a long December

A long December and there's reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last...

December. What a month. A month that most view as joyous, exciting. A month that most long for; a month full of hope, wonderment, anticipation.

You'd think I'd be among the "most" being a December baby and all that but I look forward December with all the enthrallment of looking forward to an annual gynecological exam. A necessary evil; an unavoidable annoyance. It's not a fear of getting older; it's not the stress of the impending holidays. I think it is, more or less, the year coming to an end. Another chapter of my life closing without my permission. It's a time of reflection on the year passed and wondering what could've been had you done something just a little differently.

The smell of hospitals in winter
And the feeling that it's all a lot of oysters, but no pearls...

December grew to a new level of suck-tastic-ness last year. Being infertile makes you acutely aware of you body. It's inevitable, really. You learn your body's quirks; learn how and when to react to impending ovulation. Where most women go "Huh. I missed my period. Maybe I should take a pregnancy test?" there are those of us that research which home pregnancy tests register the lowest amounts of hCG so we can test days before our period is even due. In such, if we're fortunate enough to see two lines on one of those wretched pee sticks, we can immediately calculate where we are in our pregnancy, and thus, our expected due date. The guess work is all but completely removed. We know the exact day, perhaps even the hour, that we ovulated and thus can predict when to expect the arrival of a little bundle of joy better than any nurse or doctor on the face of this earth. This is a blessing and a curse. A blessing for those who go on to have happy, healthy, normal pregnancies and actually end up bringing home a new baby roughly 36 weeks later; a curse for those of us who only experience the joy of a new pregnancy fleetingly.

December 30, 2007. That was my due date. From the moment I saw those two glorious pink lines I began subconciously mapping out pregnancy milestones in my head. By summer, when I planned to attend my best friend's bridal shower, I would be around 15 weeks. I had visions of my west-coast buddies poking my [maybe by then] protruding tummy and giggling. I pictured myself waddling around the streets of San Francisco with a few of my good friends in tow; smiling in the sunshine of my favorite city. I saw myself in a costume on Halloween that would make my belly the center of attention. I saw myself happily helping myself to seconds at Thanksgiving dinner because I really and truly was still hungry. And then I saw myself in December. Oh glorious month of December; month of hope and happiness and anticipation! I saw myself struggling fruitlessly to bake Christmas cookies and my family chastising me for doing so. I saw myself on Christmas day hoping that I wouldn't disrupt the holiday festivities by going into labor a few days early. I even saw myself on New Year's Eve, still full of baby, wondering how much longer I'd go overdue.

It's not like I was doing any of this purposefully. I knew, long before I found out I was pregnant, that having PCOS carries with it a higher risk of miscarriage. I'd been around the infertile [online] community long enough to know that just because you got pregnant did not mean you were going to stay that way long enough to bring home a baby. However, the subconcious mind is not a rational creature. It is the part of our collective conciousness that thwarts the more rational and endlessly more predictive (and stable) concious mind. It betrays us at every turn. Our concious mind builds up these nice, safe walls of logic and certainties only to have our subconcious mind push us off the ledge of those walls with a little nudge of unwanted hope. A quiet utterance of but what if? But I've come to realize that it's all but impossible to keep my subconcious mind under wraps. Try as I may -- and believe me, I DO try -- I just can't seem to do it. It was my subconcious mind that put all these thoughts into my head thus setting me up for eventual failure.

Five weeks, two days pregnant and it was over. All those subconcious fantasies gone up in smoke in the instant the nurse returned to my ER room and muttered the words "I'm sorry. Your beta dropped." Those words left a gaping hole in my chest; in my heart. While the hole has healed a great deal in the past 19 months, it is still a hole underneath. When poked, the surface reopens revealing a fresh, unhealed wound that takes days, weeks, months to reheal. It doesn't help that I have a daily, living, breathing reminder of the hole. My niece was born a mere month before her cousin should have been born. As much as I love my sister, watching her pregnancy progress along the 'natural' course was like hearing those words over and over and over again. And now, every milestone my niece passes, I watch with mixed emotions. I watch with the pure, unadulterated joy and unconditional love of the aunt that I am. And I watch, simultaneously, with the raw emotion of a should-have-been parent; of an infertile.

I do still have some inkling of hope that, someday, I will not dread December. That the end of another year will not mean another year that we failed to get (and stay) pregnant. That one December, someday, will mean our baby's first Christmas. And if it doesn't happen I still have hope that someday, some December will not mean agonizing over what could have -- should have -- been. That someday, some December I'll find that the hole isn't so much a hole anymore.

And it's been a long December and there's reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last
I can't remember all the times I tried to tell my myself
To hold on to these moments as they pass