ChezPerky

I was laid off on Thursday. Seriously, I am ceasing to see the humour in the suckage of 2009.

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Okey dokey.  I think I’m all set up in my new home.   If you don’t have the password to my protected posts, email me.  I haven’t had time to put up a real post here – but I wanted to let everyone know that I’m still here and I do intend to keep posting.  Thanks everyone for hanging in there with me.

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J-man at the party

     
Sam with his beloved elephant

 
Ellie – our little daredevil – standing on the slide

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Last month, I picked up a pair of knock-off croc-type shoes for each of the triplets.  A pink pair for Ellie, an orange pair for Abby, and a blue pair for Sam.  The kids were delighted, but there was one problem.  Poor little Sam's shoes didn't fit him.  I had guessed his shoe size incorrectly and althought I'd gotten a full size bigger than the girls, it wasn't big enough. 

My kids don't talk, with the exception of a very few  words, but they sure do communicate.  The girls absolutely knew that they had something Sammy didn't have, especially Abby.  Abby would put on her little orange "crocs" and wave her little feet in front of Sam giggling.  Ellie was equally delighted with her own little pink beauties.  But poor Sam was despondent.  He would pick up his blue shoes, and bring them to me, crying wistfully, holding out his bare little naked toes, asking for goodness to be restored in the world.  But, alas, they did not fit.

Fortunately, just two days later, I had to take the triplets in for hearing tests at the hospital, so I had the morning off anyway.  Afterward, the nanny and I went to the store and I ran in to exchange the little shoes for slightly bigger little shoes and I put them on Sam's little feet in the car and he was ecstatic!  He shook his little feet and touched them and showed them off and giggled and laughed all the way from the store to the restaurant where we grabbed lunch before I headed back to work. 

And all was right in the world again. 

It doesn't stop there, though.  Our three little Imeldas are so shoe-obsessed and were so delighted by their new brightly colored shoes that they wouldn't take those little shoes off for several weeks.  They wore them day and night, literally, and if we took them off to do something drastic like change their clothes or give them baths, the temper tantrums were phenomenal.  It was delightful.

But lest you believe that it is just the brightly colored, rather unnatural looking (and feeling) croc-like shoe things that my children are obsessed with, here is evidence that, in fact, it is purely a generalized shoe obsession…  in fact, their preference is for Mom or Dad's shoes – and J's shoes are a close second choice.  They are frequently found stomping (or stumbling) around in our shoes, and the first thing that they do when we walk in the door at the end of the day is race over and start pulling at our shoes desperately trying to get them off our feet. (Interestingly, they are also nearly always offended to find me in my stocking feet and will race over with my shoes and push them onto my feet!)  Enjoy:

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You may remember my last post in which I wrote about telling my new-found therapist that my next IVF would likely be my last – and quickly following that up with “and I’m okay with that.” I was shocked to hear those words come out of my mouth, didn’t know where they came from, and didn’t know how I really felt about them, even.

Lorza left a very insightful, particularly true, comment:

Sometimes I think our ending comments like your “I am okay with it” are our attempts to put OTHER people at ease. Even subconsiously. It have become our nature to help others feel at ease with our suffering. I am so sorry you have been through so much.

I think this comment goes right to the heart of the matter, actually. In the last seven years of the ups and downs of living in this world of infertility, I’ve spent a lot of time tiptoeing around other people’s comfort levels in approaching me. Some people are downright brazen and out of line in how they have approached me over the years. Others spent years just plain avoiding me. Some people avoided me until I had the triplets, and then came out of the woodwork. Like having children was the antidote to infertility, and now I was not a leper any longer. (Some still haven’t come out of the woodwork at all yet)

But for those who are somewhere in the middle? I find myself either avoiding the topic alltogether (my usual response) or doing whatever I can to put them at ease – and usually, yes, that means ensuring that they know “I’m okay with it.”

When I met my therapist for the first time, I knew that the one thing I needed was for her to not focus on the infertility thing – that 5,000 pound elephant in the room. I needed her to know that infertility was not the driving force sending me to her – and I knew that infertility is such a huge red flag, particularly since I was telling her that I was actively pursuing IVF. It would have been easy for her to have assumed that infertility was the foremost issue causing me stress. Frankly, it’s astounding that it’s not my biggest issue. I think by saying “I’m okay with it,” I was trying to do just what Lorza suggested – put her at ease, and also make it clear that it isn’t that big a deal.

And who am I kidding?

This sucks. All of it. I’m so tired of all of this. I mean, I’m still not sorry that I’ve at least stalled on having the shrinkadoo go down that road, because I really do have bigger fish to fry, but sooner or later I’m going to have to face this. IVF#3 is around the corner, and when it fails, I’m out of options, and I’ll have to deal with that one way or another. I’m just… not ready to go there yet. Maybe I needed to put myself at ease, too.

But then there was the rest of Lorza’s comment… “I am so sorry you have been through so much.”

It’s funny because I don’t ever really think of myself has having been through “so much.” After all, I’m sitting here doing this from an enviable position. I *have* children already. And to get those children, I never had to pull out the big guns. Five rounds of Clomid, 6 Follistim/IUIs, 1 miscarriage, and voila! Triplets. It sounds positively easy compared to what so many of my fellow infertile myrtle friends have been through. Sure, it’s not a couple cocktails, soft music, and candles… but it could have been worse, right? Except that goes completely contrary to my own philosophy on the burden of infertility – I don’t believe you have to have pulled out “the big guns” of IVF in order to have felt the strain and suffering of infertility; I don’t believe you have to diminish your own trials just because there’s always someone else who’s been through more than you. I do my best not to play the pain olympics trap that so many fall into, however understandably.

And this time around? Why shouldn’t I feel the stress this time around? Truthfully, I’ve never really given myself permission to bitch about this round of treatments. I’ve got a really blessed life; I have a beautiful family, and I have a great deal of guilt about seeking to expand it, despite knowing that my family isn’t yet complete. I feel guilty if I feel stress through these rounds of treatments, guilty if I can’t hold my head up high in the face of cancellation or failure, guilty if I’m not 100% happy with the status quo all of the time.

Someday, probably not today, I’ll have to deal with all of this. For now, I suppose it’s simply progress that I’m acknowledging it all.

Okay, seriously, people – you had to know it was a dangerous thing to let me into therapy, right? Didn’t you know you’d end up with all this froo-froo, introspective, self-indulgent whinging?

Of course you did! Welcome to my world. Imagine how my poor husband feels. And poor Barren – that poor woman gets endless emails filled with self-pitying ridiculousness from me every. single. day. Even I’m sick of me by now. I can’t believe she hasn’t just started hitting the delete button by now. Gawd. Feel free to pull me off your readers anytime now. Seriously.

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