our life, unedited

Well, I'm finally hopping on the blogging bandwagon. It really is more for me than anyone else, but if other people want to read about my life that's fine too. :)
My husband and I have been married for 2 years and 3 months. My husband, Roy, has Aspergers and I am infertile. We have 3 dogs; 2 miniature dachshunds named Buddy and Bambi, and a Boston Terrier named Miho. We have no children (in case you missed the part about me being infertile), but have been hoping for a baby for about as long as we have been married.
You kind of go through stages when you start trying to get pregnant. At first you are so excited. You keep thinking about how this time next year you will either be HUGE or have a baby. You get all giddy thinking about how it will change your life; what you will name him/her, how cute your baby will be, if it will be a boy or a girl....the list goes on. You touch as many pregnant bellies and hold as many babies as possible. You probably don't know about ovulation and cervical mucus and peak time, and optimal positions, and taking your temperature every morning at 6, touching your own cervix every 4-6 hours to see if it is 'high and soft' indicating ovulation, the temp. your bath/showers should be so as not to kill sperm, and modifying your diet in order to create an optimal conception experience. You just have sex a lot, and if you are sick when you are ovulating, or visiting family, or tired, or just 'not feeling it'; you don't worry about it. You are naive and think that you have plenty of time, and one month of skipping ovulation day isn't a big deal. If you are fertile (we hate you, just so you know) you will conceive within the first few months of tyring. With Roy and I; we agreed to not prevent and just let nature take it's course. If it happened, it happened. Roy and I both had good jobs, and felt we were financially secure enough to bring a child into the world. Unbeknown to my poor husband, we were actually trying. Very hard. I would religiously chart and temp and check my cervix waiting to ovulate, and jump him when I knew I was ovulating. He had no idea everything was carefully timed (sorry you had to find out this way, honey)and I wasn't as relaxed as he was about getting pregnant. I had baby fever BAD, and I was determined!
We conceived soon after that, and were ecstatic! I called my doctor, and she told me that she didn't want to see me until week 8 or 9, so we made an appointment for 8weeks 4days. I was always touching my tummy and talking to our baby. I instantly stopped eating lunch meat, tuna & seafood, any caffinated beverages, and restricted my exercise. I took my prenatal every morning, and couldn't wait to see the baby on the ultrasound. We talked about names and baby products, and started collecting baby stuff. 2 weeks later I started cramping. I thought nothing of it, I googled it and all of the thousands of books I had read said that cramping was normal the first trimester and especially the first pregnancy, as your uterus was stretching in a way it hadn't before. 3 days later I started bleeding. A lot. The cramping became unbearable and I was vomiting a lot. I passed several clots of tissue, and there was no question what was happening inside me. I was devastated, sobbing for weeks. The doctor confirmed that my body had passed everything, and encouraged me to try again immediately. I also knew that over 75% of first pregnancies ended in miscarriage, and was convinced that it was just an unlucky fluke.
Once you hit about 6-8 months of trying you start to wonder if maybe their is something wrong. By now you have probably googled it and found that the average, healthy couple will conceive in approx. 6 months. You start to get anxious and you try harder. It doesn't matter if you are tired, or 'not feeling up to it'. If you are ovulating, you stick to your schedule like a crazy person. You ask strangers if you can hold their baby, and you walk through the baby section of every store you shop at.
Once you hit the year mark it is very hard. That is the point when it is suggested to go see a doctor if you haven't had a successful pregnancy. It is so defeating and depressing. I never thought I'd be sitting in a fertility specialist's office 1 year and 3 miscarriages later. I felt broken. I felt mad. Why were crack whores that left their babies in trash cans able to have countless children, but I was unable to have one? We were stable and loved each other very much. Our marriage was awesome, and we wanted a baby more than anything. We had spent a fortune on pregnancy tests and ovulation predictor tests. I had spent countless hours reading textbooks and self help guides on getting pregnant and increasing your fertility. I was ready to be a mom, and Roy was ready to be a dad. We felt ready to have a baby. Wasn't my body made to do this? Why couldn't I be one of those women that had to worry about if their birth control would work? Heck, why couldn't I be excited when I got a positive pregnancy test? Instead I felt fear, and my husband would tell me, "Okay...let's not get too excited yet..."
There are so many emotions associated with going to a Reproductive Endocrinologist. You fully expect for them to tell you in that visit what is wrong with you and give you a shot or have you take pills to fix it. Then you can get pregnant on your own like the rest of the world and not feel like there is something wrong with you. Instead, it is an hour long meeting about your history. You sit there answering questions you never expected to be asked and talk about things that would make you blush in any other circumstance. You talk about how often you have sex and what position. You talk about your cervical mucus and the position of your cervix. You talk about your period and your menstrual cycle. You go over every place your husband has worked and every injury he has ever had. You go over family history and your medical records. And you might start to plan what to do next. You leave with no real answers, and you leave feeling no better than when you walked in.
When you hit that year is when most people start to feel resentment and bitterness. You feel angry, and think "why me?" more times in the day than you pee. Every pregnant woman makes you mad you don't want to have anything to do with other people's babies. You don't want any reminders that the rest of the world is out there getting pregnant on accident and having healthy babies while you are broken and unable to do any of that no matter how hard you try. You snap at people who ask when you are going to have a baby, and you are rude to pregnant women. You cry. A lot. You do the 'baby dance' whether you are sick, tired, at someone else's house, at work, in the car, it doesn't matter. You become desperate. The reality sets in that you might never be pregnant. That you might never have a baby, and compare who he/she looks most like. And that is a hard pill to swallow.
Once you hit 18 months you start to lose hope. You look into IUI, IVF, adoption, egg/sperm donors, and whatever medication you can get your hands on. Your RE's office knows you by name and has your menstrual cycle memorized. You have to make a lot of difficult decisions. It seems like EVERYONE is pregnant, and that makes you angry and bitter. You see happy pregnant woman and you want to punch them in the face. You see pregnant teenagers and your blood boils, you want to scream their fertility makes you so mad! You go home and cry instead.
18 months was very hard for us. It was almost like we didn't know what to do with each other. We didn't intent to go this long without having children. Our life plans were being crushed in a major way. Were we going to be that couple? The childless couple at family events? The couple who didn't coo and smile at babies or touch pregnant women's bellies. The couple who everyone asked expectantly if they planned on having children.
Our families never really had fertility problems, so when we hadn't had kids yet people assumed we didn't want them yet/at all. People told us we were being selfish; and that we shouldn't wait until we were in a good place financially to have children (which I wholeheartedly disagree with), that there was 'no right time to have a baby', and went on and on about what a joy children were. It seemed people had no filter when it came to the childless couple. People said things that left me in tears. Did I have to wear a t-shirt? Did I have to announce at the beginning of every conversation that we had suffered 5 miscarriages by now and had spent more on trying to have a baby than they had on their car? That we desperately wanted a house full of children, but it felt like God didn't see fit to make us parents?
I started using snarky comebacks for people's comments. I asked a women if she would normally ask about my vagina or my husband's testicles? No? Then why did she think it was okay to ask about our reproductive habits or why we didn't want children? If I was in a bad mood I would be honest and tell people that we had spent more than their car was worth on trying to have a baby, and we had lost 5 babies already. But thanks for assuming.
It is not an easy thing to be looking at spending $20,000-$90,000 to adopt or spend $10,000 for IVF, and then have people complain about an unplanned pregnancy; and all people seem to be able to tell you is about how someone they know couldn't have kids either but they miraculously got pregnant anyway and the baby is fine and healthy.
Soooooo....this has turned into more of a rant than than anything else....but it's my blog and my life. So there ya have it. Us in a nutshell.

Goodnight!
Love,
the bitter, infertile woman