This is a good one to skip if you don't like wallowing and/or obsessive navel gazing around fertility

Hey guys! Ready to get uncomfortably personal up in here? Let's do it!

So. As you may have caught in my grand summary return-to-blogging post earlier this year, one of the life events of the past year was a miscarriage, back in March. It sucked, as I imagine they all do. It was a baby we had been trying for, and we got far enough along to see a fuzzy little thing on the sonogram screen that they assured us was a fetus, and heard the strong, fast little heartbeat. The next time we went in for a sonogram there was silence. Saying it sucked is such an understatement, but also a really succinct and accurate description as well. It did indeed suck, a lot.

Anyway, after that, I had a lot of wonderful people reach out to me and tell me several helpful and supportive things: many more people than I realized had gone through miscarriages of their own, and many of them had reassuring stories of miscarriages followed immediately by successful pregnancies, resulting in babies I had personally met and whose lovely baby heads I had sniffed. The hard part is apparently getting pregnant, so I was lucky because my body had proved it was capable of getting pregnant, even if it had a little bit of a learning curve on the staying pregnant part. So I consoled myself with the thought that this was hopefully just a trial run for my body, and the next time it would do better.

....and then nothing else happened.

It's weird: in the many months leading up to the pregnancy, I was not upset each month when I didn't get pregnant. I was still mentally in the headspace that pregnancy and motherhood would be wonderful, but not necessarily something I desperately needed to fulfill my life. I didn't have a lot of faith in my body's ability to get pregnant in the first place, so I didn't want to get too excited or hopeful. As my sister pointed out, she was sure I'd be a great mother, but didn't think I was the type of person who NEEDED a baby to be happy in life.

But once there's a heartbeat, things apparently change. You're forced to go from a hypothetical to a reality. Obviously, a heartbeat is not a baby - extra obviously, in my case - and while I was perfectly aware of the risks of the first trimester, and was only ever cautiously optimistic, at most - there was a definite shift somewhere inside me, mentally and emotionally. The heartbeat forces you to make an emotional commitment. It's obviously why so many anti-choice organizations force women to have vaginal ultrasounds before allowing them to terminate a pregnancy: it's really hard to stay detached at that point. All of a sudden there is a real possibility of a human being being deposited into your life in a few months, and for me at least, it sparked some primal shift deep in my psyche which caused me to lurch suddenly and solidly into the baby = good side of the house.

So while the miscarriage sucked, it would be OK. We would try again and I would do better.

Getting my period prior to that hadn't denoted a failure. It just meant we'd try again next month; no big deal. Each month now, I'm kind of shocked at the depth of the anger I have directed at my own body for failing me yet again. It's not enough that I failed at being pregnant; now my body won't even give me the opportunity to try and fix that? Then there's the mean little sliver of my brain that suggests maybe it's good that I keep failing to get pregnant again, because I'd probably just fail to keep that pregnancy again anyway. What is this shit? I thought I had shut up that nasty toxic voice in my head after highschool.

I was sure I was not going to be the type of person who dwelled on things like my would-be due date, and I still plan not to be. But I also made that determination when I assumed I would be pregnant again by my due date. Which I will not be.

All hope is not lost, of course, and I'm not nearly a dramatic enough person to keep up this level of wallowing as a permanent state. We decided to talk to an RE to see if there were any physical limitations that might be contributing to our low success rate (you know, aside from my vastly advanced age, at least in the realm of reproduction). And hey! Turns out there are. So on the one hand: it's nice to know it's not due solely to me failing at a pretty basic human and biologic function, since there are things beyond my control affecting the situation. On the other hand, my prior melodramatic and woebegone announcements that I felt as if I had one shot at this pregnancy situation, and I'd used it and failed? Was actually sort of accurate, seeing as our doctor gave us a roughly 1% chance of conceiving in a given month, in our current state.

So! We'll see where things go from here, but it looks like there is a good chance I will be joining the (somewhat silent) (except honestly, when have I ever been silent) ranks of women who delve into the fascinating and distressingly-not-covered-by-insurance realm of assisted fertility. I feel better than I have in a few weeks: there's a plan. We might not follow that plan, and that plan is certainly not guaranteed to work, but at least someone has proposed one. And that's a hell of a lot better than sitting around waiting to fail.