The Great Race

I’ve been in this battle for about two 1/2 years now.  It has had its great triumphs, where I’ve learned a lot about myself and my marriage and my body.  It has had its truly awful times where I’ve felt like donating my fallopian tubes to science and calling it quits.  But in the midst of all these times, what I’ve also gained has been a steady collective of women who reside in this same fight with me.  We support each other, we laugh at jokes that we know other people would never understand, and we provide each other with what every woman fighting infertility needs: knowledge that hers is not the only malfunctioning uterus on earth.

But there is also a great fear.

In the above clip from Toy Story, we find ourselves in the claw toy machine.  Putting us in the perspective of those toys we see a sea of small green aliens who look identical.  Yet, when that claw comes down, only one is chosen…and he says as he rises to the top of the machine, “I have been chosen, fare well my brothers…”

This is the PRECISE feeling a reproductively challenged woman feels in her head when a comrade in the infertility fight calls and says, “I’m Pregnant!”

You try to maintain low tones, don’t get furious, or self-loathing.  Try to remember that this is your buddy, your ace, your friend, and show genuine joy for HER and HER dream coming true.  Do not freak out.  But all the words you tell yourself in your head, are completely muted down in your heart where a small death has occurred.  It is hard to see someone else get the dream first.  It is especially hard when you feel like they are “fresh on the scene”, or “new to this game”,…whereas you’ve put in IUI’s, IVF’s, THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS, millions of hysterical prayers, weeks of waiting, days of crying, buckets of tears…and they take ONE round of Clomid and produce twins….  It is hard.

But then you know what?

You breathe.

You go out and buy that layette set you saw on sale at Kohls.  You wait for your shower invitation or you help plan whatever you need to plan.  You HONESTLY give your friend the same happiness an joy that you would want if the claw had chosen you, and you move on.

I struggle with this.  I struggle with friends who I just KNOW will probably get to that dream before me.  I see them planning, and I can’t help but feel like “must be nice to put together a plan that is gonna work”, in light of my own that has yet to even spark.  But this blog is my therapy.  So I’m going to take my own advice, suck up all my hater-tussin, and be prepared to be a happy camper.  Its what I would want.  And that is still the golden rule, isn’t it?