Limbo Land and a Rant about Fertiles

One of the things I hate most about trying to resolve my RPL is the amount of time I seem to spend in Limbo Land. There are so many different kinds of limbo. There's the obvious limbo of the two week wait. There's the limbo of waiting for a doctor's appointment to discuss next steps. There's the limbo of waiting for test results. And I've just discovered a new limbo: the one where I'm waiting to be well enough to get my immune blood work drawn. I have this lovely cough that is hanging on long after all my other flu symptoms disappeared. I asked Dr. R., hoping that it wouldn't make any difference, but he thinks I should wait for the cough to go away, too. So more limbo. Ugh.

The worst of it is, I know it won't end really with a positive beta, an initial ultrasound, or any milestone except a healthy baby. Pregnancy will be one long stint in Limbo Land. Learning to live with uncertainty is so incredibly hard. Even though nothing in life is ever really certain, some parts of life seem more within my control than others, and this business of RPL is so far out of my control that it is also way outside my comfort zone. Much as I hate to apply the term "control freak" to myself, I really do like to be in control of my life. Having no control over the most important goal I've ever had is very, very difficult for me.

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On another note, I have had a couple of recent run-ins with the fertile crowd that really rubbed me the wrong way. The first was yesterday, on my way home from a really productive therapy session. I ended up behind a car with a vanity license plate holder that said "Papa's Final Score: Girls 4, Boys 2." Reading that was like a slap in the face. It hurt so much. I considered the possibility that it might refer to his children, but it seemed to me more likely to refer to a count of grandchildren, partly based on the car he was driving and partly based on how old I thought he was from what little I could see of his head.

Once I'd got that idea in my head, I had two more reactions. The first was irritation at the arrogant assumption that this guy knows the score is "final". How does he know that there won't me more babies? How does he know that his kids are done having kids--that none of them are struggling privately with IF, or planning to try for another child? My final reaction was disgust at the smugness of the sentiment. Which made me think about other ways people publicize their success at family building. I realized that even the window decals I have always seen as super cute are smug. I think what really struck me was the fact that this guy was (presumably) bragging about kids he didn't have an active hand in creating. Parents bragging about their ability to create live offspring is bad enough, but the idea of a grandparent taking credit for his grandchildren's existence bothered me so much more.

The other fertile run-in was really minor, it just rubbed me the wrong way. I was walking home from the library, and at the last stoplight a mom with a toddler in a stroller came up to wait beside me. What bugged me about seeing her was really silly. It wasn't that she was a mom, or that she had a stroller I know to be super expensive. It was that on top of everything, her hair was bright pink. I think the pink hair bugged me because just yesterday I was talking to a friend and the subject of dyeing our hair came up. Neither of us do, but I've been fantasizing recently about going bright red, and my friend confessed to a desire to go pink. So seeing this other woman with pink hair was just a little too close to home right now. Especially since I probably won't dye my hear when I'm hoping for a successful pregnancy soon. I wouldn't want to add harsh chemical hair dye to all my other risk factors . . . But it would be fun . . .

Anyway, rant over. I just needed to get that out of my system.