The Infertile Sleeping Beauty

Whenever you watch a movie, there is typically a clear resolution at the end of the film, the soundtrack kicks in and the credit roll. Well, ok. I should say most movies. Physiological thriller like INCEPTION or BLACK SWAN are exceptions to this rule. With those two movies in particular, the audience not only had no clue what the resolution was but typically, they would turn to each other and be like, “Uhhh, does anyone know what the f*ck just happened???”

Getting back to my point though… if you take romantic comedies for example, the hero gets the girl or the couple gets married or they have a family. It’s a general happy and conclusive ending where they live happily ever after. End of story. Cue the sappy Celine Dion song.

When you’ve been struggling with infertility for awhile, the happy ending is you get pregnant and go on to have a healthy baby. That’s what you’ve been working towards, struggling with and wanting more than anything. What I’m realizing though is that a positive pregnancy test doesn’t automatically mean that everything you’ve endured while trying to get pregnant is now completely fixed and happy again.

My husband and I have been through so much in the last two and a half years. We’ve had medicated cycles, inseminations, in vitros, financial strain, debates on how to proceed, periods of depression and our own separate feelings of failure to contend with.

It's like our relationship is a country. Our country has been under attack for the last few years. We’ve been hit with Clomid bombs, estrogen grenades and financial ruin. However, the attack appears to be over and the President is currently assessing the damage. Our country still stands but frankly, it kind of looks a little like sh*t right now.

Now, I don’t mean to "over metaphor" you to death but I need to add one more. Lately, I’ve been feeling like the “Infertile Sleeping Beauty”. I’ve been in a hormonal, depressed coma for over two years and just now, I’m waking up. I’ve behaved badly. I’ve whined and put Sam in a position more often then I would like to have to take care of me. I complained about our lives, our infertility and often pushed aside what was good about us and our relationship. I have not been myself. Not the real me and now that I’ve “come back”, and even though I know in my heart that I handled things the best I could, I can’t help but be slightly mortified at my behavior. “Who WAS that chick? What a lunatic!”

I don’t know if Sam will ever fully understand what it felt like to be on one medication after another; hormonal, upset, physically tortured (in a sense) and worst of all, feeling like a total colossal loser as a woman. We all know on paper that having fertility issues does not make you a failure… but that’s simply not how it feels. Of course, this doesn't excuse my two and a half year long tantrum. It’s only meant to try and explain it. No matter the reasons, I feel terrible about my reign of terror and I have apologized to him often.

In the thick of it though, while I was off having my prolonged mini-depression, I think it’s safe to say that Sam felt abandoned. He gave me space but that space slowly created distance and in that distance, we appear to have created different coping skills. Sam began playing online video games and took up photography. I turned to the online community (which has been enormously helpful) and started reading the most mindless chick lit books I could get my hands on. More and more, we had our own little lives and our own ways of dealing. It was like, “I need to decompress… I’m going to this side of the apartment… you go to yours… I’ll just see you at the next retrieval.”

I don’t mean to give the impression that Sam and I are desperately unhappy. We absolutely love each other, he is still very much my everything and we’re beyond grateful to be ten weeks pregnant. It’s more that we’ve created some counterproductive habits, our relationship has been strained and we aren't on the same exact page as much as we used to be. Luckily though, we're in the same book... and possibly even the same chapter... so there's hope!

Any which way, this is the time, more than ever, to come back together and rebuild. We have to become reacquainted with one another and develop new habits and strategies to work together. It’s not, “What can I do to get through this?”. It’s “What should we do to help each other out and plan for the future?” I realize we should have been doing this all along, but as many of you know, when you’re in the hell of infertility, you really do what you need to do to just get through the day.

We’ve been making an extra effort to spend more time together and we’ve been going to couples counseling more frequently. There are things he feels like he can say to me that he couldn’t say to me before (when I was in my Infertile Sleeping Beauty state) and I am way more together now to actually hear him and express myself in a coherent manner. We’re figuring out how to reconnect, to better communicate, to decide what type of parents we want to be, where we want to live, how to work out the financial future and how, most importantly, to be one big happy family unit.

It’s a process and I know now that I was naïve to think getting pregnant would magically fix the damages of the past few years. It takes work. I just hope that when the baby is born and the credits begin to roll, Sam and I are starring in a Romantic Comedy with a happy ending and not a physiological thriller where everyone is like, “Was that a happy ending? Did they dream it was a happy ending but it’s not? Where am I? Whose underwear is this?”

I guess we’ll see...