On coping.

My thoughts and feelings are tangled and twisted at the moment and maybe writing it out will offer catharsis and well as clarity.  Surprisingly, I'm actually doing ok about 80% of the time. Surrounded by my family, with its collection of 2 dogs and one cat, I'm coping far better than I ever would have had I stayed in San Diego.

But, there still is that 20%.  There are short horrible stretches when you feel like you are drowning and cannot figure out how to stay afloat. Last night, I was jet lagged and could sleep for two hours at a time. Each time when I woke up, I was filled with the most negative, bleak feelings and I started crying, and I ended up waking up my mom. She asked me this, why on earth am I hell bent on torturing myself? She told me I HAD to figure out a way to make this stop. Tough love, but she is absolutely right.  When you are a person struggling with infertility, failure is like corrosive acid on your psyche. Fear is a demon and we welcome it in, we wallow in  it and our pain, and to what end? Its not going to give us the ending we want and it achieves nothing. 

So whatever happens, I have to find a way to make peace.  If I have to wait 5 years or 10 to get that child I want, by whatever route, I have to find a mental balance, a state of tranquility in that period. I have to find a way to go back to the happy and even keeled person I normally am and stop wallowing like a pig in self pity. Oh I lost 2 babies. Oh I have to go back to my sucky real life in a month, compounded by a  move to a bitterly cold city (biggest gripe, ha) when I know no one  Oh I don't know why, despite being pretty good at getting pregnant., something strong and nasty and unidentifiable is killing my babies. Yeah these things suck, but turning into a basket case in response serves no purpose. I'm young, healthy, have options, and there is still plenty in life that offers joy, I just have to turn myself to those things while life makes me wait, for however long, to have that baby. Most importantly, I also have to make peace with the remote possibility that the child I will eventually have might not be related to me by blood.

How do I do this? Giving myself this pep talk really helps. For the first time in my life, I'm going to see a shrink. I don't know what else will do it,  but I have to figure it out, and nobody can tell me how.  Its a really important life lesson and my managing to learn it would be the silver lining in this process.

Infertility is a bitch and I'm not going to let it slap me around.