I’ve been thinking about coming back from my self-imposed hiatus for a bit things are finally starting to happen and honestly I miss having someplace to put down the thoughts that are constantly running laps in my head.
The last few months have been hard – really really hard. My mother got incredibly sick (she’s had heart problems for about 15 years) and the doctors in our area basically told her there was nothing that they could do for her and that she was going to die. Hearing this was a shock but thanks to the suggestion of one of my uncles my mother contacted someone at the mayo clinic and my dad took her up there for treatment. They were able to do what the doctors here couldn’t and thankfully she is still here and doing much better. I am sooooo incredibly grateful for the care she received up there. The one good thing is that it did serve as a bit of wake up call for her and she FINALLY quit smoking and is doing really well with it – I’m very proud of her. A few weeks prior to that one of my uncles took a turn for the worse with his cancer diagnosis and unfortunately it’s been all downhill for him, I try to put a positive spin on things when I talk to my mom about it – I want her to still believe that the impossible is possible, but you can only do that for so long.
Worst of all at the beginning of January we received a phone call from my family in Florida that another one of my uncles had passed away. He’d been sick for awhile and had suffered a stroke but I honestly didn’t know it was that bad. My mother took it incredibly hard and I do what I always do when someone in my family dies (I have a HUGE family so it happens every few years it seems) I kind of turn into a stone – I don’t cry (especially not in front of others) and I make myself busy. When my grandmother passed away in 2007 I wrote her eulogy and her obit, since then I have sort of become the eulogist for my family – when someone dies I somehow get roped into it. I sat down to write this for my uncle and I blanked – I suddenly realized that this man I grew up around who I loved deeply, I in fact barely knew. So I set out to ask my family questions – I asked his children, I asked his ex-wife (the one I still consider my aunt), and I asked my mother. I also remembered things that my grandmother said about her little boy – the boy with curls and the smile that could light up a room. The boy she said she sent to Vietnam, the boy she said never really came home. I already knew all that my cousins would say – he was a drunk, he loved alcohol more than anything, he could never leave the war behind, he loved his country passionately but could never quite love his children enough. My mother told me of her little brother, how changed he was after he went to war how she always wanted him to find his way back to that lovable wonderful boy he was – but that he never could. I finally cobbled something together, but it was nothing like what I wanted to write. I wanted to say that he was a man with many flaws, a man who was destroyed at 17 by the horrors of a war he was not even remotely prepared for, a man who loved his children even if they never really understood it or even if he failed to show it in all the ways he should. After he died they found some insurance policies he had taken out years ago and paid for faithfully every month so that when he died his children would have something – this shocked them. This man who couldn’t remember to show up to school events remembered this one thing – this one little thing, and at the end for his kids that was enough – they would never get back the time he missed with both them and their children – but they had this, this one final sign that their dad did in fact love them and had not forgot them.
Through all of this me and the husband have been trudging along – trying to finalize the sell of his family property in Cali to his mother so that we can FINALLY move on with our plans for IVF. Thankfully this week the house finally closed and he is supposed to sign some papers this week and then we are done with it, I am so incredibly relieved. We can finally move on with our plans to finance our IVF this spring/summer. In the meantime I have started trying to eat better and take my metformin regularly. I started using Myfitnesspal on my phone and it’s really great. I started the second week of January and I’m already down 9 1/2 lbs. Thanks to a suggestion from a good friend of mine I actually use baby stuff as a motivation – if I start to feel like I’m going to cheat and eat something bad instead I go on pinterest and pin some baby stuff, if I’m at the grocery store and I think about putting something bad in my cart I go stand in the baby aisle for a few minutes. The fertility clinic we use is now offering nutritional counseling, I called them earlier this week and they are supposed to be calling me back to schedule an appointment. It would be wonderful if by changing my diet and losing some weight I could magically get my PCOS under control and we would be able to conceive naturally. However, I’m not betting the farm on it so we are going through with all of this with the belief that it will increase our chances come IVF.
Since I took my blogging hiatus – I’ve seen soooo many fellow bloggers have babies along with numerous people that I know. I’m honestly incredibly happy for all my fellow IF’ers who have had their babies – it’s been a long wait for all. Every time I look at a baby announcement whether it be in my blog roll or on facebook I try to remind myself that one day it will be us. I’m trying to not let myself get overwhelmed or saddened by the unfairness that is so easy to feel – instead I am trying my damnedest to concentrate on the positives and so far it seems to be working.
Other than all that not a whole lot has been going on – we’ve been battling the flu, strep throat and numerous other fun time ailments this winter and I think we FINALLY got rid of all of them – they just kept bouncing back and forth between the husband and myself which sucked. I’m hoping to be able to frequently update my blog but I’m taking it one day at a time, hopefully I still have a few people out there reading it after all this time 😀
-tara
Why Not Us? 