Staring at Change

Our embryos come out of the freezer at about 9am tomorrow - our 10 year, one month journey may be over by lunchtime.

I thought that having nothing to transfer might be a relief - it won't be. Turns out I really do want this - for me and for my husband (in those naive, early days, we agreed we wanted two kids) and very, very much for my son. I have been panicking about the fact that maybe I waited too long, that I am not fit enough, that I am too fat, that the badly fitting ring pess.ary that's holding my prolapse in is interfering with the absorption of the Cyc.logest . . . you get the picture.

I am also preparing for grief. This all started with a first pregnancy that ended in a first miscarriage and I fought all the way from there to here. I didn't really stop to grieve because I was never very sure what I was grieving. The losses were early - I didn't feel like I had lost a baby, more that I had lost the possibility of motherhood this time. But six losses mount up. Six losses (all natural pregnancies, separate from treatments), failed rounds of clom.id, a failed IUI, two failed IVFs. Some interesting diagnoses along the way - high blood pressure, a clotting condition that affects others in my family. And then there's the lost friendships and the lost opportunities - the career chances I didn't take because we were focusing on treatment, the holidays we couldn't take because we were paying for treatment. A lot of stuff.

And I think that, mainly, I pushed it all down and deferred it - waiting for "the end" - the time when I would know what I was grieving. Was it going to be the losses I spoke of above or was it going to be the much bigger loss - was I going to be grieving the loss of motherhood?

I am one of the lucky ones - we have our son. And one thing I don't grieve is my genes. Happily, since he arrived, I have never felt the need to mourn the fact that he is not my genetic child. How could I? He is all I could ever have hoped for - I love him more than I thought it was possible to love anything.

But, as we get closer (maybe very close) to the end of our journey, I realise that there is grief there and I'm a bit scared of how it's going to come out. I also realise that infertility/miscarriage is always going to be part of our lives. Because our son is the result of donor eggs and we intend to be (are already being) honest about this with him, we are not going to be merging into the world of fertiles now that we have our son. No bad thing, I think. I want what I went through to count for something, to help someone other than me. I am already helping out with the infertility support group at our local SANDS and I would like to be involved with the Donor Conception Network - an organisation whose ideals I strongly agree with.

The name of my blog becomes very relevant again. For our embryos, for us, for my son, I need to hope for the best. But I'm not sure how prepared I am for the worst. We'll see . . .