A Reality Check

And I think I'm doing better than I might have thought.

It's Saturday night, and I got so much accomplished today -- too clothes to the used clothing store and walked out with $25, Walmart, haircut, polish change at the nail salon, Kohls, made cupcakes for work on Monday, worked on two Christmas presents (more on that later) -- that I'm kicking up my feet, Casey laying against my legs, and surfing blogs I haven't visited in a while.

I went to a few of the fertility blogs I used to read all the time. Tonight, after reading things like:

I wanted to answer the unasked questions I saw in their eyes. I felt like saying, "Thanks for the congratulations. I'm not as lucky as you think. I can't have children. If I could have children I probably wouldn't have even applied for this job. I would give up this promotion in a second if I could go back and have a successful IVF. Don't envy me."

and...

I bristled inside. "When I get pregnant.... When I get pregnant... When I get pregnant..." The words rang in my ears all day. Part of me wanted to tell her, "Yeah right. It might not be that easy." But another part of me realized that for her it probably would be that easy. "When I get pregnant" is the world that most people live in.

and...

And just as a parent will always be a parent. I will always be infertile.

After reading several posts like that, I realized that I'm not there anymore. Oh sure, I still have days when I feel like that, days when I have a pity party for myself when I hear someone is pregnant, days when I wish more people would talk to me about what I've been through, to have some sympathy for me...but what I realized tonight is that those days are becoming further and further apart.

I remember nights flipping through the channels and finding nothing but pregnancy-related story lines, even on the Food Network. And it would send me into slow, deep sobs. It's been a long time since I had a night where I cried myself to sleep.