Flotsam

Hello Internets, I am not doing so well.
A friend wrote to tell me she is unexpectedly pregnant, a friend who has struggled with infertility herself, and though I have tried to write her a congratulatory email in response, all I have managed to do so far is sneak off to the bathroom at work three times to cry as quietly as I can in the stall furthest from the door. Today is Cycle Day One. Apparently the lovely Ms. Pru is right—all I need do is blog about its absence, and my period will come. Sort of like in college, when we discovered that if you are waiting for a train to show up, the fastest way to make it materialize is to light a fresh cigarette. I suppose I should be grateful that my cycle was only 37 days long, but I’m not. I was purposely preventing pregnancy, so getting my period should not make me feel as though my most cherished hopes have been crushed, but it does. A few weeks ago, the office of The Special GYN rescheduled my appointment from September 1st to next Tuesday, the 13th. I thought that would be fine–my cycles have been so long I probably wouldn’t be ready for Day Three tests before then. But now it looks like Day Three will be Sunday. I called The Special GYN’s office, but they won’t order the tests before my appointment, they said I would just have to wait until next “month.” I called my old doctor, who referred me to The Special GYN in the first place, to see if she could run the Day Three tests, but she doesn’t “do that” and doesn’t work weekends anyway. Oh dear, I am getting all worked up. Time for another bathroom run.

So, where was I?
I thought I was comfortable with the modified plan The Nearly Fiance and I made recently, vague though it was. But I’m not. The Nearly Fiance is not ready to specify when he wants to start trying, and the lack of a timeline makes me jittery and despairing–more than the waiting does. A lot is in flux for him right now—just finished his thesis, is about to start looking for a new job, working on a book, etc. He has also decided not to go for his Ph.D in art history, and is thinking seriously about architecture (not the thing itself, but rather he is considering going to school for that instead of art history). So there is a lot going on, I understand that. But…
After my miscarriage, he suggested we start trying again as soon as I had healed for a few cycles and completed a few projects of my own. A few months after that it got pushed back to 2006. And then he decided he wanted to finish some other things first and wasn’t ready to say when he might be ready. Last night he started talking about two years from now as being on the early side of possible.
A few months ago, at my insistence, The Nearly quit his job to concentrate on his thesis–because all I want for The Nearly is for him to achieve the things that are important to him. I, myself, want two things—to write a book and to raise a child (I also want to teach, and it would be nice to have someone to share my life with, but a book and a child—those are the two things I need to do in order to be a beatific old lady who dies with a murmur of fulfillment). The book will get written, because it is up to me–I have control over the work I do in that pursuit, and control over when I do it. I could wait for a bit, happily, (for the most part) to have children, concentrating on other things, if only we had a plan, but we don’t, and if we did I would probably worry that we would get there only to have The Nearly Fiance change his mind. He keeps saying, rather disingenuously, that if I can’t wait, he will support me leaving him in order to have a child on my own, but of course that isn’t what I want. Yes, my plan at one point was to use donor sperm to have a child by myself, but that was before I met The Nearly, whom I love. I spent most of last night in tears, and it bothers him that I have become so obsessed with matters reproductive, he says the girl he fell in love with wasn’t like that.
And it’s true, I suppose, I have changed. The miscarriage heightened everything for me. And there are moments I have no idea why I want a child so badly—3 years ago I went from “Someday I will have a child” to this weird, deep longing that I don’t understand. I never believed in any sort of “biological clock,” or that maternal desire was a function of biology at all, but I had a huge hormonal shift 3 years ago—my migraines began, I morphed from a 97 pound waif into a 140 pound voluptuous creature. And I started wanting to have children in a way I never expected. And now, the two miscarriages, the exponentially worsening physical pain, my long and irregular cycles, the fact that in all of my combined charting time (admittedly, less than a year) I ovulated only thrice—all of these things combine to make me incredibly nervous (terrified, really) that I have only a short and finite amount of time in which to accomplish what I want, and I am watching it fly quickly away from me. And I feel horribly alone.

P.S. I am sorry I am not my usual witty and scintillating self.