lissmo . dot . com

One of the first things you learn about being an infertility patient is that it’s all about waiting. Wait until you have the time and money to pursue treatment at all. Find the right doctor, and then wait for the right time of month to start medications. Wait until you’ve taken the medications long enough. Wait to ovulate. Don’t just jump into bed - wait until the time is just right (or wait until you’re in the proper clinical location - no romantic jumping in bed with a bottle of wine!). Every day or two for two weeks or so out of the month, wait in the doctor’s waiting room. Finally, some action - egg retrieval! Wait for the phone call to find out how many (if any) viable eggs you have. Wait by the phone for a few more days to see how many fertilize…how well they divide…how many good embryos you’ll have…wait for the word on when the transfer will be. Then it’s transfer day - and you’re pregnant! Or maybe not…wait two weeks to find out whether any of your embroys implanted or whether you’ve just spent a ton of time and money for nothing.

If you’re really, really lucky - like I was, finally - the news at the end of those two weeks is joyous. You’re pregnant! Now you keep waiting…nine more months until you can meet this miracle that’s growing inside of you.

And by the end of those all that waiting and preparing and waiting, you’ll be so very tired of waiting, and so ready to meet this little person…and yet you’ll still feel so completely unprepared for everything that will mean.

Still waiting, and hoping to meet our baby girl on her terms and not at a scheduled c-section in three days.

Sometimes you realize that you’ve been paying attention to all the wrong things for a long time. Focusing on the stupid details of irrelevant distractions instead of spending mental time and energy giving the important stuff what it deserves. Fortunately, sometimes you realize that before it’s entirely too late. You figure it out while you still have time to give the important things all of your attention, even if only for a little while. But when you find yourself saddened at how much time you wasted paying attention to the wrong things, you also have to remember that it’s also a waste of time to dwell on “what might have been” when it’s “what will be” that still deserves the focus.

This has been a hard year in a lot of ways - losing the house that we’d really invested a lot of time, energy and heart in, for one thing. When I weigh that against the good, though - the miracle of finally knowing that we’re going to be parents after so many years of hoping and wishing and trying - I have to admit that I have a damn lot to be thankful for. I have a great family and a good life, and anything else is just more.

And for once, yeah, I really am thankful.

The hardest thing for a Type A control freak like me to do is accept that I can’t control everything in my life. Even when I think I’ve accepted something that wasn’t my ideal, all too often I find out later on that I really hadn’t accepted it at all - I’d actually assumed that somehow, at some point, I’d find a way to get things the way I wanted them all along.

Unfortunately - or maybe fortunately - that’s one of the first things that motherhood is apparently planning to throw in my face. The vision I had of what my “childbirth experience” would be like? Huh-uh. Not likely to happen. Baby apparently has other ideas, like hanging around on her butt instead of her head. (And who can blame her, really? But still.) In this day and (litigious) age, good luck finding a doctor who will even consider delivering a baby in breech presentation. Nope, if you’re baby’s breech, you’re having a c-section, like it or not.

It’s not impossible that she’ll still decide to turn into perfect position when (and if) I go into labor, but it’s not likely. At this stage of the game, it’s almost 99% certain that this baby will be born in an operating room - a very nice one, to be sure, but still an operating room - and not the nice, pleasant, quiet room I’d hoped.

It’s very easy to say all that matters is that both mother and baby are healthy in the end result - and it’s definitely true. At the same time, it’s very clear that my intellectual knowledge and my emotional acceptance are definitely not in the same place.

The problem with due dates is that they�??re always �??estimated�?�. In fact, only 5% of babies are born on their �??due dates�?�, so the term is obviously not at all accurate. It�??s more like a �??somewhere in here maybe possibly�?� date. Two weeks on either side doesn�??t sound like much, I guess, unless you�??re the one who�??s forty weeks pregnant and anxiously waiting to meet your new child in person.

Two weeks, then, can seem like a very long time.