ICLW and a Pity Party

First, if your visiting for ICLW, welcome!

Unfortunately, you caught me in a downswing. I'm currently recovering from my third miscarriage and the flu. I'm physically and emotionally really down right now (for more on that, check below the fold). You can read my story and learn more about my journey in the tabs above.

Who am I outside of RPL?

• Wife to a wonderful man, The Mister, who can usually make me laugh in spite of myself, no matter how angry or sad I may be. :-)
• Volunteer Music Docent at a local public school--I teach one 30 minute lesson per week to a class of 20 Kinders.
• Volunteer Sunday School Teacher at my church--I teach as part of a team of five, so each of us prepares a lesson about once a month, and acts as an assistant at least once a month.
• Volunteer Community Gardener--I'm in the process of exploring a new garden to work at where there *hopefully* will be less likelihood of running into parents of preschoolers. My previous garden had become a hive of the moms-of-under-fives set.
• Craft Artist--I love doing handwork, although I don't have any current projects going. See my Projects Page for pics of some of my creations over the past year.
• Cook--I actually spend 20+ hrs/wk in the kitchen, making most of my/our food from scratch. The Mister generally eats out at work, but we eat at home together most evenings and on the weekends.

There, I don't think any of that is "identifying". ;-) But since I blog anonymously (Hope isn't my *real* name) I'm not going to tell you where I live or how many siblings I have, or anything like that. Sorry. :-)

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Back to the Pity Party mentioned above. I'm just in a real slump right now. I've been feeling very alone, very isolated, even with all the support that the ALI community offers. Because it seems really hard to find the other RPL ladies out there. There are lots of people with a loss or two. There are lots of people who have trouble getting pregnant. A lot of times those groups overlap. But what I keep wondering, what I keep asking myself, is, "Where are the other women who are going through RPL *right now*? The ones like me who conceive okay, but seem to lose every pregnancy just as quickly? Where are they?"

I know I should appreciate the fact that people with different stories can support each other. I am very appreciative of my loyal readers, especially the ones whose stories *are* different from my own. But that doesn't stop me from longing for connection with someone whose story is close enough to my own for her to say, "I get it," and for no other words to be needed.

I'm grieving right now, and that's really hard, too. I had hoped that, since I've been through this before, and since I have a professional support team to turn to for both emotional and medical help, this latest loss wouldn't be such a huge emotional setback. But it is. It hurts. I can't look into the future right now. I can barely cope with the present. I just want to curl up in a ball and wait for it all go go away. Wait for the pain to go away. Cry my heart out and do nothing else. I know that this is normal grief, but I don't want to feel it. It hurts so much. Loss sucks every time. It will continue to suck, every time. I don't know how much more of this I can endure.

I cannot believe that I will stay pregnant the next time we try. I cannot picture myself having anything but another loss. I am out of hope for the moment. Yet, I keep plodding on. I know that I will take the next step and go in for the immune tests Dr. R. ordered (as soon as I am over the d@#n cough). If he finds something, I will proceed with treatment. If he doesn't find anything, I will have more decisions to make. I am praying that the tests find something treatable. I think that, finding something else to treat might restore my hope, at least a little.

I am, in some ways, grateful that I got the flu, and that this cough is taking it's time getting better (it is improving). I wanted to take some time to grieve before we tried again, but The Mister wants to make sure things keep moving (probably because it took me four months to take any action after my second loss). So not being well enough to go in for the tests gives me a legitimate excuse to take the break I need from TTC and try to focus on my grieving.