Has it really been that long?

Wow, I gulped when I glanced at my blog archive and saw the stack of years, one on top of each other like a huge puffy layered birthday cake. This year, 2011, marks my 5th year of blogging. Could that be possible? Could all those years have gone by full of angst and misery and now I finally approach the dreaded 40? A whole year has passed by and my daughter is entering into toddlerhood? I am not sure whether to celebrate the dedication I have had to writing or to cry thinking of how long infertility has been the main subject of my life.

Now that we are officially entering 2nd trimester for baby #2, it seems ironic that infertility is still in my life. It was never more apparent when a friend announced she was pregnant with her own eggs after years of failure, including with a donor and with a surrogate. Another friend just told me she was pregnant with her own eggs after 5 failed IVFs and after she received the expected "donor egg speech." She went to a different specialist who magically told her it was not her eggs, it was just a hormone issue. She proceeded to get pregnant this month with just an IUI and clomid. This is definitely a WTF moment for me. Why must the universe taunt me with such success stories after I have done everything in my power to put my eggs in a wooden coffin and nail it shut?

Hope is a funny thing that way. It is suppose to be such a beautiful thing and yet it can pierce like a knife. I haven't cried about my eggs for over a year. Certainly not since my daughter was born. But this brought me to tears. This brought up the anger again of, "Why me?" This so easily tore the wounds open again after I had painstakingly sutured them up, bandaged them, and supposedly healed.

But the reality is that these wounds are with me for the rest of my life. The longing for a biological child seems wrong and selfish as I have been blessed with a daughter and another baby on the way. So I try to give myself an emotional slap in the face and say, "You can't always get what you want." I do find comfort that it was not until these triggers of miracle pregnancies that I got so upset all over again. On a day to day basis I am not angry or sad, so I suppose it's just a lifetime of managing those triggers.

A book I would highly suggest is Little Bee. It's a beautifully written and compelling story with voices of two women from very different worlds. One quotation sticks out right now as I think about this life long pain:

I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.

 -From Little Bee, by Chris Cleave