Achieving Conceiving

The Fiber of My Being

2009-09-11T11:30:00.000-07:00

Long, long ago, in March of '08, I started this blog, and it has been very good to me. My goals included getting myself through the hell of infertility, and letting my friends and loved ones know what the journey was about. And I've done all of those things.

When I was still in the trenches, I would follow link after link to great-sounding blogs written by infertile gals like me, only to find that they had beat the affliction and had children. Their blogs may have offered hope that it could happen for all of us, but they also contributed to my feeling of isolation. If even infertile people could have children, why wasn't it happening for me? As my aunt Joneil would say, it was a bummer.

A few months ago my dad mentioned that it might be time to move on from Achieving Conceiving. After all, I'd achieved and conceived. Not to mention carried (almost) to term, birthed twin babies, and survived until they started sleeping through the night.

So although I usually like to do the opposite of what Dad suggests, this time I'm taking the advice. I'm moving back to where I started: my art blog at Fiber of Her Being. It isn't that I'm leaving my friends in the infertile community behind. To the contrary, it's because I love them so much that I don't want to muddy this blog space. What I have to say simply doesn't fit an infertility blog any more. I don't want my joys to trivialize the sorrows of people who still need to write and read about the struggle.

As I start the re-design of my personal and professional existence, I will be combining these spaces in real life and on (computer) paper. It's a matter of formally bringing my art and family together, since they've never really been separate. It's time.

And if Amanda and Elisa's gorgeous little faces help sell quilts, well, I'm not above that. Who said exploitation was a bad thing?

I love you all -- yes, all of you -- and I'll see you over at FiberOfHerBeing.blogspot.com.

Thursday Afternoon

2009-09-10T19:44:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday the girls and I had a nice time hanging out on the living room floor, like we do every day. Here's a slideshow that features not just photos, but also an honest-to-goodness video!

Fur Allure, and a Thing for String

2009-09-10T07:21:00.000-07:00

The babies love the cat. When Sarah walks into the room, it is like Marilyn Monroe has just entered the scene. Everything stops so they can watch her. They look at her intently, hoping to catch her gaze. They never do. They have started reaching out for her. Sometimes they are lucky enough to have her walk close to them, so their little fingertips can graze her fur. It is heaven. Someday they hope she will speak to them. Someday.

In the meantime, Sarah is not as aloof as she could be. She is interested in the babies. Occasionally she will smell their heads -- preferably when they don't know it's happening. The 5:00 a.m. feeding usually finds me sitting on the floor between the babies in their boppy pillows, holding a bottle in each mouth. Sarah often comes in and sits on my lap there. She wants me to pet her, but I'm short the hands to do it. So if one of the girls reaches her little fingers into Sarah's fur, Sarah chooses not to realize it's not me.

One day when Elisa got very, very lucky, Sarah's tail fell on her neck. Elisa took it in her hands, like a banana, and put the tip in her mouth. She sucked it until it looked like the end of a paint brush that has been sitting in a jar of water. I didn't bother to stop the action because 1) I didn't have enough hands, and 2) it was inevitable.

Meanwhile, Sarah loves one thing more than all others. String. She has been known to swallow thread that's still threaded through my sewing machine, and run upstairs pulling the thread behind her, as it's being unwound from the spool in the sewing room. We have a hula girl lamp that used to have a grass skirt on it. Sarah ate it. We found puddles of grass-skirt throw-up around the house and the remnants of the skirt on the floor. (When a delivery man came to the house and saw the lamp, and I explained what happened, he said, "Good cat." Sadie, our lamp hula girl, was only wearing a painted-on thong under the skirt).

So when Leigh, my delightful cousin with two growing girls, sent us a new box of hand-me-downs, we were thrilled to find a pink plastic hula skirt among the clothes. And Sarah was delighted as well.

Now the girls and Sarah have one thing in common: they love this skirt to pieces. There is nothing more fun to entwine one's fingers in, or chew out the side of one's mouth in hopes that a strand will fall off. The texture is delicious to little girls, and the flavor is delicious to cats who also enjoy the taste of plastic bags.

Now when Elisa or Amanda is sad, I hand her the skirt to rub her face in. Perhaps they know it is covered with cat spit. Perhaps that just makes it all the better.

To see a video of our beautiful girl-girl-cat dynamic, click HERE.

A Slice of Morning

2009-08-28T06:22:00.001-07:00

This was taken a few minutes ago. Mornings are actually kind-of nice.

Body Language

2009-08-19T08:46:00.000-07:00

I had a dream recently where someone told me that if you didn't speak the language in a country, you could not communicate with the people there at all. To that, in the dream and in real life, I say, "HA!" I think that travels across the tongues pretty well. HA!

I love languages. That is not to be disputed. This morning when I was talking to Amanda about a butterfly toy, I said the word "butterfly" in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian before I got stumped on French. The other Italian words that the girls will learn from me are precious few, but at least we do like to keep up a good banter in Spanish so they'll grow up bilingual. At the very least. As Napoleon Dynamite would say, "Gah!" We think language is THAT important.

Once, when I was a single girl, I found myself sitting at a table of Bulgarians. Some spoke English and those were the ones that I spoke to. Dmitri Dmitrov was one of them. He was like a Saturday Night Live character in real life, an Eastern European who had learned English -- and recited it accordingly -- from CNN news anchors. Imagine experiencing life with a nightly news inflection. Yeah. Anyway, I could talk to the would-be news anchor. But the people at the table that I couldn't speak with almost didn't exist. They were props to be smiled at and turned away from.

And then one of them said, "Habla espanol?" My head perked up, my eyes opened wide, and I saw a new person at the table. He had been there before as a languageless lump. And now he was a whole new interlocutor with opinions and experiences and personality. The Communist connection had brought his Eastern Bloc parents to Cuba in the 1960s, and they had all learned Spanish there. Someone -- maybe it was Dmitri Dmitrov -- pointed out later that I seemed to like speaking Spanish better than speaking English. Maybe it was that I liked talking to the Spanish speaker better than I like Dmitri Dmitrov. No offense, Dmitri Dmitrov.

So regardless of who you're talking to, or writing to, language allows you to bring details and stories of other times into the conversation. It lets you refer to things that aren't right there in front of you. But talk-language is by no means the only language. A "tongue" may be a set of words and structures, but it is also just one of the many body parts.

One time I was in Serbia, speaking about 10 words of Serbian, and I was assured that half of all Serbians speak English. I got on the bus to go downtown, missed my stop, and found that none of that half of the Serbian population was on the bus. "Ruski?" they asked me hopefully? Nope, I didn't speak Russian. "Portugues?" I offered bleakly, as a last resort. Of course nobody spoke Portuguese in Belgrade.

But you know what? Once I made it clear that I was looking for downtown, and I feared we had passed it -- because we were leaving civilization -- the whole bus got involved in helping get me back. Practically a group pantomime arose about getting off the bus and crossing the road to the other bus stop. Someone wrote down the numbers of the busses that would take me where I wanted to go, and wrote the word for "downtown" (whatever it was) using the Cyrillic alphabet for the next bus driver. They collectively wished me luck, I think, and I ended up perfectly fine. And richer for the detour.

This all comes to mind because, as you might have guessed, the girls don't use a lot of language. They are seven months and several days old, and despite a dirth of words, we know them EXTREMELY well. Their personalities stand out a mile -- so far that I doubt I would have missed them from any bus. Their tongues, the body parts, are active as hell. There is never a time that they aren't using them to eat, taste, explore, and lubricate anything within licking distance. Sometimes when their tongues are not otherwise engaged, Amanda grabs hers with all ten fingers. It may be uncomfortable, but it's clearly worth it to her.

Though their language is unformed, they aren't mutes either. (And don't think of calling them "dumb"). I hear Amanda right now, supposedly in a nap, talking to herself in her crib. It's a mix of noisy inhales and exhales, laughs, and squeals. Elisa went through a growling phase about two months ago. In one gravelly stream she would expell all the air in her lungs like a baby bear. Nothing ferocious, but nothing human either.

I can't imagine what they could possibly have to say that they don't already convey with facial expressions and wiggling. There's fear, frustration, incredulity, amusement, sleepiness, boredom, glee, contentment, ambivalence, and, of course, pooping. We know with 100% certainty when they are happy (usually) and when they aren't (right before naptime or bottles).

Some of my peer moms have taken a sign language for babies class, and I'd love to have been able to go. We have several books that show the signs for household nouns and verbs. My friend Katie told me that, in teaching the babies to sign, you start with baby-side things that they are interested in. That could be the fan, light, toy, cat. When you see them engrossed in one of those things, you show them the sign for it. When they get the concept that a sign stands for something else, you can bring in parent-side words, like bottle, diaper change, hungry, and so on. They are slower to adopt the signs for those words because they already have a perfectly fine system for communicating about those concepts: crying. Not to mention their facial repertoire. Still, when they are comfortable with a set of about twelve baby- and parent-side words, they're ready to start learning the signs for everything. And then, get ready, you start to get some specificity. And maybe you can branch out from "hungry" and "annoyed."

From what I hear, they will start talking in a while. They'll start by saying all the cute things that people recount about at the water cooler. "Now that you're a big girl [on your third birthday], what are you going to do?"/"I'm going to drink coffee." ha ha ha ha ha! And then they become teenagers and their body language takes back over and reverts to "hungry" and "annoyed." That's when they exercise their linguistic option of surly silence.

Language acquisition is one of the bazillion aspects that we find so interesting about parenting. Given all the variables that produce so many other variables in forming these new people, I wonder what on earth would happen if we weren't the greatest parents in the world (hypothetically). Here, as always, I'm surprised at how few controls there are for weeding out bad parents. Seems like everyone except my infertility crowd is allowed to have a child, just by, well, you know. Then just anyone gets to shape little brains, become their babies' communication sounding boards, guide the creation of vocabularies and -- by extension -- their thoughts?

Now I'm thinking of the pressures of parenting. If we get it wrong, we've fucked up a life or two. I mean, screwed up. I mean, messed up.

I mean, never mind, Sweetie. Have a cookie and let's see what's on TV.

The Pleasure of Being a Bad Influence

2009-08-17T12:32:00.001-07:00

We call Elisa "Elisa-Lamb." Sometimes I play with that: Elisa-Lambkins, Ellie-kins, Elkins. And I think about Bobby Elkins. The Bad Influence.

Bobby (he calls himself Bob now) Elkins has been a friend of my parents since they all started kindergarten in 1949. He picked up a wife, Donna, along the way. And they all picked up another couple, the Bermans, in college. Now I'm an adult and they're adults, but once upon a time, they were adults and I was a kid.

And that's where the games began.

Around 1978, the Elkinses and Bermans came to town for a visit. Bobby Elkins brought my brother and me fake tatoos and candy cigarettes. Why? Because it was funny to try to teach his friends' kids to be bad-asses. Of course, nothing could make us happier. I think we have pictures of ourselves with the tatoos on our inner forearms (apparently no one gave us any practical guidance as to where people wear tatoos). We tatooed the experience permanently onto our little brains.

In the meantime, David Berman told jokes. They were of his own making, mostly the self-deprecating humor he learned as a Jewish kid in Brooklyn. I laughed and laughed and laughed, my stomach aching, as he said he should come to town more often, as it was good for his ego. I've told him several times now, as he humorlessly points out, that he shaped my sense of humor. His influence followed me to college at Columbia, where I was surrounded by hysterical Jews and Jewish-wannabes. I realized my dream was to have been born Jewish. The best I could do was to go on to marry a Catholic, which I have been told is just as good. I do love my Catholic boy dearly, but he knows it's not quite the same.

When I think about the influences my parents' friends have had on me, I think about the influence my friends are having on my babies. My friends Eric and Karen handed us four baby books when they first came to see our offspring. The books were entitled Baby fix my car, Baby do my banking, Baby make me breakfast, and Baby mix me a drink. They're published by McSweeney's, an irreverent artsy publication, and epitomize the loving corruption my friends hope to pass along to the next generation.

But it's not just my friends, and it's not just humor that have been leading the girls astray. Their grandmother Tish is a perfect grandmother except for her sucky sleep-enforcement. "She wasn't sleepy," Tish will say to explain the only-five-minute nap. Or, "She doesn't want to go to bed. She should stay with us in the kitchen for another few hours instead." I roll my eyes.

I can't pretend that external forces are the only source of spoilage. I myself am swayed by my parents' attitudes and the equal and opposite reactions they inspire in me. At our twins play group last week, a mom brought her boy-girl twins, decked out in gender-appropriate gear. Ella was wearing a wide headband covered with cloth flowers, as if she were Esther Williams in a dry pool. First I thought, "I wonder why she needs to assert Ella's femininity so strongly in only the seventh month of her life." And then I thought, "Screw that. Who doesn't love flowers on one's head!?" So I bought fourteen stretchy headbands on the Internet, to decorate with bows and flowers and any other pink thing that responds to the hot glue gun. It's in direct reaction to my parents' gender-neutral boy-girl twin parenting experiment of the 1970s. Damn straight. Bring on the Barbies.

So here is my summary. The babies are tabulae rasae, and we scratch and dent them every time we come into contact with them. The "bad influences" I have listed above? They're really influences of humor, love, whimsy, and personality. Add those to lots of singing, Spanish speaking around the house, appreciation of color in vegetables, and modeling love for our fellow men, and you have the rest of our arsenal.

Mama wants a martini.

Thank you baby (and please pass the pretzels).

Spit-up

2009-08-15T19:09:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I wrote. I think my excuse is that I have infant twins. I spend a lot of time tending to them, and I try to do other things around the house, like sew, wash the clothes, get out of bed, and sometimes eat. Blogging doesn't always fall in the top ten.

But James and I got a babysitter tonight and went out on the town. Specifically, to Fairfax, I think it was. Our friend Jolynn was having her babyshower BBQ and her mom was there. Gloria -- that's the mom's name -- is a self-described 75-year-old old lady and drunk (that's "drunk" the noun). She is James's favorite drinking partner. They flock to each other at parties and share a bottle of whisky or whatever is close at hand. Since we don't see Gloria all that often, I let James go wild and have fun with his little friend. It was the right thing to do today, because after I pried them apart from their goodbye hugs and plopped James in the passenger seat of the car, he told me what they talked about. Me. How great I was. So smart, and such a good writer. Awww. Go on...

"You've got to keep writing on your blog," Gloria had insisted to me before we left, more times than was necessary. I'm not sure she ever read my blog, but she was certainly in favor of the idea, which Jolynn had told her about. "Write about the thing today and the throw-up."

And so here we go.

I made Jolynn some larger than average swaddling blankets for her soon-to-be baby. That's my favorite gift to give expectant parents, because larger blankets are absolutely necessary, and they can't be bought in stores.

I also gave Jolynn two huge diaper boxes full of baby hand-me-downs, industrial-sized post-partum maxi pads, extra burp cloths, and various odds and ends we didn't need any more. Although Jolynn considered them baby presents as well, I considered them crap that someone needed to help me get rid of. And since Jolynn thought she wanted them, she got them. Without ceremony.

As I pulled two big toy arcs -- things the babies could lie under and look at from below -- out of the back seat in front of Jolynn's house, I noticed that one of the toys had spit-up on it. A small pool of dried spit-up. Maybe 1.5 inches in diameter. Slightly textured and of varying thicknesses because what had been spit up upon was a textured piece of plastic. Hunh. Well, it wasn't like it was wet or anything. And if the spit-up is dried on something, we don't really consider the thing dirty. If it were wet, that would be a little gross, though nothing we couldn't handle. And nothing we would necessarily clean up. But dry spit-up? Out of the question.

I brought the stuff in to Jolynn's party. "Here's some more crap you can have. It's got some spit-up on it."

That's what I said. That's what Gloria thought was so funny. "You have to write about the thing and the throw-up," she had said. "And embellish it a little."

So here is the embellishment: a discussion about spit-up.

The girls have been spitting up their whole lives. That's a true statement. When they were born, 7 weeks early, they spit up every time they were laid down horizontal. That's because their esophageal sphincters had not formed all the way, and there was nothing to keep the stuff that went into the stomach from coming right back out. They were like baby bottles without even the nipples on them to rein in the milk.

So up came the milk. Mixed with stomach acid. Our little babies took Zantac to neutralize that acid for several months. It didn't stop the liquid from coming back out their cute little mouths, but it did keep it from burning their little throats.

These days the esophageal sphincter seems to be doing fine, and they only spit up when overfed or squeezed. I should mention that they are always overfed. It's our system. We put in what they will take, and then they self-regulate by handing me back what they don't need. But without hands. See what I'm saying?

Elisa, who is nominally the smaller baby, had worse reflux in the early days. She used to spit up through her mouth and nose simultaneously. It was like getting water up her nose while swimming in a pool of hydrocloric acid. Poor little girl. Now she brings it on herself because she is a compulsive stomach swimmer. When we put her down on her back, she instantly flips onto her belly. She will be crawling any day, but she still needs to fine-tune her moves. What she does now is balance on the fulcrum of her full stomach, and lift her hips/legs and shoulders/head/arms in the air. Then she flails purposefully. Looks like the breast stroke. So in the midst of this 17 pounds of flailing pressure on her abdomen, well, there comes the spit-up. More than you might think necessary. More than you could keep track of once it was dry. More than you would even dream of cleaning up.

Amanda spits out some perfunctory spit-up every now and then to keep us on our toes, and to remind us that we need to take care of her too: she's still a little baby who needs her mama and daddy. First of all we don't believe that for a second. But sure, as long as she keeps the spit-up to a minimum, we'll be fine to go along with that charade. These girls are seven months and one day old, and it's about time to stop babying them.

I looked down at my desk as I was contemplating what to write next. You'll never guess what I saw just to the right of the keyboard: spit-up. A dry spot. Looks kind of like the profile of a fish with a large jaw. Some people interpret cloud shapes. We do spit-up.

My friend Paul told me once that the best baby present was a laminating machine because the word "secretions" best described the first few months of a baby's life. But until they find a way to laminate a wooden desk and toy arc, we're just going to have these nasty little reminders of our cute little babies around.

And that's fine with me. You can't say we didn't ask for it.

In the meantime, our babysitter's husband took some pictures of the girls while we were away. Here they are, to satisfy your curiosity. Reminder: Elisa is blonde with invisible eyebrows, and Amanda is brunette with eyebrows that look like mine.

Pictures from June and July

2009-07-09T19:19:00.001-07:00

These feature Fourth of July festivities, plus visits with cousin Iona, honorary Grandma Marsha, and Brady's family!

Glowing Parents

2009-07-08T19:17:00.000-07:00

My mother recently learned how to download pictures from her camera into the computer. That relevation leads to this post. She sent us a couple very sweet pictures of ourselves in full parenthood.

Conception Achieved: Anniversary

2009-06-10T16:30:00.000-07:00

On June 10, 2008 we conceived our two babies. Actually, they were conceived for us in a petri dish, and there were more than just the two. This wasn't the first batch of embryos to be conceived, either. They were in the third group. These two were the fifth and sixth embryos to get to see the inside of my uterus in the span of a year. What made these two special was that they survived. They stuck around in my body long enough to get bigger, and when they were ready they came out as baby humans.

Last week, Shady Grove Fertility finally got around to my repeated repeated repeated request, and sent me the photo of these two particular embryos.

This is the first picture of Amanda and Elisa.

Amazing. Think of all the genetic information that was inside those tiny cell clusters. We had no idea what they held at the time, and we're only starting to find out. What tiny little bits of infinite mystery and wonder!

To my dear friends who are still in the fight, I think about you all the time. Here is hoping that little clusters of cells like these, wherever they start out and wherever they gestate, float their way into your lives very soon.

Never have things so small been so big. Never have things so nondescript been so beautiful.

Summer Fun

2009-06-08T20:16:00.000-07:00

This slideshow has pictures of the girls hanging out at home with their cousin, Iona, in the "Where's Waldo" role (hint: she's usually under something). We also have some pics from our trip to their Godfather Jeff and Aunt Noemi's wedding in Pennsylvania. No, the margarita is not bigger than Amanda. But that didn't stop me from drinking it.

The Latest Photo Shoot

2009-05-26T17:53:00.001-07:00

Grandma and Papa were in town for the babies' Christening this weekend, and we took the following pictures in our traditional last-day-of-visit photo shoot:

For Whom the Bell Tolls

2009-05-18T10:48:00.000-07:00

Any [wo]man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

-John Donne

Can you love someone so much that they become a part of you? That's what I asked at Mamaw's funeral on Friday. I had been thinking that question after we buried her in a private family ceremony earlier that afternoon. In the car on the way to the church I looked at Amanda in her carseat. Did I really embody part of Mamaw? Did Amanda? I know we had been saying she would live on through her relatives, but would she really?

In her almost 96 years, Mamaw was so "involved with Mankind" (and not just because she was boy-crazy) that around four hundred people came to the Celebration of Life service at the church. The whole choir sang. Grandchildren and children and honorary relatives got up and spoke. Ten years ago she gave one of the "bastard children" from her Sunday School class the task of giving her eulogy. He finally got to do it. And these people are all at least a generation younger than her. Imagine how the congregation would have spilled out into the halls if all -- if any -- of her contemporaries were still around.

Yes, she would live on. Of course she would. All those people filling up the sanctuary were part Mamaw now. The way she had treated them would influence the way they treated others. The way she interacted with the world, the things she had talked with them about, would affect the way they thought and acted. She loved so many people. Like me, she made a best friend every time she went to the grocery store. And because she loved so much, many many people came to love her.

Mamaw is a part of me because she offered her loving arms to me for 37 years. We wrote each other letters; I visited her whenever I could. She would always say that it was so easy to be around me. I found the same true of her (except when she was watching Fox News, which she had chosen because the anchormen were the cutest). One night one year I read her poetry from a very old book. She recited it along with me. It's an understatement to say she was special. And for her to tell me I was special, well. It was special.

When I write letters, when I make friends, when I fight for a chance to speak to a crowd -- about anything -- that's all from Mamaw. When I make a little "huh!" sigh and look up and raise my shoulders, that's Mamaw. When I dangle my fork between my fingers over my plate, that's Mamaw, by way of Mom. And when I yearn to make my home a place where anyone is welcome, where everyone is loved individually, and where music and light reign supreme. That's Mamaw. I want, I want, I want to give my girls the kind of experience that I got at Mamaw's house.

That's how she lives on.

But Mamaw doesn't just live. She died. She swapped love with us. The places in us that she filled with her memories and appreciation, used to hold bits of us. We gave those to her. And so when the bell tolled for Mamaw, it rang for a broken community, a broken family, a broken me. We're mostly the same, and we hold so much of her still. But it's a loss. It hurts. We all died last Monday.

Along with the tolling bell quote, I've been thinking about "tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." Can you imagine what life would have been like without Mamaw? No, me neither. And I don't want to. Getting my heart broken at 37 is a small price to pay for the life she's given to me.

I see Mamaw's baby pictures in Amanda's dark hair and chubby cheeks. I see Mamaw's love of people in Elisa's perpetual smile. In James I see the person Mamaw said she'd marry if I didn't.

We're all Mamaw. It's only barely a metaphor. And so we're all less now than what we were.

It will take some time to recover.

The Day of Mothers

2009-05-10T19:01:00.000-07:00

This morning I wrote about Mothers' Day from the perspective I've had until now: that of someone on the outside. Today I was inside. And I like it.

I did the 6:00 a.m. feeding, but James took the babies from there, and I got to sleep until 11:23! I slept so much that my eyes were puffy. That hasn't happened in a long time. I awoke to the sound of Amanda howling in the living room and James begging her, from the kitchen, to just hang on. As I came down the stairs, James told me to go back upstairs. Then he reconsidered. Okay, you can come down here, but you have to stay in the living room.

After a very sweet few minutes talking to my little babies, both of whom were smiling back at me and doing some very preliminary cooing sounds, James walked in with a masterpiece. The girls and he had made French toast with strawberries on top, and fresh squeezed orange juice. I can't remember which girl they said it had been who squeezed the oranges, but either way I'm impressed. I wouldn't have thought they had the strength.

James also brought me out a card from the girls, which he was kind enough to take dictation onto. He even drew a heart on it, because the girls told him to. They know, at this early age, that girls draw hearts on things. It's true. I told him about the year of 5th grade, when I dotted every single "i", for one year, with a heart.

Next, James brought me out a baby bottle with some flowers in it. It was going to go on the tray that would have brought me my breakfast in bed, if I'd stayed there to receive it. Oh, so cute.

I love my husband, and I love my little daughters. And according to what they wrote on the card, they love me, too. It turns out, Mothers' Day isn't just about elevating the mothers around us. It's not even spelled Mothers' Day. It's Mother's Day. It's not about being celebrated: it's about celebrating your own mom for the wonderful, wonderful things she's done for you and meant to you. When you hear somebody thanking you for what you do for them, and they tell you they love you as much as you love them... well, wow. James's card made me really understand that the girls love me. It may seem funny, but I wasn't sure they did. I wasn't even sure they recognized me when I picked them up. But yeah, I guess they would.

I have heard people say that when you have children, you appreciate your own parents much more. You have a much greater understanding of what they went through with you. That's true. And having twins myself, I realize with shock and awe what their lives were like in 1972. And so I say,

WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME?

It's true that Dad tried to comfort me in the infertile years by saying that children were a lot of trouble, and maybe I didn't want them anyway. But it wasn't a very specific warning.

I do feel my mother could have been a lot clearer about what I was really in for. She did say year ago, apropos of nothing, that she hadn't minded the work of taking care of two little children at the same time, since David and I were so cute. She just liked being around us. At the time, I thought that was obvious. Now, I see it's not something you can take for granted.

So why didn't Mom tell me how exhausting it is to do everything you have to do to take care of one baby, and right after you have won every struggle with the one, to turn around and do the same thing with the other? You finally rock one to sleep. Okay, good. Now change the other's diaper, feed her, and rock her to sleep now. Whew. Finally got one through a bath, screaming the whole time? She's warm and toasty, finally calm, and smelling sweet? Okay, go get the other one and peel her clothes off her. Start the cycle all over again.

I'm not complaining. I'm just saying. Damn.

Mom should have complained. So why didn't she? I suppose it's because she loved us as much as we loved her. And that's a whole, whole lot.

Now I get it.

Mother's Day

2009-05-10T03:40:00.000-07:00

Few things are as pervasive in the Animal Kingdom as motherhood. There are references to it everywhere. "Motherhood and apple pie." In James's Catholic church the Virgin Mary gets a pass on Original Sin because she bore and raised God's son. To be absolutely as obscene and insulting as you can be, you call somebody a mother fucker: yeah, nobody could be as vile as a defiler of the most revered people on earth. In my friend's church, they have all the mothers stand up to be recognized on Mothers' Day. In the infertility community, we know how excruciating motherhood references (except for the mother fucker thing) can be for people who're are trying and failing to be mothers.

Last year on Mothers' Day I was awakened by a wrong number. "Oh, well," the caller concluded, "Well, I hope you have a happy Mothers' Day." A shoe might as well have emerged from the receiver and kicked me in the stomach.

This year, Mothers' Day is different. I'm finally a mother. I woke up to two infants screaming with despair and fear that they would never ever ever be fed. When I put each of them on the changing table, they smiled at me. Then, as I was feeding them on either side of me, their warm little feet kicked at my ribs happily.

Needless to say, I feel a lot, lot better now. But Mothers' Day will never be the same for me as it is for most mothers. I know how devastating it is to a silent minority of women. And if we're only finding out now that "Motherhood and apple pie" can evoke tremendous feelings of hurt in so many people, what else don't we know?

The Grandmother Connection

2009-05-08T14:02:00.001-07:00

My grandmothers have been tremendously important in my life.

When we went to Texas a couple weeks ago, one major point of the trip was to introduce the babies to my grandmother, Sara June Goode. Coming up on 96 years this month, she has lived a long life in very good health. Only after she turned 95 did her health start to deteriorate. The decline has gotten steeper recently. We expect her to live another few days or weeks. Or hours.

One of the best things that has happened in my whole life is that I finally had children, and that their lives got to intersect with Mamaw's. Mamaw was the 20th Century, born in 1913. They are the 21st, born in 2009. And here both are, lining up for 4 months. I am so grateful.

Two weeks ago Amanda and Elisa smiled at Mamaw, and Mamaw smiled back. I told the girls that Mamaw had been a baby once. And I told Mamaw that my goal was to create two future Mamaws. I can think of nothing better.

That was in East Texas. When we drove to West Texas, to the land where my paternal grandmother had been born and grown up, I started to get sad. Grandma died ten years ago, when I had just started to get the maternal itch. I didn't expect her to get to meet her great-grandchildren, and indeed, she missed them by a decade. Because I couldn't introduce her to her progeny, I decided to show my babies everything Grandma. We dipped their toes in the creek where Grandma had played as a child, and where her three kids and five grandkids had followed suit. We showed them the rocks, the barn, the river, the cattle, the house where she grew up.

Then we took the girls to Grandma and Grandpa's grave. "We're going to meet your great-grandparents." We pulled up to the old family cemetery and found the Bailey plot. I'd thought blithely that I would romantically hold my babies up above Grandma and Grandpa and say, "Here they are. See what I have done? I had twins too! Aren't they beautiful? I'm going to raise them the way I was raised, and I'll make them into people you'll really like."

But when we got there it started to rain. James and I held the babies silently as we stood on the graves. "You stupid fool," I thought to myself. "It's too late."

Grandma wasn't there: she was dead. She couldn't see the babies. She would never know what became of her only granddaughter's life. She couldn't see me carrying on her traditions. It was a stupid, romantic idea. She wasn't there.

James, that sweet man, told me that when he saw the clouds open up and let the sun through the rain, he thought that was Grandma. And when it started raining droplets on us at the cemetery, those were her tears of joy. I love James. That's what I preferred to think. It's a much happier interpretation.

But I could do him one better. That evening we spent the night at my aunt and uncle's house. Two of my three cousins were there, with two new wives brought into the family, and four new children. My other aunt and uncle drove in from out of town to be there, and my dad joined us, too. I missed my brother and my missing cousin, but was thrilled to be in the bosom of the Baileys. There were pictures of Grandma and Grandpa and their forefathers up on the walls. I saw Grandma's footstool in the living room. And I saw a little bit of Grandma in Aunt Mary's face.

This was where Grandma was. She was in her family. Duh. What would Grandma want more than anything? To keep the family together. She'd want for me to keep in touch with my cousins and make more trips to West Texas. She'd want for me and my husband and babies to spend more nights at Aunt Mary's. To pet their dog, to ask Cousin Scotty about his love life. To become great friends with John and Jeff's wives. To have my kids get to know their kids like cousins. Grandma always regretted being an only child. She wanted a big family. The least we could do was to be one.

And so on the way back home, I went through East Texas and saw Mamaw one last time. I thought about the things that had made me so sad when Grandma died in 1999. I'd wanted to keep writing Grandma letters, but I knew there was nowhere to send them. I'd felt sad abandoning Grandma, stopping my letters to her, not visiting her any more. I wanted her to know it wasn't that I had forgotten her: I just didn't know how to reach her.

So the last afternoon I spent with Mamaw, I asked, "When you die and I miss you, what should I do? How can I reach you?"

She said, "Well, what did you have in mind? A seance?"

"No -- is there any particular music I can listen to that will represent you?"

"I've been listening to Harry Connick, Jr. recently," she responded. And then she started singing.

Missed the Saturday dance
Heard they crowded the floor
Just can't bear it without you
Don't get around much any more.

We can analyze the hell out of those lyrics, and maybe I will on a post some day. But you should have heard Mamaw singing Ella Fitzgerald's lyrics, as she appreciated through Harry Connick, Jr.'s sweet young male voice.

And there I had it. I knew Mamaw would live on through music. And now I knew what to do when my letters would have no more earthly destination. I'd play some jazz for the girls. I'd shape them into little grandmothers for the next century.

This is a personal post. It's the kind of thing I would write in a diary, but here I am writing it in a public forum. Why? That's not a rhetorical question; I had to ask it of myself. Did this have anything to do with infertility or raising my test-tube babies?

Well, yuh. This is what fertility is all about. And this is what infertility threatened to cut short. It's not my own mortality that I care about: it's my grandmothers'. E=MC squared. Conservation of grandmothers in the universe. When two die, two must be born.

So here's to that. Amanda and Elisa: you go, girls!

In Bad Taste

2009-05-06T02:46:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to write this post for a long time, so while I'm on a roll and have my second wind of the night (or is it first wind of the morning?) I'll go ahead.

Several days after I was discharged from the hospital after my C-section, I noticed my tongue with horror. It had lots of jagged growths on it that seemed like they were filled with puss or some other disgusting substance. I ran to the doctor, who said, "Neat" and took a picture. He said that this was just inflamed taste buds. Why were they inflamed? I said I'd had dry mouth for months during the pregnancy. That might be it, or it might be something else. It might be related to the pregnancy or not. Maybe my salivary glands had stopped working. If it didn't go away in a few months, that might be it. Or it might be a reaction to other things going on in my body.

I suspected the latter. There were lots of things going on in my body. This is the story of how I gave birth.

I went to the doctor on January 13 for a weekly check-up. They said, "Go to the labor and delivery unit right now." Apparently my liver enzymes were high and platelet count was low. I walked over there, in the same building. When those people finally figured out why I was there and who I was, they put me in a room with one monitor on my belly. "The other baby is about right here," I offered. Oh, there was another baby? Well then, they slapped on another monitor. They hooked me up to an IV for reasons unknown to them, and I decided to text James. "Everybody ok but I have preeclampsia. In hospital. Could u come now pls." The return text said, "On my way."

Pre-eclampsia is one of those syndromes that happens a lot in multiple pregnancies. It involves the shutting down of organs -- liver, kidneys, etc. I had HELLP syndrome, a particularly nasty version of pre-eclampsia that involves low blood platelets. When the hospital finally got my chart from the doctor, they put me on IV magnesium, which helps keep the pre-eclampsia in check, but brings on nausea. I immediately threw up. That was nothing new. I had been throwing up for months. I kept throwing up. Every time I did that, I peed in bed. Peeing while vomiting was nothing new either. They gave me anti-nausea medication in the IV. Every few hours they took blood to test the platelet and liver enzyme count. They put saline in the IV to keep me hydrated.

In the meantime, they needed to know how much urine I was producing. They put a urinary catheter in so they could suck the urine straight out of my bladder into the measuring bag. You know how that feels? Sucky. And you know how it feels if they do it wrong? Like a urinary tract infection. You know how that feels? Remember the UTI medicine commercial where you see the door of a bathroom stall and hear a woman screaming? That's how. After hours of that, a nurse mercifully took it out, let me pee into my bed like a normal person, and reinserted it the right way. Then they changed the sheets.

More blood tests. They gave me a steroid shot in the hip to bolster the babies' lungs. Ideally, I would get four shots over 48 hours, and the babies would be more ready to breathe when they came out. They were at 33 weeks of gestation at that point. Normal is 40.

More blood tests. The question was: was my pre-eclampsia getting worse? The cure for pre-eclampsia is giving birth. How long could they wait to get the babies out before my organs started shutting down? Could they wait 48 hours, long enough for the steroids to kick in in the babies' lungs?

More blood tests. The nurses and doctors kept looking with concern at the urine bag, not filling up. I wasn't making urine. I should say, my kidneys weren't working. The blood tests showed the liver was spewing enzymes left and right. That's what a liver does when it is in distress. I didn't really get that at the time. My platelet count was dropping lower.

James was there. So was Mom. The endeavor had started about 3 p.m. and by 3 a.m. James was asleep on the fold-out chair, Mom was back home, and the doctors said, "We've got to get these babies out now." We called the appropriate people and James got his paper outfit on. We were going to have a C-section.

I started to get a little nervous in the operating room. The anaesthesiologist tried to put an epidural in my back twice, and a spinal once, but my back was so twisted with scoliosis that after the three tries he didn't want to waste any more time. I had held on to my doctor, a wonderful woman who had twins herself via C-section several years before. I said, "I'm scared." She comforted me.

The anaesthesia was making me throw up. Or maybe that was the magnesium still. Lying on my back on the operating table, I threw up huge amounts of liquid -- all the liquid that wasn't making its way through my kidneys -- into little tiny vomit pans that the nurses held at the side of my face. They had a fireman line of vomit pans coming to my cheek and back to some receptacle to dump them out. "Is there a better way to do this?" I asked, wondering if the pans were designed to fit my cheek at a better angle. I certainly didn't want to make a mess. "No, you're doing fine." Vwaaaaaaahhhh. Vwaaaaaaahhhh. Vwaaaaaaahhhh. Later the doctor told me that everyone in the operating room was impressed by how nice I was being. "It must be what happens when she gets stressed," she said. What, me? I'm always nice!

Before I knew what was happening, they had the sheet hung vertically to shield my abdomen from my eyes. They let James in to see me. I felt them poking my lower belly. "Do you feel that?" Yes. "Do you feel that?" Yes. Here? Yes. Here? Yes! Here? Yes!! I had this feeling that the operation was about to proceed without the anesthesia.

And then I got confused. What really happened was that they gave me general anaesthesia to put me to sleep, now desperate to get the babies out of me. What I felt was confusion as to whether I was inside or outside. I didn't know where I was. I yelled as much to James. I saw white buildings like a theater set coming in at me. I thought they should all know that I didn't know where I was. James found this unnerving.

James had to tell me later what happened during the operation. They pulled Amanda out and showed her to James briefly. She weighed in at 4 lbs. 13 oz. at that point. Elisa came out immediately afterwards, a small 3 lbs. 13 oz. James didn't even see her. As the neonatologist ran the babies to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, James watched the receptacles on the floor fill up with blood. I was hemorrhaging; that's what happens when you have no platelets to help clot your blood. Fortunately they got that under control. And eventually they woke me up and told me I had two babies.

The rest of the night and the next day, my IV was delivering magnesium, anti-nausea meds, saline hydration, and morphine. Though James kept slipping away to go look at the babies, I lay in bed thinking, "I would have thought I would want to see them, but I'm too tired to bother." That was the morphine, I'd venture.

I had a monitor on my finger measuring the amount of oxygen in my blood. Whenever it got too low, the alarm would go off and a nurse would come running. Whenever I went to sleep, which was always, my breathing would become shallower and the alarm would go off. It's not a very restful situation. Morphine -> sleep -> shallow breathing -> too little oxygen -> alarm -> wake up -> sleepy -> sleep -> shallow breathing ... times 24 hours.

The nurses tried to get me to cough and do other things to get my abdominal muscles and lungs going. Coughing after a C-section hurts. Like hell.

A day later, I had still not been able to see my babies, though everyone else had. We begged and begged, and finally they let me go down to the NICU. I still had the IV in, but my liver enzymes were now low enough to let me go off the magnesium. They pushed me in the stroller (did I write that? I meant wheelchair) to see my destiny.

I got to hold Amanda. I cried and kissed her. I caressed her head. James videotaped it for Amanda's enjoyment later. I don't think we'll be posting it online. I didn't get to hold Elisa, and from my rickety perspective in the wheel chair, not able to move my body on my own, I couldn't see her very well in her incubator. But I did see her teeny body a little. I wished I could hold her.

When I came back to my room, they gave me a transfusion of two units of blood. I want to thank the person who donated for me to use. I needed it, and I appreciate it. I think it might have saved my life.

The next few days were a blur of blood tests, pain meds, IVs, and not being able to roll over in bed from so much pain. James, and occasionally the nurses, nursed me back to health. Every hour or so I would ask James to hand me my glass of water and my chapstick. Now we realize that it was the dry mouth that made me need both of these things; James just thought I was addicted to chapstick. It was the bane of his existence as it went rolling around under the hospital bed and other inconvenient locations.

For several days they kept me on a liquid diet, not because I needed it, but because of some error in reporting my medical status to the cafeteria. The first time I cried in the whole process was when the cafeteria refused me real food. Was this post-partum depression, I wondered. No, I concluded. It was the fact that I had just been sliced open, bled dry, stabbed repeatedly, and jostled, and now they wouldn't give me a sandwich!

With James's loving care and unsqueamish walking me to the bathroom, and bathing me while I sat on a seat in the shower, I finally got better. He wheeled me to the NICU several times a day to feed the babies. After a few days we finally got to hold Elisa, who had been cloistered while she still had an IV in her umbilical cord stump. We have James on video feeding her for the first time. What a sweet little, little girl.

We went home without the babies. I had a prescription for percoset and ibuprofen, but that wasn't really enough. I don't know what I would have done if I had to care for newborns in that state. Though I hated to leave the little girls at the NICU, I was grateful for the rest at home. My platelets were closer to normal; my liver enzymes now a mere three times the normal amount, not ten times. My exercise regime was going to see the babies several times a day, and occasionally standing up straight.

And then I looked at my tongue in the mirror and was horrified. Was it that my salivary glands had stopped working? Or was it that something else in my body had thrown my system off kilter? Was there anything else going on in my body that would have disturbed my equilibrium?

Oh, I don't know.

Anyway, yeah, my tongue went back to normal within a few days. It just had to register its disgust first.

Texas Slideshow

2009-05-06T02:31:00.000-07:00

A lot of people are missing from this show, since we were too tired to find the camera a lot of the time. But here are some pics:

La Madre Patria

2009-05-06T02:14:00.001-07:00

We went to Texas, the Madre Patria, my homeland.

Ashley procured us bouncy seats. Bill insisted that all babies looked alike. Celia tried to disabuse him of that idea. Lute rocked a laughing Amanda vigorously in her carseat. Steed (age 3) showed Elisa a picture of herself that was really a picture of me as a baby. Charles served us cheeseburgers at Stover Boys Burgers that were better than Five Guys. Sara waited patiently to hold a baby. Jana did not. Julie cleaned everything in her house except the baseboards. Jeff C. gave up his home for the weekend. Kay W. gave the girls their first barrettes. Tom told me about a mountain in West Texas where ladybugs congregate. Mom did some middle-of-the-night feedings.

Marsha made us an amazing casserole. Dan told jokes. Ralph told jokes. Marjean wore a lot of mascara. Frieda gave me an uncharacteristically gentle hug. Linda, the town librarian when I was a little girl, gave us children's books. Roe, having not aged since the 1980s, had a baby face.

Dad showed the babies around the ranch. Mary provided lots of baby gear. Jenn gave us hand-me-down shoes. Jacqui gave us half-cows, half-blankets. Jeff H. said Scott said Jeff was too ugly to hold the babies. Scott said no such thing, probably. Trey showed us pictures of his boat. Kenny looked for a store that sold Pirelli tires. JoNeil wore her red Members Only jacket. Quinn and Haydn played together by the refrigerator. Hunter tried to use up the green chalk on the front stoop. Madeleine cried when she had to leave.

And that's not even mentioning my grandparents. I'll do that later.

Music is Love

2009-04-20T15:04:00.000-07:00

Some people say that God is love. I say God is music, and music is love.

Last night and today I've thought a lot about music, and the role listening to it and making it has played in my life. Sharing music with people can be so personal, and so expansive. I've had some wonderful, intimate experiences of singing lullabies to my babies. And the most spiritual moments I've ever felt have been while singing in a chorus of 100 voices, with the sounds echoing through the high ceilings of a marble chapel. I thought that there must be some higher order to the universe to make all the sounds interact so neatly.

Whether singing harmony to Dolly Parton on the 8-track, or singing James Taylor songs in the car with my father and step-mother, listening to my mom and aunts sing harmony while doing the dishes, or gasping excitedly for breath while a huge choir sang around me in Lincoln Center, music has been its own leitmotif in my life. I have sung at my brother's and father's weddings, and my grandmother's funeral. My other grandmother, who says that music is her religion too, has planned the musical fare for her own future funeral. She did that decades ago. And half a century before that, she was singing in a trio with Dale Evans. My brother has a band now, and I've sung with them. Once I got onstage with a zydeco band in New Orleans and played the washboard with them. I'd have sung if I knew the words. Lately I've sung in my living room with my friends Linda and Roy, my babies (not singing), and my mother-in-law, who has the most wonderful voice. My mom has sung in her church choir for years, and following her lead I've sung in lots of church choirs in many different cities. When I worked in Mexico, I amused the whole office by singing the jingles I learned from the radio. In Brazil I sang the Minas Gerais state song with a green parrot named Juruna.

Is that enough of my singing resume? Need I mention the musical theater shows I sang in? Mom's advice at the auditions for "Annie" was "sing loud and smile!" I got the part in the show, but I also use the advice as a metaphor for getting through life. I've sung loud and smiled my way into lots of jobs, apartments, countries. My marriage even.

By far, one of the most wonderful parts of my life was singing in my high school choir under the tutelage of the director, Phil Raddin. As my parents were getting a divorce and I was insisting to the world just how independent I was, I became very dependent on Mr. Raddin and his choir. He had -- has -- the amazing talent of bringing music out of high school kids. He is a rigorous director, insisting on very precise diction and timing, flowing dynamics, and disciplined vowel sounds. And beyond the mechanics, he makes the choir members feel the music and "emote" the hell out of it. When you put this together with a bunch of adolescents who would follow him through hell and back, you get music that bounces off the walls and reverberates through hearts. And while music is the end that we were all working toward, it was also the means to lots of other things kids needed. Self-esteem, pride, sense of community, work ethic, fun. Love. I sang second soprano in the chorale. I also got love, encouragement, and attention from Mr. Raddin and Mrs. Garza (now Mrs. Hood), our beloved accompanist. I lived for them.

There is a song, "The Music and the Mirror," that the characters in "A Chorus Line" sing as they audition for a part in a show. Substitute "sing" for "dance," and it describes my experience in the HHS Chorale:

Give me somebody to dance for
Give me somebody to show.
Let me wake up in the morning to find
I have somewhere exciting to go.
To have something that I can believe in
To have someone to be.
Use me, choose me,
God, I'm a dancer,
A dancer dances!

Give me somebody to dance with.
Give me a place to fit in
Help me return to the world of living
By showing me how to begin.
Play me the music,
Give a chance to come through.
All I ever needed was the music
And the mirror and a chance to dance for you.

When Mr. Raddin moved to a different school my senior year of high school, I was crushed. I didn't realize it at the time, but he had really become a parent to me while my parents were otherwise occupied. For twenty years I've kept in touch with him through Christmas cards. I've watched his two kids, through yearly photos, be born and grow to beautiful children. I heard from a fellow HHS Choruster that his music program at Klein High School won a Grammy! And then last year he wrote that he was coming to Washington, D.C.

Yesterday I went to see his choir perform at the National Cathedral. They sang a 30-minute program, a prelude to the Evensong service. There were 50 or 100 Texan teenagers, all dressed in black dresses and tuxedos, singing with the same perfect diction and disciplined hearts that I remembered from my own experience. Their voices reverberated through the cathedral, weaving between their excited bodies up on the risers, forging an experience that they would never, not one of them, forget. I wept. Sobbed, really. I watched a mother in the audience in front of me rock her toddler in time with the music. When their part was over, the choir members filed off the steps and back to their seats, lining up to hug Mr. Raddin along the way. I cried at that, too. I remember hugging him. I remember being that devoted, that grateful.

And then I got to see him again, talk to him and his beautiful wife and adorable kids. He had about 45 seconds before he had to resume his teaching duties, getting his choir reassembled to take a picture in the back of the cathedral. I showed him pictures of my babies. I congratulated him on his Emmy. Grammy. Yeah, whatever. I got a hug. He hadn't changed a bit.

As I watched the concert, and after I left, I had a million thoughts about music, relationships, parenting, accomplishment, and belonging, swirling like five-part harmonies in a baroque chorale in my head. In a lifetime of music, look what a huge impact one person and two years can have.

I hope I can give some of that to my daughters. We have lots of songbooks already and have more waiting on the baby registry. (Yes, that's at http://www.amazon.com/). I've sung them lullabies, Mexican nursery rhymes, and show tunes. Though as a child I didn't think it would be possible to raise children without knowing how to play the guitar -- a lesson I learned from Julie Andrews in "The Sound of Music" -- I am doing my best with my voice and my CD player. And the keyboard is in the basement in case we get in a bind with my sightreading.

One miracle is that the babies have been asleep for an extra 52 minutes to let me write this whole post. Another miracle is the number of people who have shared their music and their love with me over the course of my life. Mr. Raddin is an extraordinary example, but he is only one of many. I hope, hope, hope that my girls have as rich a musical life as I have had. I hope they get as thick a coating of love. And I hope that my impact on this world, through music, art, or anything else, can be half as strong as Mr. Raddin's.

Hallelujia. Hallelujia. Hallelujia. Hallelujia. Ha-leeeeeiiiii-luuuuuui-yaaaaaaaaaaaa.

For Starleneg

2009-04-16T03:32:00.000-07:00

As per your comment, trust me: I'm exhausted.

Three Months!

2009-04-14T14:43:00.000-07:00

The girls are three months old today! Here are some recent pictures, including Elisa and Amanda in their Easter finery. The third baby in the three-baby shot is Cousin Iona.

They Slept Through the Night!

2009-04-01T01:46:00.001-07:00

April Fools! Of course they didn't sleep through the night.

BFFs

2009-03-31T10:48:00.000-07:00

"That's your best friend!"

James was holding Amanda up by the armpits, holding her over her sister. About two weeks ago we became aware that they were actually looking at people now. One time Elisa had woken up to Amanda's screaming. She looked over at Amanda, glanced up at the mobile, and then closed her eyes again and went back to sleep. Another time, I saw one of the girls glance at Sarah the cat, who has been smelling their heads for a couple months now. They're making purposeful eye contact with us now, which is really a delight. And about damned time.

Though they could look at each other this time, they weren't. James got Amanda closer to Elisa, almost on top of her. Amanda continued to look upwards, towards the light, and had to crane her neck to be able to see it from the new angle. Elisa was awake and aware, but managed not to notice the baby in front of her. She kept looking towards the blanket.

This may be a lesson in childhood development -- babies do not typically interact with each other until 10 months of age. Or it might be the first of many times the girls just avoid doing what we want them to do. Well, I shouldn't say FIRST.

I have no idea when I first became aware of my twin brother's existence. As far as I was concerned, and quite literally anyway, he was just always there. I believe I expressed that sentiment at his wedding -- that it was easy to take David for granted because he was an inherent part of my experience of the world. It didn't come out sounding all that nice, actually. When people would ask me as a child what it was like to have a twin, I always answered that I didn't have anything to compare it to, but I did note that you had to share your birthday. Now that I'm an older twin and have twins of my own, it seems like the best part of twindom (and maybe the worst?) is constant companionship.

One sweet and annoying development of about a month ago was that the girls started hearing each other cry, and joining in. Maybe because it was scary to be in an environment where someone else was crying, maybe because they were sad their sister was in distress. So we can call them co-cryers now.

They also have to share their feeding time. We try to feed them at different times -- whoever starts to get cranky first eats first. But it doesn't always work, and lots of times I wind up with two hands holding two bottles in two mouths, and with my two eyes bonding with no one. Lots of other times one baby is getting held and the other is crying. I have to put the quiet one down (yes, punish her) to pick up the loud one, and then have her quiet down and have the other start up again. They must hate to hear their sister cry in that case, because it heralds the exchanging of the babies in the lap.

A book on raising emotionally healthy twins told me yesterday that I should spend individual time with each child, while someone else took care of the other. If I could relate to each baby one-on-one, I would have a better relationship with each. At this point, that seems like a luxury. Where's the "someone else" from 9:30 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. anyway?

As someone who survived twinship with a hearty ego in tact, I'm not too concerned about their potential to blossom as different people. But if we can give them life, individuality, and a Best Friend Forever, wouldn't that be nice?

In the Treetops

2009-03-24T17:20:00.001-07:00

"I'm finding it very hard to get things done," I said to the night nurse we hired the other day. My mother-in-law, who had held the babies for 20 hours a day, 21 days in a row, had gone home, and we thought we needed just a little more help before the babies got big enough to sleep longer stretches at a time.

"There is nothing that needs to get done," she said, a grandmother herself. "All you need to do is be with them. The babies are the most important thing, and they grow up in a flash. Think about it: one year from today they'll be walking and talking."

I couldn't picture it. And I didn't agree that nothing needed to be done. Sometimes I had to go to the bathroom, for example, and sometimes I needed to prepare their next feeding. It's not like I was trying to translate Romeo and Juliet into Portuguese. Just survival stuff.

By six o'clock the next morning, Grandpam, what Pam the nurse calls herself for the babies, had changed her tune. "If last night is any indication, you must be going crazy!"

Uh, yeah!?

Apparently, our babies have what they used to call colic, what they now call reflux. Every time they lie on their backs, which is always, they get stomach (hydrocloric) acid in the throat. Sometimes it comes in an impressive amount of spit-up, and sometimes it just reaches their esophagus and makes them cough and sputter. Sometimes it comes through their nose and they gasp for air and weep wet tears. In any case, it makes our babies cry more than most babies, and sleep less. It didn't happen for three weeks when my mother-in-law could hold them all the time, because they were more upright. But now that she was gone, we were all feeling it.

It could drive a mother mad. In both senses. It could make you want to act out the "Rock-a-bye Baby" lyrics for real. To the treetops, Alice!

Mothers who have experienced infertility are more prone to post-partum depression because caring for a crying baby is not as fun as they had imagined and wished for, for all that time. Mothers of multiples are more prone to post-partum depression because they have more work, and more screams to contend with, and a lower hand-to-baby ratio. Mothers who have had depression in the past are more prone to it because once depression gets into your system, it's hard to remove. And mothers with colicky babies are more prone to post-partum depression because their lives are filled with more crying than sleep.

But as Pam has told me no less than four times, "There's a light at the end of the tunnel, and it's not the train." If I didn't like the content of that joke so much, I might not need to hear it as often. But I do like the thought. In the several days since she's come into our lives, she's told us to feed the babies a larger amount of formula, swaddle them tighter, lay them to sleep in an inclined position, and talk to our doctor about the reflux issue. And I see the light. In the confusion of this morning, we accidentally skipped a feeding, and the babies didn't let us know about it for two extra hours. Two hours, in twin time, is almost a whole day. Miraculous.

Thank God for Grandpam, for her medical knowledge and experience. Thank God for my mother-in-law, who was unquestionably put on this earth to be a grandmother, and whose baby care for three weeks was more herculean than Hercules himself could have pulled off. Thank God for my father-in-law, who likened his chest to a waterbed, soo good at lulling babies to sleep. Thank God for my own mother, who comes over in the afternoons to bring me chocolate milk and take the girls while I take a nap. Thank God for my dad, who took the night shift for a week when he was first here, and who will surely come back for more. Thank God for James, the sweetest of all fathers, who is currently shushing a baby downstairs, eating his pizza. His multi-tasking skills have come in so handy in our new life. And thank God for all my friends who have brought food, brought their babysitting and litterbox cleaning hands, and passed along to us their swings, bouncy seats, and other baby-quieting supplies. It takes a village to raise twins.

And thank God for those twins to bring together the village. And to be my sweet little babies. They can melt your heart in the blink of a little eye. And that's what keeps them out of the treetops.

Motherhood and Apple Cake

2009-03-12T07:29:00.000-07:00

There are a few conclusive signs I've seen that I am a mother. One is that I was up feeding someone last night at 2:00, and it wasn't James. Another is that I have a baby on my lap right now. And a third is that I am starting to love my mother-in-law, who is here for 3 weeks to help with the babies and the night shift, as much as I love my husband. Maybe more. She made us apple cake, too, and that got her right up there.

Besides the concrete evidence, there have been certain moments that I truly felt like a mother. The first was when the girls came home from the hospital, and I would go in their room while they were sleeping to put clean clothes in their dresser. Getting to go into the dark room and tiptoe to not disturb the girls, but still having housekeeping duties that were more important than the need to avoid their quiet room... I must have learned this from my own mother. It made me feel like I had the very special resposibility, and the privilege, to care for these little babies.

The next thing that made me feel like a mother was when we took our first trip to Babies 'R' Us, just the three of us girls, to load up on more diapers and Diaper Genie refill bags. After I had strolled them around in their double stroller inside the store, we came out to the parking lot, I loaded them in the car, put the stroller in the trunk, and told them we were going home now. As I backed the car out of the parking spot, I had a flash of tremendous maternality. I was looking carefully to see if anyone was coming, and I backed out very cautiously. I was suddenly very aware of my very precious cargo, and the fact that the quality of my driving had a direct impact on their survival.

The next moment of maternal bliss came when I was changing Elisa's diaper. After I got her dressed again, I picked her up, and she had her arms sticking straight up above her. Once I got her up to me, her straightened arms instinctively clamped around my neck, and I felt the amazing rush of The First Hug! She may not have meant to do it, but it was a wonderful feeling for me.

The last such moment occurred yesterday morning as I was singing to Amanda to calm her down before a feeding. A friend lent me a songbook with the lyrics to every imaginable song, and I was making my way through the "Friendship" section. I sang James Taylor's "You've Got a Friend" (You just call out my name and you know wherever I am, I'll come running to see you again. Winter, spring, summer, or fall, all you have to do is call, and I'll be there. You've got a friend) and the AIDS benefit song "That's What Friends Are For" (In good times and bad times, I'll be on your side forever more; that's what friends are for). And as I sang those words, I realized how much I meant them. It may have been the friendship section of the book, but it was easily translatable to maternal love. I looked at Amanda's somewhat sleepy face and tried to do my Kay-Bailey super-duper facial expressions to impart to her how much I meant what I was singing. A mother's devotion to her child, coming out through song and through singing.

And do you know what? Not a single one of those moments has involved thinking about our genetic link. We spent a lot of time in the beginning talking about which of the girls looked like whom, and who had whose eyes, etc. But my moments of intense maternal feeling have been entirely situational. My friends and I in the infertility world spent many, many months yearning for a child who was biologically ours, with DNA we could trace to our own ancestors. It's what we all want, because that's the way the species works.

But I'll be damned if motherhood, for me, isn't turning out to be about the way I take care of the girls and the way we relate to each other through our behavior and our communication. I know that's easy for me to say, the mother of two beautiful babies that are entirely my own biologically, but I think I "get" adoption now. And for those people who choose to create their family that way, I'm so glad to know that they'll get to back their kids out of parking spaces, too, and feel just as wonderful about it.

By Popular Demand

2009-03-11T13:45:00.000-07:00

Walter and Jack, the girls' honorary cousins (or maybe they're soul-brothers), have requested a new slideshow to watch.

So without further ado, here's another slideshow. This one features two grandmas, a mom and a dad, a cat, a few friends, and of course, our stars, Elisa (blonde) and Amanda (brunette).

The Baby Dance

2009-02-22T10:12:00.000-08:00

The babies are squirmy little worms, which is worth a slideshow.

A Night in the Life

2009-02-22T10:02:00.000-08:00

Last night around here was like a Thurber short story. About 9:00 the babies started crying fiercely, so I went to check on them. Their transition to “newborn” size left them in slightly large clothing – too large. Elisa’s had slipped off one shoulder, so she looked like the girl from Flashdance. Amanda had kicked her nightie so vigorously that her feet pulled the neckline down around her elbows and belly button. Meanwhile, Sarah had discovered how comfortable the changing table was, and acted defensively when James tried to move her. So we changed the girls on the bed.

At 10:00 James went to take a nap in the basement. I worked on my Fiber of Her Being taxes and made up the bottles for the next day. At midnight he joined me in the nursery for a feeding, and then he took over while I went to take my nap in the basement.

At 3:00 a.m. the electricity went off, and I was awakened by some appliance that sounded a final “beep” as its death knell, so I came upstairs groggily to relieve James. James, in a middle-of-the-night stupor, was ready, just in case it had been an intruder who cut the electrical line to the house and was coming to rob us. “Hello?” he called threateningly from the babies room, ready to defend his kin. “Hi,” I said from the stairway.

We both got to bed about 4:00, and shortly after that, Sarah came in and meowed her funny meow. “What’s that?” asked James. “Hold on, I’m going to turn on the light,” I said, but he was already asleep. I clicked on my lamp and peered over the footboard. Sarah’s weird meow was the kind she made when her mouth was full. She plopped a dead mouse on our rug. I got up, scooped it up with an “It’s a Girl” paper cup and paper plate, and dumped it in the toilet. I threw the cup and plate away in the garbage can that was full of coathangers. I hadn’t been able to untangle the coathangers with one hand earlier that evening while I was holding Elisa, so I threw them all away. Now the mouse scoops came in with them.

When I went to sleep that time, I dreamed about having an enormous rabbit with a swollen foot on our back porch. I also dreamed that a guy from Cherrydale Hardware was running for President. In the dream only, his name was John, and he needed me to think of a campaign song with “John” in it. The closest I could come up with was “Dawn,” the ‘fifties song. It wasn’t until after I woke up that I realized those lyrics go, “Dawn, run away I’m no good for you.” That would make a terrible campaign song.

When the girls woke me up for the 6:00 a.m., the different clocks in our bedroom said 12:05, 2:17, and 4:20. My watch, which I was glad to have repaired the other day, told me it was 6:45. They slept almost three full hours! Amazing!

As I prepared their bottles, I thought, it’s like the night the bed fell on James Thurber’s grandfather. Just one night in the life. February 21, 2009.

Nowhere Else

2009-02-19T09:50:00.000-08:00

"Uh-oh. Is someone getting upset in there?" I listened, and didn't hear anything else.

I had walked into the kitchen and was getting out a pot to boil some water in, to make my whole wheat mac and cheese. I looked down at my right index finger, whose nail was cleaner than the rest because Amanda had been sucking on it for so long.

I looked out the window at the clear, beautiful day. There was a lot going on outside in the world, while inside I was still in my nightgown at 12:50. It was wet on my shoulder where I'd had a baby drooling for a while. Now both girls were settled down in the living room with pacifiers, giving me a couple minute break.

Whenever I think about being saddled with a lot of babies, I think of Heath Ledger's wife in "Brokeback Mountain," the quintessential overworked young woman stuck at home with a ton of kids vying for her hip and arms. A young mom could look out my kitchen window and feel trapped, yearn to be out there experiencing life.

But me, I've been around. I've traveled the world, gotten two post-graduate degrees, had several great careers, owned my own art business, and settled down with the man of my dreams in a wonderful house with a beautiful furry cat. There is nothing that I want to do that I haven't already done.

Except get back to those girls in the living room.

What a wonderful, wonderful life this is.

Oops, someone's crying. Not me.

Taking a Walk

2009-02-10T17:12:00.000-08:00

Sunday we took our first family walk. The babies were bundled in their well-insulated carseats, with new hats knitted by Aunt Carolynn. Destination? 7-11 for a Big Gulp!

The rest of the pictures come from our fast-paced activities at home. Rule of thumb: the blonde is Elisa and the brunette is Amanda.

Let the Games Begin

2009-02-07T13:27:00.000-08:00

A quick note on what is happening in the crib:

Amanda and Elisa are "asleep" lying close together. They are both working on pacifiers. They are facing each other. Amanda has the hiccups. Every time she hiccups, her pacifier hits Elisa on the nose. Elisa does not seem to notice.

What a funny life. I like it.

Home from the Hospital: Pictures

2009-02-04T12:48:00.000-08:00

This weekend Amanda and Elisa came home from the hospital, and what an adventure it has been. Here are a few photos from the transition. (To download and/or print, click on the Flickr logo to get into Flickr.com).

If you can't see the slideshow above, you should be able to find it by clicking here.

They're Home!

2009-02-03T09:38:00.001-08:00

The babies are home! The babies are home!

We are having a delightful time. Mostly we prepare bottles and feed babies. After each feeding we pause, change diapers, and start another feeding. They are on a three hour schedule, left over from the NICU: they fuss for an hour, during which we hold them, prepare the bottles, and change diapers. Then we feed them (sometimes sequentially, sometimes with one baby on each side and each hand with a bottle in each mouth). We try to burp them, with spotty success, then we put them in their crib together.

The good part of the NICU routine is that they're on that same schedule. The bad part of this all is that they have a lot of feedings when James and I were used to sleeping...

I'd post a picture but I don't know where the camera is.

Pardon me if I don't answer emails or the phone for, um, a year.

I have my hands full!

Full of baby.

It's fun. Thank God.

Fun with the Camera

2009-01-29T21:03:00.001-08:00

We had some fun photographing the girls today. Click on the picture to see our slideshow:

Elisa is the wild one in polka-dots, and Amanda is asleep in the blanket.

In the next slideshow, we put the babies together on my lap for the first time (hard because of all their tubes and wires) and what do you know: they held hands!

New Pictures

2009-01-25T17:19:00.000-08:00

The girls are still in the NICU, but today Elisa and Amanda topped 4 and 5 pounds, respectively. They are doing very well for their tiny sizes. They still have feeding tubes that go into their noses and down into their bellies -- but these are just for getting the formula down into them when they've gotten too sleepy to bottle feed any more. They are still connected with three wires to a machine that measures their heart rate, breathing rate, and amount of oxygen in their blood (whether they're breathing deeply or shallowly). But all their systems are working perfectly and they are healthy and happy little babies. When they gain enough weight to keep up their temperature on their own, and when they can eat all the formula they need without using the feeding tube, they will be able to come home. We estimate that to be in the second week of February.

In the meantime, I am resting at home most of the time. James and I go to the hospital between two and three times a day to help feed them, change their diapers, and coo at them. James has told them all they need to know (and more) about the inauguration and our system of government, football and the lead-up to the Super Bowl, and our families. I have sung them more songs than I remembered that I knew. James and I both are so in love with the girls that we are almost intolerable to others. It's hard to talk about anything other than our daughters. And we tend to repeat ourselves: "They're just so cute." "Can you believe how beautiful they are?"

I have much more to say on the subject, but less stamina than that would require. Suffice it to say that we are very, very happy. When I held both girls in my arms at once last night, for the first time, I told James that I would have paid $50,000 for that one evening. And to think we have them forever.

This is all I ever wanted.

Family Resemblance

2009-01-20T05:57:00.000-08:00

Me (on left) and my twin bro at 2 weeks:

Elisa at about 2 days:

James as a newborn:

Amanda at 2 days:

Baby Pictures

2009-01-19T00:52:00.001-08:00

Hello, my friends,

We're finally back from the hospital, though we didn't get to bring the babies with us just yet. They'll stay in the neonatal intensive care unit a few more weeks, just to put a few more pounds on them and to get their little bodily processes a little stronger.

In the meantime, we have some pictures for you now.

These are Amanda Panda (baby A):

and Elisa Bear (baby B):

and a very very happy nuclear family

The Babies are Here!

2009-01-16T14:15:00.000-08:00

This is the 100th blog post, and it happens to be the best. James and I are now a healthy, happy family of four with our two daughters. Everybody is doing really well.

We had the babies early Wednesday morning: 4:55 and 4:46 a.m. on January 14, 2009. Their names are Amanda June and Elisa Katherine (that's Baby A and Baby B, respectively). Their weights were somewhere around 4 lbs. 12 oz. and 3 lbs. 13 oz., but they were both within a quarter inch of 18 inches long. So we have one little skinny tall one and one bulkier skinny tall one. They were born at 33 weeks -- seven weeks ahead of what would have been full term, and three weeks ahead of what we were expecting as average for twins.

The girls are beautiful. They are expected to stay in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) for a few weeks as their premie bodies stabilize, but so far they are going gangbusters -- breathing and eating on their own. Amanda has dark hair and looks like James and Elisa has blonde hair and has my hands. Their cries sound like little sheep bleating. We have gotten to bottle feed them a couple times and I've spent some skin-on-skin time with each little one. I can't wait to rip those wires and tubes out and just snuggle up with them forever and ever.

The birth came along unexpectedly by C-section after my Tuesday afternoon doctor's appointment. Routine tests determined that I had preeclampsia, a dangerous disease caused by pregnancy that affects liver function. I was instructed to leave my doctor's office and march over to the labor and delivery unit and check myself in. So that is what I did. And the rest is history. I'll leave the scary emergency C-section anaesthesia and blood loss stories for those of you who really want to hear them. The upshot is that by the next morning, I was highly drugged, very sleepy, and a mom. I'm doing much, much better now.

James has been a trooper throughout, taking care of me and the babies in every way imaginable. I love him more than I ever thought possible, and I love how enamored he is of his daughters. We made a lot of extra love for the world this week. It feels fantastic to be in the middle of it.

Since we showed up at the hospital unexpectedly a few days ago, we weren't prepared with things like the cables that would download our pictures from camera to computer. So you'll have to wait for the photos. But we'll get them out as soon as we can. In the meantime, trust us: these little babies are the sun and the moon and the stars. They are love incarnate, and they are beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful.

Adding to the Pantheon

2009-01-08T09:56:00.001-08:00

It took me 26 years to be cool enough to have a real boyfriend. I passed the time between birth and that point engaging in cultural and intellectual pursuits. It was the next best thing. By the time I got to graduate school I had formed my own Pantheon: a group of people living and dead that I considered godly. It contained such characters as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and J.S. Bach. They were people who had such talent, and had mastered their genres so well, that the results they produced were almost spiritual.

Today I add one more member to my Pantheon: Pepcid AC. Yes, that's it: the heartburn medicine.

In the last three days it has changed my life immeasurably. All the entries that you haven't been seeing on my blog in the last months -- because I haven't written them -- have been about the physical pain and discomfort of pregnancy. You can't say that I didn't ask for it, beg for it. So I have mixed feelings about dwelling on my absolute state of disability.

But the heartburn was going to kill me. I knew it. The doctor said it would put hair on my babies' chests. Just what we wanted for our girls. I went through 100-count bottles of TUMS and Rolaids (which only spelled T-E-M-P-O-R-A-R-Y-R-E-L-I-E-F) like Halloween candy. But every single time I hiccupped, rolled over in bed, sat up, sat down, walked any where, said anything, or God forbid ate anything, it would light the fire in my chest and throat. Last week I even used my Lamaze breathing methods to "breathe through the pain" of it.

And then my doctor said I could use Pepcid AC too. Once a day, over the counter. I selected the E Z Chews.

Immediately the sun began to shine. The birdies chirped. I felt like skipping through the clear winter air. I felt like like rolling over in bed, hiccupping, eating spicy and acidic foods... Baroque harmonies swirled around Colombian magic realism in my brain.

The day of my liberation was Tuesday. Today is Friday*. I'm a new woman.

All hail Pepcid AC.

*(It has been pointed out to me that today is Thursday. Just FYI.)

I Hate Glucose

2008-12-19T08:51:00.000-08:00

We just don't get along. When I see glucose, I run the other way. But not before pouring salt on it and watching it shrivel like a slug. I think glucose has had a terrible effect on our nation's economy and democratic process, and is contributing to the erosion of the Ozone layer.

As you can see, I'm glucose-intolerant.

Or so they tell me. I flunked my 28-week Glucose Tolerance test this week. It may be because I'm in Week 29, or may be because I ate a banana two minutes before I began the test. I found out several days after the test that I was supposed to have fasted for 12 hours before I got tested, but anyone who sees me can see there is nothing fast about me right now. And boy, did I need that banana!

The test is composed of my drinking a sweet orange beverage that tastes like off-brand Kool-Aid, then waiting an hour and having my blood drawn and analyzed. The analysis tells us whether I have gestational diabetes or anemia. Or rather, it tells us whether they can be ruled out. They can't in my case. Maybe because I ate before the test, maybe because I'm really diabetic and/or anemic, and maybe because I'm so intolerant on the subject of glucose. Bellicose on glucose. Belly-cose.

So next week, for Christmas, I am going to take the 3-hour Glucose Tolerance test. I fast, presumably, then have my blood drawn, drink the orange beverage, and have my blood tested every hour after that, for three hours.

And so, just in case it helps the results, I want to say for the record that what I said about glucose up there wasn't true. I love glucose. God knows I love all sugars (in spite of my troubled relationship with lactose). As far as I know, glucose has not affected our country or planet in the ways I listed above, and I do NOT advocate pouring salt on it. Or on slugs.

That's all.

Left and Gone Away

2008-12-17T06:22:00.000-08:00

The right ankle bone's back, but the left one is still gone. I'm not surprised. "Left" has long been associated with bad things: sinister and gauche both mean "left." Not to mention the "left-leaning" political thing, which some people don't like. I'm left leaning with no apologies. Not only do I believe in the things that Susan Sarandon espouses, but I also have severe scoliosis that tilts me to my left.

I wonder if it was all too much pressure on the left ankle bone. So much so that it left. Something about it just wasn't right.

The leg bone's connected to the --- wha?

2008-12-13T04:36:00.001-08:00

My ankle bones are missing.

I discovered it in the shower yesterday morning. I had had them the night before when I went to bed. As I shaved my legs, I sang, "Oh where, oh where have my ankle bones gone? Oh where, oh where can they be?" I took it lightly. I assumed they were still in my bed.

Then I remembered about my ears. They've been burning. Not like I have people talking about me -- though if that's true, it's a whole lot of people at once. No: like I'm a human furnace and my ears are the pilot lights. The day before yesterday at the doctor's office, I got so hot that I told the nurse I was going to take off all my clothes and maybe shave my head. I fanned vigorously at my ears, hoping the fanning motion wasn't increasing my overall body heat.

So now my concern is, maybe my ankle bones got too close to my ears and burned up.

It wouldn't have happened while the ankle bones were still in my body, because I don't really fold up that way any more. I bend at the knees and hips and I can slump my shoulders, but that's it. The threat of vomiting and heartburn prevent me from using what used to be my... oh, man, I've even forgotten what it's called. Um, waste? WAIST. That's it. Yeah. I don't have one of those.

Anyway, if you see my ankle bones I'd be most relieved. I don't need them right away, but maybe in February when the girls are here.

Making Triplets

2008-12-11T12:17:00.000-08:00

I spend a lot of time during the night -- asleep and not asleep -- working on blog entries. When the morning comes, I find that my genius ideas of the night before don't actually make sense.

For example, two nights ago I composed something in my head about the question of whether pregnancy was good or bad. It all depended on which pillow I was sleeping on, and whether I was sleeping on my right side or left side. Doesn't make a ton of sense, does it? Unless you want to treat it as modern art and "see whatever you want to see."

I did have a couple of coherent dreams in the last week that seem relevant to the blog. In one, I was in my grandmother's living room where all eleven cousins used to pile on the couch for our Cousins Picture. This time, the floor was full of babies, all about six months old, who represented the Next Generation of Second Cousins. There was one set of twins there, and at different times during the dream they represented me and my twin brother (David), my two twin girls, and one baby belonging to me and one to David. Now this seems like something you CAN read into. Each time I looked at them I wanted to find out which one was mine. Even in the case where both babies were "my twins," I still considered one to correspond to David.

In the waking world, the buns and I went to the OB yesterday for a regular check-up. Baby A's heartbeat was in the high 150s per minute, and Baby B's was in the 130s. Both are in the normal range, but they are clearly very different from each other, as the OB noted with amusement. We see this pattern in all our ultrasounds and heartbeat checks: Baby A is frenetic and won't pose nicely for a picture, and Baby B is calm and provides a perfect, docile profile for snapshots. Baby A kicks more than Baby B, though B is catching up. Their size and health are on par with each other, but their behavior is strikingly different.

The personalities that we have read into these little bits of information seem to be parallel to my brother's and my personalities. I'm the wild one. He's the calm one. I'm loud. He's not. I've raced all over the world. He's better at staying in one place.

I have long been aware of my role in the generational cycle, the genetic line, among my women forebears. The connection between my maternal grandmother, my mom, and me has been very strong and obvious. You can see both a subjective and objective progression -- and lots of continuity -- from one life, one lifestyle, to the next. On the other side of the family, as I watched my grandmother's casket lowered into the family plot ten years ago, I imagined her as a young woman standing where I was, watching her own grandmother put into the same earth. Woman to woman to woman, sharing that experience.

Ever since I found out I was having twins, I have found my psyche spending a lot more time on my brother and me -- recreating ourselves in a way that incorporates our spouses, in a way that blurs whose baby/ies really belong/s to whom. Our identities are blurred, the generations are blurred. It gets a little confusing, really.

When David's daughter was born last month, I found I could look at her forever. I wondered about her future, her personality, her life. I made plans for her to grow up with her cousins, who were still hanging out in my belly beneath her. I was surprised at the immediate connection I felt to her. I've thought before that when David and I got married to the loves of our respective lives, about six months apart from each other, we all became a group of quadruplets. It was like we both got to bring our best friends into the twinship. (Erin and James, I hope you at least feel you were forewarned). I've never been so happy! Maybe out of our twinship, our quadrupletship, what we're doing is producing triplets. Gosh, if I weren't about to pass out from fatigue, I'd get giddy right about now.

Three babies is a charm.

I'm going to take a nap.

How to Be Pregnant When your SIL Wishes You Weren't

2008-12-08T18:20:00.000-08:00

Someone named Anonymous commented on my "How to Tell your Infertile Friends You're Pregnant" posting tonight. She broke the news to her infertile sister-in-law (SIL) that she's pregnant, but her SIL won't acknowledge the pregnancy. She wonders what she should do now.

Here is my one-person's opinion on the matter:

1) You've got a tough situation there. It sucks on every side: sucks to be the infertile SIL, sucks to be the fertile SIL. No matter what happens, there is no perfect solution, and no one will come out of this perfectly happy.

2) You are luckier than she is because you get a baby and an awkward family situation, and she just gets an awkward family situation. You can keep your irritated hat on (hey, our feelings are what they are), as long as you put your compassionate hat on top of it.

3) If I were the one pretending my sister-in-law weren't pregnant, it would be because I thought I would start to cry the second I acknowledged she was. Your SIL might think it's better to say nothing than to act sad or mad. It's kind of an extension of "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all": "if you can't say anything without crying, shut your trap."

Or her silence might be a sign that she's in denial about the situation. If she doesn't acknowledge the pregnancy to you, she doesn't have to acknowledge it to herself. As my therapist has told me, sometimes denial comes in handy.

No matter what, I am a firm believer in getting things out in the open, though, so since she's not likely to take the lead, I think it's up to you. The next time you see her, take her aside and tell her how much you care about her, and how much you hate that you're both in this situation. Ask her what she's feeling, and what you can do to make it easier on her. If you don't think this would go over well in person, write her a letter to that effect... on real paper with a real envelope (it will seem more thoughtful than email).

Once you get the communication flowing, if you can, take your cue from her as to how much she wants to be around you or talk about pregnancy and infertility.

Short of that, I'm not sure what else to tell you. So I'll open it up to my girls.

Ye women of this hard-knocks community, what advice do you have for Anonymous?

The Other Part of the Journey

2008-12-07T05:08:00.001-08:00

There is more to the journey toward the light at the end of the canal than just my emotions and physical changes. We also have to get our house in order. And that is not a metaphor.

For a very long time, this is what we have had in our guest room, the room that will become the buns' room.

Full-sized brass bed from my single days (and from my parents' married days before that) with a stunningly good mattress

A large Ikea dresser that was so heavy when I got it that I had to take apart the box in the trunk of my car and carry each board, one by one, to my first DC apartment. It has gone through three paint jobs and now has a purposefully splotchy part-colorful-part-white look that made my mom cry out, "Oh, what happened?" when she first saw it.

A LARGE filing cabinet, probably fire proof, the likes of which I dreamed of for a long time, holding old electric bills and transcripts and other stuff that I need quick access to.

An armoire from Ikea that makes up for the fact that there is no real closet in the room. (It has a door with access to the master bedroom closet, but we've hogged all the actual storage space therein). The babies currently have very good access to our winter shoes.

An Ikea "Robin"-style bookcase that is mostly full of law books. In particular, we have a stunning collection of 2004 Patent Bar Exam review materials. Anyone want them? Never opened...

Two prodigious piles of framed artwork that I removed from the stairway when we were getting our new mattress delivered. I never put them back up, so we have a very pretty nail collection on the stairway walls now. The art is in two and a half piles on the floor.

The beautiful Pottery Barn rug that I bought with my friend Leyla in New York in 1993. The cat has torn it up some, but it remains in tact in my heart. The function this rug now serves is to get bunched up from all the stuff placed on it and then moved, so that it makes large, trip-ready waves in the floor.

Two big, flat boxes that will render two baby cribs once assembled.

One Pack 'n' Play that my brother got from his neighbor. This "portable" crib and playpen is in a duffel bag with a few accessories piled on top of it. Not very stackable.

A laundry basket full of plastic coat hangers. Just 'cause.

Approximately seven clear plastic bins of my non-pregnant clothes, which should be transferred to the attic. The hold up on that is that the attic floor is covered with plywood on one side, and covered with no floor on the other side. When James saw it he declared that we were going to fix it before the babies came. Sigh. So the seven bins remain downstairs, capped off by the camping lantern we use whenever we venture into the attic.

Four red and green plastic bins that I've transferred our Christmas stuff into. That was a real splurge: I've always thought it was silly to have Christmas-colored storage boxes, but in an attic like ours, I've come around to thinking it is genius. So I have plopped one cardboard box, duly packed last year with Christmas decorations, into each bin. Those bins will be opened and used soon, but in the meantime, why not keep them in the babies' cave?

Two delightful bouncy seats that we received from our registry, each assembled and now holding a teddy bear. Those are perched on the bed.

A plastic bin full of baby and maternity stuff that my friend Julie gave me years ago, which I had to hide for a long time because they were too sad. That's now on the bed.

A weathered cardboard file box full of infant clothes that my brother and I wore as premies. Very polyester-heavy, with a few knitted items that may or may not disintegrate when worn.

An extra U-shaped "boppy" pillow from my parents-in-law-in-law (my bro's parents-in-law). Apparently my brother and sister-in-law had plenty of boppies, and us, we are going to need more than one.

So would you like to know whether the room is large enough to accommodate all the stuff that's in it? It's not.

Last evening while I was taking one of my many naps of the day, I heard some, well, activity on the stairs. My husband in shining armor was singlehandedly taking the armoire downstairs to the basement, which is to be the new guest room. It is not an activity that can be slept through. I am pleased and proud to say that the armoire is now safely two stories below us, albeit upside down, and required only minor podiatric repairs from its trip.

When I look at the huge gap that the armoire's absence leaves in the room, it makes me want to buy more furniture. Maybe a rocking chair?

Take your Daughters to Work Day

2008-12-04T10:59:00.001-08:00

Today was Take your Daughters to Work Day. For me, at least. After six months of this pregnancy sickness, I finally had enough energy to start a part-time job. And someone, for some reason, agreed to hire me part time for a job they were looking to fill at 40 hours per week.

Twenty hours per week now, four hours every day, I will be working at a law firm as a contract attorney, reviewing documents written in Portuguese. It's thrilling! It's professional work, mingled with the fun of speaking other languages. I get to dress in people-clothes (Ladies 3X, specifically; I've grown out of the universe of maternity wear) and brush my hair and talk to people in an office about grown-up things. I forgot how good I am at listening in on conference calls!

And through it all, my buns came with me. They actually let them into the conference room with me. We sat there and, the two times we were collectively going to pass out, we surreptitiously ate some goldfish crackers and drank some emergency apple juice. We maintained the open, alert, and serious look on my face. We nodded at appropriate times and I even asked two questions. And then at the end of our measly little shift, we announced Sianora and came home for a nap.

I love every bit about this. I'm pretty sure the buns do, too. I'm pretty sure they want to be attorneys now.

I'll see what I can do to discourage that. After the nap.

Life, Death, and What to be Happy About

2008-12-03T10:34:00.000-08:00

I feel that I am existing in a swirl of life and death. I have talked about the cycle of life before, and infertility's place in it. But these days the deaths seem to be catching up with the births and it's time to get philosophical again.

In one week about a month ago, a good friend had a major fertility setback, and another friend died of cancer. I felt like a boulder-sized paperweight had squashed me flat. I felt so terrible for both of them. In neither case was there anything I could do; sometimes even crafts can't right the wrong. In neither case did the catastrophe really have anything to do with me. My codependent self yearned to take responsibility for Making it All Better, but there was absolutely nothing to do.

In reference to the infertility pain, especially, I thought through my grief, "Whom can I ask advice from here? Who would know the best thing for me to do to help?" The answer, it turned out, was me. I remembered back to the advice I'd given other people about dealing with an infertile me. Support the person who is in pain. Write to her. Let her know you're behind her no matter what. So I did that. And then a few days later I awoke one night with a gasp: I had forgotten something. The rest of that advice was to keep your distance if you're pregnant. Let her set the tone and pace of the communication. Once you're displayed your support, get the hell out of the picture, because your presence cannot do anything but hurt. This realization, now that I was on the other side, sliced me to the core.

And so I finally sat down and came to the conclusion that there's nothing I can do to anaesthetize the world at large. Pain is out there. There's nothing more I can do about it.

That was a biggie. It was humbling, and it felt like a great defeat.

It made me rethink this blog.

"Achieving Conceiving." I used to think that once a couple conceived a child, all the hard stuff would be over. I was right in terms of how it feels to go through the world and see pregnant women and babies abounding. It's a whole lot better now. Not only do I not wince at the sight, but I get treated like royalty. People are extra solicitous and respectful of me. I've become very very special to a world of strangers.

What I didn't know when I started and named the blog was that conceiving does not equal having a baby (I learned about miscarriage from my friend Laughing4Heir). The physical rigor of pregnancy also surprised me, as did the fact that a lot of my existence became dictated by disabling nausea and fatigue. I also learned post-conception about what it's like to move to the other end of the infertility boat: the side where you aren't fighting for life, but your comrades on the other end are. There was plenty of stuff to say, but I resisted writing about it all; the infertility community doesn't want to hear about pregnancy experiences.

But I looked back at my blog through a lawyer's eyes and was glad to note that I'd put a tag line on the blog, in addition to the name. "Chronicling the Journey to the Light at the End of the Canal." Whew. Fine print that would allow me to continue my writing, even though I'd already achieved/conceived. But could I do it? What would my internal feeling-protecting censors let me say?

Let's review this entry so far:

1) New life abounds and fresh death abounds.
2) No matter what I do, I cannot protect everyone from pain.
3) My blog's focus must shift from discussing conception to discussing the rest of the pregnancy journey. Lots more needs to be said.

Enter Iona.

Iona Kathleen Bailey is my twin brother's new baby girl. She is sixteen days old today. I love her more than anything. I look at her and cannot wait for her to wake the hell up (she's a sleepy baby), grow, delight us with getting to know her, and become our future. I can't fathom that my little bitty brother helped make a new person with our family's DNA in it. I can't wait to see a mixture of him and his wife at work.

At Thanksgiving dinner, my stepfather said that he was thankful for Iona and the cousins I'll be producing for her soon. He said that the births of these babies gave him perspective on dealing with his own mom's final days. Me, when I heard that Mrs. Bollyky passed away, I pled with her son: please tell me that she knew I was pregnant. He reassured me that she knew.

Turns out that the world needs babies. Babies are the only thing that can counteract death. They are essential. As a former infertile woman, I need to acknowledge that. My desire to protect my infertile friends and readers from pain may be noble, but it's never going to shield them entirely. In the meantime, the rest of us need to hear about the babies. Just like we need to reproduce, as I've discussed ad nauseum, we need our loved ones to reproduce. We need an infusion of life wherever it comes from. As Iona teaches me, babies fill you with an automatic love and joy, hope and expectation.

So this light, this blog, is coming out from under the bushel. I owe it to you, I owe it to myself, and I owe it to our two wonderful, kick-happy buns in the oven.

Let this Christmas season be about life.

The Point of Acupuncture

2008-12-03T10:07:00.000-08:00

I have a new friend out there: BakingABaby, who commented on my Thanksgiving post. A fellow traveler in infertility, she asked why I stopped acupuncture after my first failed attempt at IVF. Here is the answer.

I've been guilty of piling on so many stress-relief activities in the past that I have actually gone a little crazier than I was before I started. One example is the meditation class I took once that made me hyperventilate with stress once a week because I had to drive there in rush hour and find a non-existent parking place in downtown DC. Boy, did that not help.

Like destressing, de-infertilizing can consume one's life. On my first go'round on IVF, I took the shots, took a leave of absence from my work, joined a gym, went to therapy, and did acupuncture. My acupuncturist told me that acupuncture could help almost any infertility-related condition except blocked tubes. That was what I supposedly had. So that made the acupuncture mainly for stress-relief, just like a lot of the other activities.

When the second IVF round happened, I had taken a full-time job again because we needed the money to keep up our habit. Right after I got my first BFN (Big Fat Negative), my beloved acupuncturist had moved to Dallas. I didn't want to spend the time, money, or psychic energy on finding another acupuncturist, then scheduling and keeping one more appointment a week. So in the interest of simplifying my life, I cut out acupuncture.

What was the point?

That's an acupuncture joke.

I do still believe in acupuncture, like I believe in most traditional Chinese medicine. I think those old medicine men and women, over thousands of years, have figured out a lot of stuff that we modern ludites can only guess at. The National Institutes of Health are conducting studies to try to figure out why acupuncture works; what the "chi" really is. Some medical insurance plans are (reluctantly) paying for acupuncture treatments because it seems to work well as preventative medicine, and is a lot easier and less invasive and more effective -- oh, and cheaper -- than Western treatments.

What makes me a fan personally is that years ago I saw an acupuncturist as part of my manic anti-stress regime. After a "cleansing" where he stuck about 10 or 15 needles in my back and left them there for a half an hour, I had an incredible experience. That afternoon I was driving on the parkway and felt a sensational rush of wellbeing. It felt like the fog cleared and the air was suddenly fresh, clean, and embued with lots of extra oxygen. I felt like I could do anything. In that instant, I made plans to write a book and do all sorts of lofty crafts projects that would save the world. After a while the feeling faded and I went back to normal. But damn. There's nothing like a drug-free euphoria.

If acupuncture can do that, why can't it make your ovaries work too?

Below is a picture of my friend's new little baby, conceived after three years with the help of Chinese medicine. Let's ask him what he thinks. When he wakes up.

Mrs. Bollyky, or Listening to Your Body

2008-11-29T07:52:00.000-08:00

It was August of 2002, and Mrs. Bollyky (/BOY-kee/) and I were sitting on the back patio of their house in Connecticut, looking at the thousand shades of green in the back yard. “You have to listen to your body,” she told me.

I was a stress case. I had just finished a year of law school, working full time and going to school at night. My digestive system had all but given up on me, my chest felt so tight that I couldn’t get a full breath, and I saw no way to make it better. It never dawned on me that I could alter the path that I’d chosen, that I could be a little kinder to myself. If I let up on myself, my body would let up on me.

“Listen to your body. Your body knows.”

I got the same advice when I finally got pregnant. On my first trip to the OB – I could call the doctor the OB instead of the gynecologist! – we were talking about exercising while carrying twins. “Listen to your body.” When my body could handle walks or yoga or whatever trendy pregnancy exercise regimen there was out there, I’d know.

My body has let me know that it cannot handle anything like that. I am going into the third trimester soon, and I have experienced only a few weeks when I felt confident enough to walk down the block, sure that I would be able to get back to the house. I signed up for yoga and didn’t go to a single class because I happened to throw up on my way out the door every time. My small second trimester window of “I’m pretty sure I can stand up for 20 minutes” is closing.

Things have gotten dramatic here in this body. Earlier this week I woke up at 4:00 a.m. with a ligament spasm in my abdomen. The ligament that runs from the groin through the top of the uterus had stretched and stretched (at Baby A’s kicking insistence) until it could stretch no more. It popped back into place like a rubber band. It was like a Charlie horse – the cramp that affects your legs in the middle of the night. But Charlie horses in one’s abdomen and pelvis in the middle of the night are scary for pregnant women. Fortunately, by the time I threw up everything had relaxed and I could go back to sleep. (The adventure with the doctor on call is another blog entry).

The next night I woke up at 2:00 with what felt like gas pain right at the base of my rib cage. As I bounced around trying to dislodge any mercenary bubble, the pain became so intense that I threw up again. That shook things up enough in my abdomen that I felt better. The same thing happened two nights later, but I knew the throwing up trick this time. And since I can throw up pretty much on command (I squat at the toilet and voila!) now I know the system. Sure, it resembles bulimia, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

Horrifying pain and nausea aside, I can still say that every square inch of my body has changed throughout this adventure. My hair is fuller (the next stage will be for it to fall out). My face, shoulders, and neck are retaining “fat reserves.” My sense of smell is more acute, even as my sinuses swell up and make me snore – more. I am growing “skin tags” on my neck, arms, and chest. No explanation why, but apparently it’s normal. My chest, well, I won’t go into the things that have changed there, but I’ll say that I can think of at least four new weird things. Then we get to my abdomen, which is obviously huge and having lots of stuff going on inside it. I have gas and heartburn and nausea, plus a charming habit of hiccupping. My belly button (yes, the fake one) has become a horizontal scar line in the middle of my pear shape. Stretch marks radiate like rainbows over my hips and are now showing up under my belly.

The twins make themselves known in the middle of this human pear. I feel them squirm often, as if I have some muscle that’s twitching. Occasionally I feel a jab and see my stomach move out of the corner of my eye. My bladder, well, it doesn’t stand a chance as it jockeys with two tiny little girls who are lying on it. My crotch is not a thing that I will discuss in this forum, though come over to my house and I’ll tell you all about it. There I can think of four changes there that I never knew were coming.

My legs are thicker and have stretch marks on the front of my thighs where they meet my trunk, as well as on the backs of my knees. My ankles are occasionally swollen. My feet are not swollen, I think, but they have grown. A recent trip to a shoe store found me graduating to the men’s section. As I left the women’s section, the shoe salesman said, “You’re going to have tall babies!”

That’s the state of my body. I’m listening. It would be hard not to. And I love all the changes that are happening, except for when the pain or nausea is excruciating. Being pregnant sucks physically, but it’s amazing. And it makes me finally, finally, love my body.

While I was going through the two years of infertility, I hated my body. I felt like it had betrayed me. I could think of nothing good about it. It had completely let me down with the most basic human task. One could argue that I should have been good to it, nurtured a relationship with it so it would be happier to reproduce. Yeah. Go get infertile and see if that’s the way you feel about it.

Recently, my focus on bodies has shifted. Now that my body is working as it should, I’ve seen a lot of healthy, vibrant people whose bodies have gotten sick. The people are still themselves, their minds are still them, but their bodies have been taken over by cancer. The persona and the mind have to go to battle. Chemo pulverizes a body’s mutant cancer cells and may or may not leave a body that can bounce back. By definition, it’s devastating. Listen to your body? My God, cancer patients have to almost kill their bodies. Talk about betrayal – the body betrays them, they betray the body. It’s awful.

I have gotten pretty mad at cancer lately. It has claimed a lot of people I know this year, many of them after a very long, very painful struggle. At the beginning of this month, I announced that Fiber of Her Being, my business, was going to give out five free pillows to people undergoing chemotherapy.

I got the Chemo Pillow (later Comfort Pillow) idea from my friend Paul two years ago. His mom, Mrs. Bollyky, the one who told me first to listen to my body, had cancer. “It’s not good, Kay,” I remember him saying. Paul commissioned a cheerful pillow with pictures of her grandchildren on it for Mrs. Bollyky to take to chemotherapy. It would give her both physical and emotional comfort during the grueling hours of treatment. Paul suggested that my business offer a line of Chemo Pillows. I began it. And the pillows have flown off the racks.

It makes me very happy to be able to bring some comfort to people who are going through such tough times. I know what it’s like to have a chronic condition, and I know what it’s like to be scared and to be in pain. I don’t know what it’s like to have my life at stake. But I feel very strongly that I have some skills that can be of use to patients and their families, and by golly, I’m going to do what I can.

In the last couple of months, four recipients of my Chemo pillows have died.

Mrs. Bollyky died this week.

The Bollyky family adopted me back in college. They were very close to each other and enjoyed opening their home to strays. I enjoyed being in a family. I spent a lot of time at their house over the years, and my relationship with them extended past Paul to his parents directly, especially to his mom. She was the sweetest woman you’d ever want to have adopt you.

The last time I saw Mr. and Mrs. Bollyky, it was 2002 and I was staying with them for the weekend while my friend Betsy (whose sweet mom passed away from cancer three weeks ago) got married in a neighboring town. We talked about when the Bollyky parents were young, and matters of life and love. We talked about overcoming stress!

The last time I talked to Mrs. Bollyky on the phone, I told her about my struggles with infertility, and she told me that she had suffered too. She had tried to conceive for years before her three wonderful children finally showed up and her family blossomed into the huge expanse of love that it is now. She assured me that it would all be okay for me, too.

And she was right. My body and my mind, my soul, finally came together. Together they are doing the most miraculous thing that I can think of. They are helping me fulfill my dream and my evolutionary destiny. They’re making people, for heaven’s sake! I couldn’t be happier.

But Mrs. Bollyky’s body betrayed her. She never did anything wrong. She was pure goodness and love, but something bad got a hold of some of her cells, and that was that. She lived to see four grandchildren born, but she won’t get to see them grow up. She spent the last few years of her life frail and in great pain. I hate that. I hate it I hate it I hate it. I just don’t know what to do.

I got Paul’s message yesterday when I came to my desk to find an address. I was sending out one of my Chemo Pillows. This one is going to a pediatric nurse who took care of three sisters, and when they grew up, two of their little boys. She is someone who has devoted her life to helping kids feel better. As I cried about my dear adoptive mother, I gritted my teeth and addressed the package with this next pillow in it.

I don’t know how to conclude this blog entry. I don’t know how to summarize it tidily.

I guess I’ll say that, bodies aside, the life of my soul would not be the same if it weren’t for Mrs. Bollyky.

Thanksgiving

2008-11-27T16:53:00.001-08:00

I'm thankful for my family.

Our New Niece-Baby

2008-11-16T19:39:00.000-08:00

This is not a post for people who are sad to hear about new babies. I am very thankful that we are not in that group because this is GREAT NEWS!

My brother and sister-in-law welcomed the first of a new generation into the family. Iona Kathleen Bailey was born this evening, November 16, 2008, about 8:20 p.m. She is 21 inches long and weighs 8 pounds, 15 ounces: she's just an ounce shy of nine pounds. Though she is a big baby, she is still smaller than our cat. She has long pink fingers and a beautiful pink face crowned with dark black curls. She is named after the abbey on the Scottish Isle of Iona, an important historical site in the history of the Presbyterian Church. Her middle name refers to family: one aunt (Megan Kathleen) and another aunt (me: Katherine). I'm honored.

We love Iona. We LOVE HER!

Mama and baby are both doing marvelously, though I think both could use a snack and then a nap. Congratulations and much love to all involved!

(Mama and baby got to hold hands for the first time)

(James arrived at the hospital and ran into his new niece in the hallway as she was headed toward the nursery)

Great Art

2008-11-12T10:30:00.000-08:00

I'm honored to announce that the twins have already stepped into their (inevitable?) role as artistic muses. My cousin's daughter, Celia, rendered them in this beautiful picture, which came along with a beautiful box of hand-me-downs. We thank them for both, from the bottom of all our hearts!

Blessing 6: Quickening

2008-11-02T09:25:00.001-08:00

According to some cultures, "quickening" is when life starts. It's when the mother starts to feel the flutter of the baby(ies) inside her. Sometimes it starts at 16 weeks or so; our slow little babies finally got quick a couple weeks ago, at about 20 weeks. Now they're downright fast.

We had a visit with them on Thursday at the high-risk obstetrician's office. The ultrasound showed that everybody was in good shape. We had been concerned before about Baby B having an umbilical cord with two blood vessels instead of three: sometimes that comes along with other complications. But Baby B looks great, and Baby A is as sassy as always. Everybody is growing and hearts are thumping away. I even got the experience of feeling a couple kicks at the same time as one of the babies moved on the ultrasound screen.

And then last night we finally had our first big family event. We went to see the Cirque du Soleil, which aside from producing a lot of adrenaline in me, also produced a whole bunch of LOUD music. And the buns woke up. My abdomen vibrated with the sounds of the music and the kicks of the babies. A few times we could even see the kicks from outside my stomach. Amazing. We may actually be pregnant! With miniature people!

November is looking good for our family. We are very, very lucky.

And for our friends who haven't been as lucky, not yet, we love you. And we're behind you, no matter what.

Blessing 5: Twin Set

2008-10-17T10:06:00.000-07:00

I found this picture from last week (Week 19) that I thought I should share with you. It shows the twins together in utero. From left to right (the three big blobs), what you're seeing is belly/ribs, head in profile looking up, and then head of other twin from the top, also looking up. The two little blobs that sit right above either side of the big head blob in the middle are hands: one from one twin and one from the other.

Isn't that amazing?

The Love of James's Life

2008-10-17T09:49:00.001-07:00

I was pretty sure, until recently, that I was the love of James's life. Now I know that there are two. While I'm still confident that I'm in the Top Two, I really don't know who's first any more.

This weekend we went to visit our Godsons and their parents (coincidentally, our friends). We had such a good time that, as usual, I was as reluctant to leave as I am to leave my grandmother's house when I visit there.

What was different about this visit was that our first Godson was three. He's always been younger in the past. He has a one-year-old brother who is the cat's meow. But the little one doesn't roar. The older one does. And so does James.

James and Godson One spent the weekend reading books, putting together puzzles, and running around the house roaring like bears and tigers. It's been a very long time since I've seen James have this much fun.

It warms my heart that he'll be the father of my children. You see, James is the love of my life, and he just keeps giving me more reasons why.

Little Girls

2008-10-10T10:24:00.001-07:00

Some women are drippin' with diamonds,

Some women are drippin with pearls.

Look at me, look at me.

Look at what I'm drippin' with: little girls!

--------------------

We are proud to announce that we will be having twin girls (not identical). And also that I'm not actually dripping little girls yet, but come February or March of next year, watch out.

The pictures from this week's ultrasound show that everybody is developing well and normally. Baby A is the one on the top (facing the camera) and Baby B is, as usual, posing beautifully in profile.

Absence of Pain

2008-10-08T21:56:00.000-07:00

I offended some people on the post about the absence of pain. I'm sorry about that. I didn't mean to. I just mean that as things change, feelings change, but they don't go very far away.

The 19-week Belly!

2008-10-06T21:24:00.001-07:00

Here's me with my "moderate sized" baby bump. Happy as hell.

The week-by-week pregnancy book said I should start to think about getting some maternity clothes. I told the book to get with the program: I already grew out of my first set and am on to plus-sized maternity clothes.

Prenatal Noga

2008-10-03T07:27:00.000-07:00

Eeons ago we were sitting at our friends' dinner table in Boston. We had been trying to conceive for more than six months, and I said that while I wanted to lose weight, I'd rather wait until I was pregnant so I could take prenatal yoga. I didn't want to start a different exercise class because I was sure I'd have to cancel it very soon.

Our friend Chris, ignoring the social rule that you're always supposed to poo-poo your friends' references to their own fatness, said maybe I should lose weight first and then try to get pregnant. Well, he didn't know that I was a whoppin' 34 and had no time to lose at all. I was going to get pregnant RIGHT AWAY.

A year and some months later, I joined a gym. I was still not pregnant, and I had gained more weight from my year of hormone (horror/moan) treatments. The gym featured a WONDERFUL aerobics class in the 1980s Olivia Newton-John style, the kind of exercise I'd been raised on. I loved it. Loved it loved it loved it.

And so I went six times and then got pregnant. Maybe Chris knows what he's talking about.

After a few months, when the dust and nausea settled and I stopped being so bedridden, I found a prenatal yoga class at the hospital center a mile from my house, where all my prenatal care happens anyway. I quickly signed up. Very excited. It was scheduled for every Tuesday morning for six weeks.

Week 1. I had a "quick" ultrasound appointment that morning in the high-risk doctor's office, right around the corner from where the yoga was to be held. When I ended up vomiting on myself on the exam table during the ultrasound, I decided it was not a good morning to do any upside down poses that day. I skipped the class.

Week 2. I wanted to load up on breakfast so I wouldn't be hungry/weak during the class. Three minutes before I had to leave the house, I wolfed down my huge number of vitamins. Gagging on the eighth pill or so, I threw up on the floor of three rooms of our house. Every room downstairs except the bathroom, in fact. I opted against going to yoga right after that. Instead, I sat on the couch and cried.

Week 3. I had a regular OB check up at the hospital before the yoga class. It was about an hour of activity from the time I walked out my door to the end of the appointment. The yoga class would start in five minutes, and I was just waiting on the note from my doctor that said I was healthy enough to attend yoga. (I had not quite made it to pick this note up before either of the previous classes, for the reasons stated above).

As the receptionist handed me the folded letter documenting my physical competence, I swooned with weakness. I sat in the doctors' lobby eating my goldfish crackers and drinking my water, until I was strong enough to go to the Starbucks in the hospital lobby and get some apple juice. That was finally enough sugar and starch to allow me to take the elevator one more floor down, to my car in the parking lot. I drove a mile home and collapsed for the next three hours. Yeah, no yoga. Noga.

There are three more yoga classes. We'll try again Tuesday. Or maybe we won't.

This has been a vigorous blogging session. I think I have to lie down.

Blessing 4: The Outer Trappings

2008-09-27T01:17:00.001-07:00

As I am an expert in all things reproduction, I can tell you definitively that there are two realms of pregnancy: the biological and the cultural. We'll call them the inner and the outer. You'd think the inner would be more important, since it really is where the baby-making happens, but to someone who has suffered infertility, the zingers really come with the outer.

Several years ago I finally got the chance to try to make a baby, something I'd wanted viscerally for over a decade. So I launched into things blindly, based simply on my gynecologist's advice that I was most fertile 14 days before my period. Up until then, I really didn't know timing had anything to do with it.

And so began a journey of peeing on sticks (two kinds; both expensive), acrobatic maneuvers, charting basal body temperature, and being disappointed once a month. Then came a little more reading about hormones and body infrastructure, the details of the menstrual cycle, and some oral medication. From there we proceeded to invasive testing on both of us, then learning how to get a baby going from outside you. There are shots to the belly and butt (self-administered or husband-administered), reconstituting powdered medication, screwing with your body's own endocrine system, going to get your blood tested and your uterus ultrasounded every day, and finally leaving it up to Dr. Frankenstein to make it happen in a lab.

And that, because I was lucky, was only the beginning. What I thought was going to be a downhill slide from IVF turned out to be a very difficult trek through the desert. I won't say it's been an uphill battle, but it's no waterslide. Pregnancy can mess with your hormones as effectively as hormone shots. And the bundles of joy inside you can make you a constant threat for projectile vomit. In my case, as they subvert all my energy and nutrients, I've been left almost bedridden for months. For my trouble (and the trouble of my caretakers), we've gotten to see them move and develop on the ultrasound, watch my belly grow, and dream about our growing family.

The inner part is a dream come true.

But it's the outer part that I've actually been dreaming of since I was 25. And bizarrely enough, that's the part that feels much more real.

Out there in life, in the grocery store, in the airport, and among your friends, you see pregnancies and babies happen all the time. And for the most part, nobody is talking about the inner realm of pregnancy. Not to me. Certainly not the strangers in the airport.

For over ten years, ever since I felt a tingle in my hand walking down the street in New Orleans and knew that a toddler's hand should be inside mine, I have looked at pregnant ladies with awe and envy. Here's what I knew about them:

Pregnant ladies get to buy clothes in maternity stores.
Pregnant ladies get to have ultrasounds with the wand on top of their bellies instead of inside their bodies.
Pregnant ladies get baby showers.
Strangers put their hands on pregnant ladies' swelling abdomens.
Strangers ask pregnant ladies, "When are you due?"

As you can see, I developed a very comprehensive understanding of the pregnant experience.

Because I was a girl who didn't really know what ovulation was until 2006, I wasn't expecting any of the inner stuff. But the outer stuff was a different story.

When I learned that I was pregnant, I could barely believe it. I heard it in a roundabout way from the pharmacist, so the news came as more of a puzzle than a declaration. I have thought and said that learning I was having twins, on the ultrasound table holding James's hand, was the happiest day of my life. But truthfully, I think the happiest day of my life was the day I finally had enough strength (barely) to go to the Motherhood Maternity clothing store in the mall.

I had literally been on the outside, looking in, to the maternity clothes shops in malls for years and years. I went in once, very briefly, feeling like a fraud, and quickly walked out again. Lots of times, I stood outside the window, looked at the clothes, and had to fight back tears. When I finally got to go to one legitimately, I squeezed James's hand again. As we got closer to the entrance my nauseated self started hopping with excitement. When we got inside among the racks of clothes, I could barely breathe. I looked around at the other shoppers, with bellies the same as or bigger than mine. I belonged. I wasn't a fraud. I was buying maternity clothes for myself because I was pregnant! (In the end, James bought them for me because I felt woozy and had to go sit outside and eat a granola bar).

Several weeks ago we ventured out of the house to go to an orchard outside of the metro area. We've picked apples there before, but this time we went to just go buy some. Actually, we went just for the drive. When we got out of the car, I was wearing one of my Motherhood Maternity outfits -- the kind that leaves no doubt in the viewer's mind that the wearer is pregnant. The woman selling the apples said, "Oh, when are you due!?" I reeled. I told her March, and she looked surprised. I was so big! I explained that it was twins. She was delighted. I was way more delighted.

Recently my neighbor Wendy came over with her new roommate to visit the pregnant invalid next door (me). She was so excited for me that she asked if she could touch my belly. I welcomed it. She spoke to the babies inside. The experience spoke to my heart.

I was going to wrap up here with my conclusion that -- for all I've wanted an actual baby (or babies!) on the inside -- what really makes me happy is the outer trappings. Those have been what I've known for much longer, and wished for for much longer.

But then, two minutes ago, at 4:42 a.m., I was sitting back, contemplating what to write next, and I had my hands on my belly. I have been concentrating recently, trying to feel the babies move around. Up until now, I haven't felt anything other than my pulse. But this time, I wonder. Maybe it was the glass of water that I just drank. But maybe it was my children.

I'll be damned. They're on the inside.

They really are!

Blessing 3: Loss of Loss of Hope

2008-09-22T12:34:00.000-07:00

This picture is of me at a baby's birthday party. And I look happy, don't I? We had a grand time, with me lying down for most of it at the end. A good friend kicked a bottle of beer so it spilled in my hair. It was a beautiful day in the park for a beer hair-wash. We had cake and counted strollers. I broke the twin news loudly and proudly.

The last time I went to a one-year-old's birthday party, I left in tears. That was almost exactly 5 years ago, before I knew I was infertile, before I had even met James. There is nothing like a party full of happy babies and parents to make you feel sad.

I had a few experiences this weekend that involved cooing at cute children. I went to the grocery store with James on Saturday but lacked the strength to go into the actual store. I stayed in the car and people-watched outside a string of family restaurants at the strip mall. There was a little girl who was tired of holding her bunny, so the dad tucked its pink head into its back pocket, and they preceded with the bunny's anthropomorphic, decapitated-looking body flopping against his rear end. Another daddy showed a little girl a balloon that had floated way into the sky. They speculated that it would go to outerspace, and maybe Curious George could get it while he was up there. I saw mothers who had not gotten their figures back, walking by with brand-new babies in brand-new strollers.

And my reaction to all of this was, "Awww."

Pregnancy has innoculated me against the pain of the outside world. It has been years since I have seen all these sights and not bristled and shrunk. It has been years since I have not felt, every day, like I am being left behind. Now seeing multiple generations of people together doesn't instill a fear in me that I will never have children. It just reminds me what's good.

I am so, so thankful.

And the sexes ARE...

2008-09-17T10:02:00.000-07:00

Indeterminate.

When we went for our monthly sonogram yesterday, they said it was too soon to tell. It's a shame, because last time they told us they'd tell us this time. Doh. How can we know whether we'll love our children?

(You must know I'm kidding).

As usual, Baby A gave us some trouble in the photography department. Like during the last ultrasound, when it refused to show us its neck so we could have it measured for abnormalities, this time it eschewed the camera's lense again. It turned its back on us and when we begged, finally turned right to stare us in the face with its skeletal little stare. That little kid is a handful.

We love Baby A.

We also love Baby B. Baby B, it should be noted, is very cooperative and poses like a champ. See its sweet little profile?

Fetal development is fun. The babies are starting to look like babies, even though they weigh only 4 and 5 ounces each. Their bodies, from head to rump, are about six inches long, and their heads are about 3 cm in diameter.

I think they are about the size of baby talapoin monkeys, the monkeys in the New Orleans Zoo that struck me as genetic mixtures of squirrels and humans. When I pointed them out to my great aunt Dotty and asked if she thought they looked human, she said, "Not anybody I know." Apparently her social circle is limited.

Me, my social circle is open and looking to grow. I can't wait to meet these little humanoids. Five and a half months and counting...

Blessing 2: Time Off

2008-09-17T08:26:00.000-07:00

I'm disabled. I don't mean differently abled; I mean incapacitated. I have lost capacity. It's not something I'm used to.

Within a week of learning that I was pregnant, at the end of June, I started to get woozy whenever I stood up. A week after that, the feeling turned to nausea. If I were lying down (and not hungry), I was fine. If I sat up, or God forbid tried to walk somewhere, the nausea would come back. The way I understand it, I was subject to low blood pressure (the babies were taking my blood from me) and low blood sugar (they were taking my sugar, too).

It would have been okay if I had been able to remain in bed, but I couldn't. I wasn't working. I had no responsibilities outside the house and few inside it. But I started getting hungry at least once an hour. Desperately hungry. Hunger made me nauseous too.

And so at least once an hour I had to plan out in my head something that I could grab quickly and eat in bed. According to my "anti-nausea diet and lifestyle" instructions from my doctor, I was to have both sugar and protein in every snack to stabilize my blood sugar. So I would get a plan (apple and peanut butter, say), then dash out of bed to go realize it. I would slosh some water over the apple. I would grab the peanut butter, a knife, and a paper towel. If I were unlucky enough to be thirsty, I would start filling a cup with water and hope I could keep standing long enough for the cup to be filled. And then with superhuman speed I would sprint back to the couch or bed, lie flat on my back, practice deep breathing, and hope that my system would equalize before I had to throw up.

It was glamorous, to say the least.

All of my meals and snacks, for a full two months, were eaten lying on my back. I became devoted to straws and napkins. I have spilled yogurt on the neck of every garment I own. Once I burned the back of my neck and shoulder with a little chunk of chicken and a noodle from some soup. That was nice.

Confident that I would get better soon, I made a few plans. One by one, I cancelled them. I counted the days till the end of the first trimester, when I would definitely be better.

I am now about a month in to the second trimester, the time when some women feel exhilarated, better than ever. I am not feeling exhilarated; I'm not feeling better than ever. Fortunately, I have reduced my vomiting significantly, and I am much better able to stand up -- sometimes for an hour at a time! But I am beat.

Except for my utter fatigue, every other one of my symptoms lines up exactly with my pregnancy book. Expanding ribcage? Check. Stronger fingernails? Check. Nasal congestion? Check. Never has such a bizarre, new, weird condition in my body been so by-the-book.

But what about the fatigue? What about the fact that I've been waiting for months to be able to go back to work? What about the 15-minute errands that do me in for the rest of the day? My OB tested me for anemia and other conditions, my bloodwork came back fine, and she said I was just pregnant with twins, so I should listen to my body. I asked my high-risk maternal-fetal specialist whether I should be concerned about my desperately tired state. He said it was normal in pregnant women, and especially women pregnant with multiple babies.

That was yesterday. I came back home from that appointment and went to sleep for a long time. As usual. When I woke up, I saw that a book I ordered from Amazon.com had arrived: When You're Expecting Twins, Triplets, or Quadruplets. And it all made sense.

Turns out, pregnancy with twins+ is significantly different from pregnancy with a single baby. Supported by loads of data, the book made the case that nothing is more important in the health of newborns than time in the womb. How to prevent premature labor and other complications that would force multiple babies out? LIE DOWN. The book recommends that expectant mothers in this situation stop working and traveling at 24 weeks (that's 8 more weeks for me) and take three naps a day, plus a full night's sleep. Up until then, the more time we can rest rather than work, the better. Ten to twenty hours of work a week should be the upper limit.

Finally, something legitimized my need to rest!

Two days ago, when I attempted ONE task in the whole day (buying cat food at the pet supply store), I found myself inevitably thwarted. Seeing three whole aisles of catfood, I sat down on a big bag of dogfood and called James. It would be impossible to walk through three aisles. I thought about poor Central American women who had to walk miles and miles of tough mountain terrain every day to get a bucket of water for their homes. How could they do it when they were pregnant? What would happen to women who didn't have the cushy life I had? I wonder how the human race has gone on for so long.

I have been blessed, BLESSED, with the ability to take time off from work. And my mom has come over almost every day for months to do laundry, wash dishes, and feed me. James has done a double share of grocery shopping, errand-running, and invalid-attending. My whole family has been very doting. When I wondered aloud what women would do if they didn't have this support, if their normal duties continued as usual, my cousin Ashley said, "they just do what they have to do." The very thought makes me tired.

How have I gotten so lucky?

How to Tell Your Infertile Friends You're Pregnant

2008-09-08T10:20:00.000-07:00

In the last few days, I've found out about two pregnancies. James confessed one evening that he'd been keeping something from me: two friends of his had a baby last year. He didn't tell me. I have to say I was glad. It would have been hard to take back then.

Then yesterday some other friends of ours whom we hadn't seen in a while called to congratulate us on our pregnancy, and tell us that they're expecting again this winter. They hadn't wanted to broach the topic. Again, I have to say I was glad I hadn't found out before, before I got pregnant myself.

The nicest thing the world could do for infertile couples is to stop reproducing. That would be a really kind gesture. Too bad it's insane. And impossible. The next to nicest thing would be for people to wait until the infertile couple is pregnant to break the news, start showing, or have their babies. But the same problems apply here, too.

As I discussed when I first started this blog, infertile people -- particularly infertile women -- are of two minds about other people's pregnancies. On the one hand, they're probably genuinely happy that their friends or family are having a baby. On the other, no matter what, they are at least equally sad to be reminded they they're not having a baby themselves. And while it's easier not to tell the infertile couple about successful pregnancies at all, it's gotta be done eventually. Worse than having to shoulder the bad good news is an infertile woman's feeling left out of her friends' lives. Yeah, it's complicated.

I want to tell you the story of how one couple did everything exactly right. That's my brother and sister-in-law.

They found out they were pregnant this spring, and were ready to tell the world in May, right when James and I were waiting to see if our second IVF had worked. They waited a few days and hoped we would find out good news before they broke theirs. My brother wrote me an email that week, saying he thought I was the "Greatest American Hero," not to be confused with the 1980s series. I thought that was really sweet.

It was a Wednesday when we found out our bad news. We told our families. Everybody was sad, but I felt eerily okay. As a student of my own psyche, I knew I was in a state of denial. I kept saying, "Yeah, of course it was negative: isn't it always?" I knew that a shoe would fall at some point and I would collapse into sobs. Probably in public, because I seem to like public crying.

On Sunday we had plans for a family gathering, a celebration of multiple birthdays. The day before it, I got a call from my brother. He sounded nervous. I listened. "We have some news. It's news about Erin..." I knew what was coming. "And the news is that she's pregnant." He didn't apologize exactly, but it was clear he knew he was telling us bad news. He said he wanted to tell me before we saw each other the next day at my mom's. He wanted to give us time to get used to the idea. I was grateful. Very grateful. I told him genuinely that I was happy they'd had an easy time getting pregnant; they didn't need the kind of drama that we had had. I told him I would take some time and get used to the idea and see them later.

But what happened was that I got off the phone and started crying. I wasn't crying about their pregnancy; I was crying about my own. The shoe had dropped. Boy, did I blubber. The next day, I couldn't go to the birthday party because I couldn't stop crying. It wasn't that I didn't want to see my beautiful pregnant SIL; it was that I knew that my teary waterfall wasn't exactly going to make her feel comfortable. Nobody wanted me to be sad, and they would hate to see it, so I took the time to grieve. My family is wonderful, and they all understood.

From that point, it took only about two more months for me to get pregnant. We had the pregnant couple over once in the meantime. After not talking for a while about the elephant (sorry, Erin) in the room, I asked her some questions about how she was feeling, how the pregnancy was going. I told her I was so sorry that her happy pregnancy came at the same time as pregnancy-related sadness for me. I was sorry it couldn't just be all happy. She said she knew; she was sorry too. And then we rubbed bellies so her baby-dust could rub off on me. It ended up being pretty fun and funny. And I think it might have been just the thing we needed.

Within a month, I was pregnant. And now it's really fun to hang out and compare bellies (see the picture post below). I couldn't have planned it any better at all.

I thank my brother and sister-in-law for caring about me so much, for being so kind and sensitive towards us. I thank them for giving us advance warning before we saw them, and for being brave enough to tell us, and thoughtful enough not to tell us in person. I thank them for understanding when we had to be sad, even in the midst of our happiness for them. And I thank them for letting us set the pace for how much we saw them, and how much talking about baby stuff we did NOT do when it was such a sore subject.

Now if their baby comes a month late and ours come a month and a half early, we could still beat 'em.

So here's a review, for use in your life. When you have to tell an infertile friend that you're pregnant, here are some tips:

- Don't do it in person. Your friend will need to be sad for herself even while she is happy for you. It's hard for her to make her face look happy when she's so conflicted. Let her get her bearings before you see her in person. Email is a very good method.

- Speak directly to her and acknowledge her pain. This means, don't do it in a mass email. Tell her (or email her alone) before you tell the rest of the world en masse. Go ahead and spit out the news, but don't be overly giddy about it. Tell her you won't forget how hard this is for her, and how you'll always support her efforts and be there for her.

- Let her set the pace. Take your cues from her as to how much you should see each other and talk about anything, especially your pregnancy. She might need a leave of absence from you. Trust that she'll come back to you when she's feeling stronger. Please don't take it personally. Her infertility affects everyone, and that means you, too. You're one of many people whose lives are different because of it.

- Don't ignore her and don't forget her. Even as you give her space, send her notes or call occasionally to check on how she's doing, or to let her know you're thinking of her. Invite her to your baby shower, because being excluded sucks, but let her know that she doesn't have to come if it's too hard.

- Ask her before you put her on your mass mailing list. She doesn't need to see the updated ultrasound pictures that you send out... unless she wants to.

That's all. See: nothing to it!

Boy, infertility sucks.

Blessing 1: Finding Out

2008-09-05T10:41:00.000-07:00

While we were waiting to find out if we were pregnant, we took a trip to Rhode Island with my in-laws. I spent a lot of the week under the influence of my continuing IVF shots, sleeping. I also came home a day early, skipping James's drive with his parents back to their house in New York State.

That Monday, June 30, when I was back home alone, I went to the doctor in the early morning for the pregnancy test. They took my blood and I went home and waited. That last day of the Two Week Wait is terrible. There is no way to distract yourself from the anxiety. I'd done been through this wait twice before and it had ended badly both times. I didn't expect this time to be different, but I did hold out that infernal hope. You know, the thing that keeps you hurting because you just can't stop caring, no matter how effective your pessimism.

I expected the phone call around 3:00 or 4:00 that afternoon, because that was the time slot the nurse had for calling patients. But at about 11:30 a.m. my cell phone rang. Caller ID told me it was the specialized pharmacy where I got my IVF drugs. I picked up.

"Ms. Bailey, this is Val at the pharmacy. We were just calling to see when you would like to pick up your Endometrin." Boy, was I surprised. I never heard of Endometrin.

"When did you get this prescription?" I asked. Val said they'd received the prescription from my nurse -- and she said the right name -- earlier that morning.

"Is Endometrin the kind of thing one might take if one were pregnant?" I inquired.

Pause.

"Yes?" she answered tentatively, wondering why I was asking.

"Holy shit," I said.

Pause.

"You're the first person to tell me I'm pregnant. I've been trying for over two years. This is what I've wanted my whole life."

Val got a little worried. "Oh... good!... Um, you might want to call your nurse to confirm, just in case."

Yeah, no kidding. I told her I'd call her back when I sorted this whole thing out. Then I hung up the phone and started the "could this be true" internal dialogue with myself.

On the plus side, when I'd found out I wasn't pregnant the first two times, the nurse told me to "discontinue the medications." There was never an instruction to take something new. That seemed to indicate that I'd be getting a new and different result. Of course, all the pharmacist knew was that she'd gotten a faxed prescription. She didn't actually know my test results, and the person who did -- the nurse -- was the one who could tell me for sure. What if it was a mistake?

I tended to think it wasn't a mistake.

At 1:00 I picked up James from the airport. Instead of popping the trunk and letting him put his suitcase in himself before he got in the passenger seat, I got out to greet him behind the car.

"Hi, Daddy," I said. He smiled, cooed, and then his face changed. He stopped. His eyes got big. They filled up with "are you saying what I think you're saying?" I nodded.

And then we hugged and kissed and laughed and laughed and laughed, right there in the pick-up lane. I dare say we loitered in an area of the airport where they like to keep the traffic flowing. We did the happy dance. We hugged again and laughed laughed laughed.

Later he thought it was prudent to call the nurse, just to be sure. When she didn't pick up, he assured me that I could call the front desk and have her paged. He'd never been aware of a more pressing emergency situation. When we finally found her, she confirmed that it was true: I was pregnant!

In fact, I was "very pregnant." The pregnancy blood test measures the hormone hCG in the system. A positive test is one that comes up with a score of 5 or more. I had a score of something like 1,620. That's greater than 5. That's a whole lot of hormones is what that is. Later I'd find out that it actually represented two concurrent pregnancies in my one body. Twins.

I called the pharmacist that afternoon and told her we'd be by to pick up the Endometrin, which turned out to be the new progesterone supplement that I'd be taking for the first 10 weeks. When we got there, I asked for Val and she came to the half-door window. We screamed and hugged. She gave me a book on motherhood, a picture book with cute photos of animals. I told her I'd never forget her my whole entire life. She made me promise to send her a picture of the baby when it was born. Heck, yeah! I almost asked her to be the Godmother. (Oh, did I mention I'd never met Val before?)

From that moment on, everything was different. Thus began my pregnancy. And I've been confused and giddy ever since. It's been a blessing.

Blessings and Survivors' Guilt

2008-09-05T10:03:00.000-07:00

I saw a made-for-TV movie about two people who survived a fatal airplane crash. The guy sitting next to one of them was vaporized. The person the other had traded seats with didn't make it.Though they walked away unscathed, their lives disintegrated because they felt so guilty, so unworthy to have made it out.

DailyStrength.org, the online support group that provided me a community of infertile friends to compare and commiserate with, made a new sub-group this year called "Pregnancy after Infertility or Loss." That was to shield the still-tryings from the conversations of the newly-pregnant infertility-busters. It was also an acknowledgement that pregnancy after what we've gone through is different than just regular pregnancy.

We have our own set of issues.

The most notable, which I've felt and which I've seen over and over on Daily Strength, is survivors' guilt. Achievers' guilt. Those of us who finally succeed in getting pregnant are left a little bereft. Our dreams have come true. We've crossed that second pink line. We get to move on to experiences and annoyances that were off-limits to us before. We're going to have BABIES!

And we've become the people that used to make us feel so sad.

We have left our friends behind. We have put them in the position that we used to be in: happy for the newly-pregnant, but devastatingly sad for themselves. It's hard to be around friends who make you cry. It's hard to be reminded that other people get what you want. I know that a lot of people have been pulling for James and me, and by golly, they're ecstatic. So shouldn't we be? Don't we owe it to our still-trying friends to at least enjoy the tremendous luck that we've got?

So don't get me wrong: I'm awfully damned happy. I'm so happy I can't even fathom it. How did such monumental pain just seem to work out in the end? How did I wind up pregnant with twins -- the absolutely most wonderful outcome I could ever have not-dared to wish for? Why does it seem so easy, so meant-to-be now, when it was so, so hard for so, so long?

As my mom said when I told her it freaked me out to feel some foreign object in my abdomen whenever I crossed my legs, "Don't overthink it." I know the same applies here. But remember the 65 postings I wrote before this week. Why stop the overthinking now?

The purpose of this blog, as I recall, was to let my world know about what I was going through, what a big thing infertility is. It was to share the interesting ups and downs of invitro fertilization treatments. And it provided me a forum to get my thoughts down and make sense of them outside of my head.

I don't pretend that we're in the clear now. Lots of things could still go wrong, but in our fifteenth week, the odds are that we'll come home with healthy babies next Spring. In the spirit of playing the odds and erring on the side of hopefulness, we're not going to be talking about infertility for a while, if ever again.

So what's the blog for now?

You don't want to hear about the uncensored ravages of pregnancy, although I'll be happy to tell anyone the gruesome changes a body goes through, if they ask. You may or may not be amused by all my vomiting stories. You might not find it all that fascinating to read "Today I watched some more TV and then had a glass of milk."

Well, tough. This blog's educational outreach function may be done, but I like writing. And I've always thought that the details of my life ought to be of utmost interest to strangers and friends alike. So the "chronicle of the journey towards the light at the end of the birth canal" continues. But to keep things in perspective, to allay some of my survivors' guilt, I plan to frame the adventures in terms of blessings.

Never let it be said that I don't feel lucky to throw up in public. And never let it be said that I don't wish the same thing for my still-trying friends, from the bottom of my heart and stomach. I do. More than anything.

Pregnancy Pictures

2008-09-04T09:56:00.000-07:00

You've waited so patiently all these months, so you deserve some pictures.

The bare-belly picture is a close-up view of what happens at 14 weeks, when twins are "barely showing."

The composite shows my progression from 12 to 14 weeks.

And the last pic is me and my sweet and round sister-in-law, who is exactly twice as pregnant as I am (29 weeks, versus 14.5). Hmmm. And yet only half as pregnant.

We're Pregnant With Twins!

2008-08-29T12:10:00.001-07:00

My dear, dear friends,

It is our pleasure to inform you that we are pregnant with twins. By one account (they vary) I'm 14 weeks along, and everyone is doing fine. We've got two little babies below my belly button, about the size of gerbils, with feet and fingernails and the beginnings of all the bodily systems they'll need to be working humans. We could not be happier.

I'll feed you more information as we go along, but in the meantime, let these ultrasound shots give you a concise 4,000 words.

We haven't -- nor will we ever -- forget the long, hard battle with infertility. And we won't forget our friends who are still fighting. But for the moment, let's celebrate one -- no, TWO -- successes, keep vigilant over the next six months, and get ready to welcome these little babies into the world on March 2, 2009.

Love,

Kay and James

Tag: I'm "It"

2008-08-20T15:19:00.000-07:00

I’ve been invited (actually “tagged;” see the rules below) to tell six random things about myself. And who am I to decline an invitation to expound on my favorite subject?

So here they are: six historical moments or characteristics in the “not important but influential” category from my life:

I have a fake belly button. It’s a reasonable facsimile but you can tell it’s fake if you look at it. Instead of looking like the knot of a balloon, it looks like a small tuck with stitch marks along the vertical seam. I got this modification when I was three months old and had a hernia operation. My dear twin brother, David, also has this feature, but don’t think he’ll let you look at it if you ask. Me, I’ll show you. It’s my favorite party trick.

I speak Portuguese. I learned it because a college advisor said that no Latin Americanist should stop at just knowing Spanish. I lived in Brazil for six months, got a scholarship for a free Master’s just for studying Portuguese further, and now am saddled with a huge burden. That is, I was familiar with the Brazilian fruit (and related fruit juice and ginger ale-like soda) guaraná before it became the rage in U.S. energy drinks. Now my biggest pet peeve is hearing it referred to as /gwa RAH nuh/ instead of the Portuguese /gwah rah NAH/. Poor James has to hear me rant every time it’s mispronounced on TV.

I think that education is the most important thing there is. I don’t know why I’m not a teacher, except that I’m already a Latin Americanist/democratization specialist, lawyer, and artist. I hope to be a mother next, but after that I’ll need a fifth career. In the meantime, I serve on the board of a new NGO called the Washington Collaborative for Education. It’s an organization run by two amazing DC public school teachers, and provides summer programs for DC teenagers, to get them ready (and encourage them) to go to college. We just applied for 501(c)3 status from the IRS, so watch out! I may be hitting you up for a tax-deductible donation.

When David and I were born, we had an older sibling: John Wayne, the hound dog. When Mom and Dad laid us on a blanket on the floor, John Wayne would run around the house, carefully jumping over us when he got to where we were. When we were about five or six, John Wayne “ran away.” We had just gotten a free Purina red-checked plastic dog bowl, having sent away for it with coupons from the dog food bag. When John Wayne never came back (because he was dead, duh), we used the dog food bowl as a salad bowl.

Twenty-five years and two weeks ago, I had the mind-boggling good fortune of becoming a child star in my small home town. By “singing loud[ly] and smiling,” as per my mother’s instructions, I wowed the judges with my enthusiasm and won the lead role in our community production of “Annie.” It wasn’t so much that I was talented as that I was a ham onstage. I loved every minute of it. I loved the theater itself, the costumes, the dance rehearsals, the “drama majors,” and yes, the fame. The experience changed my life, giving me a deep – and useful – sense of self-confidence. At my wedding (when, yes, I gave in to the “demands” and sang “Tomorrow”), my sweet cousin Ashley told me that she admired how unselfconscious I was. I just plowed into every situation with gusto, without fear that people would think I was weird or wrong. I was very touched. I attribute this fearlessness to having had my enthusiasm rewarded at an impressionable age. And hell no, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Everyone should be a child star.

The love of my life, James, has blue eyes. I enlarged a photo of the two of us from our honeymoon and turned it into fabric art a couple years ago. James’s blue eyes now look at me from two fabric strips hanging on a curtain rod, on the wall across from our bed. I chose a beautiful deep blue paint color for our bedroom walls, to match James’s eyes. The walls cannot begin to hold the depth and tenderness that those eyes reveal, but they provide a good backdrop for the smile he starts every morning with. When we first realized we were having trouble conceiving a child, James’s mom’s reaction was not to worry: “God wouldn’t let those blue eyes die out.” I admit I didn’t think that was very convincing when she said it, but you know. Maybe she’ll be right.

Here are the rules of this tagging game:

1. Link to the person who tagged you:

Ashley at www.PlanetDavila.blogspot.com

2. Post the rules to your blog
3. Write 6 random things about myself
4. Tag 6 people at the end of your post and link to them

(tagging only the four bloggers I can think of: L*** at www.CityMouseCountry.blogspot.com, B*** at www.bethsits.blogspot.com, Polka Dot Creations at www.lisaclarke.net, and L**** at www.OutFromUnder.wordpress.com).

5. Let each person you have tagged know by leaving a comment on their blog.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is posted.

Feeding the Fertility Gods

2008-08-20T11:36:00.001-07:00

My dear friend Ashley has called me back from my summer vacation from infertility. While it’s been a nice respite, I have certainly not been wanting for thoughts on the subject.

Half my life ago, I was starting my academic career in Latin American studies in the Big Apple. Completely unaware that anyone ever had trouble having babies, I thought of fertility as a concept associated with agriculture and anthropology. I learned about the Aztec gods of the earth, rain, and corn. Although they seemed to always have plenty of people, I thought agrarian pre-Columbians were generally more concerned about the food supply. I know that in contemporary Mexico City people leave shots of tequila for Tlaloc, the god of rain, at his statue at the National Museum of Anthropology. No rain, no crops. (Apparently the tequila works frequently enough that people keep doing it).

We know that tequila can facilitate human conception in a lot of instances, but it never worked for us. So when all else fails in the baby-making business, one can always tackle the fertility thing by planting a garden. Even without any alcohol. That’s what James did this summer.

Gardening is a focus that the father characters in “The Fantasticks” musical strongly endorse over parenting. According to those two, each struggling with difficult teenagers, vegetables are dependable and fulfilling. They say, for example,

Plant a turnip.
Get a turnip.
Maybe you’ll get two.
That’s why I love vegetables;
You know that they’ll come through!

That’s in stark contrast to “children, [with whom] it’s bewilderin’.” So following the dads’ philosophy, this garden business should make James ecstatic. “A man who plants a garden is a very happy man.”

But it’s not so easy. When is fertility easy?

James planted his vegetable garden in June. Last year when he used that schedule, we got vegetables in July. This year we had to wait until August. And even then, they were slow and really not that promising.

The one golden boy of the garden was a huge tomato that hung out, green, on the vine for a long, long time. We would go out and admire it and wonder if it would ever turn red. Finally, its apple green took on a sunny twinge. It morphed to orange, and promised to be red any day.

In the meantime, the garden was providing James the only solace he had in his life. He worked hard at the office and brought his stress home all the time, but he loved the potential and promise of his garden. I’d find him in the back yard in the evenings, briefcase in one hand and water hose in the other, before he ever came in the house. The tomato was his baby, and he was just waiting to see it reach maturity.

One night, after a particularly hard day, James seemed beaten down. It wasn’t until we’d watched our share of SciFi channel shows on TV that James finally admitted what straw had broken his back.

“They got Big Red.”

It was the most unforgiveable, un-get-overable tragedy there could ever be.

Who “they” was was a mystery. It could be the chipmunk that James had “had his eye on,” or birds, or bunnies, or bugs, or squirrels. It didn’t matter. They’d taken it. Big Red the Tomato lived its last few hours, finally at the perfect shade of tomato red, on the ground in the garden, with its belly splayed open and half its mass missing. Ants trailed onto and throughout its remaining body. So sad.

In the month since that first tomato’s demise, we’ve taken prophylactic measures. We put up a big wire fence that keeps out not only the bunnies and maybe chipmunks, but also anyone who might want to weed the garden. When that proved insufficient (we’d forgotten about bugs), James bought an organic, non-toxic bug repellent. When that proved insufficient (we’d forgotten about birds), we draped a net over the top of the fence. When that proved insufficient (we’d forgotten about those squirrels), we secured that net every 12 inches with clothes pins. That seemed to work. The garden started to bear fruit.

We also learned a few tricks. Get the tomatoes out as soon as they turn orange. Vine ripening is a luxury we don’t have. Get the eggplants before they touch the ground. Get the green peppers before... well, don’t worry about the green peppers because we’re the only ones who seem to like them.

In the end, mid-August, you know what we had? We had vegetable babies. And we ate them.

Two nights ago I made a kind-of eggplant parmesan with three of our eggplants and one green pepper. That went hand-in-hand with lentil and rice salad, which also featured our basil and another green pepper. The tomatoes were so good that we ate them whole, with our hands, like donuts.

The meal tasted good, like victory. It was a feast the gods would have loved.

Next stop, we hope: growing a family.

We won’t eat the babies. We swear.

A Young Man's Game

2008-07-15T15:29:00.000-07:00

The reproductive arts are a young man's game, and I am an old woman.

As I cast my elderly, ancient eyes back in time, I realize that it was only one year ago that James and I signed up for our first IVF. I was a new 35, so sprightly that my doctor said we could just consider me (and my probably success rate) in the 30-34 year old category.

Two weeks ago our third IVF came to an end. With my body thirty pounds heavier than this time last year, and full of gallons of natural and unnatural hormones -- some of them produced from the urine of post-menopausal women! -- I'm beat.

I'm resting. When you see my posts not appearing on this blog, know that it's because I'm not moving my arms that day. I'm napping. I'm taking a break from society. I'm regaining my balance.

Yes, you may send me chocolates. That would be fine. Or watercolor sets. Shrinky-dinks. You get the picture.

I'll see you when I wake up.

Chatty Kathe[rine]

2008-07-05T07:08:00.001-07:00

You may know that I talk a lot. Not so much that my mouth is always moving, but there is almost NOTHING I won't share with a stranger. To say nothing of friends.

The other day I saw a woman I worked with for one month, seven years ago. She was in the grocery store and immediately pointed to her new masterpiece: a two-week-old baby. She said, "This is what we've been doing." I accosted her with talk of babies and fertility. I told her about my infertility struggles, and it turns out that she did IVF too, and used my same doctor. "I'm 42," she explained. "Yeah, I'm 36." By the time our conversation had faded, we were at her car and her husband had unloaded all the groceries and snapped the child into the back seat.

The day before that I went to the chiropractor. My chiropractor is now on her second pregnancy via IVF. This time, she told me, it's twin boys. The first IVF rendered a little girl. She goes to the doctor we did our first IVF with. I think my chiropractic sessions run a little long because I don't shut up on the topic of IVF.

So in the meantime, our dear friend Eric Roston has come out with a book about carbon. It's called The Carbon Age: How Life's Core Element has become Civilization's Greatest Threat (order it on Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/Carbon-Age-Element-Civilizations-Greatest/dp/0802715575/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215267153&sr=8-1). We love Eric, and we love his book. My college friend, this historian-turned-Russophile, at some point became a science writer, and he has devoted the last few years of his life to researching every little implication carbon has in our world -- from the oil industry to low carb diets to plastics. When James said that Eric talks about carbon as much as I talk about IVF, well, then I knew that I talked about IVF a whole, whole lot.

And as I draw to a close here, I'm thinking that you're wondering how our pregnancy test went. It is with great physical concentration that I tell you, "We're not talking." You remember that I tried this last time: if the test were positive, we wouldn't want to tell you for 12 weeks. And if the test were negative, I couldn't talk about it, lest you be able to deduce from my not talking about it that it was positive. You see, right?

You may also remember that after about 3 weeks I broke down and announced the bad news on this blog.

Not this time, baby. You will not hear one peep out of me for 3 months. Not about the specifics of what is or is not going on in my body.

Peep.

Doh!

I mean it.

These Dreams

2008-07-02T01:27:00.000-07:00

Martin Luther King, Jr., as I understand it, was a guy who had vivid dreams. One of his dreams, in fact, which he told lots of people about, had to do with racial harmony. It was one of those wacky dreams that differed drastically from reality, but nevertheless made sense when you talked about it in the waking world.

I have a lot of vivid dreams, too. Like MLK, mine have a lot to do with my struggle. Unlike MLK, they might not be all that coherent in waking. But that doesn't stop me from talking about them.

In the last week I've had a lot of dreams relating to my abdomen. I dreamed that the fuzzy blanket we had in the rented Rhode Island house was my endometrium (the uterine lining). I don't know what it's really like in there, but I don't think it's white and fuzzy. But if it were it would be great. Boy, that was a good blanket.

I also dreamed about how 20 embryos would line up in my belly if I had duodecimuplets. (I made that word up). If I had a really big litter, say. I dreamed they would organize themselves in drooping lines from one side of my waist to another, like a beautiful Athenian belt of stars. Like Orion's, but more bling'ed out. Never mind that my uterus is not at my waist level. With duodecimuplets, one has to branch out.

Finally, I had the strangest dream of all: that I was skinny again. I don't think I have to say much more about the weirdness of this one.

I've also had more existential dreams, like one in which my otherwise tolerant and sweet mom issued me a citation for insolence. Using her authority from her job in the State Department, she took out one of those old tickets they used to tear off a roll and give you at the movies. She wrote "rude" on it, and the time and place of my hearing. I didn't understand how asking "why?!" could be against the law, but she didn't back down. Fortunately, the hearing didn't take place because of some natural disaster that made people have to evacuate the State Department building. The evacuation prevented me from having to defend my constant asking of "why?" and also saved me from some kind of foggy situation in which I had lost one of my shoes and was trying to replace it with a lime green pump.

As I analyze these brilliant snippits of imagination, I am reminded of what Heart offered up to us in the 80s, in the song "These Dreams:"

These dreams go on when I close my eyes.
Every second of the night, I live another life.
These dreams that sleep when it's cold outside,
Every moment I'm awake, the further I'm away.

No, I don't know what that means or how it applies. Since when have dreams made any sense at all? But the melody sticks in my head.

Well Rested and Anxious

2008-06-30T06:59:00.000-07:00

We are back from Rhode Island feeling well rested, well vacationed, and anxious. No, we still don't know the results of this round of IVF, but we will soon. And heck no, we won't tell you when we do know. Not on the blog anyway.

In the meantime, here are some observations about a beach vacation with the in-laws and my hormones:

1) When we ran out of alcohol wipes for preparing my shots, we used vodka and paper towels. That's the closest I came to a drink.

2) I slept about 16 hours a day: 10-12 hours per night, and the rest (so to speak) in one or two naps during the day.

3) We saw lots of family, official and otherwise. That included people who had been adopted, conceived by IVF, and brought into the family the old-fashioned way. None seemed weirder than the next, but it was a small, especially weird sample.

4) It was a lovely week.

Leaving the state, the world of computers, and often wakefulness is a very good way of avoiding the things that make us anxious. I think that's why people take vacations. But coming home-sweet-home is inevitable, and we'll soon be coming to the end of this dreaded two week wait.

A psychologist told me once that the most powerful (disasterous?) combination of emotions is fear and hope. I hope more than anything to be a mother. I hope that it will finally happen this time. I fear that I will never be one. I fear that I'll get my hopes smashed into pieces again. Again. These thoughts coil around each other in my head and have started giving me nightmares. I've gotten jittery and am taking it out on a piece of gum. Which I found, unwrapped, in our car armrest.

We have come to the part of infertility I hate the most: the moments of truth. We have a whole lot riding on the pregnancy test. Two years of trying, tens of thousands of dollars, multiple surgeries and procedures, and going on two hundred needle pricks. To say nothing of the hope, that deadly dagger that keeps the wounds fresh.

If you don't hear from me soon, I may have gone back on vacation. Check Rhode Island.

Disruption in Service

2008-06-22T11:13:00.000-07:00

My dear friends,

I'm going on vacation. I know, it doesn't seem like "me," but I'm going anyway. I'll be back in a week. In the meantime, be well, keep keepin' those fingers crossed, and don't think that I've forgotten you or that I'm dead. Neither will be the case.

Love, Kay

Pins and Needles

2008-06-22T10:53:00.001-07:00

When the anaesthesiologist put the IV into my arm a few weeks ago, he said, "I bet you're feeling like a human pin cushion."

Little did he know that I had thought about that a whole lot.

You see, pins and needles are my profession. I'm a fiber artist, after all. Not a day goes by (well, not a good day) that I don't use pins and needles to attach fabric together, either temporarily or permanently. Although I know it's supposed to be just for fabric, I have twice used the sewing machine to puncture my own finger. Chalk that up to accident.

Someone also mentioned that I must be on pins and needles waiting for the results of this round of IVF. Well, yes, especially since I'm always on pins and needles. Again, usually that's by accident. Damn gravity.

So here's what I've been thinking about in terms of being a human pin cushion. Pins are used to keep something in place. They stay in for a while. Needles are used to go in and out of something. They are usually just a medium for a binding agent, namely, a thread.

In IVF, I've been mostly a needle cushion. Since this time last year I calculate that I have had approximately 180 needles put into me, either to put medicine in or to take blood out. No thread, fortunately.

I have also had my share of pins put in me. Sure, they were called acupuncture needles, but they didn't help transfer anything from place to place. Just by virtue of their presence in certain places in my body, they encouraged my own bodily processes to do certain things. The pins stuck in the ears, for example, energize the ovaries. Go figure. I reckon I had a total of 100 acupuncture pins put in me over a few months. Note that I don't do acupuncture any more. Although acupuncture is proven to improve one's chances of success at IVF, it's too much of a full-time job just to use the real needles.

And so when the anaesthesiologist called me a human pin cushion, I had a bunch to say to him. I dare say that when he was finished putting the numbing gell and then the IV needle in place and hooking me up to some saline solution, I was still talking.

About a half an hour later, I heard the guy wheel his little cart over to my sister in the next pre-op bay, separated only by a curtain. "I bet you feel like a human pin cushion by this point." "Yeah," she said simply.

Imagine what our lives would be like if I didn't talk as much. I know, you wouldn't be reading this blog!

(Note: pictures shown are James preparing a butt-shot injection, the "pin cushion" belly shot area in its heyday, and my forehead during acupuncture).

Totsicles!

2008-06-19T17:00:00.000-07:00

No, of course we don't know whether this cycle will actually render any babies. But it has rendered something we've never had before. EXTRA EMBRYOS! We had two perfect little blastocysts to spare, and they have been stored away in frozen bliss up there in chilly Maryland.

That means next time -- whether we're still working on our first child or are starting back for a sibling -- I won't have to take the belly shots and do the egg-extraction surgery. And James won't have to produce another sperm sample. (Sorry, James).

FET (Frozen Embryo Transfer) -- or "fête," as I'm thinking about it -- does not have as high a success rate as regular embryo transfer. But it requires one less month and about 30 fewer shots, less bloating, and less complaining.

So yea! Something went right!

Brace Yourself: A Narrative (Part I)

2008-06-19T07:54:00.001-07:00

Brace Yourself: A Narrative (Part II)

2008-06-19T07:30:00.000-07:00

Video of Human Ovulation

2008-06-19T06:55:00.000-07:00

One of my faithful readers and friends sent me a very interesting video link this morning. It tops the "facts of life" movies the girls had to watch in the cafeteria in Fifth Grade while the boys saw a puppet show in the gym. The recording purports to be an endoscopic video of a woman's ovary and fallopian tube as she ovulates, though it's hard to make out the microscopic egg in this life-sized show. In the interest of science and nitty-gritty reproductive fun, I've included the link here:

http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2008/06/19/ovulation/index.html

Thank you, bzzzzzgrrrrrl!

Bed Rest

2008-06-17T12:27:00.001-07:00

There was a room at my old office called the health room, which I thought should have been called the rest room. It had a bed in it. I went there once after a painful procedure that shouldn't have been painful, and I had to leave when I thought I was in danger of falling asleep and staying there all day.

From Sunday noon to Monday noon, I was on strict bedrest. I was allowed to walk from the car to my lying-down place, park myself, and not get up except to go to the bathroom. (Restroom). While I was on the bed, I could be in a seated position as long as my legs were stretched out in front of me. Otherwise I was to remain reclined. I'm not lying.

Those of you who know me know that I am an excellent sleeper. I am neither a night person nor a morning person. I am a mid-afternoon person. I go to sleep early and get 9 to 10 hours of sleep per night. If I don't get at least nine, my wrists hurt the next day. So you might think that I'd do well with bedrest.

But I am also a free spirit, and I do not like confinement or captivity. I have a mild mania for doing productive, creative activites. But I'm not supposed to do them. Even now that the strict bedrest period has been lifted, I am under husbandly orders to lie around. Don't tell James I've written a blog post, for example. When I told him I felt guilty because I hadn't done XYZ charitable mind- and computer-related work, he told me tough. My job, my raison-d'etre, was cooking buns. I can sit still for a week if that's what it takes. These buns are expensive (I added that; "expensive" was always the motivating factor from my childhood). And when it comes down to it, I suppose this is the essence of productivity and creativity. If it works.

Now I consider myself on couch rest. That means I must spend most of my time on the couch. I do not have to recline, but we all know that's really the only way to be on a couch anyway. I am allowed to go to the kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, and even the office (picture me here). I put in a new kitchen trash bag but didn't take out the full bag of trash. I can get dishes dirty, but I can't wash them. I am at half-capacity. And that is about all I have to give. Whenever I walk up and down the stairs, my arms get so tired they want to fall off. Blood pulses in my ears. It's the progesterone. It makes me worthless. So I'm going to try to accept the physical worthlessness as I put all my energy into my uterus. Worthfulness.

When the babies come out, they will know a lot about home and garden TV. So excuse me as I must get back to the couch.

Bringing Home Buns

2008-06-15T17:06:00.000-07:00

I have two baby buns in the oven! And I love them dearly.

We had the embryo transfer today. This is our third IVF try, and it's the first time that the doctor thought we might actually get to freeze a few runners-up. Our seven embryos, which have been growing for the last five days, were all going strong still. We had two perfect blastocysts (that's a more advanced stage of embryo) and we had those put back inside me.

The remaining five embryos were all at a healthy pre-blastocyst stage, which I think is incredible. In the past we might have had one like that, amongst a few extras that were just duds.

Because the quality of the whole batch seemed so good, the doctor recommended transferring just two embryos. Although this was our third IVF attempt, he didn't recommend putting three in (the more "aggressive approach") because these looked so good. So that's good. As my friends in the online community have been reminded in a very sad way in the last week, multiple births (twins and triplets) represent a real risk to mother and babies. The fewer the embryos, the smaller chance that we'd have to deal with the risks of multiples.

I'm feeling battered and bruised, but happy and full of life. I'm on bedrest for the next day, and will be taking it easy for a week after that. So no more lawn-mowing. So sad.

Thank you to all my friends and relatives who have been thinking of me and praying for us, to say nothing of the people who have actually contributed food. Aw, yeah.

Happy Father's Day! Here's to parents!

Yogurt with Blueberries

2008-06-14T23:09:00.000-07:00

In the days since my egg retrieval, I've felt like yogurt with blueberries. I don't mean that I felt like eating them. I felt like I became yogurt with blueberries. Here's how.

Imagine a cup of plain yogurt. Or vanilla, if you need to. Then put ten or fifteen blueberries in the cup and stir. Now imagine that the yogurt is my insides from my belly button to my pelvis. The blueberries are the internal bruises.

This has been a very exhausting business, and I've gotten a lot fewer things done this week than I'd planned. When we go in for the embryo transfer (and the news here is that the embies are doing really well) I'll have to endure a day of bedrest. But the embryo transfer doesn't hurt. I'd think they'd suggest the bedrest, instead, for the surgery that had to precede it. They probably know that you're not going to want to get out of bed anyway.

Today, on the fourth day after the surgical egg-sucking-out, I decided that we could not live with the lawn the way it was. It was embarrassing and unsightly, and with all this talk about home maintenance (the three kids and the principal came by yesterday to apologize again for the broken window and give me apology letters), I should do my part.

So I mowed the yard. Just the front yard. But boy, did it do me in. Wear me out. One of those. When I crawled into bed tonight, I inspected my two lawnmower blisters on my hands. It's so nice to be wounded in a way that's completely unrelated to fertility.

And may I say that blisters hurt a lot less than blueberries. Who would have guessed?

(Postscript: I should note that James volunteered to mow the lawn, but I literally pushed him away from the lawnmower. That's just the way I am. The yard looks delicious now, but it is hard to see from my bed).

Kids Rock

2008-06-13T07:40:00.001-07:00

Two days I posted about the kids in the school looking like Easter eggs. Eggs and stones have some similarities. River rocks look like eggs, especially if they've been bleached in the sun. Both eggs and stones are used as euphemisms for certain body parts: never ask a waiter in a Mexican restaurant if he has eggs. Yes. Eggs and rocks seem inherently connected.

So it can be no surprise that one of those pretty Easter egg kids threw a rock through our window.

I found out yesterday at about 3:00 when the most remorseful little girl showed up on my doorstep. She did not knock, but the cat sensed that she was there, so I went to check. I opened the door and she remained silent, couldn't look at me. I thought she'd been in an accident and was asking for help. But her mother was standing halfway toward the street. "Can I help you?" I asked.

That's when the remorseful, very very soft speaking began. She and a boy were playing on the playground. She threw a pebble. She told him to throw a bigger rock. He did. They think they might have broken one of my windows. I asked her and her mother in, and we went to the back yard to check things out. Sure enough, my upstairs bedroom window -- you know the one I look at the gaze longingly at the children during my bedrest -- was smashed into a zillion pieces. When I confirmed that it looked like the window was indeed broken, her little frame shrank even more and the look on her face morphed into, "yes, this is the worst day of my life."

Here's the thing. I really like people. I like unusual situations because they're interesting. I liked my colonoscopy years ago. I liked the time I had a flat tire on the Interstate between New Orleans and East Texas. I liked having my window broken. My cheerful mother came out in my singsong response, "Well, the most important thing is that no one was hurt." The girl silently agreed.

The mom and I exchanged contact information and made a plan of action. I told the little girl that she was very gutsy for having confessed and come over to tell me. I tried not to be TOO happy because that's weird. Later in the day I got a call from the school and from another mother, and they've made it clear they'll pay for the window and will offer up the children for manual labor around the house. I do have some weeds to pull...

But when did I become the adult woman whose house got the rock/baseball thrown in its window? When did I cross the kid-to-adult threshold so clearly? In a movie, there is no doubt that my role would be played by an adult, in stark contrast to the kid role. So if I'm such an adult, why don't I have kids? How come those aren't my kids causing trouble and having to apologize to the people they wronged? I wanted to cling to the little confessor and say, "Don't you want to come live with me? I don't have any kids. I'm child-starved." But that would be way creepy. I think then I'd have to apologize to her mother. And maybe the cops.

So I'll just get secret enjoyment out of my proximity to the school and all the antics that happen there. And this weekend I'll get some little 100-celled trouble-makers installed in me. Maybe they'll grow and prosper and develop their throwing arms.

In the meantime, be assured that only the outside pane of glass got broken. The inside is still in tact, so as long as we don't open it, we're still secure and well-airconditioned.

And looking forward to childhood.

In Eggshellsis Deo

2008-06-11T09:10:00.000-07:00

The production of eggs is such a difficult thing that James has vowed to buy free range chicken eggs from now on. As he says, "The chickens have been through so much already. It's sad that they would also be in cages while their bodies are working so hard."

Like a good chicken, I produced a perfect dozen eggs yesterday. I pranced my bloated self into the operating room, and tried to complete my thought before the sedation took my brain. (Last time I think I was in the middle of a sentence about whether people snored in the operating room). They made me stand up, say, "Katherine Bailey," my social security number, and I added a "good night." Then I sat back down and conked out.

Twenty years later ... wait, I meant twenty minutes. Twenty minutes later I was back in the recovery room, trying to put my clothes on without the benefit of balance. James whisked me away to McDonalds and I was sleepy enough to not even get a shake. We got home, I downed my Big Mac, and I was off to dream land.

This morning I found myself looking out our bedroom window, through the thick summer foliage, to the school playground behind our house. With blurry, sideways eyes, I saw a series of colors parade by on the other side of the leaves. Blue, red, yellow, pink. They looked like Easter eggs. No, they were kids in t-shirts. Human kids. But every one had started out as an egg.

A people egg. Like mine. The kids all used to be eggs. That gives me hope.

This morning I got a call from the clinic and they told me that our 12 eggs rendered eight healthy embryos. Eight little babies. We'll monitor them and hopefully have a few nice-looking blastocysts to put back in by the end of the week.

That's something to dream about.

Off to Sleep

2008-06-09T19:19:00.001-07:00

Just wanted to let the interested public know that I'll be going in soon to get the eggs sucked out of me. That is, "retrieved." They call it surgery. I used to call it a procedure, but now I'm more a believer that surgery is the right descriptor. It really knocks you on your back.

I plan to be asleep for a few days, so wish me happy dreams. I don't think I can go wrong: in the last few days I've dreamed that I was a cartoon mouse stealing food and that I was writing a blog post that made a pun out of "anti-occident" and "antioxident." Neither of those scenarios works in the real world, so it's a good thing I'll be in my own one.

See you when I wake up.

The Other Side

2008-06-08T15:34:00.001-07:00

For all our talk about egg retrieval, we don't like to talk about sperm retrieval. It's much more low tech, and a bit more taboo. But an anonymous friend has contributed this picture that he took at Massachusetts General Hospital. Much like a library, this public institution has contributed to his literary development. In particular, he said that until now, he did not know that "White Trash Magazine" existed.

Bunches of Eggs

2008-06-06T07:30:00.000-07:00

Today we have a visual aid, which caught my eye this morning in the refrigerator. These grapes represent what's growing on my ovaries. At slightly under 2 cm in diameter, they're the target size we're going for. When the follicles get to look like this (except probably a different color, and without the stems), I'll get the shot that triggers the ovulation. That lets loose the eggs that are inside. Like the grape seeds, let's say, except microscopic. At the moment my follicles are about 1.2 to 1.5 cm, so it will still be another few days. At the beginning of next week we'll probably go to harvest.

Meanwhile, it's gotten a little uncomfortable on the inside of my belly. You can tell that there's something out of the ordinary going on in there. Just a little squished. On the outside I'm still contending with the injection sites where I get my three shots a day. One of those shots leaves welts; the other two just leave little bruises. Wearing a seatbelt is not fun. Not to mention a waistband, but you know how I feel about waistbands in general.

To protect my little eggs, I'm off caffeine, raw cheeses, alcohol, all those things you're not supposed to take when you're pregnant. I'm eating healthier things with vitamins and minerals. High anti-oxident content. Like dark fruits and vegetables. Grapes.

It's almost cannibalistic.

We do what we have to do.

View from Above

2008-06-05T10:01:00.000-07:00

The elevator in the clinic's building has a mirrory-brass ceiling that I always look up at, and watch myself from above. Today I was alone in the elevator so I took a picture.

So that's what I look like from above, perennially with my camera, heading to work after a trip to the doctor. I'm wearing the 2XL maternity dress that Mom bought me at Target last time. There is not a waistband in sight, nor could my waist ever get to where it was straining to get out of that much fabric. It looks like a conservative nun's maternity dress. It's just what I want to wear, as I grow my bunch of grape-sized egg sac follicles on my ovaries.

The picture makes me wonder what infertility looks like from above. An omniscient God might be able to see all the details. But if the audience were, say, looking down from a blimp, I think infertility would be invisible.

We all go to the clinic, all of us professional 30-something women who postponed motherhood for one reason or another. We sit in the waiting room and don't talk to each other. Instead of acknowledging our common plight, we silently watch CNN on a flat screen mounted to the wall. There is not a shred of babyness mentioned or referenced in the office, except for the logo on the door. That's a line drawing of a three-person family. Without that, you might just think this was a dentist's office. For women. Of my age.

From the sky-high view you would not notice that the people coming to this clinic every morning are the same women, over and over. There are thousands of us, but when it's the right time in our treatment cycles, we go to the clinic every single day. You'd think we would develop a bit of camaraderie. But infertile women are shy about it, even with each other. I don't really get that. But I'm special that way.

From above, it might look like we were calm. Ha! Use your binoculars. Check out what's happening in our bodies. We're worried, worn out stress cases. Occasionally one of us will burst out in tears in the waiting room, but mostly we keep it in. We're so cool that if you're just three feet above us you won't see it. It's only when you look in our eyes that you see the sadness and the hope.

If you're not paying attention, you might start to ask us whether we have children, and when we say we don't, you might make jokes about baby-making. You would announce your pregnancies to us joyfully, not knowing what a serrated knife that is digging into our sore, bloated flesh. You'd tell us to sit back and relax, that it would "just happen." And when you weren't paying attention, we'd go to the doctor yet again, and give ourselves three more shots that day, and get up and do the same thing the next day.

So I call to you, my fertility-challenged sisters, make some noise. Make a commotion. Point your finger up to the sky and wag it up at the clouds. Say, "not without a fight," and go back to the doctor. And talk to your sisters in the waiting room.

That's what I'm going to do. And by golly, I'll make sure the heavens know about it. I'm going to make a stink and let everybody know what infertility is and why it sucks. I'll let us all know we're not in it alone. We'll get this message to rise all the way up to cyberspace. And we won't be invisible for long.

Seventh Heaven

2008-06-03T07:12:00.000-07:00

A quick note to say that things should be looking up. Today the doctor told me that I seem to have seven follicles (future egg sacs) growing on each ovary. That's double lucky, if you ask me. And as I left, I noticed that the doctor's office is located on the seventh floor of its building. Tell me that's not a sign.

Injustice, and Other Pouty Observations

2008-06-02T07:43:00.000-07:00

Saturday I got into the thick of things again. I went to the doc for my first major "monitoring" appointment. They checked to see how my ovaries and environs were, and took some blood to test my hormones after a week and a half of shots.

Maybe I'm just "hormonal," or maybe the world is filling up with things to irritate me. Here are some of my irritants:

1. As my nurse took my blood, we talked about how there are lots of Katherines that come into the clinic. Her name is Laila, and she said there were lots of Leyla/Leila/Lailas in the Muslim communities in the area. She is African-American and her father is Muslim. I started to get mad at the socio-economic injustice that keeps minorities out of expensive fertility clinics. Why do only Katherines get to go through this hell?

2. I sat by an African-American patient while I waited for my ultrasound. This time my injustice flag went up because she had a pink bandaid on her dark arm. Why don't they make bandaids in different colors? That's just no fair.

3. I went to get my prescriptions and paid an arm and a leg for them. Maybe even some ribs. It was a huge blow as I feebly held out the credit card and closed my eyes. I went home mad that these medicines weren't available in generic form, to keep the cost down.

4. I called another nurse to confirm that it was okay to use Repronex in lieu of Menopur. That's what the pharmacist gave me. The nurse explained that Repronex was the generic version of Menopur. They don't like to prescribe it because it's not as pure as the brand version. And lo, it does leave a big red welt and hurts longer. Stupid generics.

Ah. Bear with me as I bear with myself.

A Quilted Nod to the "Wear to Make Aware" Movement

2008-05-30T12:57:00.001-07:00

You go, girls.

Infertility's Common Thread

2008-05-30T12:50:00.000-07:00

You'll notice a new icon on the left of this blog. It's a red string twisted like a memorial ribbon. Below is a prepared statement to explain the movement it represents. For more information, click on the icon. And don't be surprised when you see me with a red thread on my wrist.

For anyone who has ever had a miscarriage, struggled with pregnancy, and all things infertile...there is a movement upon us that you might want to join. It's rather simple actually: a discreet ribbon on your right wrist to signal to others that they are not alone in their struggles.

As someone who has had 5 m/c but am currently 5 months pregnant (YEAH), I wonder who looks at my big belly with sadness because they are in the month-to-month struggle. I mentioned to a friend that I wished there was some secret nod or international sign as if to say, this belly was hardwon. Well, she posted this quandary on her blog (http://www.stirrup-queens.blogspot.com/) and the response has been quite overwhelming...and a movement has been born!

The pomegranate-colored thread holds a two-fold purpose: to identify and create community between those experiencing infertility as well as create a starting point for a conversation. Women pregnant through any means, natural or A.R.T., families created through adoption or surrogacy, or couples trying to conceive during infertility or secondary infertility can wear the thread, identifying themselves to others in this silent community. At the same time, the string serves as a gateway to conversations about infertility when people inquire about its purpose. These conversations are imperative if we are ever to remove the social stigma attached to infertility.

Tie on the thread because you’re not alone. Wear to make aware. Join us in starting this conversation about infertility by purchasingthis pomegranate-coloured thread (#814 by DMC) at any craft, knitting, or variety store such as Walmart or Target. Tie it on your right wrist. Notice it on others. Just thought I would pass the word along!

Horrormonal

2008-05-30T09:16:00.001-07:00

I have always avoided calling myself "hormonal" at certain moody times of the month, simply because we humans have hormones coursing through our veins all the time. I was about to say that I might as well call myself "bloody," in that I always have blood in my veins too. But come to think of it, certain times of the month are bloodier than others. So disregard that. In fact, please disregard this entire paragraph.

I feel fully qualified to call myself hormonal now, and by that I mean, I have been injecting extra hormones into myself for a week now that make me act weird.

On the plane last weekend, on the way back from Texas, I had invested a dollar in the special Continental headphones. But I couldn't watch the movie ("P.S. I Love You") because within ten minutes I was sobbing so hard at the plot that I couldn't go on. I was trying to cry silently and daub my leaking eyes surreptitiously with my diet coke napkin. But there I was, the crying girl in Row 23. Yeah, right in front of Ted Koppell in Row 24. Who wanted a blanket, as you recall. Maybe he's going through IVF.

Because,

Last night, I too wanted a blanket. I awoke at 4:00 a.m. to the most horriffic bone-chilling cold I have ever felt. I slammed myself against James's back to try to stay alive. The hypothermia had come on suddenly and was threatening to destroy my teeth, which were crashing together in the most violent of shivers.

All this was due to a hot flash. Yes, a hot. flash. I had kicked the sheets off myself and, in the early summer air conditioning, I was drenched in liters of my own sweat. The hotness of the flash was long gone, and now I was turning blue. After verbalizing the teeth chattering (br! rr! rr! rr! rr! rr! rr! rr! rr!) loudly into my sleeping spouse's shoulders with my whole body under the quilt, I eventually realized that I wasn't cold any more. And I calmed the hell down.

This, my friends, is the beginning. This was the week of supression drugs. The "real" hormones start on Saturday. They're the ones that will grow my eggs to Grade A status. So stay tuned and keep your hand on the thermostat.

Baby-making in the Blogosphere

2008-05-29T07:21:00.000-07:00

My dear friend "Bzzgrrl," whom I know by another more vowelly name in real life, has begun musing on her blog (www.citymousecountry.blogspot.com) about privacy and chronicling one's life on the Internet. Her thoughts and my web-surfing have made me think a lot about what I'm putting out here, and why.

When you start looking, the Internet is full of people sharing their stories about wanting babies. I can't imagine how many blogs and websites there must be out there overall, because the number on this topic alone is staggering. My friend Ashley inspired me with her own blog, www.planetdavila.blogspot.com, which was designed to both update her friends and family on their treatment status, and to address the things that people did and didn't know about infertility. The benefit of the blog format is that you can aim your comments at individuals, but couch them in a "for everyone's information" tone.

Ashley encouraged me to create a blog of my own, and it has been tremendously therapeutic for me. It has both brought me out of my isolation, and allowed me to share the interesting details with people I love. I have really come to think of this as a fascinating trip, with amazing pieces and counterintuitivities that I think anyone would like to know. Treating the topic as "fascinating" or even just funny lets me not think of it as a cross to bear.

The public aspect of the blogosphere is a nice addition to the idea of just communicating with people I already know and love. I find myself writing for people that I don't know, just as much as I write for my intimates. When you open yourself up to dialogue with strangers, you tap into a wonderful world. Putting links on blogs makes that happen very easily. One can follow the links of these chains and find like-minded (and dislike-minded) people one would never find in real life. That has opened my eyes to the very broad spectrum of infertility and reproductive technology more than I ever expected.

When I got several comments from a woman who calls herself "Laughing4Heir," I Google-searched her and found her new blog: www.outfromunder.wordpress.com. Her story deals with miscarriages and makes me realize that my goal, conceiving a baby, is just the start. Another woman writes on her website, the Fortune Cookie Follies, at the address http://LuckBeABaby.wordpress.com. Do you recognize "Luck be a Baby"? A play on a "Guys and Dolls" song. MY GOD: she combines a show tune AND a pun (!) and unfortunately, the you-wouldn't-have-thought-it difficulties she's been going through as she tries to adopt. A blog at http://maybebaby.ctwfeatures.com/ has -- gasp -- a man's perspective! Meanwhile, www.waitingwomb.blogspot.com has a very long list of links to infertility blogs. To my delight, the author has categorized them by which of their authors have now become pregnant, which have their much-awaited babies now, and which are still waiting.

So what do we have there? We have a lot of information about infertility in general, and how one deals with different aspects of it. These blogs are intensely personal in that they splay the authors' hearts across the screen. They allow others to learn and empathize and put their own problems in perspective. Sometimes they lead to actual connections between actual people. Sometimes they just lead to a sense of community, which I can tell you is very valuable.

Granted, most people don't use their real names on their blogs, but some do. I do, you'll notice. I had already set myself up with a blogging account for my business (www.fiberofherbeing.com and www.fiberofherbeing.blogspot.com), and those used my real name. I guess I didn't create a separate anonymous account because I wasn't shy enough. To date, I haven't put anything online here that I wouldn't say at a conference of a thousand people. (In fact, if you know of any speaking gigs, you know I'd love that!) Maybe that's one reason I am not concerned about the privacy aspect of putting this stuff online. If someone wants to egg my house, well, that would be too bad. (And to the moms out there, remember that our address is unlisted). But if someone wants to talk to me about the ethics of IVF, even in person, don't you know I'd go bounding up to them like a golden retriever, panting with anticipation of making another connection.

I discussed this with my co-worker yesterday and wondered aloud why I wasn't worried about Internet/real life privacy. She said, "Maybe it's because you haven't written anything you're ashamed of." Huh. What do you know. Me? Shameless?

Tee hee.

Patient on the Move

2008-05-26T14:47:00.000-07:00

There are pros and cons of being a fancy jet-setter. See if you can sort them out as I tell you the following story.

Friday was the first morning I was to take my Lupron shot for this cycle. It was also the day that I was flying with Mom on the 6:00 a.m. flight to my grandmother's house in Texas. We were going to visit for Mamaw's 95th birthday. I marked the occasion by giving myself my first shot in the air.

At 8:00 a.m. it was time. I had considered filling the syringe and administering the shot at my seat, but I was in a middle seat and did not have access to my elbows, much less any privacy. I took my little case of needles, baby ice packs, and the vial into the tiny little bathroom. I sat down on the toilet seat, as it was the only piece of furniture available, and set up shop. I cleaned the vial top with the alcohol wipe, drew out 20 units of medicine, and wiped off a target spot on my belly. I turned to the left to get rid of the alcohol wipe and its wrapper, but it was not clear which of the little doors led to the trash can.

And that's when I made my first mistake. I pushed a big blue piece of plastic featuring a downward arrow, but it turned out to be the flush button. A booming vacuum pulled me down and threatened to suck my butt down into the belly of the plane. I was reminded of the Mythbusters episode where they disprove the urban myth that a fat woman could get vacuum-sealed to the toilet if this happened. In the moment I was glad to know it was a myth because, if the middle seat was any indication, my rear end was exceptionally large.

Once I survived that, the actual shot was very uneventful. I returned to my sliver of a seat feeling like a mosquito had bitten me by the belly button.

Once Mom and I got to the Houston airport, my baby ice packs had softened to a nice luke-warm gel, so I had the very bad idea to make my own ice pack. I took the zip-top baggie that Mom had carried her half-an-apple in, and filled it up with some ice that the food court burrito place gave me for free.

The little puddle-jumper plane that took us the second leg of our journey was one of the kind that reminded me of a mosquito. Tiny and unpleasant. When it picked us up in Houston, it had filled itself with the ambient, muggy air, which was about 90 degrees. The twenty-minute flight only got hotter; the air conditioning started to kick in when we touched down. And it was a bumpy 20 minutes. So what does a makeshift ice pack do when heated and jostled? Melt. Then leak.

By the end of the flight, my face was damp with sweat and the contents of my purse were soaking with "ice." But I didn't notice that until much later. Too much later.

The next morning I understood the magnitude of the leak. My pills, carefully distributed according to the IVF protocol into daily pill boxes, had melted together. On a whim I'd substituted my regular pre-natal vitamins for a sample of some prescription ones -- in the form of dark purple gel-caps. Those gave a nice black moldy hue to the rest of the medicine trapped by their side as all the pills settled together. Since I didn't have any extra medicine with me, I had to embibe what was there. I took out a sharp knife, scraped the nasty paste onto its blade, got my caffeine-free Diet Coke ready, and chugged. I wished I were a dog, so I wouldn't know it was coming, and so it would be disguised in some lunch meat or cheese.

I did this on two consecutive mornings. Taking shots paled in comparison to the nastiness of it. It was gag-worthy. I followed that show with a hypodermic party trick for my mom and Aunt Sara. Sara's only comment was that I was more gentle than she would have been. But I'd like to see her jab a needle into her belly. It wasn't so much gentleness as psyching myself up.

As far as IVF went, the shots and the pill-paste were the only intrusions into my weekend. Otherwise, my trip to my grandmother's house gave me lots of occasions to contemplate life and death. My delightful grandmother, who has 100% of her spunk even at the age of 95, pronounced that she hoped she didn't make it to 96. But when I asked her if she was going to die before I saw her next, she responded that she didn't plan on it. So I asked her to see what she could do about holding out. I want to be able to make her another great-grandchild, and that will take some time.

In the meantime, my visiting dad and I rebuilt her swinging patio bench and painted it green (see the photo). My mom and aunts powerwashed her patio and bought her new plastic chairs. I painted my great-grandmother's outdoor table a new shade of white, and a little turtle sat in the yard and watched the festivities.

A good time was had by all. And on the plane back I sat one row in front of someone who wasn't Ted Koppell. He's another similarly famous newsman, whose name I can't quite place. He wanted a blanket.

For the last two days I've been finding mosquito bites on my legs that I must have gotten when I was working on Mamaw's patio. I scratch them and smile.

Sharing Risks

2008-05-22T09:26:00.000-07:00

This is a post about money. Specifically, it's a post about the Shared Risk programs that some fertility clinics offer.

The essence of the shared risk programs is that you can pay for a package instead of individual treatments. For a lump sum, you can buy up to 4 or 6 (it varies) IVF cycles. You can use as many of those cycles as you need to get pregnant (or in the case of our clinic, bring a live baby home from the hospital). If at the end of the program you don't get the defined results, you get some or all of your money back. You can use that to start adoption proceedings -- also an expensive proposition.

Here are some reasons why the programs are controversial. First, the American Medical Association generally holds that it's unethical for doctors to charge for their services based on the medical outcome they get. That would do wacky things to the medical industry. Also, the programs imply a guarantee that the couple will get a certain result. Guaranteeing medical results is also tricky. And if the couple happens to get lucky on the first or second try, then they will have overpaid for the services that they actually end up using. Finally, the programs are only open to people with a good enough prognosis to ensure fairly quick pregnancy. The more it looks like you're actually going to need all the cycles, the less open the clinic will be to accepting you.

The reasons I advocate the programs are based on financial practicality and emotion. First, the lump sum we pay for the shared risk programs is an enormous amount of money. But for some couples who actually need the six cycles to have a baby, its the only way they would have been able to pay for that much care. I know of a sweet 3-month old baby named Charlie who would never have been conceived were it not for a full six-cycle shared risk program. I have good friends who don't live near any clinics that offer a shared risk plan, and as the number of cycles they need grows, it is getting near impossible to pay for any more. When money runs out, treatment runs out. No baby. If they could do shared risk, they would get more tries at success, or at least they'd get a guaranteed lump of money back to pay for an adoption or other options. Otherwise, there is no money left over to pursue other routes once they reach the end of the IVF line.

Another huge benefit is that the shared risk program takes finances out of the family planning decision-making. The first time we did IVF, we paid for the one treatment. That was foolish, in retrospect, because our chances of success were less than 50%. We just hadn't been able to bear paying more money than we needed to, because it was so exhorbitant, and we really couldn't afford even one treatment on its own, much less lots. When the cycle failed, we took a long time to decide whether and when to do another cycle, because we had to figure out the source of yet another astronomical payment. When we decided to move forward, we told our doctor that we'd like to enroll in the shared risk program this time around, now that we really appreciated how iffy this all was. He told us we were no longer candidates because we had "flunked" the first time. Yes, he said "flunked."

So we went to a different clinic that would still let us into the program. We paid a lot of money to them, did an IVF cycle, and it failed too. And you know what? As soon as that happened, we DIDN'T HAVE TO THINK ABOUT MONEY! We knew we were going to try again right away, and just keep trying until it worked. We spared ourselves the terrible exercise of balancing money on one side with fear of declining egg quality and lower chances of success on the other side. Ugh. Just do it. We could just do it. Thank God! Thank GOD!

Perhaps just as importantly, as a benefit that kicks in even if you get pregnant the first time, the shared risk program offers peace of mind as soon as you write the check. It comes from knowing that there are more chances waiting for you. Because on its own, IVF is really stressful and scary. It also invokes fears of never having a baby, your eggs getting too old, being left out of a new generation of parents... it's all so hard. It comes to everything riding on a small number of cells in the middle of your body. You obsess. You worry. You think about them all the time and will them -- with closed eyes and gritted teeth, oops, and then long relaxing loving deep breaths, and then a furrowed brow, no a relaxed brow, deep breath -- to survive. But if you know that this is not the last chance, that your whole life doesn't depend on this attempt, it's so much better. Much more relaxing, to say the least. Maybe it's even more conducive to being successful. Just eliminating that pressure is worth all the money in the world. And fortunately, you don't have to pay all the money in the world.

And that is why I think the shared risk programs are a really great deal. Because nobody can afford one IVF cycle, much less six. So if you can't afford one cycle, then you also can't afford to enroll in a shared risk program. At that point, what the hell is the difference. That's what credit cards, home equity loans, rich uncles are for: mortgaging your soul for stuff you want. Capital One, you're welcome. Shady Grove Fertility Shared Risk Program, thank you.

Silence is Golden, and Duct Tape is Silver

2008-05-20T09:03:00.000-07:00

I owe this title to the daughter of a friend of mine. My friend is, well, loquacious. And her pre-teen daughter is clever, and she is not above duct taping her mom's mouth shut.

So this brings me to a thought I've had recently: to blog or not to blog. Also could be put: to blab or to shut up. As always, I choose to blab, but not without thinking about it.

It used to be that adoption was a very secret thing. Many decades ago, my grandfather's law office once handled an adoption of one woman's baby, by the woman's sister. Neither sister knew about this. That is, Sister 1 didn't tell anyone she was having a baby and giving it up for adoption, and Sister 2 didn't tell anyone she was adopting. So even the sisters didn't know that the baby was staying in the family. Obviously the need to transfer care of a human is really distressing to all involved, but wouldn't the sisters have found some comfort in knowing the baby was (still) biological family?

Once on TV I saw a show that mentioned that infertility used to be so taboo that people wouldn't admit to it. Women who planned to adopt prepared the way for their new baby socially by putting pillows in their clothes until the baby showed up.

And though I think that talking is usually better than not talking, I can appreciate the problems that stem from telling people your business. A recent commentator on the Adoption post really touched me. She said that she had been adopted, and that bullies had taunted her about it on the playground. They told her that her biological parents had thrown her away. It broke my heart to hear that. Better to keep a secret, no?

Of course, there are good reasons to tell people that you're adopting, and to tell children that they're adopted. The adopting parents need support. The kid's family medical history will come from a different set of people than the ones who raise them. And that's not to mention all the various questions about identity, transparency, ethnicity, etc. that might also come up.

Now apply this to children conceived through Artificial Reproductive Technology. Assuming both the egg and the sperm come from the same parents who will be raising the children: then what? Do you tell the children they were Test Tube Babies? Do you alert them to watch for physical anomalies that they'll discover some day were due to certain fertility procedures? (Not that we know of any, but this is a new technology and there aren't any IVF babies over 40). And maybe more importantly, what will the bullies say about them on the playground?

I had never thought about this. Or rather, I thought what my chiropractor told me: that her daughter's baby book was better than other baby books because she had pictures of her little girl when she was just a few cells. Wow! Neato.

But are our babies going to be teased? Are they going to be treated differently? Because if we conceive and bear children, the World Knows now that it's from IVF.

James told me the other day that he loves this blog, and appreciates my need to get things out into the world. But overall he is reluctant to tell people that we're doing IVF, because he doesn't want our babies to be labeled as "different" once they're born. He thinks that their conceptions are their own, and nobody else's business. I can get behind that. He thinks back to how strange "Test Tube Babies" sounded when we were growing up. How space age. How alien.

It's true that by the time we have children running around school playgrounds, they will be in very good company. The scads of twins and triplets they'll be going to school with are just the obvious ones. The "singletons" (that's a single baby) will look just like everybody else. What will they think of it all? What will the mean people think? Does it matter?

Will people be mean to them?

I'm writing this blog to help me process all the things that I'm going through. It is also to teach people about infertility -- precisely because it hasn't been talked about much before.

So how will this impact our children?

Thoughts?

If At First You Don't Conceive

2008-05-19T14:35:00.000-07:00

Try, try again.

And that's what we're doing. The shots start this week, and it will be another two month process. But third time's the charm, and that's what we're counting on.

We really appreciate all the support and help you've given us in the last months, and we thank Mom in advance for her offer of frozen-casserole-and-weekend-laundry duty.

And now, as the chorus in Disney's Beauty and the Beast sang in surprising unison for an angry and spontaneously-ocurring mob:

"Sally forth! Tally ho! Grab your sword! Grab your bow! Praise the Lord and here we go!"

Love,
Kay