new order

Well, internets, it seems things are finally starting to shake down in the mind of annacyclopedia. I’ve had a few realizations about why it’s been hard for me to write since getting knocked up, and I’m really hoping that this will help shake loose a flood or even a steady trickle of words from my brain.  I realized the other day that I was holding back from writing about the pregnancy partly because I don’t think it’s that interesting – I’m no different from any other pregnant woman out there who feels tired, nauseous, incredulous, freaked out, bloated, awe-struck, whatever. But also partly because I was having a blog-dentity crisis.

When I started blogging, I was desperate to find others whose stories were just like mine. I combed the blogrolls, searching for my own story told by someone else. The more similar, the better, I thought. And surprise, surprise – there weren’t very many. I found other DI blogs, which was so great, but nobody had gone through a failed vasectomy reversal and gone straight to DI. To this day I don’t think I’ve found anyone whose story matches mine on those points. But I don’t care anymore, because I very quickly realized that it truly doesn’t matter – that the sense of community and belonging I found here in the blogosphere has little, if anything, to do with how similar someone’s story is to mine. Instead, it’s about something way harder to describe – it’s the heart connections that happen the same way they happen in real life. Mysteriously, instinctively, spontaneously –  through the little jokes that I tell that someone actually gets, or the casual mention by a blogger I already read that they love a particular band, or share a particular interest of mine, or the way a woman I admire to the point of being intimidated gives me a shout-out or sends me a sweet, supportive email out of the blue.  The way some of you have taken the time to tell me that my words have made a difference for you, in some small way. The way the guts of our experience – spiritual, emotional, physical, political, intellectual – get shared either through brilliant, detailed exposition or revealing little aphoristic posts so crammed with truth they leave me breathless for minutes or hours or days. 

If all of this sounds incredibly self-centred, it is. For me, blogging has been about finding a place where I belong, where I can tell my own story and be heard and understood. I do it because it is about me.  And in some way, I think that’s true of all of us. At the very least, that’s what draws me in – the appeal of women all over the world, trying to understand themselves and their lives by writing their own stories and releasing them like a cage of doves. 

Somehow, getting knocked up and trying to write about it, I forgot all that. I got caught in the belief that my blog is for other people who might need it, and I feared hurting those women who were like me at the beginning – desperate for a mirror of their own experiences. I didn’t want to have the story someone needed to hear, only to have them show up on my blog and be faced with a post about about stretch marks and the alarming growth of my ass. I didn’t want to let that woman down.

How’s that for wanky and delusional and self-aggrandizing?

I’ve realized that my blog is for telling my story. Plain and simple. That my story now includes being pregnant and hopefully becoming a mother to a healthy and adorable baby. And while I don’t have an obligation to tell it, I do have a desire to tell it, as much for myself as for anyone else. My blog archives are some of the most precious things in my life – it is so powerful being able to look back at a record of who I have been, of what I’ve come through, of what has healed and what remains to be healed.

I realized, too, that while I don’t struggle with feelings of guilt about being pregnant, I was wrestling with some weird stuff about talking about being pregnant. I know that everyone who doesn’t get or stay pregnant easily has their moments of anger and sadness over others’ pregnancies; I’ve had plenty of such moments myself. For some reason, I was taking that on, and trying to protect those of you who are still waiting and trying and hoping. Again with the self-aggrandizing.  I finally remembered that even though I’ve had times when hearing someone else’s good news has been painful, there are lots of times when it’s brought me joy and hope, and that my reactions are largely random, i.e. that sometimes I’m able to be thrilled for a virtual stranger and yet am plunged into despair over my own sister’s pregnancy announcement. And also that all of you dear readers have free will and can click away anytime you want, with my blessing and support. 

So this post is to declare a new order here on my blog. That although I probably will never talk about pregnancy symptoms in great detail, I will no longer be holding back. I’m claiming this space as my own even though it always was. I just forgot. 

Blog-dentity crisis over.

shaken, then stirred

This is a story in two parts. The first part is the bad news. The second is the good news. So there is no need to hold your breath while reading the first part.

Thursday evening, we had a bit of scare. I was having a poop (my current obsession with apples is doing wonders for my digestion) and I looked down to see a drop of blood fall in the toilet. My mind froze on just one thought: “no, no, no no, NO!” There was some more blood when I wiped – not a lot, but it was bright red and terrifying. I made my way upstairs and told Manny, and somehow managed to have the presence of mind to call the health line nurse who, like all health line nurses, is an angel in disguise. As she listened to me and started to ask me questions, I could feel myself calming down. No cramping, swelling of feet, hands or face, dizziness, blurred vision, abdominal pain, fever. Nothing other than maybe 1 or 2 milliliters of blood, which by this point had stopped. She said I needed to see a doctor within 24 hours, and that if I felt I needed to go in right away, I should do that, but to watch myself carefully and if the bleeding got worse, or I was cramping or anything else, I should go to the ER immediately. I was surprisingly calm by this point; for whatever reason, I just felt like everything would be ok. The bleeding did not continue or resume, although there was a tiny bit of brown spotting through to the next morning. She also suggested I call the OB/GYN on call at the hospital, which I would never have thought of on my own, although it’s on the voice mail message of my clinic if you call them after hours, which I have inadvertently done at least a dozen times. So I did call, and spoke to the OB, who said I could come in and he could see me, but he wouldn’t be able to to an ultrasound until the morning, so it would probably be better just to come in first thing in the morning.

So that’s what we did. Manny and I were at emergency at 8 on Friday morning. After waiting for 2 hours, we finally got in for an ultrasound. My panic had returned pretty much as soon as we walked in to the hospital, and as we were waiting for the u/s, it was at its peak. For all my excitement to have my first scan on Monday, we were about to find out whether all was indeed well, and the circumstances were not at all as I had imagined. They called my name, and Manny and I went into the little room. The very nice tech told me to hop up on the table, and I had a weird moment of cognitive delay, cause I had the urge to take off my pants. I started to laugh and shared this with Manny, who laughed, and the tech, who looked at me a bit weird until I told her we had done fertility treatment to get pregnant and that I had done lots of follicle tracking scans. She tried to do it abdominally, but my bladder was completely empty, so she wound up having to ask me to remove my pants anyway. Ah, good old dildo cam – how I missed you! She had the screen angled towards her for about half a minute, but then she turned it around so we could see, saying that we didn’t have to be holding our breath.

I saw the heartbeat before she even pointed it out and I’ve never been happier or more relieved to see anything in my life. It was AMAZING! She then proceeded to give me a very thorough wanding, pointing out all sorts of things along the way – looking at both ovaries, my uterus, the baby’s arm and leg buds, the bones ossifying in its face, the developing brain. We got to see the baby moving around and gaze in wonder at the flickering heartbeat. She printed us out two pictures which I will try to scan and post a bit later. According to their calculations, I was 9w3d, and the baby was measuring 10w exactly, with a heartbeat of 176.

I then went out and waited some more – before they’d let me leave, I needed to see the OB on call. They did some blood work as I waited, but it was still nearly 3 hours between getting the u/s and seeing the doctor. However, the waiting was much easier knowing the baby was ok, and the OB was very nice. She explained that the scan showed I had a very small bleed under the placenta, and that while it could be risky if the bleed got bigger, it was not that  uncommon and would most likely resolve on its own. I was smiling to myself as I held back from saying, “Oh, a subchorionic hemorrhage, right, gotcha.” We bloggers are just so damned well-informed! She answered my questions and then told me that she was on call until 8 the next morning, so if anything else happened or I was concerned, I could call and speak to her directly. She, and everyone I dealt with in the hospital on Friday, was amazing, and I am so fortunate to have been so well cared for.

As we were seeing the baby, between little bouts of teariness from me, I was thinking about how this is my child, MY child, my CHILD. A child to whom I could one day relate this story about the first time we saw her. And how much joy we felt when we did.

I know we are a long way from holding this child in our arms, and I am not taking it for granted that we will. But the sense of connection I am starting to feel to this baby – it humbles me as it sweeps over me. I am grateful. I am in awe.

dudes.

I am, like, so totally lame. I can’t believe I’ve gone so long without writing anything, and there is so much to write about I don’t really know where to begin. So I’ll take a page from Io and give you a bulleted list that will hopefully catch you up on the major events of my life recently.**WARNING: Pregnancy talk ahead.**

• I’m 9 weeks pregnant. There. I said it, as publicly as it gets for now. I’ve told my family, and while we’re not going full-scale public with the news until we hit 12 weeks, at least I don’t have to worry about my mother finding out from some friend of the family who had stumbled across the blog. If you know me in real life, please keep this to yourself for now. Also, Manny’s family doesn’t know yet – we’ll tell them at 12 weeks, too. I’m really looking forward to that – I think they are going to be really surprised, since they don’t know that we’ve actually been trying or any of our issues.
• I’m still having trouble believing it and have never paid closer attention to the state of my used toilet paper. But it’s sinking in gradually – telling my family did help it feel more real and every day I believe more and more. I’m having lots of symptoms, which helps a lot – sore boobs, queasiness on and off but thankfully no barfing yet, gas, tiredness. I am grateful to have so many reasons to believe that this is real.
• I have my first u/s on April 6, when I’ll be 10 weeks. They could have gotten me in last week but Manny had a conference and wouldn’t have been able to come, so I pushed it back a bit. Having visual confirmation will be nice but I’m surprised by how calm and in the moment I seem to be. It’s kind of weird – usually this state of mind doesn’t come easily to me.
• Manny and I had a great time in BC with my parents and my sister, BIL and nephew. It was nice to get away from the snow even if we didn’t have really great weather until we got over to Victoria, where it was absolutely lovely.
• I had an amazing time meeting up with some bloggy friends – I had lunch with Tara, Emily, Emily, and planningdoesn’twork. It was so nice to meet them face to face and spend some time together. This Emily remarked at one point that I was quieter than she expected me to be, and afterwards I was thinking that it would have been nice to meet everyone just one on one, but I just didn’t have the time. I do tend to be a little quiet in big groups, preferring to observe and listen. But we did have a really good time together, and it was amazing how much everyone was pretty much how I imagined them to be. Also amazing is just how real our bonds can be, even though we may have and may never meet. Seeing these women in real life confirmed for me once again that blogging relationships are real and important. 
• The day after I met up with that gang, I got to meet Deathstar. And let me say that however awesome she is on her blog, she is even awesomer in real life. As she said, we could hardly get the words in fast enough, and we were tripping over ourselves to finish each other’s sentences. It was amazing. Also, she has the most ridiculously gorgeous eyes (she’s a knockout from head to toe, just to be clear) and I hope she wasn’t freaked out by me staring at them. In addition to being beautiful, she is also funny and smart and has that gift of really being present in a conversation and being able to really listen. After spending a couple of hours with her, I was on a high for the rest of the day. 
• I found out that my job will not become permanent at the beginning of June, but they’re willing to give me a four month extension on my contract, which means that if all goes as hoped, I will be starting my maternity leave at the beginning of October, which my sister and others have said is actually a good idea cause it gives you time before the baby comes to get organized and take it easy. The downside is that I won’t be getting topped up, so it’ll just be 55% of my salary, and I won’t have a job to go back to after a year. The money would be nice, but I’m too lazy and too preoccupied to look for another job right now, and in any case it would be virtually impossible to find something with equal pay and benefits to what I get right now. It’ll just take some more planning on our part to make things work, but really, it’ll be fine.  And I’m extremely grateful to be living in Canada where I get a full year of leave. It’s also possible for Manny to take a portion of that year as paternity leave, but we haven’t really discussed that yet. Plenty of time to figure all that out. 
• I’ve been asked to write an article for the magazine that is published by IAAC – it’s going to be about blogging and IF. I’m really excited about it and I will be coming to all of you for thoughts and input, cause I’m only able to have anything to write about because you’re all in the community. 

Ok, that’s it for now. I promise to get back in the swing of things and write more. It’s occurring to me that by not writing I’m missing out on a record of what I’m going through. I’m still up in the air about whether to start a new blog or just to keep writing here – will certainly keep all of you posted on any future changes. 

It’s good to be back.