I mean, it took me 32 cycles the first time, so I’m… quite well practiced lol. I guess I just didn’t expect it all to slump in back at once again. Like I’m back at cycle 34 now, not cycle 2.
Part of it too is suddenly being torn away from normalcy. Being able to be in a due date group for my daughter meant that for once I was on equal footing with other people in their experiences. And all of a sudden this has thrown me straight back into the “I’m infertile and everyone else is not” camp. And unless I wanna lose one of my main sources of support for my parenting, then I don’t have the option to mute or limit my exposure to it. And I can’t go back to a lot of the infertility groups that I use the first time, because those are definitely geared towards people who have never had children (and rightly so, to be clear- but I don’t belong anymore). And I don’t feel like I connect with people who are having secondary infertility, because that’s a very different experience than being back in the infertility game rather than experiencing at your first time.
@Bracken_Joy gimme a minute and I might be there with you. absurdly enough the minute Spore started sleeping better we looked at each other and were like, this guy’s awesome, we’re getting old, there are X blastos left, we should talk when he’s a year .
Of course, I in no way meant to downplay the difficulty of your initial experience or imply that you didn’t have your own set of coping skills. I was just trying to share what has been working for me personally as I deal with pangs of my own sometimes and offer a little glimpse from what it’s like looking out of my own head right now.
No matter the particular situation, it sucks to not get what you want when you want it, especially in matters of procreation where it’s often straight zero to 60, from not quite ready to OMG-why-not-instantly.
I’m happy to have you in my “trying” cohort this time around.
Seriously! The 29-year-old me who was so relieved that I had first won over my husband (he wanted kids when we got married, then he didn’t, then he did) and then finally gotten pregnant after a year and a half of trying, would not understand my 40-year-old self on my second IVF transfer (after two retrievals) trying to make a THIRD. But then, there were a lot of things that version of LBF didn’t know.
Meanwhile, the dude who was reluctant about parenthood, upset when I got pregnant with our second (oops) and horrified when my IUD failed and we conceived again (it didn’t take)… yeah, that dude married a woman with back-to-back boys younger than ours. Sometimes they are stairsteps–so later this year it will be 7, 8, 9, 10. I couldn’t believe it when they first got together and I noticed our pack and play set up in this bedroom–when your kids are 4 and 5, going backwards and taking on a two-year-old is… well, it’s really something. But life is weird. Super weird.
I guess I already know I would have two if it were possible, so I definitely don’t find people (my future self or otherwise) who want two annoying. (Though I am pretty sure that at my age, with my lack of resources, and with the combination of how long the first is taking + my career timeline, if I get a second it’ll have to be some combo of a frigging miracle and/or adopting when I’m a little further along in my career and can afford it.)
I was originally just trying to help out by pointing out that I’ve noticed that if I find myself in comparison mode at all, it can be emotionally soothing to compare in both directions; for me, it helps gratitude replace envy, which then helps me get off the hamster wheel of comparing at all.
For example, in my personal case, I am usually able to find some level of gratitude that I was able to get pregnant at all, which at least means I can, because there are a lot of people who never even could, and for a long time, I didn’t know whether I would be one of them. Now I know, which feels like a better place to be in. If it never happens again, if as far as I ever get is where I’ve gotten, then at least I have my memories of what it was like to realistically dream those dreams with life inside of me. Even though it ended with grief (which I’m definitely still going through 2.5 months later), I do feel lucky to have experienced the wonder of knowing that life was created out of my love, even though it didn’t ever get to see the light of day.
It’s a strategy similar to a game that I play with my mind in any situation where I find myself wishing hard that my situation were different than it is. If I were wishing that I were older/younger/further along in my career/richer/without some particular affliction/etc. I try to picture what I have in my current state to appreciate that I might forget about or take for granted if I were in a different situation and try to find what’s perfect in the moment I’m in. It’s a practice, and I’m not always great at it, but when I can pull it off, it’s always helpful to my inner peace.
I was trying to share that’s what works for me when I can manage it, in case it was helpful to others as well, but I think maybe it was accidentally not. But I am definitely a person who tends to fall into help/fix mode sometimes when hear/validate mode would work better (something I am trying to train out of myself before I become a therapist!) so I just assume I’ve gone too far with that if it doesn’t go over well. My intentions are always good, in any case.
I love the reframing of a race against time/biology, that is not affected by anyone else’s success. It acknowledges the angst and urgency, but it seems so helpful in separating jealousy from happiness.
This, tbh. I think (and hope) that here we can be supportive of everyone regardless of the specific nature of difficulties they may be having, if any, but I do also understand it’s not quite the same as having a community that has Been There and Gets It.
I really appreciate that @Bracken_Joy (I think) introduced the term “situational infertility” cause that clicks for me and helps me understand my feelings toward friends who are on #3 and #4. I’m currently at a little pang of jealous but I could see that grow… Mind you I really only want max 2 of my own, I think.
Thanks! That was not always the case, so it’s something I work on and value greatly. (Fewer than five years ago, my coping strategies were mostly “get drunk” and “wallow,” in that order. Life is better now.)
So I’d gotten TERRIBLE about temping after the MC and also because I’d been using my Fitbit vibrating alarm (so as not to wake my partner up too) which didn’t give me anywhere to have to reach to turn it off. Recently, the Fitbit alarm stopped working on me (not stopped working period but I started apparently turning it off in my sleep) so I figured out a new hack: set my phone alarm to vibration alarm, put it halfway under my pillow, and strap my thermometer on there with a fat asparagus rubber band, so I have no choice but to go through the thermometer to shut off the alarm. It’s working, y’all. Two days of temps successfully recorded! (And I’m back to marveling how a human can live with a body temperature of fully two degrees below “normal.”)
Feeling nervous about my cycle, because my period lasted all of three days, and my cycle has been only 26 days long… And other people saying that they have similar cycle lengths and period lengths are like “oh yeah I’m premenopausal.”
Yeah, my doctor warned me on Wednesday when I saw her that even though I have my period back now after the MC, things might be either irregular for a while or just totally different than they were for me before. She warned me that even if I’m temping/tracking, not to depend on my previous stats for guidance but rather to temp for my records AND use strips AND just have as much sex as possible until confirmed ovulation until I either get pregnant or know what my “new normal” is.
It’s probably one of those person dependent things, but I always found that kind of comparison to be rage-inducing, especially deeper and deeper into it when the “at leasts” got smaller and smaller.
One person’s gratitude is another’s dismissive-ness (is that even a word?) and whatnot. I just think that people are allowed all the shitty feelings they want to have and no one should make them feel bad for it. If you were feeling a way about something, that’s valid and you can feel it all you want. There’s a place somewhere for the support inward/vent outward circles of relation, which is why there are groups with rules like “don’t talk about pregnancy/breastfeeding/children/TTC/whatever”.
I would have liked two–probably not as many as four, or even three–but circumstances are such that it would not be feasible, which though I knew from the get go has been and will still be a bit of a process to reconcile. But in the thick of it, 1 was infinitely better than 0, while 1 and 2 and 4 might as well have been the same compared to none.
Heartily agree with this, for sure! Every single person should feel the fuck out of their feelings for as long as they need to feel them.
Some explanation of why I need my "toolbox" (as Ferngully called it)
For me, my strategies are most useful for when I wish I WASN’T feeling particular things anymore, or when don’t want to feed them because it makes me feel worse. I try to, like, ratchet myself back to equanimity, if that makes sense. I’m also way, wayyyy more prone to self-pity and anxiety than ever to rage, so my work to modulate my emotions kinda stops me from going someplace that only hurts myself.
I do recognize that I’m pretty weird emotionally, though. I have a hugely traumatic childhood history, am undiagnosed but am probably somewhere on the mild end of the autism spectrum, was a social pariah for most of my childhood, and then consumed substances instead of feeling regular feelings for most of my adolescence and adulthood. For me, the process of just being able to identify, name, feel, and then modulate feelings has been like learning a second language in adulthood—one that I am very excited about sometimes. IDK if that makes sense to anyone?
Metaspoiler
I am now reflecting on the idea that I may be strangely rage-deficient. That’s an emotion I’ve encountered only maybe a dozen times in my entire life, and strong anger in others tends to mostly mystify me more than it does anything else. It’s actually an ongoing thing in my relationship: stuff PISSES my partner off, often. Stuff that I find vanishingly small sometimes. Thankfully it’s rarely me or anything I’ve done. But I am almost never genuinely pissed off, so I get so puzzled sometimes when it happens to him. Annoyed or irritated sometimes, yes. Frustrated, occasionally. ALL CAPS PISSED OFF? It’s quite rare. Enraged? I can barely remember what it feels like, it’s so infrequent. IDK if I’m just a super peaceful creature or unhealthily stunted in some way.
Feelings are totally valid but what I read in @wooljaguar 's explanation was trying to get around “comparison is the thief of joy” in a world that sets us up and actively trains us to compare and compete. Even when we know, cognitively, that it’s not a competition at all, it can be hard to see someone get something you want faster and with less (apparent?) effort…
Basically I see it as a gratitude practice. Which I have found extremely effective when it feels like “everything sucks”.
IDK, I wrote a bunch and deleted it several times because I don’t really know what to say except that I think gratitude is different from reverse comparison (which ends up often minimizing one person’s pain or making another person’s lived reality into a worse case scenario*).
But I feel like there’s a limit in the number of replies before it’s just argumentative and as a non Not Pregnant…Yet member, I’m just here to provide support as needed so Imma bow out.
*Like, no, having a child through donor embryo who has no genetic connection to me is not a nightmare, kthx. For example.
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