Cheek: An Infairytale of Sorts

November 22, 2007

An Infairytale of Sorts

I didn't think I'd ever write this post, for about forty million kajillion reasons. (Okay, three that I can think of off the top of my head.)

Reason #1: I decided, a year ago, to stop blogging because I needed to protect my family, and my website was being regularly snarked by some big meanheads. And I didn't feel like battling them, so I made the really really hard decision to quit. It was like cutting out a piece of my heart.

Reason #2: I needed to focus more on my daughter, and I was spending waaaaaaaayyyy too much time in blogworld. (Daughter: (Tugging on sleeve) Play! PLAY! Me: (Staring at screen) What's a synonym for poop? It needs to be poetic.)

Reason #3: Well, you'll see below. Probably the biggest reason I never expected to be writing this specific post.

(But let me say that I missed writing and missed being a part of bloggy goodness like crazy. My writing muscle is all stiff and dorky, but hopefully it'll limber up.)

Anyway, let's start at the beginning. I'm going to tell this weirdass story in chunks, working up until I get to the present (this is only chunk #1...the whole story is going to take me a while). And I'm going to be completely annoying and tell it in the third person, because it still seems so unreal.

BEFORE THE BEGINNING

Once upon a time there was a boy and a girl who wanted a family. So they started trying but things went immediately downhill in the form of strange bleeding. The girl went to a Reproductive Endicronologist because she had a lot of friends online who visited these amazing wizards of conception. That was only the second month of trying to make a baby. The Reproductive Endicronologist gave the girl many tests that revealed some problems, like luteal phase defects and other whatnots that the girl, surprisingly, has actually forgotten since then (it was a long time ago, anyway). The girl tried out Clomid for a while, but that didn't do squat. So the girl made the decision to switch to a big, popular clinic. The doctors there (many Reproductive Endicronologists, all bedecked in white coats and bearing many Articles of Disctinction after their names) told the boy and the girl that they needed to do an IVF because of the whatnots wrong with them, but that their chances were excellent. So the girl and the boy did a few IUIs and then a few IVFs, some of the cancelled right before retrieval, some of them completed. And they switched clinics again, because the second clinic failed them and they wanted to be successful. And they underwent lots of tests, and then the girl decided to cheat on her new doctors and went back to Clinic #1 to have surgery done to examine what the hell was up. The surgery showed nothing. So more IVFs and IUIs were attempted but nothing worked, and the girl remembers the four years of medical intervention as being endless dawn trips to the city to get blood drawn, phone calls beginning with "I'm sorry," follicles that would not bloom, cysts that crowded her ovaries, and bloating. Oh, and tears--lots of them. And a bitter taste in her mouth that eventually filled her blood and changed her, literally, into someone she didn't recognize.

Eventually the girl and the boy were cancelled in the beginning of a cycle and told they would have to wait for levels to go down (an important level--FSH--was too high. This, the girl knew, was Bad News). This information came on their anniversary, so it was too much and they decided to adopt.

And then came paperwork and more paperwork and deadlines and trips to immigration offices and waiting and waiting and waiting.

THE FIRST BEGINNING

One day the waiting was over and there was a picture and information about a beautiful chubby cheeked girl. And a little over two years from the first paperwork sent, the girl and the boy adopted a 13 month old baby from China. And this baby girl (who we'll call MP) changed the couple's life and the skies opened up and let loose a whole galaxy of sunshine.

During this time when the girl would tell people she was adopting people would usually say "You'll probably get pregnant now." And at first the girl, when she said "no, I won't, and I don't want to anyway" was lying a little bit because really, she wanted to be pregnant as well.

And then after MP came the boy and the girl knew that getting pregnant was not important to them anymore, at all. And although the girl always wondered what had kept them from ever, ever, ever conceiving (after four years of medical intervention and two years of on-their-own) she embraced her new life as Mama and found the bitterness draining out of her as if she was a salted eggplant. (Foodies, you know what I mean.) And she threw baby showers and was genuinely happy for her pregnant friends and secretly thought too bad you won't ever adopt now, because it's so freaking awesome. And she was healed and stronger and in love with her daughter and her new family.

And for a year they lived happily, the three of them. And then one day after their year-long anniversary as a family, the girl began a new cycle, started her period, which had become nice and regular and was not plagued by strange bleeding anymore. And I guess this would then be called

THE SECOND BEGINNING

Two weeks later the family moved into a new house with a big backyard and an extra bedroom and a kickbutt family room with a woodburning stove. The house was so much bigger than the one they moved from that they had almost no furniture to fill it, but that didn't matter, because it allowed MP to race around wildly and somersault and jump ("bump!") and scatter her many, many toys (cooking/wooden food ones being her favorite because she is a Mini Chef in the Making).

And two weeks after that the family decided to go out to dinner and the girl realized she had still not started her period (it was a few days late). So she jokingly dug through a box and got out a First Response pregnancy test left over from, oh, years before when she should have bought stock in the stuff. She wanted to drink copious amounts of margarita and wanted assurance. Plus, it was kind of unlike her period to be late. Laughingly she peed on the stick and held it up to perform the Pee Stick Squint which she had perfected over the years ("do you see a line? I see a line. See if you angleitthisway youcansee--see it? No? Yeah. *Sigh* Me neither.")

A line appeared immediately. And then another line. Two lines. Very clear. There were two dark lines. She grabbed the box, heart hammering, and compared: Two lines, two lines. Pregnant. WHHHHHAAAAAAAAAA?

She ran upstairs, saying "Ohshitohshitohshitohshit" over and over, and thrust the pee stick into her husband's hands, who was saying "What? What?" and rushing to her. He looked at it. He took it to a window. He said, "Oh, wow."

That night, she googled "false positive pregnancy test" and saw that it could, indeed, happen. She had three positive pregnancy tests by then, but she recognized that none of that meant very much.

***********************************

So that's it for now. A positive test. A relatively huge hurdle in a universe-sized obstacle course filled with hurdles.

Next up: OB Appointment number one. What the hell. I learn that a Fetal Pole is not something you vault with.

Posted at 01:38 PM | Permalink

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d83420d00853ef00e54f9f69cd8834

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference An Infairytale of Sorts:

Comments

You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

First, this is such exciting news and I'm so thrilled to see you posting.

Second, I work for immigration and one of my jobs is to approve I-600A petitions. It is one of the fun parts of my job and I always think about you and MP whenever I approve one. Every once in a while I get involved enough that someone sends me a picture and that is always cool. Sometimes, when they pick up their approval in person, I have a chance to talk to them and they almost always say something like, "You have no idea how happy we are to have this approved." I tell them that I can't know myself, but that a) I'm a mom so I get it on some level and b) I know someone (okay, that's an exaggeration, but it's too hard to explain the internet thing at that point) who adopted from China so I have a small inkling of the amazing experience. Anyway, I just thought you might like to know.

Posted by: Stephanie | November 22, 2007 at 09:25 PM