18 Months

I was looking over my blog today, and noticed something disturbing? sad? surprising? All three, really.  It's been 18 months exactly today since I lost my first precious baby -- the one I really thought I'd be bringing home after all those years of disappointment.

In some ways it feels like it has been so much longer than just a year and a half.  So much has changed....though superficially it may seem like we are still stuck in the same place (childless, infertile, gambling everything we've got on IVF) -- we are so not.  My life today resembles nothing of my life then.

That day was a catalyst for me.  It broke me, in a way that nothing that I've endured up until then could.  It took several months for me to emerge enough from the blackness to take any sort of action, but that day was the beginning of our new life.

I've been toying with the idea of starting a new blog.  I know most women do that once their infertility journey is over, and mine is far from it.  But it does seem as though this blog doesn't fit the way it used to.  Part of it is my fault -- in the year-long break we took after our second loss, I stopped commenting.  I was still reading (mostly on my smartphone), but its so much harder to comment using that.  And so it should not surprise me that my own comments have dropped off, in direct correlation with my posting.

But its more than that.  My life -- as recorded in all its deliberately vague glory -- has changed so drastically from a year and a half ago.  Mo is a different person, I am a different person.  And while I don't want to lose any of my past (as it has contributed significantly to my present), it also bothers me to look back and see reminders of where we came from.

Those were dark days, darker than many people will ever realize.  I never, ever, ever want to relive them.  It's hard to even revisit them (as I've been doing a significant amount of navel-gazing and archive-reading lately) -- knowing, as I do, the subtext of all those posts, all the things I couldn't write then -- and yet will never be able to erase completely from my memories.  It's funny how re-reading those posts can take me back so easily, and stir up emotions that I would rather keep locked away.

I've often said over the years that you can really never know a marriage unless you're in it.  And that was so very true for so many years -- Mo and I put on the perfect facade.  You would never believe how many women over the years have told me how lucky I am, how wonderful and funny and smart and sweet and genuinely GOOD my husband is.  And all of that is true.  But they never saw the darker side of our life, the raw emotions, the fury, the helplessness, all the dirty, ugly things that no one wants to talk about.

Ironically, that quote is still true today.  You can't know how much Mo has grown, changed, back into the man I married over the past year.  It's been a bumpy ride, for sure, but he is so different -- and thus WE are so different -- I can't even explain it.  And no one will ever be able to see it the way I can, because they aren't in our marriage, and never have been.

This summer marks ten years since Mo and I began dating.  In those ten years we've endured so much more than I ever thought possible.  I've seen every side of Mo that there is, and he's seen all sides of me.  That's the beauty of marriage -- it gives you a safe place to be your very worst self, and also your very best.  I read a line many years ago that has stuck with me.  I think it was from Scarlett, the sequel to Gone With the Wind, though Google fails me in this regard.  Anyway, a philosopher was quoted there as saying something along the lines of  "No woman can ever be considered truly beautiful, unless she is also sometimes truly ugly."    And, for me, that's been my life, my marriage: sometimes brutally ugly, but also sometimes breathtakingly beautiful.

I am grateful today to be exactly where I am, though I would never have chosen the path that brought me here.  And I hope that, in time, I can say the same thing about infertility as I have about marriage -- it's been a long, arduous, and bumpy road -- but in the end, it was all worth it.