I\'m Back

No, I didn't go anywhere, except Boston for the weekend.  But that doesn't account for my not writing.  The only reason I can think that it took me three weeks to put another report up is that maybe I'm... um, happy?  (Can that be?)   We had the 20 week ultrasound (actually 19, but I'm rounding up) and found that both babies are healthy -- nothing to worry about now from the single umbilical artery problem that we'd found last time.  And we found out that they are both GIRLS! I have so much to say that I"m going to try to be brief, though it goes against my very nature.   When we found out it was two girls, we were shocked.  First of all, we had waited for two solid hours in the waiting room for the ultrasound, because there was some paperwork hold up, and I got woozy sitting there for so long.  Then they did the ultrasound, which makes me nauseous anyway.  I had to take a couple breaks to lie on my left side -- supposedly that helps nausea subside.  Not permanently though.  And then the tech told us that both babies looked good and were girls.   As a boy-girl twin myself, I was stunned, because I hadn't really considered the possibility that there could be two of the same sex.  At the 16 week ultrasound they had told us that it "looked" like a boy and a girl, but that they couldn't say for sure.  Now they could say for sure, and it was girl and girl.  I was also stunned because I"ve been wanting a girl for so long that I took a lot of time to prepare myself for having only boys (contrary to what I just said) -- so I wouldn't be totally disappointed.  We had a cute boy name picked out, and I'd thought a lot about how James and a son would get along.  But I never thought I needed to prepare myself for two girls.  That's one girl to take my place in the world (in the children = immortality school of thought), but... what about the extra girl.  Who is she?  I joked to James later that maybe we should give the "extra girl" away to an infertile family who needed her.  He said it's kind of sad to regard Baby B as "extra" because she's only second since we looked at her second.  In reality she's as primary as the other girl she developed along with.  I mean, she's always been a girl, if not in our minds.   None of this would have been too hard if I hadn't seen James turn away and wipe away a tear when they pronounced Baby B a girl.  Then he did it again.  Two tears.  It broke my heart: I was getting what I wanted, and he wasn't.  And my sweet, sweet husband who I would do anything for was sad.  So that started the waterworks.  I started crying so hard that I threw up.  Of course.  I cried off and on that day, about this and other things. That evening, I saw that there were a couple of comments on my most recent blog posting.  I'd written about how there are two stages to Infertility, and infertile women are in one or the other of them.  The first stage is to be infertile and be longing for a baby.  The second stage is when you get the family you want (through pregnancy or otherwise) but never stop feeling the pain for the friends you "left behind" in the first stage.  There was more, of course, and maybe some of it was ambiguous writing, but I didn't mean to hurt anybody, certainly. But the comments I got were biting.  They said that I had been horribly insensitive to think of myself as still infertile.  I didn't hurt any more, and I had been delivered from that terrible hell.  How could I say that I was still in the same boat? In my heightened emotional state that day, I immediately took down the post and sobbed sobbed sobbed sobbed sobbed.  I hated to think that I'd hurt anyone's feelings, especially my sisters in the still-TTC camp.  I posted an apology and cried the rest of the night. That's when I turned my mood on here to "bad." Eventually I got enough encouragement about it that I stopped feeling terrible.  My husband, who is my greatest fan, found a way to find my old post in the cached storage on the internet, so he "un-erased" it.  He said it should go in my book some day.   I'm over the incident, and maybe I'm too sensitive to other people's opinions to have a public blog.  The purpose of the blog was to tell people what I'm going through.  When my sadness turned to joy, and my TTC turned to pregnancy, my experience didn't stop.  But I did become one of those people that used to hurt me, just by existing.  And the things that I"m going through in my pregnancy are the things that might be considered complaint-worthy.  It doesn't mean that I don't love being pregnant.  And I don't want to be perceived as complaining -- or gloating, for that fact.  It's a difficult line, writing about one's experience while trying to preserve the feelings of lots of people whose own experiences are very different. I came back to the once-infertile-always-infertile thought the other day when I watched "Juno," the movie about the teenager who gets pregnant on accident and gives the baby up for adoption.  I had been cautioned against watching it while I was still TTC, and for that I'm very thankful.  With two healthy babies in my tum-tum, we settled down to watch it Friday night. And I cried and cried.  While I knew that the movie was about the unwanted pregnancy, I didn't realize that it was also about the relationship with the adoptive parents.  You know who that means?  An infertile couple.  Jennifer Garner plays the adoptive mother, and in every one of her expressions -- especially after the young girl's line like "you're lucky you don't have to be the one going through the pregnancy" -- I could feel all the pain come back and smack me over the head like a frying pan.  I felt like I was on fire.  I tried to keep telling myself, "Jennifer Garner is an actress and we know from the tabloids that she had a baby only recently."  But the yearning, fear, hope in her eyes was just... Well, I don't know that someone who hasn't had a hard time conceiving would have gotten it.  It was subtle acting, but yeah, it burned. As I sobbed into James, he said, "Well, at least we made it farther into this than we did into Ratatouille."  That's true: I'd had to stop watching Ratatouille in the very beginning when the little protagonist rat and his family were running away from the cook, and he was getting separated from the rest of his family members.  But this time I told James I wanted to see the rest of the movie, even if I did cry.  I thought I could do it.  And I did.  And when I cried at the end, it was happy tears. So how did I interpret all that?  First that I was right about infertility being a lifelong condition: that sensitivity would never, ever leave my sould.  And second, I was wrong about it at the same time.  I realized that it's been months since I could feel my soul burn like that.  I haven't felt that kind of pain for a long time.  It feels really, really good to be free. And so now is the time when I tell you the happy stuff.  James confessed that he was initially sad about having two girls (see, feelings like this are really hard to advertise when you're trying to preserve the feelings of people who haven't gotten pregnant yet?).  But he said then he thought, "Who is my favorite person in the world?"  Kay.  "Who is the smartest person I know?"  Kay.  "Who is the coolest person I know?"  Kay.  "Whom do I most want to spend time with?"  Kay.  And so he concluded that 1) girls could become your favorite people, and 2) two little Kays running around would make him incredibly happy. Ugh.  What a sweet man. I was sad for a day or two.  I missed the little boy I'd imagined, whose name we'd picked out.  I tried to imagine what the girls' lives would be like, what their relationship would be to each other.  I realized that expecting my children to live lives parallel to my own childhood with my brother was a bit unrealistic anyway.  And this sister thing -- how many decorative plaques and magnets have I seen that say, "Sisters are friends forever" and stuff like that.  It seems like it might be a good thing.   And I got used to it.  And now we think about our girls, our daughters. I made one baby quilt and will be making another one soon.  Can you imagine: finally I get to make a baby item for myself?  Unbelievable.  I made it with great, great care. I mentioned we went to Boston.  We went to see our godsons, who are 1 and 3.  James played with them non-stop.  I have never seen such parenting zeal as I saw in him.  He's so in love.  I thought, "if we don't have children beyond 'the girls,' at least James will have these two boys forever and ever."  And since he's their Godfather, he can have a special relationship with them them that might otherwise be creepy! And that's about all I have to say today.  We are all doing well.  I bought a body-pillow, which has brought even more joy to my napping.  So maybe I'll go do that now. Thanks for all your good thoughts, and to all my friends who are still TTC, I am thinking of you!  You know that.