Shoulding All Over Myself

Lately, I’ve been finding myself waking up in the middle of the night with thoughts of doubt…

I should have gotten a second opinion sooner....

I should have started trying to get pregnant the second we got married....

I should have told more of my friends about our struggle....

I should lose forty pounds…

I should have asked for my money back after seeing AVATAR...

Thoughts like this are not helpful to either my outlook or my sleep. Aside from the fact that there’s nothing I can do to change anything that’s already happened, the word “should” automatically implies guilt and guilt, in case you didn’t know, is a wasted emotion. This however isn’t stopping me from “should-ing” all over myself…

Yesterday was the work baby shower I helped plan (discussed in an earlier post: http://the2weekwait.blogspot.com/2010/05/infertile-plans-baby-shower.html). I tried to figure out some way NOT to go; an imaginary doctor’s appointment with an imaginary ailment, call in sick (when will companies start letting people take “mental health” days by the way?), break an unimportant limb (if one exists) or get hit by a car (well, maybe just a bumper car) all came to mind. I didn’t do any of these things though. Instead, I went to the damn party. Why? Because I SHOULD. I planned the effen’ thing, it would look bad if I didn’t go and on paper, I’m a lovely, f*cking person!

So, I put on my nicest dress, did my hair, smiled, set up the cupcakes, gave the pregnant women hugs and said my sincerest congratulations. I then hid myself in a sea of single women who talked about their weekend houses, swamped bad date stories and discussed which vibrator is the best (the pocket rocket won hands down incidentally). And although it didn’t help that one of the pregnant women being honored announced that her pregnancy was unplanned, the single women did help me cope. The cupcakes didn’t hurt either.

It was more the hours afterward that were the worst. For the rest of the day, I heard joke after joke about how many women in our group are pregnant (in addition to the two we had the shower for yesterday, there are three more but they are due later this year). Of course, the ol’ “Wow… guess there’s fertility juice in the water cooler and/or coffee” was a popular joke. Then there were the simple comments like, “Women in this group seem to get pregnant so easily” and “This is a fertile department!” I finally put my headphones on and turned on my mp3 player to drown them out. Is there a radio station called, ‘WTFU”? If not, then there SHOULD be.

In addition to second guessing myself, I’ve also been feeling ambivalent about some upcoming events:

• A few weeks from now, I’m getting together with a bunch of friends; three of them are pregnant and one just had a baby so I’m expecting LOTS of baby talk and frankly, I don’t care how much liquor is served, I don’t want to go.


• Then, another friend of mine who had a baby a few months ago has emailed that she’d like to catch up. She in particular is one of the people who constantly asks, “So??? Any news yet????” And then proceeds to go on about how easily she got pregnant with her FOUR kids. Love her but don’t want to talk to her. At least not right now.

What stops me from blowing everyone off though is again, that word “should”. I SHOULD go. I SHOULD talk to these women. I SHOULD be nicer. I SHOULD get over it and be a good friend. I’m telling you – this word is killing me.

Thanks to the special guest star taking up residence in my uterus, Jackson Polyp (my charismatic polyp that you can follow for a limited time on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jackson_polyp), I’m in a ‘trying to conceive holding pattern’. To be clear - I don’t know for certain that as soon as we evict JP from his happy uterus home, we’ll get pregnant right away, but any which way, I know that I logically have nothing to be embarrassed of. Trouble is I am. I am embarrassed. I feel like a failure. I feel like all these pregnant women and/or recent moms successfully managed to get pregnant and I can’t. The only thing growing in my uterus is an uninvited polyp. I can’t send announcements out for that. Ok… I could but that would be insane… or funny… or both.

On July 8th at 10:10am, Jay had a several ounce polyp removed. It’s named Jackson Polyp and looks like… um… the blob from that 1950’s movie. Both Jay and Jackson are doing fine!

I sincerely am a social person and avoiding everyone and everything isn’t me. I really SHOULD just suck it up, go meet these women for drinks and talk to this very fertile friend. There have been times where I’ve acted like a normal, happy, fertile person, and I actually seemed like a normal, happy, fertile person.

Perhaps this is the role I’m meant to play these days. It’ll be a hell of an undertaking. If I pull it off, lord knows I SHOULD win a freaking Oscar.