It's been two years since we started trying to have a baby.

No two journeys are exactly the same, but I have been fortunate to know several different ladies who each understand one piece of the crazy pie.

A girl I know here in town, she understands the obsession. She was a charter and a planner. Though it only took her a few months to get pregnant, she remembers vividly the obsession with the science aspect. Like me, she never stopped picking up her charts and comparing month to month. She knows the agony of knowledge and the grief of searching for some medical indicator of why things don't seem to be working.

Another person from my Real Life understands the bitterness. She is mad, mad that she grew up, finished school, got married, got a good job, planned and saved, and now is stuck frozen in time, just like I am. She also hates her high school health teacher for saying that Man + Woman = Baby, because for some of us, it just simply doesn't. She is the only person I know who is as bitter about her lot in life as I am.

I am eternally grateful to know Darla, who like me counts the chickens far before they're hatched. Every month I too check the due date calendars online and plan for a baby nine months later. She and I remain hopeful to a fault, because the overwhelming evidence in our faces should make us slit our wrists rather than start picking out names. But we do it anyway, torturing ourselves with hope. I am glad to know Darla can still do that after seven years, because I have felt crazy for doing it for two.

And on the flip side, my best friend from high school understands the despair. She understands those days when you wallow and feel like it will never happen. Because although she eventually went on to have children, she never fully recovered from the emotional damage the journey took on her. She never gives me any platitudes, never tries to cheer me up, never tells me that things will work out. She keenly remembers the despair, and she too is a bruised orange.

And this Army Wife, whom I recently discovered because of The Worst Possible Thing, understands feeling like a biological failure. When the majority of people on this planet can and do reproduce, and you slowly realize that you can't, it is a severe blow. I feel like we have lesser genes, that we are faulty, that we are not the fittest and thus shouldn't survive. I've never heard anyone else even mention how not getting pregnant or miscarrying feels like a personal biological failure. Reading that on her blog made me finally feel normal about that one piece of the crazy pie.

These women help me realize I am not alone and I am not insane. I am so grateful to each of them for what they have taught me along the way.

Two years.

Damn.

Posted by: Sarah at 06:27 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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