17w4d

I have a journal elsewhere that I write to keep many of my friends updated with my life, and I have a few people who have similar interests (or careers) or whatever that I don’t actually know. I just deleted one of those “friends”, not someone I actually know, because she is pregnant again and is going on about how “super fertile!” she is. She got married a few years ago, got pregnant on the first try (of course) and now again, same thing. She doesn’t post much so I probably won’t even notice, but it surprises me at how bitter I can still feel towards those who get it so easily. Why should I be bitter anymore? I’ve gotten what I wanted (or at least am on my way to it), so why should I feel that way still? Why do I still get that twinge when I hear of people who have only been married for a short time who get pregnant (and assumedly weren’t trying before)? It’s not quite as strong as it was before, but it’s still there. Do you ever lose that feeling? Do you ever lose your identity as an infertile?

I saw a friend who I haven’t seen in almost a year (mostly because she got pregnant and I avoided her, which was pretty easy since we don’t see each other that often anyway, but still) and it was good to see her, but I still can’t help but feel that it’s unfair that she got her baby (a very cute one!) before me. She tried for 6 months before conceiving, and she at least acknowledges that she has no real idea how it feels (as opposed to saying, “oh yeah, it took us a while, I know what you’re talking about”, which a lot of people do), but still. She says that you get the baby that you’re supposed to get… but why couldn’t that baby have been the two before? Or happened at any point in the previous four years? Why are there people who try even longer and have to go through so much more than I did? (I still find it so hard to believe that I am actually one of the lucky ones… how is anything I went through lucky?)

On the other hand, she said she was miserable for her entire pregnancy because she had no idea it would be so uncomfortable and she had no idea about a lot of it. I knew a bit of what to expect because I’ve had four years to research it. I am grateful even for the crappy stuff (because there is some crappy stuff that goes with it, though I’ve been incredibly lucky so far, if you ask me) because I’d been thinking for years that it might never happen. She agreed that she probably would have enjoyed it more (or at least been more grateful for it, not that she wasn’t, but still, it changes your perspective) had she had more trouble achieving it.

And being the last one to get pregnant means I get to pick their brains about everything, rather than being the first one to go through everything, which has been nice because there is way too much information out there.

She told me that another friend of ours (we all used to work together) who got married….. two years ago? is pregnant and due right around the same time as I am. I don’t really know how long they’ve been trying, so maybe it was that whole time, but I would assume if that were the case, she would have mentioned it since she knows we had issues. But it just gave me that familiar twinge to hear. I’m not necessarily bitter and not happy for her, but I’m still not exactly happy in the way I would have been before all this, and the way I’d like to be again one day.

Maybe it goes away when you’re finished having kids and you know you don’t have to worry about it anymore. Maybe it’ll go away when I have a kid in my arms and not just a “can’t quite believe this” like it is right now. Maybe it never goes away once it’s there, although I really hope that’s not the case. I hope at least once I’m done having kids (we want one more for sure, although we’ll see if that changes when I have one :P), because at this point I’m not sure if it won’t be another several years of unsuccessful trying to get there. Though now I think if we had issues, I’m not sure it would be so acute because the biggest thing was that I was never sure I would ever get to experience being pregnant (a big thing for me) or that we would ever have kids at all, bio or not. Now that I’ve had a chance to do it, I’m extremely grateful for that, and I would be much more open to going straight to adoption. It’s not as much about being biologically related, as experiencing all of this that I’m going through now. I cannot express how absolutely, extremely grateful I am to get to do this, crappy stuff and all. It is the most amazing thing I have ever done, full stop.