The first crochet project I ever did took me a full YEAR to finish. I had started a layette when we decided to go off The Pill. The layette is beautiful, but it has become something of a prayer shawl, reminding me of a lot of pain and hours spent bargaining with God. I learned to read the pattern as I read it, and undid as many stitches as I completed. I would pick it up when I needed something to do other than obsess over my basal body temperature chart, and I would put it away when I got too depressed to look at anything baby related. I finally finished it and put it away. That layette was more for me than for a Someday baby.

This baby, the one that is here with me, has a name and a heartbeat full of hope and promise. This baby is real, and wakes up in the middle of the night when I have to go to the bathroom. I felt that this baby deserved a few fresh stitches. Stitches untouched by angst and depression. I picked up the easiest sweater pattern and chunkiest yarn I could find, since I don’t have all year to make another layette. This sweater took me a week to finish. I even made the buttons out of Shrinky Dink paper. How’s that for nesting?

That Guy I Married is getting the nesting bug too. This week I looked up the dimensions of the high-chair we bought, then measured the kitchen, the kitchen table, the microwave stand, the trash can and the dog food storage container. I couldn’t figure out how to make it all fit in the space meant for a kitchen table. That Guy decided “Oh, that’s easy” and went about measuring and redrawing. He ended up opening the box and setting up the high chair. Everything just barely kinda sorta fits. But that’s the way we like it.

Today I’m babysitting for the first time in several years. My cousin’s baby is sleeping beside me, while she runs out for a hair cut. He refused his bottle, and fell asleep with his pacifier. I’m sure he’ll wake up starving, and ready to tell me all about it later.

I babysat a lot as a teenager. I loved to play House with a baby on my hip. It didn’t matter if I was washing dishes or playing tag with two giggling red-heads; I felt like me when I was swapping that baby from hip to hip.

With fewer babies around to watch these days, reading mommyblogs has become a way for me to play House. I peek in, to catch a chapter in the lives of characters across the country. Milestones, trials, and stories in the lives of Leta, Kaitlyn, Fatty Matty, and The Poo. A new chapter delivered to my Feed Reader every day. I read about trials and tantrums of other kids, and I get to daydream a little about my own child’s story, whatever it might be.

We picked out names for our children, while we were engaged. We picked names in much the same way that we picked out bedroom furniture and Christmas traditions. I pointed to the one I liked, and he bought it; I asked him to suggest one, and it became ours. But calling the baby by its name doesn’t make it feel more real. It’s still just the name of a character in a novel that I haven’t gotten to read yet.

This weekend, my sister-in-law sent me a baby book. A baby book for the stories of our baby. I opened the book to slip the ultrasound pictures in, just for safekeeping. Our ultrasound pictures of our child. I flipped through the pastel pages and looked at the blanks;

Mommy was in labor for:_______________
What you wore to your baby dedication:__________
Favorite lullaby:______________
Baby’s nickname:_____________

There are pages marked for Baby’s Handprints, and a photo of Baby’s favorite toy. Our baby’s handprints, our baby’s favorite toy. Somehow, seeing those blanks in a book is so much different than an ethereal and premature domain name, with ramblings about ill-fitting maternity clothes and heartburn. A place for my child, a place for my child’s story. A child who’s kicks I am no longer imagining.

I’ve been so afraid to let myself expect this child. Too afraid to look forward and get my hopes up. Always waiting, during this 40 week wait, to wake up and find that the other shoe has dropped. Yesterday, after looking at the baby book, I looked down at my navel for the first time and told my little duck “I love you.” For the first time, I didn’t feel ashamed of dreaming, and I didn’t feel silly talking to a child who isn’t there.

I went underground last year because I didn’t want to publicly share my/our struggle with infertility.
I didn’t want to join that group.
I didn’t want to be that woman.
I didn’t want to admit that I was consumed by that pain.

There are hundreds of infertility blogs out there. Women who have been hoping, trying, struggling for years to get pregnant. I spent a lot of time reading those blogs, searching, trying to find a way to cope and understand. But I did not want to be one of those women. Becoming one of them felt like accepting defeat. But I read them. I read them for months and months.

The Internet does not want to help you get pregnant. The Internet wants to sell you useless saliva ferning microscopes and $150 fertility monitors (talismans). I joined message boards, downloaded fertility software, temped, charted, told my husband when it was time to try. I read, I researched. I learned, and then I got angry.

I have never paid any attention to my menstrual cycles. I never needed to. My periods are rarely last longer than a day-and-a-half. I had a vague sense that I didn’t have a 28 day cycle like everyone tells me I do. I never needed to track, because, well, I have never had any embarrassing accidents.

Girlfriends in high school would ask me: “How can you go swimming all month long.” I swam five days a week for four years. I only get horrible PMS maybe twice a year. One extra-skinny tampon every month or so really wasn’t a big deal.

Wasn’t a big deal, until we had a good solid marriage, a little money in the bank and a spare bedroom with room for a nursery. I have PCOS. For you non-infertile types, that means I have eggs in my ovaries, but they don’t exit the ovaries every 28 days like all the textbooks say that they do. My 1.5 day “periods,” they would be Anovulatory Cycles.

I didn’t figure this out until after we had been “trying” for six months. Go read this book, Taking Charge of Your Fertility. Even if you don’t want to get pregnant, you deserve to have this information. Read every page. You are an intelligent woman with the right to know what is going on inside your own body. Seriously, did you buy it yet? Go buy it. I’ll wait.

I read the book, got angry at every female relative, doctor, nurse, and Sex Ed teacher I’ve ever had. Elementary school sex ed in the 80’s, Sponsored by Tampax, was nothing more than an awkward video of a woman standing at a card table in the produce isle of a super market; with a pair of panties and an adhesive panty liner. Do you prefer tampons or maxis?

A few years back, I took an upper division college biology course on Human Sexuality. We had a 16″x20″ textbook with full-page, full-color pictures of uncensored nether-regions. We learned the scientific name for every anatomical part that you never wanted to know the name of. We watched dozens of videos of the physiological aspects of orgasms, as studied in a laboratory setting. We watched the full-length college-biology version of how conception happens. How conception happens when everything works just like it says it works in the text books.

No one, not one person, ever spent five minutes saying “and here are the five most common causes of infertility, just for your information.” Not five minutes. When I put that book down, I was so angry. I got angry, and then I went online and ordered a vaginal speculum. My present to you is that I will put up with the google hits for vaginal speculum, just so that it occurs to you to go get educated and find out how your own body works.

Two months after that package came in the mail, I was pregnant. I love Amazon Prime.

There are many causes of infertility. Many women struggle against impossible odds with very serious fertility problems. I only had to join that crowd for less than a year.
I have a less-serious fertility problem, I have irregular, anovulatory cycles, and I ovulate maybe twice a year, but I can still get pregnant. But the waiting, and the not knowing, it really sucks. PCOS may effect as many as one-in-ten women. It might be you. Go read the book, and then go ask your doctor intelligent questions.

Good luck!

Hello! My name is Elizabeth, I used to write for Dink(y).
Used to, until we started struggling with infertility. I didn’t want to talk about infertility on my blog because I didn’t want the ass-vice. As it turns out, NOONE knows the right thing to say to a young married couple who should have had a kid by now.

Eventually, I just stopped writing. I couldn’t blog about an exciting night of going out for Chinese food for dinner… when the real issue of the year was “dang it, what is WRONG with my body?”

My ten-year high school reunion was hard for me. It felt like everyone else in my class (who wanted them) had a couple of adorable kids.

In January, I finally did get pregnant with our first. But, after waiting so long, it was so hard to be happy without being scared. Just scared. Don’t jinx it! It’s now the end of May. Hello Internets: I’m pregnant. Insert fanfare, excitement, and a jpeg of a stick with two lines on it. As it turns out, I have PCOS, and have probably had it since puberty. Every single person in my family/health/medical/educational life thought that it was someone else’s job to explain the birds and the bees to me. Ugh. It’s infuriating. So much wasted time and heartache could have been avoided with some basic information.

I have still been following dozens of blogs (I pink-puffy-heart Google Reader). I have been debating how to go back online and start over. I couldn’t find the words then, and I struggle with the words now. A couple of days ago, Dana posted something that was a swift kick in my big beautiful booty. What she posted really resonated with me. She found the words I couldn’t say out loud. I’m sorry that I finally got to the other side, and she has not… yet ;-).

Blogging forces us to stick our bare underbellies out there for the whole world to see. Its scary, and there are repercussions, but we all need this community. We blog to know that we are not alone. Whether you’re an IF blogger or not, thank you for being open, and being honest with the world.

Go visit Dana and give her some love. Without the ass-vice, please.