Invisible identities

As I've posted before, Chez Miscarriage is an insightful funny eloquent fabulous blog I read pretty regularly. Her latest post talks about being infertile, and how that identity can stick with you even as you move closer and closer, even into parenting. (Not only is the post eloquent, but the comments on the post are pretty cool too).

For myself, I can't see myself as anything but "recovering infertile." I'm not sure I ever want to see myself differently. What we went through en route to Otter did change me, and is a permanent part of me (just as my many years unpartnered through my mid to late twenties into my early thirties changed how I see the world). And that identity is under my skin, not immediately visible to anyone who didn't know us then (just as my identity as an adopted child is invisible to people I meet).

All of those pieces of me feel so central that it's often jarring to me when others don't know, don't recognize, and speak as if "we" are all the same: we formerly-pregnant just-jump-in-that bed-and-make-a-baby mothers, we families built by biology, we married people.

And we're not. Some of us have families built other ways; some of us have kids begun in doctor's offices and specimen cups, some of us have decades of unmarried lives and perspectives.

I have so many jumbled feelings about this, and perhaps I can't, today, articulate clearly how these things all connect for me.

But here are some thoughts I want to come back to:

It's left me thinking about what I "got" from my time when I was, explicitly, infertile. I don't mean to slip over the awfulness: there was much of that. I remember what seemed like a summer's worth of ongoing family gatherings with my in-laws, where I was:

• sobbing after I was --again-- "not-pregnant",
  
• shaken and anxious and full of doubt as we went into another 2ww (the 2 week wait between ovulation and finding out if (that) you're (not) pregnant, for those of you not embedded in infertility talk),
  
• peeing on OPK stick (ovulation tests to find out if you're about to ovulate) after OPK stick in the much-shared cabin bathroom at the family reunion, talking on the cell phone (behind the cabin during the family reunion photo time out front) to the covering doctor to schedule a Sunday noon sperm-washing/insemination procedure that meant we had to check out early, so rushed we left with our cabin key and had to mail it back, driving like mad to make our schedule, playing Cosmic Wimpout in a deserted doctor's office while the sperm spun round and round in the high-tech high-hopes not-always-high-results machine
  
• choking up as we explained, in a quiet kitchen side conversation away from the children running in the yard, pushing away tears at yet another family function, that while our insurance would pay for procedures to get pregnant apparently ad infinitum, the prescription plan would pay for only one month of injectable fertility drugs--and then we'd have to ante up $1800 a month of drug money to have a shot (ha ha pun there--not truly funny after you've taken the training class practicing injecting an orange imagining it's your body) at a pregnancy, so it had to work now, had to work this time, or else

I feared up front, in my bones, that I'd not have an easy time getting pregnant. I'd had diagnosed endometriosis, had gone through a laparoscopy, before we ever began trying. Many of our family and friends thought we should wait, but I felt this onrushing terror that it was going to take a while, take time and we couldn't sit around enjoying this new partnership and wait until we were "ready."

I don't know for sure why I couldn't quite envision myself as fertile. Maybe because my parents are infertile, and I'm adopted (as is my brother). Maybe because I did come to partnership past what our culture sees as prime child-bearing years. Maybe because of the endometriosis, or the weeks of non-stop bleeding that stopped only with medication, leading on through tests for ovarian cancer and polycystic ovarian syndrome to months of periods spent on codeine and then on to the eventual laparoscopy that found the endo.

Whatever it was, the infertility felt as if it was something I'd always suspected, always felt lingering in the corner just out of eyesight.

(At that laparoscopy, my parents came to wait with my closest woman friend and with my partner. Beforehand, I talked to my OB/GYN surgeon/doctor, pleading with her NOT NOT NOT to do a hysterectomy unless there was grave and life-threatening need, because when sa family member had her similar surgery decades ago, the one that was supposed to make her able to conceive, she woke up to find that the drs had decided that nothing in there was salvagaeable, and there she was, in her twenties, complete hysterectomy, unexpected, unplanned, and waking up in the hospital to a dr who said "she was entitled to a blue day" due to the news.

And my dr said: but there's no reason to think that we'd find any such need... but I needed to hear it, needed to confront that up front, to be a bit reassured, but, maybe, just to hear myself voice the possibility out loud.

And somewhere in a file in an office is a picture they took during the surgery of my ovaries, a picture the dr promised, unsolicited, to show me sometime.)

Hmm. This entry is already VERY LONG. I will stop here, and insert a cheery little Otter anecdote to clear your palate of the saga of my musings on my own reproductive history.

Otter anecdote of the day: Otter's cousin K the Elder has sent us more lovely hand-me-downs, including a fabulous green vinyl raincoat with a frog on the front. This raincoat, while nominally one size too big for Otter, is in fact six inches too long in the sleeves, comes down to almost his ankles, and the shoulders of the coat are closer to his elbows than his actual shoulders.

So what is the coat Otter craved yesterday? You got it: "frog one, frog one!" and "on! on!" were the cries as I dressed him for daycare.

Not only did he wear it off to daycare, when his father came to pick him up, Otter, who had been playing outside in a normal fleece-y blue coat, ran up to his dad and said "frog one, frog one" and insisted on changing into the raincoat for the drive home, insisted on wearing it in the carseat with all the snaps fastened, right up to his litle chin, with the green vinyl hood up.

Did I mention that there has been no sign of rain here in days?

So whatever infertility markings linger under my skin, or perhaps in part because of that lingering, I do recognize that my green-vinyled demanding-raincoat child is a blessing beyond measure.