National Infertility Awareness Week, Two Years Later

I.

I haven't been a fertility patient in TWO YEARS.

That fact is simply astonishing to me.

I haven't been a fertility patient for a while and yet I am always, still, an infertile woman.

My "childlessness" was resolved.  Two kids in my house, two embryos on ice.  But my body and my relationship to my body?  I used an egg donor in my 30s.  (You don't get much more infertile than that.  No, no pain olympics here, just stating the facts.)

But the pain of infertility, the daily sorrow, I can say it has diminished for me with a tiny boy in the house.  Every day, I think, it gets smaller and less significant to my daily living.

II.

I just went back through my archives, to the last week in April.

2009:  Still hopeful, gearing up for an IUI that was actually successful.  The IUI that sent me down recurrent miscarriage lane.

2010:  Hysteroscopy and micropolyposis diagnosis.  Beginning of the bad summer.  The second bad summer.

2011:  Pregnant.  Lost a twin.  Thought I'd lose a Tiny Boy.  That doesn't go away.  Sometimes, honestly, I look at him and think things like:  I wonder if that flat spot on his head is because he was being crushed as a 10 week old embryo.  I wonder if his slower language development is because the pregnancy was fucked from the start.

III.

So here I am in 2012 2013 [like I said, TWO YEARS?!]  Things are good.  Two kids.  Tenure.  Getting back into my writing.

Getting ready to donate embryos because, and I can say this now, I don't feel like I need to hold on to them as some kind of perverse back up plan.  Because, and this is a horrific thing to say, if something happened to LG or Tiny Boy I know I wouldn't try to get pregnant again.  As much as I would love to be in a sexual relationship that might result in a spontaneous pregnancy, I wouldn't try to get pregnant again; it broke me.

That is, I see the value in those embryos less as my possible children than the possible end to someone else's childlessness and sorrow.  I know I might feel differently when I sit across from Dr. Gorgeous and I sign those papers, but if those blastocysts stand a chance in someone else's body they should have it.  No, I don't believe the embroys have rights.  But women?  Oh yes, oh yes.  And if the end of my infertility journey is helping someone end hers as well.  Wow.