6dt5dt: the right way to get a BFN

5:30 a.m. Wake up when 2-year old decides to join you in bed.

5:35 a.m. Lie awake trying to convince yourself that you don't have to pee.

5:36 a.m. Consider that this pee will be FMU (that's First Morning Urine, for any of you not on the crazytrain).

5:38 a.m. Pee. Test.

5:38-6:00 a.m. Stare at pristine white test, willing a shadow of a line to appear.

6:01 a.m. Give up, crawl back into bed.

6:02 a.m. Have toddler jam chubby arm around your neck, nestling fragrant head under your chin. Breathe. Think about how lucky you are to have this small, strange, snuggly person unfolding before your eyes every single day. Twine ankles with your best beloved, in your comfortable bed, with your healthy child between the two of you. Cry a bit from the happy, and also the hormones.

6:15 a.m. Drift off for a second sleep, smiling.


So... yeah. Still BFN. Still wish it weren't. But you know, I think I'm on to something here. I'm going to start scheduling my HPTs for right before a designated snuggletime. There's a depth I just can't plunge to when the Small Boy shoves his arm around me and sighs.

I have also been thinking a bit about the Slow Path. A year or two ago, I was sure that my struggles to conceive had done nothing but damage me as a person. I was more guarded, anxious, cynical, angry, bitter. Damaged. I thought that I was a worse mother than I would have been if I had traveled a smoother path.

But I've started to think that it's not true. I think that I genuinely have, to a great extent, healed. I can tell, because some of the patterns I feel myself bending into now are simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar: my brain bends that way, but it hasn't for a long time. And that's very, very good.

I don't know if I'm a better mother because of infertility, but I'm starting to cautiously think that I might not be a worse one.