My particular pandemic pain point has been the pursuit of motherhood. Motherhood, or lack thereof, has been the most painful element of my life for 13 years. I am a person who has never questioned whether or not I want to be a mother. I have always wanted it. When I was young it was completely a matter of course that I would have children. No question about it. I went off birth control when I got married in 2007. When I was 28. And then…nothing. For 13 years I have lived in this painful limbo, with the last year being the most excruciating in some ways.
Throughout the entirety of my 30’s I was holding my breath, waiting for the pregnancy that never happened. I watched as friends had babies, and then watched as those babies grew into children and those friends grew into parents. I also watched myself disappear into my grief about it. It felt like all of my dreams and inspiration for what I wanted my life to be died along with the dream of being a mother, like all potential for who I could have been faded away. I gained a bunch of weight and became prematurely middle-aged by age 33. I vanished into the idea of being a total failure. I was too depressed and hopeless to pull myself out of it in terms of focusing my life on something else, and my husband and I couldn’t afford fertility treatment or adoption. I basically lost a full decade of my life to despair and hopelessness.
Sometime around age 38 the fog began to lift a bit. I did yoga teacher training, went to Thailand, finished my Thai Yoga Bodywork certificate. I began to resurface, to find myself again. The other thing that happened was that my husband’s career took off, and mine did, too. We were finally making pretty good money. The year I was 39 we bought a house in the city. The year I was 40 we started pursuing fertility treatments. That was a year ago, one month prior to pandemic lock-downs beginning in the U.S. We had a plan in place to start towards intra-uterine insemination (IUI) in March. Then the fertility clinic was shut down due to COVID-19. It was July before we could get back on track with the plan. I’m not going to lie; I did a lot of drinking during that four-month period.
In late July 2020 I started taking the hormones for IUI. I went in for a baseline ultrasound and found out that, though my hormone panels were perfect and I have a freakish number of eggs for my age, my uterus looks like a war zone. I have giant fibroids, polyps, and a huge cyst on my right ovary. After confirming all of the above with a sonohysterogram (super pleasant procedure), the clinic pronounced me no longer a candidate for IUI. If I wanted to proceed with trying to have a baby, I would need to do In Vitro Fertilization (IVF). For me that would involve retrieving my eggs, making embryos, having them tested, freezing the viable ones, having surgery to clean up my uterus, letting my uterus heal for at least three months, and then putting the embryos in one by one until one of them takes.
Now, in February 2021, I am healing from my second egg retrieval, which happened last week. In the first egg retrieval, out of 33 eggs (a freakishly high number for a person of any age), 20 were mature and 16 fertilized. Eight embryos developed enough for genetic testing and only one of those did not have a chromosomal issue that would cause miscarriage (the doctor assured me that it was entirely due to age and not anything I had done or not done). We decided that the entire weight of our parenthood dreams was an awful lot of pressure to put on one little embryo, so we went for a second round. In round two we got 30 eggs, 24 were mature and 20 fertilized. Twelve developed enough to be tested. Next week we will find out how many were viable. Regardless of how many that is, we will not be doing any more egg retrievals.
The next steps for me are an MRI and a consult with the surgeon who will be fixing my uterus. That is in early March; a full year after lock-downs began. For me, as for many others, it has been a year of waiting. A deeper pressing of pain points. A development of patience. And maybe, hopefully, dreamfully, optimistically, a time of incubation.
chaos to clarity 