The Shock & Awe of Parenting after Infertility
I was lucky enough to stumble over Chicklet and her blog Bloorb. And in the weird world of social media we have become friends without ever hearing each other’s voices Chicklet is a funny, truthful writer who started her blog to vent about her infertility and is now writing about life as a parent, all with an appreciative, but never cheesy point of view. I asked her to write about what it’s like to have a baby after three years of struggling to get pregnant. Read her guest post, and then do yourself a favour and head over to Bloorb to see the whole story.
I remember getting drunk on a ferry between the Greek islands of Samos and Paros, because the food was so crappy and the ferry was so long, we figured what better way to pass eight hours stuck on a ferry together? I remember being just a little more than half-gone, and agreeing we were finally gonna give this kid thing a go when we got back home, because why not? we could do it! we could do anything!
And I remember the first Sunday a few weeks later - when I had to decide whether to start that new pack of pills or not - sitting on the couch with the husband for hours, agonizing over the fact that we had just pulled the goalie. That it could happen anytime now. That we could end up knocking me up that very night. And I remember how it actually had both of us sitting there wringing our hands out, chests all tight, freaked out over how we were about to change our lives.
Yet three years and almost $20,000 later, things weren't that simple.
And what that does to your mental state is one thing -- I admittedly may have gone a tad bit psycho on the husband a few dozen times (including the great "you just don't bring a cheese board to bed" fight that will forever be a turning point in our marriage), but what it does to your decision-making, well that's a whole another thing.
Because every time one procedure failed, we had an opportunity to step back and take stock of what we really wanted.
Because every time one procedure failed, we were offered another procedure. Sometimes the procedures were bigger and bolder, sometimes they were just totally different, but either way, every time one procedure failed, we had to stop to think. We had to stop to think if this kid thing was what we wanted because it was what we really wanted, or if it was what we wanted just because we couldn't have it.
And when you get three long years to decide if something's what you really want over and over and over again, you come out of it pretty hungover, but also pretty clear about what the hell it is you really want out of life. Did we want return trips to Cambodia and Africa? Hell yeah! Of course! But we wanted them with a kid - a kid we could annoy with endless stories from when he wasn't yet a part of our lives; a kid we could also live vicariously through as he saw giraffes and ancient ruins in 40 degree heat for the very first time. Did we want fancy cars and ski trips out the wazoo? Uh, yeah! But we wanted them with a kid who would potentially puke all over the leather interior on our very first trip to the mountains, and then be singing along to Led Zeppelin with his very next little vile-smelling breath.
So yeah, sure, I could whine and snivel that woe is us, we had a rough time getting here - but we did get here, and we do now have the coolest seven month old on the planet. The last seven months have probably been just about the most insane time of our lives, but it's the good kind of insane. The kind of insane that even when you're putting a pillow over your head to muffle out the sounds of screeching at 5 o'clock in the morning (seriously, do babies not know that 5am is not morning?!), it is still an insane you're thankful for. An insane we are especially thankful for probably because we had a rough time getting here, and an insane we're thankful for probably because that rough time changed a lot in how we look at this life we are now living. And no, I'm not saying having a seven month old who is only now learning to sleep is like Christmas every day, because it isn’t. There also aren’t rainbows and unicorns flying out his diaper. But for the husband and I, we had three long years to figure out that there probably wouldn't ever be rainbows and unicorns flying out his diaper - and that is totally fine by us.
So what changed for us isn't the parenting part of the experience - that's just as hard for us as it is for everyone who doesn't go through infertility. What's changed for us is how we see the parenting experience. Almost every day in our household a conversation starts with, "Holy, we have a boy!”, even when it’s a weird repeat of a discussion we had two days ago. Because for the husband and I we have a wave of shock almost every day that this is actually the life we're living. Yeah, it's hard, and exhausting, and sometimes even a little mundane with all that poo talk and sleepless nights, but it's also the life we one hundred million percent chose. We know we chose it over any other life we could have had. We'll never have to think about what we gave up to have a family - there was nothing else we really wanted.
This post was written by Chicklet at Bloorb. I will be back on Monday with more tales from chaos!
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