The Pail Sea

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CAN ANYONE HEAR ME?!?

It is I, Stork.

It has been... Jesus.... two months since my last confession. Let's just get into it, shall we?

I haven't been too active in infertile world because I've been frozen in terror, and I need to thaw. I need to unfreeze because I miss you people, but mostly for my own sanity.

I've often compared being a member of our community to being a passenger on the Titanic. We're all unlucky - every last one of us somehow ended up on the wrong fucking boat, and most of us wound up in the freezing water. There are unmistakable divides in our community - who's been in the water longer, who was in it for too short a period or too long ago to count, who's currently sitting fat and happy in a lifeboat.

The ideal code of conduct between these divides, as I understood them pre-pregnancy: If you're in the water, try your best not to focus on the order people should get saved based on suffering because that's never the order it will happen in. If you're in a lifeboat, for fucks sakes don't complain about the gd conditions of the lifeboat particularly to people who are still in the water.

I was in the water for 4 years.  It was a tit bit nipply. I thought, if ever I get yanked onto a boat, because of the aforementioned ideals, it would be a non-obnoxious transition. I'll admit - a million times I've heard a finally-pregnant infertile express how terrified they were, and I've thought 'OMG just be fucking happy'.  So I had a pretty good idea of how I was going to respond if I was ever lucky enough to be 'saved'. Pregnant = problem solved. Smooth transition to happiness.

I was - and this still annoys me - totally, fucking, spectacularly, wrong.

The moment my butt hit a dry seat - happiness. Happy disbelief.  No denying that. There's a physical reaction to obtaining what you've been going after for years before you even have a chance to mentally process it.

Then, I think because of losing one of the embryos 5 weeks in and having enough time to remember - I dunno, who I was? -  and that person was not someone I associated with good luck or a lack of cruel irony, it just morphed into panicked disbelief.

I thought... this can't be your boat. The last one you were on sank spectacularly, you were in the water forever - one of the gajillions of people floating helplessly in frozen, never moving, on-the-cusp-of-ice water. Do you really think you're going to be one of the lucky people successfully saved on this tiny ass boat after all that? Please, by all means, spend a few minutes thinking your safe - because that will give Gawd/the universe/Mother Nature all the more booming a laugh as they hurl you back into the water and you will pray fondly for the days where your skin was used to the cruelty of that temperature... it's going to be soooo much funnier now that you've warmed up a bit.

Another unforeseen reaction on my part was how I would view my place in our community. A million times before, when one of us has gotten knocked up and then disappeared completely, I thought 'well that's kind of a dick move... I guess we'll see you later? Thanks for playing?'. When my butt hit that dry seat, after I realized what happened I looked back in the water. Freezing cold fucking awful water, full of people who had kept me warm for years - and I couldn't do shit to save them. Still can't.

The water had become my HOME. My community. My place. The unbelievably cold and the unfuckingbelievably strong. To stop paddling seemed preposterous... presumptuous. Better women than me were still paddling. Out of habit, I was/am way more used to the idea of surviving than I was the idea of being a survivor.

For a combination of circumstances I don't really fully understand myself - previous experience, hormones, genetic disposition, who knows - I also went a wee bit coocoo for the first half of my pregnancy. I am, if left to my own devices, a very calm, cool, collected and above all mellow person. I find the goof in everything. About 6 weeks into pregnant I became so afraid of how far I was going to fall when it all went to shit, that my brain started entertaining itself by spending most days picturing every possible disaster. An example? I went hunting for blood so thoroughly I would accidentally make myself bleed. If so much as a fucking ant boarded my lifeboat, I would be completely convinced it would sink the whole damn thing.

I'd have a few days where I'd feel normal, and then a few days where it was just... panic. Maybe I would have been better prepared for that if I had hints of that in my personality to begin with but.. nope. It was like being taken over by someone else.  I technically no longer had to paddle to stay alive, and that threw me into such a panic that I exhausted myself paddling. Exhausted.

Maybe around 20 weeks (I'm 25 now) I started to show a little bit (although I'm pudgy to begin with so one could argue I just look like I'm awkwardly carrying fat). Around the same time, I started to feel her move. I started to feel a slight thaw. Maybe I'm really pregnant - but like, the kind that may result in a baby.

A few weeks ago I was driving to get myself some peanut butter froyo with chocolate chips and strawberries (which is now my jammmmm) and listening to "the Loft" on Sirius. (If anyone knows what the fuck the theme of that radio station is supposed to be - don't tell me because at this point it's become a great big infuriating riddle I need to solve.. but do tell me someone knows?).  Anyway, I was thinking about how I really needed to just... let go. Embrace the unknown.  I didn't get this far being a chicken shit. I am no longer trying to get pregnant or struggling to get pregnant... time to accept that I just may be one of the lucky ones. I'm thinking this to myself, this song comes on I've never heard before, Heisenbaby starts to dance around apeshit, and I start to cry - another totally-out-of-character thing for me, but they were happy/relief tears.

So, I still have rough/weird days where relaxing feels like it will bring on punishment.. However, as pre-pregnancy I was no chicken shit, I'm now trying to embrace the happy ending. I bought a crib. I got her a few outfits. I started a registry.

And I'm forcing myself out of the weird and unbearable inbetween... because again, I miss you and I miss my sanity - and at least previously it would seem one was very tied in with the other.

So... I declare this a PAIL blog.

I'm going to get back to writing in here - which has and will continue to be mostly weird shenanigans and certainly not where you go to get an instructional on how to knit a sweater out of tuna casserole using only heavily used stockings.. but I will be writing my shenanigans as a pregnant woman. Which I will be talking about (but I'll go easy on the fruit comparisons).

I'm going to preface this whole new blog - wherever it goes - with the following disclaimer: I am grateful. So grateful. If I had to put hot needles in my eyes every day for the duration of my pregnancy to result in a healthy baby, I would do it with gratitude.  Not just gratitude, but the same perfect understanding I had a year ago as to why any pregnant person should be grateful.... but in that scenario, on this blog, I will be saying 'dude I wish these needles in my eyes were more fun' in my own overly dramatic way... and when I do, please don't think I've forgotten where I come from or how to have gratitude (I think that ought to cover it for the disclaimer).

If you need to back away from me - don't spend a second feeling guilty about it. Just... before you go, know that if there was any way I could drag you by your hair into the boat I seem to have found myself in, I would.  Because I want us all to be happy, sure, but mostly for selfish reasons - I want the familiar on my damn lifeboat, I want you with me because I'm afraid, and you know I'm not going to be able to socialize with too many of those Carpathia bitches who never sank in the first place.

Tomorrow: back to shenanigans. Shit they don't tell you about pregnancy but STORK WILL.