yearnings and musings

My visit to Philly brought the one thing I had successfully avoided thinking about for the past few months back to glaring center stage. Babies. The friends I stayed have a two year old, and she is a lovely child (also a genius-- she is spelling at 2!). More than anything,  I could not stop marveling at the utter trust and love that exists between parents and their children. It is the best of relationships. When you spend two days observing it, you get a wee bit wistful that despite having been pregnant twice, you don't have it yet, and far worse, there is the gnawing fear that something so wonderful might be forever denied to you.

As my mom tells me, I need patience. And, more importantly, I need to stop catastrophizing (if that is even a word). I cannot honestly imagine that after getting pregnant, that my baby will actually keep growing and that at some point, I won't have to stumble out of an ultrasound crying my eyes out. When that is all you know, its hard to imagine that an alternative exists, although, rationally, you know very well that it does.

I've completely lost the faith that I will actually have a baby someday, and its not going to come back until well,  maybe I cross the 5 month mark and the anatomical scan shows that all is well. God, the fear.  FDR did have it right when he said that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, this terror and anxiety is bloody stupid.

I chart my cycles, and I now kind of beleive that when you are using natural cycles for conception, observing your fertility signs, which are very rough indicators of estrogen and progesterone (and by extension, egg quality) might be telling. For example, I hated the cycle I used for my second conception, I thought it was my worst ever. But I went ahead with it, though at that point, I compared it to a poker player going all in with a substandard hand.  And I ended up with a baby with an entire chromosome missing.  IF that error was in my egg, did it have anything to do with the possibly lower-than-my-average and definitely less-long peak estrogen levels in that cycle? No RE will even attempt to address this question, it is speculation beyond speculation. There is so little you know of this process, nobody knows what are the driving factors behind meiotic non-disjunction (where the chromosomes do not segregate correctly, causing numerical errors like trisomies or monosomies). Studies make it clear that estrogen has a role to play in this process, but correlating the estrogen levels, and moreover, the importance of time period of the estrogen peak, to the probability of meiotic non-disjunction is far beyond our ability to speculate, we simply have no clue.

Every now and then, you have a cycle where everything looks so good  you wish you could have used it to attempt conception.  The one that just ended was one such one. There were virtually rivers of the egg-white you-know-what (sorry for the icky detail). Then, my luteal phase, instead of being the usual 14 days, was a whopping 16.

If I had not been sure that there was no way conception could have occurred, I would have been fairly nervous when it took over 16 days after day of ovulation for AF to show!  Whenever I conceive next, I hope it is in a cycle I feel this good about.