Pushing the Reset Button

Last Friday, we arrived at Johnson’s office around 3 p.m.  After making sure I was sufficiently loopy, antibiotic-ed, and dilated, we had our 2^nd d&c .  I had hoped that on our way in things would have started happening on their own, but they didn’t.  I felt guilty; I felt nervous; I felt angry that we had to go this route and just pray that there will be no scarring or other issues as a result.  Fingers are tightly crossed.  

I know I’ve said it before, many times, but Johnson really is a wonderful doctor.  She is human and caring.  She jokes with us and talks matter-of-factly about the baby we will have soon.  “This is actually great. You won’t have to be pregnant in summer.  You can be pregnant in the winter, have the baby around July or August and have next fall for maternity leave.  This is going to work out great.”  She is optimistic for us, when we often don’t feel so optimistic. 

Not surprisingly, this recovery has been so much easier.  Maybe it is because only the sacs developed and so everything was toned down, hormonally.  Maybe because we had known for over three weeks that this wasn’t going to work out, so all the sadness, the grief, had already played itself out.  I also don’t feel such an all-encompassing drive about when we will try again.  The teeth-clenching feeling that “I MUST GET PREGNANT, NOW.”  That isn’t there this time, at least in the sad, desperate way it was before.  I think if I have learned anything, if this has prepared me at all for anything, it is having limitless amounts of patience.  Something I severely lacked before.  And no matter what happens, patience is a good thing to cultivate.  It will serve me in my work with high school students, even more so with my high school teaching colleagues (excluding those of you who are probably reading this; seriously, you are my sanity at work), and in the hopeful future I envision of being a mother.

I think what is still hard this time around is seeing the enormous amount of pregnant women and new mothers that Portland seems to breed like skinny hipsters with mustaches and birds on things.  It is amazing to me how many of them I see in my day-to-day life.  What I also notice is they all seem to be a bit older.  Or maybe being a new mom just makes you look really old? Sometimes I want to ask not, “How old is your baby?” but “How old were you when you had that baby?” I want continued reassurance that it is possible, even though I know of at least two women who are slightly older than I am who just had and will have a baby soon.  My head knows, my heart is just slow to believe.

So in many ways it seems we are back where we started around this time last year, but obviously so different from who we were then.  Physically, I am continuing to do acupuncture, yoga, a basketful of supplements every morning, a mason jar full of slow-steeped raspberry tea every day, and Chinese herbs.  I am hopeful that we won’t be waiting as long as we did before for things to return to normal.  But at the very least, I know that it can take a very long time.  Patience.

And on a mental level, we’re doing some work, too. I know I said I wasn’t woo-woo in a previous post, but I guess that there are parts of me that feel intention and invitation are going to have to be part of this process for us.  In the fall, we had painted the eventual baby room.  After the miscarriage in November, we literally shut the door and kept it shut.  We have since opened it.  I went on a Nikki McClure binge, one of my favorite artists.  She does fantastic papercuts around the theme of motherhood, among other things.  We have framed a number of them and put them around the house.  Part of it is about inviting this experience into our life and part of it is about feeling happy and hopeful when I see images of a pregnant woman amidst sunflowers, a mother holding a child in a garden, instead of feeling sad and hopeless.  Maybe it will transfer into the real world, maybe not.  But they are sweet prints to look at.    

We leave for a nearly three-week West Coast Tour this Friday and we are looking forward to getting the hell outta Dodge, seeing family and seeing friends.  My brothers and my best friend have not so new babies now that I have yet to and need to squeeze.  This will be our last hurrah before we come back and start a three-month ‘cleanse’ so to speak.  It takes about 90 days for an egg to develop.  During that time, so much of what you do can impact whether that egg is healthy and viable or not.  We will do what we can on our own to get the world’s healthiest egg (for sperm, it’s like 24 hours, but Brett is being a good partner by suffering for three months with me) before we try again.  I will start Mayan abdominal massage when we get back, and the practitioner also suggests giving it three months - man, the more I write about what I’m doing the more woo-woo I feel.  It works like acupuncture in the sense that it helps blood flow to the ovaries and uterus and makes sure everything is in the right place. 

So three months.   November.   That puts us smack-dab where we started.  Hopefully, this time, we’ll be ready.