the crawl

Slowly, surely I am putting one foot in front of the other on the path towards wellness. Okay, maybe that’s a bit of wishful thinking –most times I am army crawling inch by painful inch, through the sand traps of grief and the water traps of sadness and despair, under and over obstacles lobbed at me by infertility. I see a normal life ahead, just out of reach, and I want it, so badly, even if children aren’t in it. I want to live, and smile, and lessen the stranglehold of depression.

Therapy is so helpful, as are the anti-anxiety meds. I am really thankful that Hubby is open to the process, that he acknowledges that he needs to change too, if I am to get well, and that maybe he needs help to reach his own happiness. Our therapist gets me, I think. She sees right into the heart of our relationship and zeroes in on what is good, and what is bad. She has, in her own roundabout way, convinced me that I really truly am suffering from clinical depression. I don’t think I realized just how ill I have been until recently. I can’t believe I let it get so bad. I also can’t believe that I was more willing to accept a vision of myself as a total fuckup – a wife who can’t keep the house clean and the bills paid, whose inertia almost brought us to the brink of financial ruin, who barely has the energy for work and surely can’t fit time for friends in – than as someone with a mental illness. And so now I am double stigmatized – I am a mentally ill infertile who happens to take breast cancer meds and Parkinson’s meds and anxiety meds and aspirin and folic acid in the foolhardy hope that something will make it all magically work as it should. Yay me.

Hubby and I have a reasonable plan ahead (I know, I know, our plans change almost as frequently as our underwear). We’re going to try with our last cycle of femara. Then, we may take a couple of months off so I can detox a bit and get physically and mentally as healthy as possible. Exercise. Sweat. Do acupuncture and yoga. Eat well. Spend time with friends (or maybe actually make some of my own, since all of our friends here are couple friends and I let all of my female friendships die). All the while we’ll be building our savings account towards that lofty goal, IVF. And since it will take a while – since, in my depression, things like “paying the bills” and “not getting sent to collections” were not high on my priority list – we’ll try a couple of iui cycles. If all that fails – as it likely will – we’ll move on to IVF (which scares the shit out of me, because if that fails as well, I’ll be cliff diving off the precipice of depression to the depths of complete batshit crazy!).
We’ll get there, inch by inch. We might be the oldest parents of a kindergardener EVER, but we'll get there. I hope.