I'm Special

Me and H.P. had a nice long talk last night. That would be my higher power. I confessed that this was now getting a little harder and to send me a sign, any sign of what was going on.

When we finished talking, I got up to go to the bathroom and had started bleeding. Right through the progesterone.

So, the sign was to go ahead and sleep in rather than get my ass up too damn early on a cold morning and take a blood test at the big fancy clinic? I slept in.

This morning I had to go to the drugstore anyway, so I went ahead and picked up an HPT, just to waste money.

The RE and I have had our little BFN talk and this is the part where I'm special: I'm going back to Clomid. Yes, it seems I'm the only woman to ever try IVF and go back to Clomid (ok, maybe not the only one, but you find me another one. My acupuncturist has never heard of such a thing either). I'm telling you, I was the Clomid poster child and it got me pregnant once. Remember when I told you I was having a massage in Bali and I heard a voice telling me to do another round of Clomid? Yeah. Listen to your inner voice kids, even the crazy voices usually have a message.

I don't know about you but dancing with wild abandon in my living room always makes me feel better no matter what. That, and cooking. So, I've made a delicious soup and in between stirring, danced like my life depended on it--hair flinging all around and I think at one point some spit even flew out of my mouth.
I leave you with the video for L.e Ti.gre so you can see if it works for you and the soup recipe which is perfect for these cool days.

Parsley Potato Soup

Delicious, nutritious, and freezes well.
Ingredients:
4 cups potatoes, peeled and cubed
4 slices bacon
1 large onion, chopped
½ cup chopped celery
¼ cup fresh chopped parsley or 1/3 cup dry parsley
4 cups chicken stock
2 cups milk or half and half
3 tablespoons cornstarch
Salt and pepper to taste
½ teaspoon nutmeg
Fresh parsley for garnish

Pour chicken stock into saucepan and heat on medium. Meanwhile fry bacon until crisp. Remove from pan and crumble into warmed stock. Saute onion and celery in the bacon fat until golden then add to saucepan along with potatoes and parsley. Bring to a boil and cover and simmer until tender. Stir in the milk and continue cooking until hot but do not allow it to boil. Mix cornstarch in a small cup with 2 tablespoons of water. Add this to the soup continuing to cook and stir until thickened. Add the nutmeg and add salt and pepper to taste. Enjoy!

I Was Right

It's 100% negative. BFN.

I'm doing all the poses in my yoga class tonight.

On to the next round...whatever that is.

Did I mention that as I walked to the clinic the morning of the IUI I almost didn't go because I knew this cycle was a bust? I knew the timing was wrong. I knew.
And this morning I almost just went across the street and got an HPT because I knew.
When I did the progesterone this morning, I thought, "what a freakin' waste". I knew.

Still Spotting

And freaking out.  It's not AF, but it's not normal.  It comes and it goes now for almost 4 days.

I broke down this morning and took a test...BFN...but with a possible faint second line.

We went to brunch and in the bathroom I was SURE I had started my period, then came home and nothing!

This is maddening!!!!

I'm playing Dr. Google and while there's loads of information, it's all different.

My nurse called me back yesterday and encouraged me to try to wait until at least Monday if not Tuesday to test (which of course I failed to wait!).

K is really doing her best to keep my spirits up, be supportive, keep me from buying a pregnancy test and talking to me about our future vacation plans--that always takes my mind off of bad things!

Thinking of Bali, not going to test, thinking of Bali, not going to test....

Going on a long, long walk now....goodbye internets.

Misery Didn't Get Me

I’ve been M.l.A. I’m sorry.

Right after getting my BFN, I had to go out of town to visit my family in Missouri which I will refer to as Misery for reasons that should become obvious.

I haven’t been there in almost three years, but K and I went to be with my mom for an early Mother’s Day weekend.
While labeling myself Zen is quite a stretch, I’m not a terribly anxious person. All of that changes when I am preparing for a family visit when I become nervous and twitchy and generally difficult to deal with.
My family is a small, simple, uneducated, born-again Southern Baptist clan. We don’t have much to say to each other.

There are small towns with vibrant energy and there are small towns with their souls gouged out and my hometown is the latter.
If you’ve never been to this part of the Misery Midwest, let me tell you that it is a brain-drained, economically depressed area. There used to be factories and chicken plants and dairies where young men with HS degrees would get a job and go about their lives, but with most things, the factories have largely closed and the plants now hire cheap labor.

Growing up, three kids to a divorced mom with a high school education, we were very poor. When I was five and my aunt was dying in a hospital from breast cancer, my mom fell down the stairs and never got back up. They took her away and for a year I lived with my grandfather while my mother lay in a hospital bed paralyzed from the neck down. She didn’t even have her own mother there with her most of the time because my grandmother was taking care of her other daughter in a city 4 hours away.
My father wouldn’t take all of us, so we were split amongst family members and I spent my first year of school playing by myself in my grandparent’s basement.

The year I turned six, my mother recovered from the rare and mysterious syndrome and came home again but our family would never fully recover.
That same year I was raped by a family friend repeatedly. I told my mother and while she made sure I never had to be around him again, she never did anything about it. She neither confronted him nor went to the authorities.

My mom did without many things so we never had to go on welfare or be those kids who had to go to the front of the lunch line. She knew what that would be like for us and wanted to save us this humiliation. Nevertheless, everyone in this small town of 5,000 people knew we were poor. I had one pair of shoes for the entire school year in third grade and I remember other kid’s parents wouldn’t let them spend the night with me because my mom was divorced and we lived in an apartment. I hated her for this.
We used to roam the rural roads at dusk collecting cans and my mom made it a game and we never knew it was because she was selling the cans for money.

In the 4^th grade my mom started dating her future alcoholic husband and he started sexually, physically and mentally abusing me.
I knew the last time this happened, I had told my mom and she had protected me. But this time, I told my mom, I told her best friend and I even told my grandmother. They called me a liar and two years later she married him anyway.

When I was 14 and had devised many ways to kill myself, she left him after he chased her down the hallway with a baseball bat, pausing long enough in my doorway to ask me, “little bitch” if I wanted some of this, too.
I was sent away after that to live with relatives while my mother settled in a new town.

My high school years were a blur of alcohol and depression. I know I had good times because the signatures are in my yearbook, but I don’t really remember much.
By this point, I had become an expert at blocking things out--my mind like Swiss cheese with great gaping holes.
My senior year in high school, my mom, who was never really around, moved in with her soon-to-be third husband, leaving me on my own, working two jobs and trying to finish high school.

That year I met a rich Japanese college student who fell in love with me and wanted to marry me and take me back with him. When I told my mother he beat me she said, “but he loves you and he has money, marry him.”

Let me make this clear: I had no role models. Ever. I basically raised myself. There’s no teacher in this story who came along and made a difference or relative who took me in. I should have been dead or a drug addict or a teen pregnancy statistic or a domestic violence abuse victim or any number of things other than what I became.

My brother’s were not so lucky. But somewhere from all of the neglect and abuse came a fire and a fury in me to not only survive but to fight.

So when it’s time for Mother’s Day, it’s hard to find that special card because what ever I find, I never really mean it.

She’s come a long way my mom, but the best thing she could’ve ever said to me was when I asked her how she felt about me trying to get pregnant. Looking me in the eye last week she bravely declared, “I know you’ll make a better mother than I ever was. I made so many mistakes and I can’t take them back and I’m sorry.”
That was a great Mother’s Day present.

I love her, she’s my mother. But I don’t like her very well which makes going home very painful.

All I want to be is a good mother, to stop this cycle of poverty and abuse and show that I can raise a child the way I deserved to be raised.

BFN #2--Day 1 Cycle #3

So, it's a Big Fat Negative. I didn't even need to take a test this morning as AF arrived, just as predicted.
Damn.
But you know, I knew it. The universe said it to me loud and clear on April 20 in my bedroom. We were having the apartment painted on April 22 (had the appointment booked since January and couldn't really change it...) and had to clear everything out, up and off into the middle of the rooms and cover it all with plastic.
It's like moving without moving and it's Horrible. As we were deconstructing the bedroom, I realized with horror that I had TOO MUCH SHIT.

Now anyone who knows me will laugh right now because you will be thinking "um, you just realized that?!" No, I didn't 'just' realize it, but it hit me with a force since I need to make room for baby.
It's not that I'm a pack-rat, maybe just a pack-gerbil, you know...something on a smaller scale. I like collecting things and I like saving things. Looking at things that I've saved and collected brings me peace and happiness and I have always hoped that someday I would have children who would spend rainy days looking at all of mom's old things and enjoying them immensely.
So there are things I just cannot get rid of.

Plus, I've moved around so much that this is my permanence. Since I was born I can count 28 moves. I have no childhood home and my home travels with me. So all these things that I collect are a part of me and most of them I just can't bear to part with.

Enter the Container Store. If I can't get rid of it, I have to find a better way to contain it! What the paint project became was an entire apartment renovation project and at one point I heard the universe scream at me to get all this crap done before adding something else--like a baby--to the mix. Call me crazy, but that's when I knew I wasn't pregnant this month. So, we went ahead and stained the furniture.

From the very beginning, way back in the cold, dark month of January, I had the feeling that May would be the month. We shall see...

Tonight I'm going to a birthday party for one of my best friends and I think I'll have a glass of champagne and celebrate! Yes, it's bad news for me...but someone got pregnant today and good things are happening all over. I have a lot to be thankful for and I'm going to keep focusing on that.