I feel like an orange.  An orange that someone is trying to peel without the help of long fingernails or a knife.  The would-be peeler pushes on it really hard, hoping to break the skin by sheer shoving.  The skin finally breaks but the sections inside are smashed.  All the internal pouches of orange oil that are in the zest of the skin get ripped open and run down the peeler's hand.  The membrane juice cartridges in the smushed sections spurt juice into onlookers' eyes.  The orange is devastated, ripped, and bruised.  Imagine how much easier it would have been to use a knife, or not to have opened the orange at all. Sometimes at night I feel my yearning for a child pushing on my abdomen just under my ribs.  A hand forces its way through my skin and muscles and grabs my heart.  My whole body curls up but there's nothing to be done about the bruises, then gashes, the hold on my heart.  It's a perpetual ache that affects me in mind and body.  When I think about it I want to throw up from the pain alone.   We're in the middle of an IUI but I have no faith that it will work.  No hope at all.  I ask myself why not, and I think the answer is that it's easier not to get my hopes up.  That's my deep psychological analysis.  On the practical side, I ask why I bother to keep doing the fertility interventions, if I don't think they'll work.  And the answer to that is that it's a lifestyle.  Even if I don't expect them to work, it would be far sadder not to "try."  At least taking medicine and spreading my legs for the casual medical passer-by passes the time. In my office today two of my colleagues were talking about what trouble it is to be a stay-at-home mother.  It's so much work and no one appreciates what you do.  The husband and kids only complain about what hasn't been done, and no one likes the food you cook.  The more they talked, the more I could feel the thumb working its way under my orange-peel ribs.  No one would use a knife -- saying something ultra-sharp and direct like, "Kay, why don't you have children?  They're great."  That would get things out in the open and the conversation would have a very short lifespan.  Instead, normal people in the normal world go on as normal, and reality keeps pushing and pushing on me until I'm in absolute agony.  I said quietly, "I would give anything for that."  But nobody noticed.  Nobody thinks about the orange.