Dispatches from Coocoo

Greetings, blogosphere!

Just wanted to pop in and say howdoyoudo... Need to get back into the swing of writing, so I first wanted to dip my toe in the water to say hey in a sudden and possibly alarming fashion.

HEY.

Going to be talking about pregnancy in this one, so feel free to skip if you need to.

We good? k.

I shall be 16 weeks along with Heisenberg on Wednesday.

Also? Heisenberg is a SHE-BEAST!

While she may be a lady, she shall still be known as Heisenberg as she is clearly a fucking badass (although a friend on Twitter suggested 'Heisenbroad' which made me die a thousand deaths).

The short story is I haven't been on here because I went a little bit coocoo.

By coocoo, I mean the midpoint between 'oh that Stork and her antics, she's silly' and 'holy Christ on a cracker somebody call someone with a giant butterfly net'... maybe a little closer to butterfly net.

I will admit I previously thought that when infertiles got pregnant and then were all nervous and nutso? That it was melodramatic bullshit.

Not so, friends, not so.

Infertility is a fucking survival game. You do what you have to do to get by.  My MO is to make jokes, numb myself out, soldier on like a good little soldier.

And here's the thing, folks... infertility or not, when you put off feeling things you're not getting rid of them - you're just guaranteeing you have to pay for them later. With interest.

Pretty much every day in my first trimester I was convinced something terrible had happened. Not 'oh that would suck, I wonder if something's wrong' but 'something is WRONG'.

I'd randomly get completely overtaken by anxiety that was seemingly not even related to Heisenberg.  Like, getting out of my house and suddenly crippled in fear that the stove was on when I hadn't used the stove in a few days. Wondering if someone was breaking into my house when I wasn't there.

Why? I suppose because you get used to happiness eluding you that when it finally shows up wanting to be a part of your life, your first thought is to figure out what kind of con this is.

I was constantly, cripplingly, 1,000% terrified of getting attached to the idea of a happy ending.

Best way I can describe it... You know that game where you put your hands straight out, and your opponent puts their hands a few inches below yours, and they have to try to slap your hands before you can pull away?

Okay so the process of trying to have a baby when you're infertile is like getting slapped constantly.  Like a never ending fucking slap fest where your fingers get raw and bloody, and eventually you get used to it.  You're constantly taking punches. If you try = you get slapped.

Getting pregnant at the end of infertility is like putting your hands out never having known anything other than slapping, and your opponent just sits there mind fucking you with their eyes. If this one time you can make it 5 minutes without a slap (even though you've never made it 5 seconds without one) the abuse will stop and you can heal. With each passing second, you're more and more afraid of that slap because it's going to scare you, hurt you, make you feel stupid on a level that you're just never going to be able to recover from.  So while before you were physically getting slapped, now it's psychological warfare which makes you flinch and cringe more than you ever did.  Because this slap?  This slap could be worse than all the rest - your opponent could just be winding up for this one, with every passing second a little more inertia added to it.

A specific example of coocoo level? I was checking so vigorously for blood that wasn't there that I would make myself - in a tiny way - bleed.  Not healthy.

I'm starting to feel better. I'm thinking it's a combination of the Maternity21 testing coming back (which I only had on account of my being adopted) lovely, getting a fetal doppler so I can find her when I want, and knowing that prior to this happening to me, when another infertile reached 16 weeks of pregnancy I thought 'oh okay, she's really pregnant. A baby is going to come of this.'

So for the most part I am more relaxed... a few paces further away from the butterfly net. Just a few paces.

Don't get me wrong, in a moment of relaxation panic can still find me...

(Source.)

but it's a little less alarming than it was a week or two ago.

(Source.)

So I'm dipping my toe back into the world.

Hello, world.