clair072

Last Friday I celebrated my 3rd Survivor Anniversary. On my 1st Survivor Anniversary I'm pretty sure I spent the day in bed crying. I honestly don't remember, but I'm pretty sure it was spent doing something like that. Then I wrote about my 2nd anniversary  last year.   And now I've lived through my 3rd anniversary.   But let's take it back to three years ago... On March 23, 2015 the nurse called to tell me that my latest round of IVF did not result in pregnancy. I was so exhausted and so depleted that I didn't even have any tears left to cry. I sat there numb and knew it was over. I could not go on "living" like I was. I put "living" in quotation marks because I wasn't really living. I was alive. My heart was pumping and I was breathing, but... That's about it. Like I've written before, I was walking death. A shell of my former self. I looked back at the last three years of my life and all of the time, money, and emotions I had p...

I am so chatty (bloggy?) this week. I guess I'm just encountering a lot of material... Last night I had a vivid dream. Nightmare. Is there a word for something in between a dream and a nightmare? Oh, that might be a good title for a novel or an album: In Between a Dream and a Nightmare. That's actually kind of how I feel right now. I am in between my new life that I am creating (a dream) and the living hell that was infertility while trying to conceive (my nightmare). Anyway, I digress... So last night I had a very vivid dream/nightmare. I was a mother. Apparently I had adopted a baby named Olivia. I'm not sure where that name came from because it was never on my baby name list, but it's a very nice name nonetheless. She was cute and tiny and babbled a lot. She had bright eyes and a big smile. She loved me and I loved her. I held her in my arms and she fell asleep on my chest. She even had a dirty diaper that I was not quite sure how to change but I managed. It was all ...

I was having lunch with a friend yesterday. We worked together, oh wow, fifteen years ago (time freakin' flies) and always stayed in touch. She knows my story. She also has two boys of her own that I have watched grow from young elementary school kids to young men in their early twenties. We were talking about my upcoming move, which has been a plan almost three years in the making. She is sad I'm moving but understands why. I had a different life planned for here. Now I'm going to live a different life somewhere else, somewhere that offers me more of what I'm looking for. My current place is a great place to raise children, but now I'm looking for a place that offers more things that appeal to me. There are various groups throughout the world, though not nearly enough, designated for women without children. I haven't found one where I currently live, but I did find one where I plan to move. I was excitedly telling my friend about it, saying I can meet these wom...

I don't talk about infertility very often with other people, especially not with people that have kids. Yesterday I made an exception. I was hanging out with a friend and one of her friends. I had met her a couple of times before and really enjoyed her company. I felt fine saying things around her, so I spoke freely without guarding what I said. What I mean is infertility completely changed my life and I wouldn't be back in school nor would I be moving if life had gone as I had hoped. But I'm so used to censoring myself around others that I do it without conscious thought. However, when I feel like I'm around "safe" people, I feel like I can speak honestly and openly without editing my experiences. This woman is in an interesting spot. Her relationship of 20 years is rocky. Her son is almost finished with his 10th grade year of high school. She shared with us that she spent most of the last two decades being a wife and a mom. Now she wasn't sure her marria...

Failure is never fun. It never feels good. Especially when you've put your blood, sweat, and tears into your endeavors and have given it your all. I almost failed high school chemistry. I just didn't understand the subject. And my teacher didn't know more than one way to explain the concepts. I kept doing my homework and studying for the tests, not understanding anything. To this day, I have no idea how I passed. My first semester in college I had to take chemistry as part of the requirements for my biology major. I was really, really dreading it. But on the first day of class the professor explained his "No Fail" contract. If you went to every class and every review session, turned in every homework assignment on time, and kept a daily journal about what you did and didn't understand from lecture and turned it in at the end of the semester, you were guaranteed at least a D. I was relieved! It was actually going to be impossible for me to fail the course!! So,...

I woke up Tuesday morning and as I got ready to go to school I thought, "I wonder how I will be insulted today?" Sad, isn't it? That I've just come to expect it now... My question was answered within the first hour of class. We were discussing a research article and a classmate made the observation that the condition being studied was more prevalent in mothers 30 years old and older. The classmate shared, "This makes me nervous because I am getting close to 30." So regardless of what comments, if any, followed my classmate's comment, the fact is she just shared a very personal (and some would even say very private) worry with our class. And what does the professor do? She blasts all of us, effectively shutting everyone down. I saw it happen before my very eyes. Not only that one classmate, but at least a quarter of the class immediately stopped participating in discussion. And then the professor had the gall to tell us that we were "awfully quiet th...