Some things never change

A few days ago, my friend R., who's now about five or six months pregnant and whom I haven't seen in a couple months, sent me an e-mail with some recent belly shots. I clicked on the e-mail, thinking surely I would be able to handle it now, but was shocked by the anger and bile that rose up in me as soon as I saw the photo of her swelling belly. I have no rational reason to be jealous of her--I'm pregnant now too!--and yet the old bitterness is obviously still very much present, curled up inside me and waiting to strike. Will I ever be able to hear someone else's pregnancy announcement without feeling a pang of jealousy?

(Of course, if she had been infertile--and for all I know, maybe she was--I would have had no problem at all looking at her damn belly shots. Would have been delighted, in fact.)

*****

Today I am officially ten weeks pregnant. It still feels a little unreal, partly because I still haven't told anyone at work. Originally I'd thought that if I could get away with it, I'd want to wait to tell my boss until the end of August, or at about 15 or 16 weeks. Then I thought, maybe 14 weeks is late enough. Now I'm so impatient, I'm tempted to do it at 12 weeks, after I have my next OB appointment and live-baby check. It's just so odd to have something so huge taking up so much of my brain, and yet spend 8-9 hours a day surrounded by people who have no idea.

Part of me wishes I could just fast-forward through the rest of this pregnancy and be in February, about to give birth. (It was never pregnancy I cared about so much as the baby at the end.) Then I realize that technically, the pregnancy is already one-quarter done, and I need to enjoy it while I can, as one wise woman reminded me.

*****

I was reading ahead in my pregnancy book to the section on childbirth (see above re: impatience), and was amused to read, in the section on "secret worries you may have," the question, "Will I have to bare myself in front of a lot of strangers?" I thought about it a little and realized that in the past nine months alone, no fewer than twelve different doctors have seen my lady bits--not to mention at least as many nurses. So exposing myself to strangers will obviously not be one of my personal sources of childbirth-related anxiety.

On the same topic, I forgot to mention that at the emergency live-baby check a couple weeks ago, Dr. Awesome kept saying things like "Okay, I'm just going to insert my fingers, get ready--you're going to feel something now--here it comes..." and apologizing for the speculum being cold, and I finally had to tell her, "I've been through infertility treatment, so pretty much nothing you do down there is going to faze me."

*****

Thanks for all your interesting comments on my last post--though y'all are so young, I feel like a crone! But that just proves my point, that infertility in younger women (and at 32, I still definitely qualify as young by RE standards) is way more complicated than the media makes it out to be--and that infertility itself, as we all know so well, is way more complicated than just "career bitch waits too long."