Relief

Lest you think I've been spending all my time since that last post weeping, I should share with you that on Tuesday Bat Girl learned how to play Duck Duck Goose at daycare. As soon as I got home from work she demanded that we all play. I don't know if you remember how RIDICULOUSLY EXCITING it was to play Duck Duck Goose when you were a kid, but the look of glee on her face, as she practically vibrated with anticipation waiting for one of us to say "GOOSE!"--well, I can't remember the last time I laughed that hard.

*****

And in other good news, I got a job! It is, in fact, very nearly the same job I turned down almost exactly two years ago. You know, the job I turned down because I loved my then-current job and thought it was a better path to what I wanted to do with my life? (And then I got laid off six months later and cursed myself for sticking with the old job.) It is also the exact same salary I turned down two years ago as being not enough of a bump up from my then-salary.

But a lot has changed in two years. I got laid off, for one thing. I spent a year and a half freelancing/consulting and incrementally moving myself in the direction of my ultimate ideal, the penguin zoo. But then work dried up over the winter, and we started running a major deficit in our budget, and I started coming to terms with the fact that while I might do OK as a roving penguin handler, the market for penguin zoos has really dried up, and there really aren't many, if any, full-time penguin zoo managers anymore. (In fact, that Dream Job I didn't get last year ended up majorly reducing their penguin division, so it wouldn't have been a dream job after all.) And we need money, and our health insurance now costs $1250/month, and we have preschool bills to pay come fall.

So I took the job. It's not perfect, but it's a good job--a better (as in more enjoyable for me) job than what they were offering me two years ago, even though the salary is the same. I like the people, and they have excellent benefits (including IF coverage). And I buy myself some time to figure out if I want to totally reevaluate my future. I'm relieved. And happy (even if I don't sound totally enthused on paper). There's still some i's to dot and t's to cross on the paperwork (so if we're friends on Facebook, please don't mention this on there--I have a lot of industry friends on FB and it's still under wraps) but by the end of the month, I should be gainfully employed again. Yay!

Sadness

This morning, I opened my email inbox to find a message with the subject line, "Baby!" Yes, a birth announcement, from the husband of a friend I hadn't even known was pregnant.

The email brought up all sorts of complicated sadness for me. First, the difficult feelings I have toward this friend, M. I met M when Bat Girl was just a month or so old. Her daughter was six days younger, born in the same hospital as BG even, and we met walking the paths of our neighborhood park with our newborns bundled into baby carriers. We were each other's mainstays through those foggy newborn months, bonding over breastfeeding difficulties and sleep issues, putting together a little moms group for other neighborhood women with newborns, sharing a babysitter, meeting up in the park on summer weekends (once we both went back to work) to marvel at our girls' chubby legs and attempts at crawling. We got to know each other's husbands. We celebrated our daughters' birthdays. I really thought we were good friends. We were good friends.

Then, when our girls were about a year and a half old, M got a job on the other side of the country, and she and her husband and daughter packed up and moved. They had a goodbye party, which of course we went to, and M and I said heartfelt farewells and promised to keep in touch.

And I never heard from her again. Not one email or phone call or text. I sent her a few emails asking how she was doing, but never got a response. At first I thought maybe she was too busy to keep in touch, but then a few other neighborhood moms mentioned hearing from her. Then I thought maybe she didn't have my email address and my emails were going into her spam folder, or something like that. But then I started getting occasional mass emails from her husband--notes that they were looking for a new subletter for their Big City apartment, announcements about a new project he was working on--and I had certainly never given him my email address. So I knew that she had given him my email for his "New York Friends" mass email list, yet somehow never found the time to write me a single word personally, after all that we had been through together. And that hurt.

So of course, seeing M's husband's name in my inbox brought up that hurt all over again. She was pregnant--and I hadn't even known it. I had to find out through that impersonal mass email to everyone they know, after the baby was born.

Then there's the fact that she just had her second baby, and her first is exactly the same age as BG. See, my bitterness about other people's pregnancies/babies is very specific now. I feel no resentment toward people having their first, even if they had no problems getting pregnant. (We've had a LOT of first babies in our lives lately--one born last month, one due this month, two more due this summer. Two of those are to friends who had miscarriages last year, so for those I am especially happy.) Maybe I still resent people who have super easy, robustly healthy first pregnancies--but only a little. I also feel little or no resentment toward people who have two kids under two--I was not ready for another baby when BG was that young, and would not have wanted one at that point.

But people with children roughly the same age as Bat Girl, who are pregnant with or have just given birth to their second? People whose second babies were conceived during the period last year when we were going through treatment? Those people, I resent the hell out of.

Last weekend I ran into the mother of a friend of BG's from daycare, whom I happened not to have seen for several months, and who was obviously, gigantically pregnant. I'd had no idea--and yes, her daughter is just a few months older than BG. I felt like I'd been socked in the stomach. And I ran into this woman and her belly again at daycare drop-off this morning.

AND this morning I got my period. I'd been spotting or bleeding basically every day for about 5 or 6 weeks, and I finally called my clinic last week and got a prescription for Provera. Took the damn prescription, and you'd think that after bleeding for 6 weeks straight there wouldn't be anything left in there, but as it happens, there sure is.

So there I am this morning, feeling terrible because of my period, which had to be artificially induced thanks to my eternally fucked-up ovaries, unemployed with no way to pay for IF treatment and no insurance that covers it, feeling sad and resentful about not being pregnant and not knowing if I'll ever be pregnant or have another child, feeling bitter about someone I know with a kid the same age as mine who's having another baby, and oh yeah, dealing with some more relationship crap that I don't really feel like getting into right now. And then I get a birth announcement from the husband of a friend who basically dumped me.

So yeah, not the best morning.

But dumping it all out on the Internet helps. So thanks.

PS I did write a very nice short email back to M and her husband (he sent the email but she was cc'ed) congratulating them and telling them how adorable the new baby was and how beautiful and grownup their daughter looked and how they both looked great too (they sent a lot of pictures). Because, you know, everyone deserves congratulations when they have a baby, and I'm not an asshole. At least not in public.

Infertiles! FRERs! A match made in heaven!

So apparently TLC.com has a new web-only reality series, A Conception Story. The idea was suggested to TLC by the makers of First Response, who will be supplying the participants with free ovulation and pregnancy tests.

I don't have a beef with the concept (it's actually quite brilliant, from a media/branding POV) and I haven't watched any of the episodes or even looked at the site. But I just had to share this quote from the NYTimes article on the series, which should elicit a snort from anyone who's had to allocate a special area of the medicine cabinet for HPTs:

Ms. Feldman [vp for marketing at First Response] said that while their customers are evenly split among those wanting a positive and negative result, “hopeful positives buy more boxes and use more sticks.”

You THINK???

(I also thought of the Serono ads Julie wrote about, where the husband is showing us his wife's gigantic stash of HPTs stacked and squirreled away in every spare inch of their home...)