post. We are not freaks. (Pictures of us dressed up in costumes at the library notwithstanding) We’re just a couple of women who want to have a baby or two. Is that so much to ask? Can I PLEASE see an article in the paper that just says, Hi I’m Jane Doe and without modern science I would not have been able to have a baby? Instead I read articles, like the one in USA Today, shaking their fingers at the women and doctors who transfer bushels of embryos. Making it seem like the women and docs are so greedy. The article seemed to be saying the responsible thing is to just implant one. I almost choked on my chocolate chip cookie! If that reporter had to pay upwards of 12K on each cycle I bet my bad fallopian tubes she’d change her mind.
P.S. Seriously, how funny was it that we were climbing onto roller coasters talking about cycles and hormones? And, I’m willing to bet that man had never heard someone say the word infertile, let alone say it in a theme park.
Am I about to talk about my vagina on a blog? Yes, yes I am. I think we should talk more about vaginas, because mine is starting to feel a bit like public property. As in, “Mind if I take a look in your vagina?” “Sure! Everyone else has!”
When I went to get my “ping” test the guy made my vagina feel like a bit of a freak. But today my (female) doctor said my vagina is a perfectly normal vagina, maybe with a few idiosyncracies, but still, perfectly normal all the same and more than capable of having a catheter and balloon shoved into it.
I’ve already grown tired of various and sundry doctors peering into my love hole. But when they do stare into it, I’d at least like them to remember that there is a person attached to it. That’s all.
What can I say after our very first “V list” outing but that I can already tell going down this list is going to be a bright spot in my black abyss.
What better way to take a girl’s mind off her barren uterus then a trip to a spiritualist camp in the middle of rural Florida?
I was upset that the physchic only “felt” one child coming from me (though I guess one is better than nothing!) And the more I think about what she said, the more I have to wonder if even that one is coming.
What she said (after she came out of the spirit world for a moment to answer her phone and make plans with her daughter) was “I definately feel one strong willed little spirit around you that has A LOT of energy.”
My first thought was, “You know, I think you might be feeling my dog.”
I suppose only time will tell. I’m going to look at my calendar now to see when we can go ride some rollercoasters. We should take a picture next to the “No pregnant women” sign they have posted before you get in line. Oooh maybe we can make it into a t-shirt?
P.S. Peggy the fertiity goddess is stil snuggled happily in my purse.
