Year of the Wood Horse

I possibly, sort of got my period last week. I had outpatient surgery the week before that and the preop bloodwork went off without a hitch, so I'll assume that my hCG is down to zero (they tend to get tetchy about operating on pregnant women). Which means I could start again, right now.

I'm not. For the first time since starting TTC, I am taking a voluntary break. Since I began (both the first and second time) I've always felt like there was a drill sergeant barking "GO GO GO" -- just imagine one wearing a hat that says "FSH" on it.

Well, that drill sergeant is in the freezer next to my embryos and several pints of Ben & Jerry's. My eggs aren't getting any older. My ovaries will never be called upon again. No matter what happens, I'm not going to do another fresh IVF cycle.  I am lucky to have a generous batch of embryos. When I run those out, I'm done.

Any other haste would be driven by a desire to control the age-gap between Small Boy and Smaller Sibling. I wanted three years, didn't get that. Won't get four years either. Does a few more months really matter? I think not. I think if the sole consideration is temporal spacing, a few months' rest is not significant.

And I really want a few months off. I want to live on my own schedule, not buffeted by hormones and nerves. I want to do house projects and snuggle my child and future-wife (fiancee?). I want to plan our wedding.

Interestingly, I have experienced the exact same phenomenon all three times I have miscarried: while my HCG levels were declining, I felt a burning urgency to get pregnant again ASAP, and despair over how long the time gap would be until I could try again. And all three times, after my HCG had faded completely, so did the suffocating need to get pregnant immediately. *shrug*

I will, kinnehorah inshallah god-willin' and the crick don't rise, start again at either the end of April or the end of May. Until then, I'm just going to enjoy living.

Either of these dates would put any possible delivery in the Chinese year of the Wood Horse. I think that sounds like a really nice year to have a baby. Wood Horses are warm, stable, strong. I like it.

words are weak

There are no words to express the sorrow our community feels at the loss of Caemon.

T and I struggled to conceive together; she got pregnant a few weeks after I did. Caemon was born while we were still reeling from the shock of having Small Boy in our lives. T is a lively and eloquent blogger, and it has been a pleasure watching Caemon grow into a creative and precocious little boy, and watching his moms dote on every detail of his development. They reminded me of us, and of Small Boy, so very much.

This past August, Caemon was diagnosed with a rare form of childhood leukemia, JMML.  A bitter struggle followed with chemo, a bone marrow transplant, and relapse. He died on Tuesday.

It makes no sense. None of it makes sense. It doesn't make sense that I got to wake up this morning with my boy snuggled against my side, and J and T did not. It's not right, it's not fair, it doesn't make any sense at all. I am angry for them, and for all of us, and for Caemon, who didn't get a chance to do so many things.

I've had this post open for days. If it's so impossible for me to write, how do J and T even breathe?

What is there to do? Almost nothing. Send them money, send them love, and go back to trying to figure out how to carry the knowledge that we are all so close to the precipice.

It gets better.

Things are better. I'd have to look at a calendar to figure out where I'd be right now; it's fading, gently, covered with snow. Maybe not coincidentally, my hCG is falling, too. Two weeks ago it was 21. I have a recheck on Monday and expect it to be zero.

There have been a lot of babies around me lately. The lady in line in front of me at the thrift store had two huge baskets full of stuff. Checking her out took a while, so we had time to chat.

"How old are your kids?" I asked.
"One month, three, four, and five." She laughed and rolled her eyes. "How old are yours?"
"Three and a half."

I don't know. People don't get to choose the thing that's hard for them. This lady was, judging from her clothing and heavily accented English, a recent African immigrant. I'm willing to bet that the journey and adjustment hasn't been easy, even if she has had the best of circumstances. I don't know where I'm going with this. People don't get to choose the thing that's hard for them. A friend of mine, the thing that's hard for her is breathing. How is that fair?  I don't know.

But never mind, on to happier subjects. Her Indoors and I had been waffling about getting married until we knew the likely outcome of the pregnancy. I definitely wanted to be hitched before the baby was born, for the legal protection it'd give our family. That meant probably a small courthouse-type thing. But now that that is no longer an issue, the calendar opened wide up, and we could schedule it far enough in the future to give us time to plan the wedding we really want. So: next December! I am insanely excited.  I've been madly pinterest-ing and browsing for silk velvet and roses and sari fragments. I want this, and I can have this. I'm burying myself in wedding prep and it's really comforting.

I'm going to cycle again once I'm able, and maybe I will get pregnant and stay pregnant, and maybe I will be enormous and pregnant at our wedding. But you know what? I can't plan around it any more. I have to go ahead and live. If I get pregnant, we'll adapt.