Somewhat lower

Spot the error(s)--a geography lesson

2011-12-15T18:34:00.000-08:00

At the pediatrician today, I had to fill out a form about Eggbert. All was fairly routine until I ran into the following question:

"Race/ethnicity. Check ONE box [emphasis in original]:

White/caucasian___ African-American___ Native American___ Hispanic___ Other____"

Now color me sensitive (what, me?), but I think that asking a child to choose to acknowledge only one side of their ethnic heritage is wrong wrong wrong. It's like saying who do you love more, mommy or daddy?

Also, I have to wonder if they teach you about the existence of this place in doctor school. I heard it's kind of big and a lot of people live there, and the last time I checked, it wasn't called "Other."

Vindicated

2011-12-15T18:33:00.001-08:00

Eggbert had her 4-year checkup today, and officially measured in at 37 inches! Take that you heightist bastards at I*kea!

Rejected

2011-12-11T15:59:00.001-08:00

Some part of me always knew this was going to happen one day, but I thought we had a few more years.

Eggbert is...how do I put this kindly...freakishly small for her age. She was under the 3rd percentile for height (well, length, I guess, in a newborn) when she was born, and around the 10th for weight, and she has stayed pretty close to those numbers throughout her life so far, floating between the 3rd and 10th percentiles for height (but mostly sticking closely to the 3rd). Good things come in small packages, right? At age 4, she is just barely over 36 inches (91.5 cm) and 30 pounds (13.6 kg). So, if she were only 3, she'd still be on the small side (the 41-42nd percentile for height and weight), but for a 4-year-old she is tiny. She doesn't seem to have noticed yet that her classmates at preschool tower over her, but I have certainly noticed the other parents and even the teachers sometimes grouping her in with the 3-year-olds, or even the 2-year-olds, when they are talking about ages. The "up" side is that this makes her seem wildly precocious--people often tell me how well she speaks, for example, as if being able to communicate effectively at age 4 is an unusual accomplishment, but the down side is that she is often babied and not challenged to act her age.

Anyway, a few days ago, we went to I*kea. We live in the middle of nowhere, so this is an epic journey for us--over 2 hours each way--but necessary in light of a recent move and the subsequent discovery of how little furniture we actually owned. So off we went. And I'll tell the truth. I was excited. It's not that I*kea is my design ideal, but I just find the bright colors and do-it-yourself attitude enchanting, and the prices are affordable enough that I don't agonize over purchases there like I do over most things. Our plan was to arrive there around lunchtime, have lunch in their cafe (one of rare venues that has something that each of the 3 of us really likes), then take Eggbert to the playroom while Mystery and I shopped.

At first things went off without a hitch. The drive was good. Eggbert was cheery, Mystery and I were happy, and we made good time. Lunch was reasonably enjoyable, and we trotted off to the playroom with eager anticipation (Eggbert), and only mild misgivings (me). There was a queue, so we waited our turn. We watched the staff check in child after child, and then it was Eggbert's turn. We got to the front. The staff member frowned.

"They have to be potty trained!" she said. "

Of course she's potty trained!" I said.

"They can't be wearing a pullup!" she insisted.

"She's not!" I said, beginning to feel annoyed.

"She's too small!"

I took her up to the "children below this height cannot enter" sign and showed the staff member that Eggbert was right at the line.

"Take off her shoes!" she crowed.

We did. She was about 1/4 inch below the line. The woman said "see! we can't take her."

I whined "but she's four!" The woman just shook her head.

A lively conversation ensued among the parents behind us. "She's four? There is no way that child is four! Is she really four? How could she be four?"

We skulked off. Eggbert was crushed about not being able to go to the playroom, although she didn't really understand the reason. I was furious at myself for putting her through that, but also furious at the staff for being so unbending. On one level I get it, they don't want kids of too many different sizes playing together because someone might get hurt, but the upper limit was based on age, not height, so apparently they will let in 6-footers that are 7, but not 3-footers who are 4, so it's not just a size disparity issue. Ultimately, I'm sure they have their reasons, but that knowledge doesn't actually make me feel any better about the fact that my child was excluded based on a physical feature that she has no control over.

Sigh. It probably won't be the last time.

The end of the world as I know it

2011-12-08T15:23:00.000-08:00

OK, fess up! Who taught Eggbert to read? I have a bone to pick with that person. How on earth am I supposed to be able to talk right in front of her about topics like "i-c-e-c-r-e-a-m" or "the p-a-r-k" or "s-e-x" without her understanding me if she can spell?

A curve ball

2011-11-01T19:23:00.000-07:00

I went to the RE on Sunday (yes Sunday! My RE works on Sundays, or rather, my RE's staff and colleagues work on Sunday), and they ran some tests, including FSH, estradiol, AMH, and an ultrasound with antral follicle count. Since I had to drive 2.5 hours each way for my date with the cooter-cam, I was just pulling into my driveway when the nurse called with the results. She said that the tests of ovarian reserve were all really good, and that the doctor thinks that all options should remain on the table, including cycling again with my own eggs, or even trying injectibles with IUI. I was not expecting this. At 42, I have already grieved the possibility of a genetic connection with my second child, and moved on to being pretty enthusiastic about donor eggs. I don't really know why I agreed to having tests of ovarian reserve at all, given that we were planning on DE. I guess that either my RE is very persuasive (true) or that I was assuming that the results would be bad, thus confirming that DE is the best (and only) option for us (also true). So, I really don't know what to do with this. I do NOT want to do another failed cycle. I am tired of BFN's and want something to work. We can't afford to continue to throw money away on failed treatments, and we don't want too big of a gap between our kids. All of this points to using DE. But... it isn't just about what I want. The one thing that continues to worry me about using DE is that I don't know how any child that may be created will feel about being donor-conceived, especially given that Eggbert is my genetic offspring. Will #2 FEEL like #2? Having the option of putting the donor out of the picture and still maybe possibly perhaps having another child dangled in front of me has really thrown me and I just don't know what to do. Meanwhile, Mystery has come down with a terrible case of Whinging Cough, and has officially declared himself unable to even converse about any topic of seriousness until he feels better or expires, whichever comes first. So, I am counting on you, dear internets, to help me process this. Any thoughts? All advice, sage and otherwise, is welcome.

Still here

2011-10-08T15:46:00.000-07:00

I don't know why I haven't posted an update in a while. It wasn't that I didn't have anything to say. In person, I very rarely don't have something to say. I've just lacked inspiration I guess. Or time. I don't know where all 24 hours of each day go, but they sure do go there quickly, wherever it is!

Anyway, all is well with me, Mystery, and Eggbert. We've been busier with usual with activities (dance class! swim class!) and we are in the process of buying a house, which is surprisingly (to first-time homebuyers) time-consuming, but all of it is going well, so no complaints there.

The event that inspired me to post was our return to the RE after a one-year-plus break. We had to drive a few hours for the consultation, which was kind of annoying, but it gave us a chance to go shopping for our house in the "big city" at the same time, which was kind of nice. The RE visit itself was anticlimactic. I told him right off the bat that we were interested in being evaluated as candidates for donor eggs, which I had thought would mean a whole slew of testing, but as it turned out, the only tests that he has ordered so far are tests of my ovarian reserve. Yes, you read that right, MY ovarian reserve. At age 42. He seems to think that I am giving up on my own eggs too easily. This is so not what I expected that I don't know how to process it. Isn't the donor egg speech pretty much standard for infertility patients over 40? Honestly, it's kind of hard for me to imagine paying for another IVF cycle with my own eggs, given the age-specific low odds of success, but unfortunately, Mystery picked up on the doctor's optimism, so if the test results are good, we are going to have to at least discuss the option of trying again with my eggs. How weird is it that I find the thought depressing, rather than inspiring?

The big disappointment of the visit was that as it turns out, my clinic only has a completely anonymous DE program. No photos, no potential for identifying information to be made available to the child at age 18. Nothing. That takes away just about any incentive to cycle there, since the cost would be about twice that of cycling in any of our other target countries. I had been thinking that I was willing to pay substantially more to both cycle closer to home and to have the option of identity release, but without the identity release option, I really don't see any reason to pay twice as much for what is essentially the same service. Of course if I could find my own donor, open donation would be possible, but I really have no idea how to go about finding a donor. So, I think we're now on the path of an overseas DE cycle unless the testing reveals any surprises (and probably even then).

In other news, Eggbert is 3.9 going on 16 these days. She is suddenly competent at a broad variety of tasks that were way beyond her abilities just a few weeks ago (Putting on the seat belt in her car seat! Going to the fridge and making her own snacks! Balancing the checkbook! Well, OK, not that last one, but she can now count to 100 in both English and Mysterious, and occasionally gets simple math problems right, so I think I will be able to put her to work as my accountant soon.) She continues to delight me in a million different ways. I am very lucky.

On a positive note

2011-05-13T16:52:00.000-07:00

One of the best things about not (yet) having a second child is that with Eggbert pretty mobile and easygoing, travel is fairly easy and enjoyable. We're about to take off for a trip to Central America, and I can't wait. I'm so excited to show Eggbert a new place and to spend some time in the tropics again. Life is good, despite my reproductive woes.

Speaking of that...

We have tentatively decided to travel overseas to try a DE cycle sometime next spring. I'd like to do it domestically for many reasons, but the pricetag is just outrageous, and I can't really justify spending Eggbert's college fund on only a 60% chance of a sibling. More on that when we get back from our holiday. Until then, have a lovely spring!

Being Eggbert's mom

2011-04-22T17:57:00.000-07:00

Before Eggbert was born, Mystery and I played the game that many parents play--talking about whose nose we hoped she'd get, whose eyes, whose hair, etc. I wanted her to look exactly like him; he wanted her to look more like me. As is not uncommon when we disagree, I won. When Eggbert was first born, she looked nothing like me. NOTHING! The nurses at the hospital all commented on it. My family commented on it. Strangers on the street asked me not if I had adopted her but where or how. I didn't mind. She looked exactly like a teeny weeny light-skinned version of Mystery, and I love the way that Mystery looks, so I thought that she was perfect. However, as the days went on, I started to wonder. Was it possible that the embryologist had switched the eggs? I couldn't stop thinking about it. Worrying about it.

The part that worried me wasn't that my eggs might have gone elsewhere. I was worried that they ("they" in this case being the clinic) would figure out that Eggbert hadn't come from my egg (perhaps when some Korean couple delivered a half-white baby) and try to take her away. I spent some time going over this scenario in my mind until I had formulated what struck me as a sensible plan: at the first sign of trouble, take the baby and flee the country.

Clearly, I was delirious with sleeplessness, which fortunately kept me from having the energy to get too worked up about any of this. I did eventually realize that the Egg looked no more like the average Korean woman than she looked like me. I now think that it's noteworthy, though, that my concern wasn't the loss of a genetic connection with Eggbert, or the loss of a hypothetical child from my own genetic material--it was the loss of Eggbert herself, the baby that I gestated, loved, and delivered. This is one of the reasons that I think that DE might be a reasonable choice for me.

As Eggbert has grown, some hint of a resemblance to me has started to develop. She now has a hair color close to mine (her black baby hair fell out and it grew back in a medium brown), her lips are quite a bit like mine, and her Mystery-like features are now arranged on a face that is shaped more like mine. She still looks a lot more like Mystery, but now she doesn't actively NOT look like me anymore. Nobody has asked where I adopted her in over a year. I think that parents that use donor gametes sometimes wonder how they'll feel about having a child that doesn't look like them. Having experienced that, I can say that it felt fine, and in fact, perfectly delightful. The surprise for me as she has started resembling me more is that while it hasn't changed my feelings toward or about her in the slightest, it has changed the way that I look at myself.

You see, my daughter is beautiful. I know, I know. Every mother thinks that their child is beautiful, and I love that. Nature does wonderful things to our brains when children come into our lives that causes us to see them through the rosiest of rose-colored glasses. I'm not saying that my child is more beautiful than anybody else's (in fact, when Eggbert was born, I've noticed that all of the kids in the world immediately became better-looking), but the Egg happens to be my exact cup of tea. And now I look a little bit like her. Therefore, logic dictates that if I look a little bit her and if she is beautiful then I must also be a little bit beautiful. I have always been critical of my appearance despite the knowledge that I actually look perfectly fine, tending to focus on e.g., the slight bump on my nose rather than the unusual and interesting color of my eyes. Now, though, sometimes when I see a feature or expression that I love on my daughter on my own face, it makes me feel a wave of something--sympathy? warmth? compassion? fondness?--for myself that wasn't there before. Put simply, she has made me like myself better.

I have a lot of moles on my arms and legs. I've never liked them (what's to like?), but what can I do? I had come to a place where they only annoyed me when my doctor told me that he wanted to biopsy yet another one to make sure that they hadn't turned cancerous (so far I've had six biopsies--all negative, luckily), but would still have chosen not to have them if that was an option. However, Eggbert likes my moles. There is one on my wrist that I had never given any attention. Its color is only a few shades darker than the rest of my skin, and it's not very big. It is, however, raised just a little bit, which apparently makes it delightful to the three-year-old touch. For the past several months, Eggbert has taken to rubbing my "spot" whenever she can. When I'm in the passenger seat of the car, she asks me to reach back toward her car seat so she can "touch my spot." When she's upset, she calms down immediately when she touches my "spot." If she's in my lap, she will absentmindedly rub my mole. And just like that, I've come to love that thing. It's a small sign of my own uniqueness; a quirk that my daughter uses to sense my presence and feel comforted. I think that's one of the great gifts that children can give to us. Not only the ability to see the world, just for a moment, through a child's eyes, but also to project the tenderness that we feel for them further, until it envelopes other children, other adults, and finally, even ourselves.

Other family history stuff

2011-03-19T20:58:00.000-07:00

In response to my previous post about genealogy, Lut very sensibly pointed out that there's a lot more to the connection to one's genetic progenitors than genealogy. Well, yeah. Good point. I think that when I started the post, I meant to get to that, but I never quite made it there. (Of course it's also possible that I wasn't thinking clearly--I can't actually remember what I was thinking, so this actually seems more likely.) Wanting to know whether you're more closely related to Charlemagne or Genghis Khan (for the record, my money is usually on Genghis) is hardly the most serious issue that a donor-conceived child is likely to face when trying to figure out what their conception means for their identity.

I imagine that many donor-conceived people are much more interested in knowing where they got their eyes/hair/funny big toe/love for anchovies/odd sense of humor, if they have other half-siblings that they don't know about, and if there are any dark medical secrets hidden in the missing half (or halves) of their family tree. Not having this information might be painful, but then again, many people who aren't donor-conceived also don't know these things.

Half-siblings? Any of us could have them. Many closed adoptions probably involve family secrets, so children born in the birth families later may have no idea that they have half-siblings, and of course there's always the fact that none of us know for an absolute fact that our genetic father never sowed any wild oats elsewhere. Obviously the odds of having unknown half-siblings are higher for adopted or donor-conceived people, but they aren't zero for any of us.

As for family medical histories, I think that they sound great on paper, and they have their real advantages, but can be overrated in real life. For example, I admit that it's nice to know that my parents have had three cancers between them-- no, scratch that, it's horrible to know that my parents have had three cancers between them, but given that they have, it's nice to know what they were so I can be on alert. However, there have been all kinds of things that they didn't tell me. I have no idea what two out of four of my grandparents died of, for example, although both died of disease, one of which was long-term and degenerative. So whenever I check that there is no family history of disease X, all that I really mean is that I don't know of anything, not that there's nothing there. When at age 37 I told my mother that I had been diagnosed with endometriosis, one of the first things that came out of her mouth was that her doctors had always thought that she had endometriosis as well. Uh, mom, don't you think that it would have been more helpful to share that information with me before I was approaching the END of my fertile years? It might have changed everything to know about the endo before I was well over 2 years into trying to get pregnant, but she never bothered to mention it. In this case, having false info (the belief that I did NOT have a family history of endometriosis) was undoubtedly worse than simply having no information, since endo is highly heritable, so I thought I probably didn't have it. In fact, knowing that my fertility was under direct threat might have changed any number of decisions from my early 20's on. So, that whole family medical history thing? Not so helpful to date. Obviously my results may not be typical, but based on how non-attentive (translation-non-obsessive) most people seem to be about medical issues, I think that they probably are. So, people without family medical information might imagine that they're missing more than they really are. The reminder of one's origins every time one goes to the doctor's office might actually be the main problem here. Don't misunderstand. I'm not saying that donor-conceived people and adopted people don't have a right to feel upset about not having this info if that's how they feel, I'm just saying that if they are upset, they might be overestimating the actual value of that information for most people that have it (or think they do).

I wonder if the issue of resemblance is really at the heart of people's discomfort with donor-conception. Given how much people enjoy talking about family resemblances, there is obviously something really human about wanting to know where your features came from. This is what I worry about most if we use donor eggs. Eggbert looks almost exactly like Mystery, so I can always hope that we'll get lucky that way again. Given the way that genes tend to shake out in biracial children, I'm cautiously optimistic that regardless of who the child actually resembles, strangers will just look and see "white parent--check!; Mysterious parent--check!" and conclude that the child does actually look like me, even if he or she doesn't. I've noticed that in the USA, people seem to always think that biracial kids more closely resemble the darker-skinned parent. Books could be written about THAT and what it means about the state of race in America, but regardless, that might create enough cover for the child to not have to talk about his or her origins unless he or she actually wanted to. Friends and family members will know the truth, so hopefully they will resist the urge to indulge in much in the way of resemblance talk.

I think that by all of this, I'm really trying to wrestle with a) whether I really think it's OK to deliberately conceive a child who won't have much of a relationship with the source of half of his or her DNA (I do, but just need to reaffirm it to myself from time to time), and more importantly b) how far am I willing to go, and at what cost, to protect the child's right to information to the extent possible. Ideally, I think a known donor (a friend, family member, or compassionate acquaintance) would be best for the child. However, all of my close friends and cousins that I am close with are at least 35, and therefore not good candidates to donate, my sister is older than me (yet she has a one-year-old--is that fair?), and I live in a small town where looking around for a donor would not be easy, and would jeopardize the child's (and our family's) right to privacy. The closest RE is a few hours away in a bigger city, so we could look there if we knew how, but at this moment, I don't (any tips about how I might do that would be VERY much appreciated). When I look at RE info, it seems that most of the donors they recruit are anonymous, which doesn't really help. We had originally thought about going overseas for DE-IVF, since the costs are substantially lower, but it seems that most such programs insist on anonymity.

Sigh. It's all so complicated.

An unbroken chain

2011-03-18T16:26:00.000-07:00

Many years ago, while I was still in graduate school, pre-Eggbert, pre-Mystery, a friend of mine asked another if he was planning to have children. His response was "my ancestors for the last 4 billion years have all had children--no way I'm going to be the one to break the chain!" That statement stuck with me, long after that friend got married (to a close friend of mine who had claimed she didn't want to have children), had his two kids (an "oops," and then a second conceived on the first month trying), and drifted out of my life, as happens sometimes.

I have another family friend who is obsessed with genealogy. He's a good guy, but I cannot for the life of me understand why he thinks that non-relatives might be interested in hearing how he found his great-aunt's uncle's father's half-cousin's niece twice removed lives in Odessa, but he does, oh he does!

I myself am interested in lots of different kinds of people and places, and generally am more interested in stories that touch, move, shock, terrify, or otherwise impress me than I am in mundane stories about about family members that I don't know. It has never occurred to me to find out the names of my paternal grandmother or grandfather's siblings, and I've never been particularly interested in genealogy. It seems to me that by the time you get past grandparents, you aren't much more closely genetically related to your relatives than you are to randomly chosen strangers anyway. I have a cousin who keeps a book of information about one branch of the family, but it has never occurred to me to ask to see it.

Mystery's family tree is mostly, well, mysterious. He has a gajillion aunts and uncles, who have a quintillion children, but he doesn't even know the names of two of his grandparents, or any of his great-grandparents, and given the poor record-keeping in the Land of Mystery, he never will. So, Eggbert will know exactly where her Mysterious ancestors came from, but nothing else about them, and as for my side of the family, well, she probably won't even get that.

All of this is an introduction to admitting that for no reason that I can explain, a couple of weeks ago, after seeing a TV commercial (oh the shame!) I clicked on one of those on-line genealogy websites. I made it as far as entering my grandparents' info, and then it turned out I'd have to sign up formally (of course) to see what the place had to offer. There was a free trial, though, and I was about to click on that when I realized that I couldn't. Or shouldn't. Or just wouldn't. Because if I choose to go ahead with donor eggs, that may not be an option available to my child. Of course Eggbert wouldn't make it very far on ____.com either, but by asking around in the family, we could probably put together enough information to get her started if genealogy turns out to be one of her "things." But for a donor-conceived child, it would be Mystery's rock on one side, and a hard place on the other. Even if we used a known or identity-release donor, that doesn't guarantee the kind of access to information (birthdates, places of birth, etc.), that would allow a future adult to, at age 42, idly type _________.com into a computer and start exploring their family history. Really to me, that doesn't seem like much of a loss at all. When I realized what I was doing, I clicked away, and I can't say that it is really bugging me not to know whatever it is that I might learn if I kept clicking. But it does kind of bug me to realize that many people think that this IS important, illogical as that seems to me. (Edited: When I wrote this, I didn't mean that other people's interest in genealogy bothers me. I meant that it bothered me to realize that a future donor-conceived child might think that this is important and be unable to access their information--sorry if that wasn't clear in the original post.) Beyond pointing out that everyone's family tree can't really lead back to Charlemagne, that even if they did, there is something like a 10% rate of extra-pair paternity in most human societies, so some of those "fathers" on most family trees probably aren't really the fathers at all, and that even if you ARE descended from Charlemagne, that doesn't actually make you special, what can one do to help a donor-conceived or adopted child handle the disconnection that comes from not living with genetic relatives?

I've seen lots of different answers proposed--don't create donor-conceived children in the first place (because somehow adoption creates fewer losses?), be very open (at times to the point of pushing being donor-conceived as a central part of a child's identity), or just relax and follow the child's lead. I don't know. And I also don't know whether it's better that I don't care much about genealogy (so I can lead by example in not being too worked up about genetics), or worse (because it will make it that much harder to relate to a future child's sense of disconnection or loss about being donor-conceived.

And that's if we decide to go for it at all. So much to think about...

(PS--I've decided that I'm going to start just typing and publishing rather than rereading and editing my posts in the interest of making them actually happen. If you notice a radical decline in quality--that's why!)

**********
I just re-read this post and can't stand how disjointed it is. I've edited just a bit, and it's definitely back to routine rereading and editing before posting for me in future posts!

Unique

2011-03-12T19:16:00.000-08:00

One of the things that I may or may not have shared about myself is that I can be a bit of a stickler about details. I'm that annoying person that corrects her husband's grammar (hey! he's not a native English speaker, so he thinks of it as helpful, not annoying), edits everything compulsively, and notices, and occasionally comments on, word abuse when it occurs. One of my (many) linguistic pet peeves is the misuse of the word "unique." Webster's defines unique as "Radically distinctive and without equal", as in the only one in the universe quite like this. It does not mean unusual (well, once you get to Websters' fourth definition, it does, but it's hard to take the fourth definition seriously). Being one of a kind is a special thing, and it's a thing that does not involve degrees. One isn't "very unique." One simply is unique or isn't, and that's that.

I have been thinking a lot about uniqueness lately, for many reasons. Until fairly recently, I thought, despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary, that infertility had a basically similar footprint wherever it happened to fall. There seemed to be a fairly standard set of responses--a five stages of infertility grief that everybody dealing with infertility went through to some extent. Obviously the actual circumstances vary from case to case--infertility undoubtedly feels different at 22 than it does at 32 or 42, or when you're single vs. coupled, and different diagnoses can send your emotions in very different directions. Still, it seemed that there were a limited number of paths that infertile people chose, and that these corresponded to a fairly standard set of emotional responses. Obviously this isn't actually true, and I've actually blogged about this before. Still, I was really blown away by what I found when I took a few weeks to read my way through the almost 250 blog posts currently up on Mel's "Creme de la creme" of infertility blog posts for 2010. There were a huge number of posts that spoke to my heart, that I could totally relate to, that I got on an emotional level. These posts included both posts that described events that I have experienced, and also those that went to places that I have never been (and in many cases, that I hope to never go). That didn't really surprise me. I expect to relate to infertility blogs, and often do.

The thing that surprised me was the number of posts that I totally couldn't relate to at all. There were a huge number of different ways in which I couldn't relate to some of the posts, in fact. The one I want to focus on today, though, is posts that spoke of the authors' frustration and disappointment specifically about the fact that they might not have the option of conceiving naturally, even though their chances of conception may have been good, or the authors' determination to buck the odds and conceive naturally. There were enough posts on this theme that I really was forced to admit that this feeling is widespread, and to some extent, assumed to be present. I have touched on this idea before, but have never really fully grasped the extent to which conceiving the "old-fashioned way," without chemical or surgical help, is important to some people. And, conversely, the extent to which it is of little or no importance to me. For me, infertility was a problem not because it made "natural" conception impossible, but rather because the treatments that might enable me to overcome this problem were prohibitively expensive, uncomfortable, and came with no guarantee of success. From the moment that I first started to expect that something was wrong, I was terrified that I'd never have a child at all, not that I wouldn't conceive naturally. If in my 12th month of trying to conceive, someone had given me the option of trading in all hope of a natural conception for guaranteed success as many times as I wanted with free IVF cycles, I'm pretty sure I would have leaped at the chance. I am still digesting the fact that this doesn't seem to be true for everyone. It explains a lot, though.

Now I wonder if the fact that some (or is it most?) people place such a high value on "natural" conception is responsible for the amnesia that some infertile people seem to experience following successful treatments. Is it a way of distancing themselves from something that they feel embarrassed about or ashamed of? Is that why the comments after any newspaper or magazine article related to assisted conception are so hateful? Is that why some women dealing with male factor infertility take such care to point out that there is nothing wrong with them that necessitated fertility treatments? Is it why so many people drag their feet about seeking treatment or even diagnosis? Why some people give credit to the moonlight rather than the clomid when they do actually conceive?

If so, I don't get it. What is so special about the process of ejaculation in a vagina at exactly the right moment that somehow makes it intrinsically (as opposed to financially or logistically) more valuable than a little magic in an embryology lab? If conception is a miracle, how much more miraculous a conception that was richly desired and earned with great difficulty?

I'm interested in these questions in part because as I consider using donor eggs, I am trying to identify exactly what losses, if any, Mystery, I, and any child that might result, may feel as a result of our choices. I love it that I conceived Eggbert via IVF. I don't love it that I needed IVF, but I'm proud of the fact that I found a way to make it happen--to make Eggbert happen. It wasn't easy. It wasn't fun. But I did it, and I feel great about that. But if natural conception is widely considered to be better than assisted conception, then what does that mean for Eggbert's feelings, and for the feelings of any other child that may come along? And then when donor conception is added into the mix, what does that mean? Is there any chance that a donor-conceived child might feel an additional element of loss (beyond the loss of a genetic connection with me and the loss of a mother-child relationship with the donor) as a result of being conceived in a non-traditional way? Is there any chance that Eggbert might sad or embarrassed about the circumstances of her conception too? To be honest, these thoughts had never even occurred to me before reading those posts. But forewarned is forearmed. I think I'm going to start adding in the story of Eggbert's conception to her birth story (which I tell her every year on her birthday), so she knows how special the whole story is to me. I hope that some day, she will see it as a special thing too.

An afterthought: I just re-read an earlier post (linked above) that I wrote about processing infertility, and it seems that my feelings have really gone full circle in a way that I hadn't appreciated until I read both posts again. There was a time when I grieved the loss of natural conception, and then I stopped grieving it, and now I can barely even remember ever having felt that way. That must be progress.

It's different this time

2011-01-09T18:31:00.001-08:00

Happy New Year! I can't believe it's 2011 already and I haven't posted since summer. Well, actually, I can believe it. I compose posts in my head, but just haven't had the inspiration to write them down. My life is so different now than it was when I first started blogging. In 2006, I was desperate for a baby, totally fed up with infertility, and so full of wild and passionate thoughts that I felt like I would burst unless I found a way to get them out into the light. Now, I'm, well, mostly fine. I am still unimpressed with my reproductive system, and still have moments of feeling very frustrated at all of the external factors (the delays in my marriage caused by the US immigration system, the delays in my treatment caused by financial constraints) that probably cost me a chance at a relatively easy (if IVF can be considered easy!) path to a second child. But most of the time, I'm happy. I'm good. And happiness on what is basically an infertility blog feels weird. Inappropriate even. I haven't decided yet what to do about that--shut down the blog? start a new one? But I am going to start writing again and just see where it takes me.

One of the things that I've learned in the last six months or so, since I stopped obsessing about the next IVF cycle and just started living, is that there are some up sides to my situation. It feels sacrilegious to point this out, but when I watch my friends and relatives who have had 2-3 children in the time that it took me to have Eggbert, I notice that they aren't actually any happier than I am. Sure, they love their kids, but it sometimes seems like people who have two or more kids very close together in age don't actually have as much opportunity to enjoy their kids as I do. The logistical challenges of life with two or more children under four are undeniable, whereas life with one three-year-old is (if that three-year-old is Eggbert, anyway) actually pretty easy and pleasant. We have plenty of time for cuddles, games, and to just be. She doesn't seem to think that she has to fight for my attention, probably because she almost always has it. I know that not every child is easy, and Eggbert hasn't always been easy, but at this particular moment in time, she's absolutely delightful, and there is a tiny part of me that is almost (almost!) glad of the secondary infertility, not because I don't want another child (oh boy do I), but because as it turns out, I think I needed this special time with just Eggbert.

Having given up on my own eggs (well, more on that later), I don't feel the incessant time pressure that I felt before. That is such a relief. Obviously there is still a time factor. I don't want to have two children so far apart that they don't grow up together, and I also don't want to be elderly by the time my children graduate from high school (Mystery is only 32, so this isn't really an issue for him), but I don't feel like every month lost is a disaster anymore. Now I can seriously think about waiting until Eggbert is four or older before taking further steps without feeling like my head is going to explode at the very thought of it. Giving up was liberating.

Now, have I really given up? Yes and no. I no longer think that I will get pregnant with my own eggs, but I still hope that I will. I don't mean to, but what can I do? Every month, the thought at least flickers across my mind that maybe the 78th time was the charm. I'm surrounded by urban legends, so it's hard to forget that improbable events do sometimes occur. I hadn't realized that Mystery was also still hoping until I suggested that we lend our stroller to a pregnant friend last month, and he kind of flipped out. He denies that it's because of hope, but really what else could it be?

We haven't yet revisited our conversations about what, if anything, comes next. I'll bring it up soon, but again, I don't feel any sense of urgency anymore. We're planning to buy a house in the spring, and I think it makes sense to get that sorted out before committing any more of our financial resources to reproductive attempts. I'm also still experiencing some ambivalence in that area. Adoption or donor eggs? I realized something today (after reading this post, from the creme de la creme list). I've never been able to articulate this before, but I reject the assumption that everybody seems to make, although few actually state it aloud, that adoption is the morally superior choice. I just don't think that's true. I totally agree with the post author that the only good reason to adopt is that you WANT to adopt, which is no more or less selfish than any other family-building decision. Adoption can be a good solution for a family in need of a child and for a child in need of a family, but it's not simple. There are a lot of wrong reasons to adopt, and thinking that it's the right thing to do (or wanting to do it because it will make you feel good about yourself) is high up there on the list. However, as clear as I feel about this point, I still fear how my friends who are adoptive parents will feel if I tell them that we've chosen third-party reproduction, and I don't want to have to hide it. Really, it's the openness issue that's kind of sticking with me. I would want to be very open if we chose DE, but is our community--the community in which the child in question will have to live--ready to hear that particular truth? Can they handle the truth?

Luckily, I don't have to decide right now. I'm thinking more and more that it's important for me and Mystery to take our time in thinking about what, if anything, to do next. We're happy right now, so I think we'll just keep enjoying that for a little while.

It's about time

2010-10-04T05:36:00.000-07:00

The Nobel Prize committee awarded biologist Robert G. Edwards, who along with his colleague M.D. Patrick Steptoe pioneered the in-vitro fertilization procedure for treating infertility, the Nobel Prize in medicine this morning.

Well done Nobel Prize committee. Four million children (so far) and their grateful families agree that Edwards and Steptoe's work is well worth honoring.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/health/research/05nobel.html?_r=1&hp

Life is a box of chocolates

2010-08-12T15:57:00.000-07:00

I know that I'm supposed to be moping. I assumed that if the IVF was negative I'd mope for, well, I don't know. Days? Weeks? Months? A lifetime? But the truth is, I don't feel like moping. In fact, I feel pretty good.

Do I wish that the IVF had worked? Of course. I want another child. I want Eggbert to have a sibling. I want Mystery to be a daddy of two. But somehow, the fact that it doesn't seem to be happening seems to have lost a little bit of its sting with that last IVF. Apparently, for me, the feeling of desperation resulting from the knowledge of the ticking biological clock, coupled with a multi-year history of infertility giving me very little hope of conceiving on our own, coupled with a set of life circumstances that made doing another round of IVF very difficult, combined with the belief that an IVF cycle might actually work today, but not tomorrow, was actually more stressful than knowing that another round of IVF is unlikely to succeed. I guess it's called closure. I have been focused on trying to conceive #2 pretty much since the day that Eggbert was born, and now, I finally have permission from my body to stop focusing on that. It's quite a relief. I don't know if anybody else in my situation would feel this way, but I am so glad that we tried again, even though it didn't work.

The other options available to me--adoption, donor eggs, or living as a one-child family--all look pretty nice now that they've stepped out of the giant shadow cast by the hope for conceiving a mutually genetic child. I'd be thrilled if I got pregnant tomorrow, of course, but I no longer feel a sense of dread that I won't get pregnant tomorrow. I've faced my fear, and well, yes it sucked, but by facing it, I think I took away some of its power over me. So now I don't have to look at my other options through a filter of fear. It's liberating.

When I look at my life, I have to admit that, actually, it's pretty great. I am happy. I like my job. I adore my husband. And while I may be somewhat biased, I suspect that I have the most amazing child ever born. Now that my life isn't full of dread, I have been able to let her fill it with joy. We are having so much fun since we got home from Asia. Nobody is more surprised than me.

It could all have gone differently. I can't even imagine how I would be feeling if we didn't have Eggbert. But I do have Eggbert. So life is good.

I'm really not sure what happens next. But I'm not afraid any more.

The song of the fat lady

2010-07-30T06:19:00.000-07:00

I tested again with a name-brand "early detection" test, and it was clearly negative. I don't know how I feel about it yet. At the moment, I just feel sad, but calm about it. We'll see how things progress.

Not looking good

2010-07-28T18:32:00.000-07:00

The telltale migraine arrived yesterday, as it always does a few days before my period (or before the end of a failed IVF cycle). I'm not bleeding yet (as I did with my two previous failed cycles by this stage), but a home pregnancy test was stark white today (9 days past 3-day transfer). I will continue to use my progesterone like a good girl, and will test again in two days, but hope has officially left the building.

I told Mystery yesterday that I am done with IVF with my own eggs. I just can't keep doing this. If somebody offered to pay for another round, I guess I'd do it, but otherwise, it's just too expensive, too stressful, and too much of a hassle for such a low probability of success for me to be able to justify trying. I didn't feel that way after my last cycle, so I guess I'm glad that I did this one, but I'm not sure where this all leaves me. I'm just not ready to think about the next step (if there is one), before the dust settles a bit.

All aboard!

2010-07-21T04:03:00.000-07:00

I had such big plans for regular updates while I was on the road, but clearly that didn't happen. The reasons are many, including limited internet access, being surprisingly busy, writer's block, etc., but were different at different stages along the way. It's only now that I'm back on US soil (as of just a few hours ago) that I have been able to get it together to write an update.

Our trip had four main parts, only one (the last) of which was the IVF cycle. First we visited three destinations in Southeast Asia: one for work, and two to visit friends. Not living in Asia anymore, we just couldn't resist the chance to see some loved ones while we were there. A silver lining of that is that we will have many happy memories of the trip, regardless of the outcome.

Part 4 included work, visits with friends, AND an IVF cycle, so obviously it was the most intense. I had used BCP's to make sure that my period would arrive the day we got to Korea, so we were able to start the cycle right away. Within three days of arrival, I was on stims. In many ways, this was the easiest cycle I've ever done, but in other ways, it was the hardest. The easiest part was that it's so old hat by now, and there were so many distractions that I didn't obsess much at all. The side effects were minimal (headaches, mainly), and being an old fart with tired ovaries, the soreness associated with stimming was minimal. I was really busy aside from appointments, since I was also doing some consulting with my former employer and visiting friends, so despite the fact that we'd flown half-way around the world to do IVF, I didn't actually think about the cycle all that much. Those were the easy parts.

The hard part was that it just didn't work all that well. After four days of stims, there was barely any follicular growth at all. After three more days, only one follicle on each ovary had reached medium size. Three more days resulted in four medium-sized follicles and a bunch of smaller, clearly non-viable follicles. Two days later, the doctor concluded that four was it, and scheduled the retrieval. All of my other cycles were completed in 15-16 days, but in this cycle, the retrieval was on day 17! I'd never heard of such a thing, and am practically gasping with relief that I allowed for a little extra time in the trip scheduling, just in case.

We retrieved two eggs from those four follicles. I had been hoping for four, but fearing zero, so I don't really know what to say about two. It is what it is, I guess. Luckily for me, my RE's office are magicians with gametes and embryos. Both eggs fertilized, and became "good" quality three-day embryos. They were transferred yesterday morning, and then we went to the airport to fly home. Talk about cutting it close!

I don't really know how I feel now. More hopeful than a few days ago, but obviously less hopeful than I was before the cycle started. I guess that the silver lining, if there is one, is that the cycle wasn't the kind that leaves you wanting more, if that makes any sense. At no step did it in any way encourage me to think that if we just tried again, it could work. Obviously it might, but the point of diminishing marginal returns is here. So, I am pretty sure that really was my last IVF cycle (at least with my own eggs). What happens next, I don't know.

I'll do a home pregnancy test on the 29th.

In transit

2010-05-25T08:45:00.000-07:00

Well, we've finished the first leg of our flights so far. So far so good. As it turns out, Dora the Explorer on a portable DVD player is a traveling mother's best friend. We didn't hear a peep out of Eggbert for the two hours that we let her watch it. Whew! The trans-Pacific segment is next. Wish us luck!

We are taking a holiday before the IVF, so we won't actually be in Korea for a few more weeks. I may not post for a bit, but just thought I'd let you know that we're underway. Woo hoo!

What to do what to do?

2010-05-17T20:18:00.000-07:00

We're getting in the car tomorrow morning to start our epic journey (which starts with a road trip to see family, then a plane trip to see more family, and then the trip to Korea). I'm excited, nervous, and worried, all at once. Excited because there should be some fun in many places along the way. Nervous because traveling with a toddler is always nerve-wracking. Worried because the trip is likely to end with some very bad news. But I think that I can handle it. I guess we'll see.

To follow up on my previous post, I think it's only fair that I give a little more info about why I am feeling so conflicted about adoption. It's quite complicated, of course, so I'm not sure I'll be able to articulate it, but I'm going to try to at least list some pros and cons so you can see what I'm thinking.

Adoption pro: Almost guarantees a child.
Adoption con: Not necessarily true of domestic private adoption--we may never get picked. What pregnant woman is dying to place her child with a family that a) already has a bio kid, b) isn't at all wealthy, and c) speaks an obscure 3rd world language at home?

Adoption pro: May result in an orphan getting a home
Adoption con: Some of those "orphans" aren't really orphans, or at least didn't have to be. International adoptions sometimes (I'm not saying always, or even often, but sometimes) involve baby-selling or worse. Domestic private adoptions are sometimes executed in a coercive way, with agencies (and sometimes friends and family) putting pressure on vulnerable women to surrender their children when it might have been possible for them to parent. I think I might always wonder if we did the right thing.

Adoption pro: People will approve
Adoption con: People will say stupid things that will hurt all of our feelings

Adoption pro: An adoption would add a wonderful new dimension to our family
Adoption con: The child might feel really left out, since being Mysterious is a big part of Mystery's identity, and will probably be a big part of Eggbert's as well. (She is a dual citizen, and is bilingual.) An adopted non-genetically-Mysterious child would never be accepted as a Mysterious tribe member. Ever. Even if we adopted a child that LOOKED Mysterious, they wouldn't really be accepted as Mysterious by people who knew. And adopting from the land of Mystery is complex and might not be possible for us.

Adoption pro: We don't care about genetics--we just love children
Adoption con: The child might care about genetics, and might have some issues about the fact that his/her older sister is our genetic offspring, whereas she/he isn't.

Adoption pro: If we did domestic adoption, we might be able to have some openness, which would be good for the child
Adoption con: There are no guarantees. The birth parents can always cut off contact and there is nothing we can do to stop them.

Adoption pro: Our hearts really lean toward international adoption
Adoption con: If we adopted internationally, we'd miss the first few months or even years of our child's life.

DE pro: The resulting child would be Mysterious, and would be genetically related to Mystery and Eggbert.
DE con: It might not work.

DE pro: I'd get to gestate and breastfeed (which for me is HUGE).
DE con: It's expensive and might not work.

DE pro: Nothing about the appearance of our family should draw attention from strangers beyond that which we already get (as long as we choose a white door so the child is the same mix as Eggbert)
DE con: Our friends and family might not understand.

DE pro: We'd be able to take the best possible care of the baby from the date of conception
DE con: The child might resent the circumstances of his/her conception

DE pro: The child would be genetically related to the two people that I love most on earth
DE con: The child might wonder if I love him/her less than Eggbert (but this is a con for adoption too)

DE pro: We could choose the donor
DE con: We might not be able to get a donor that we like

DE pro: There is no heartbroken birth mother in this picture.
DE con: An egg donor might be less likely to be willing to answer a child's questions when they grow up than a birth mother.

This isn't an exhaustive list, but at least you get the idea.

Pleasing the people

2010-05-10T19:30:00.000-07:00

When I was trying to conceive Eggbert, I don't think that it ever really occurred to me to worry about what other people thought about my choices. I don't mean that I wasn't aware of the judgment that the world heaps on infertiles (and mothers, and, for that matter, women), but I never let it creep into my thinking when I was making important decisions about family-building. But for some reason, other people's opinions bother me more now. I can't really put my finger on why.

I've always been a bit of a people pleaser, so caring what people think, unfortunately, isn't exactly a new thing for me, but caring what they think about my family is. When I met Mystery and we fell in love, our relationship was almost universally disapproved of in the community where we lived at the time. Our families were supportive, luckily, and so were my friends, but several of Mystery's then closest friends really let him down, and our coworkers were unanimously appalled. I can't say that we were happy about that, but it never made either of us doubt that we were making the right decision for ourselves, and ten years later, we still think that we did (and the naysayers have mostly come around).

And when we ran into infertility, I certainly heard the "just adopt's" and the "perhaps it wasn't meant to be's" and even the "it's God's will's," but I just chalked those off as stupid things to say and then moved on. Sure, it hurt my feelings sometimes, but it never made me doubt my choices. People that think assisted reproduction is wrong found me nothing but supportive of their decision not to undertake assisted reproduction, and when they didn't agree with my decision to use it, well, they were welcome to kiss my PIO-bruised arse.

For some reason, though, it feels different this time. Maybe it's because I've somehow landed in adoption-land central. In my 12-person department at work, five people have adopted children, and one of my closest friends outside of work is currently waiting for a placement. Apparently, adopting is the standard operating procedure for infertile couples here. It is not a coincidence that while all of my friends and colleagues know that we're going to Korea this summer, I haven't told all of them why.

But that's not the worst of it. The fear of disapproval isn't just silencing me, it's also getting into my head and giving me doubts about where to go from here. Mystery and I had a really difficult time deciding to try IVF again, but now that we've made that decision, I feel good about trying one more time, but then what?

Like many people, I find it much easier to start an ART cycle when I have a backup plan for if (when?) it fails. When we started trying for Eggbert, our backup plan was adopting from Ethiopia. I felt really good about that plan, and it definitely helped me to get through some dark days. So you'd think that I'd know what we were going to do if this cycle fails, but you'd be wrong. Now I am full of doubts. I don't doubt that I would love an adopted child wholeheartedly, but I am increasingly doubting whether that would be the best decision for our family as a whole. It's so complicated. At this point, I'm torn between three options: 1) embracing Eggbert's status as an only child, 2) adopting, and 3) trying donor eggs. And when I listen to my heart, I lean toward option 3. I've been trying for about 20 minutes to outline the reasons for my waffling, and am having trouble getting the words just right. It's so hard to talk about these things without seeming to condemn other people's choices. Or am I just afraid of your disapproval too? I really don't know. Reason #85 gajillion that I really hope this cycle works. If not, I really don't know what the next step should be, and I'm pretty clearly not yet ready to face it, whatever it is.

I think we're going to do it

2010-04-11T08:25:00.001-07:00

Numbers have been crunched, souls have been searched, and now, plans are being made. We're going to try it. One more time.

Results

2010-04-05T21:12:00.001-07:00

The clomid challenge test results did not suggest that my ovaries have gone kablooey yet. Dr. Google assures me that this is not particularly encouraging, but rather simply isn't DIScouraging. In other words, a normal-ish (my FSH on CD3 was "very slightly elevated", but my doctor isn't concerned) result doesn't mean anything, whereas a bad result is bad. So, I now have a decision to make.

Still alive, despite strange loss of words

2010-03-21T20:48:00.001-07:00

Life is strange. I left Korea assuming that I'd be blogging weekly or more, as usual, about this, that, and the other, but somehow on the way across the Pacific, the cat got my tongue. Or fingers. And here we are, nine months later, without a single post.

The time lag is probably not coincidental. A lot of unexpected things happened in the immediate aftermath of my leaving Korea, and one of those things involved an accidental pregnancy (not mine) that took the wind out of my sails so thoroughly that I could barely breathe for a few months there. I didn't know that it was possible for me to feel so horrible about someone else being pregnant. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, I really didn't feel like it was something that I could talk about on the internet, since the events that made it so hard for me involved loved ones who may read this blog, but since it was hard for me to think for a while without thinking about it, I found myself going silent. However, with the birth of a beautiful healthy baby girl today (not mine), it seems as good a time as any to close that chapter (well, OK, it was a very short chapter, having no actual words in it), and try to start again.

So, here I am.

Transitioning back to life in the US has been, well, interesting. In some ways it was surprisingly easy. I'm not as socially awkward among Americans as I had expected to be after several years away. In fact, people are often surprised when they hear my life story after knowing me casually for a little while. So I think I'm passing as normal, which, I suppose, is good.

Other things have been hard, though. After living in a cosmopolitan city where I was a foreigner for almost three years, it has been hard to readjust my expectations about the world views of the people around me. You see, I'm now living in a very small town. A very small, very white, very homogeneous town, in the South. And it's weird, y'all. Don't get me wrong. The people are nice, as in shirt-off-of-their-backs nice, holding the door even if you're 30 feet behind them nice, exchanging endless pleasantries nice, and seeming to genuinely care about the people around them nice. I'm undoubtedly the rudest person in town by a mile. But everybody around here seems to think that this little town is the center of the world. And as far as I can tell, it's not. I suspect that I would have felt dislocated just about anywhere, but I have never lived in a small town in the USA before, and really, small town America IS a different world from urban America. It's very beautiful here, but it sometimes feels like I'm in a foreign country, even though I'm actually in the US. Other times, though, it feels kind of good. I'm really not sure yet if I like it here. I guess we'll see.

Eggbert is now a big girl of 28 months. She talks, she dances, she climbs anything climbable, and she sings. She is the most delightful person that I have ever known. I remember when she was a newborn wondering if I would continue be as thrilled by the sight of her once I actually got used to having her around. If anything, I find her even more amazing today. She still does ask for her little best friend from Korea, though. I had no idea that it was even possible for a two-year-old to remember someone that they haven't seen for nine months, but it appears that she does.

Mystery is doing OK. He's one of only a handful of brown men in town, which took him a little while to get used to, but by now he just takes it in stride. At first, we both felt uncomfortable when people did a double-take at our family. Now, we don't even notice. One unexpected benefit of being in a tiny minority is that he gets huge smiles (usually coupled with nods or other gestures of acknowledgment) from every other person of color that he passes in a public place. I also get the smiles when I'm out with just Eggbert. The warm feeling that these feelings of instant connection give me more than make up for the occasions when total strangers approach me and Eggbert to ask me what country I adopted Eggbert from. As far as I can tell, I am the only white mother of a nonwhite child in the county that didn't form their family via international adoption. It bothers me that a) they think it's OK to ask a total stranger how their family was formed, b) they assume that all nonwhite kids are foreign, and c) someday, Eggbert will understand the question, and it might bother her a lot more than it bothers me. Often when I explain that she is my bio daughter, they seem embarrassed. As if the problem with their question was that it revealed that they thought that she adopted. And then that bothers me more. Oh well. My skin is thickening quickly, and given the size of the town, probably most people have figured us out pretty soon anyway.

Fertility-wise, we're still in a holding pattern. We're thinking about making a trip to Korea this summer to try one final IVF cycle (while also visiting friends) before we admit defeat. When I mentioned this to my GYN, she suggested that I might want to repeat the clomid challenge test, just to see if my ovaries have totally given up, before we book the tickets. That seemed sensible, so I'm on day 2 of clomid now. For a second, I let myself think "hey, maybe the clomid will do the trick and I'll get pregnant!" And then I remembered that not only has it never done so before, but also that it's specifically contraindicated in women over 40 (ouch! I'm still not used to being one of those) as a fertility treatment because it ruins the uterine lining. I don't really know what we'll do if the results are horrible. I'm pretty sure that tears will be involved, but then again, it might help me to just face facts and move on. I guess we'll see. I spend a lot more time thinking about other options, including both adoption and donor eggs, than I used to. I think Eggbert would be an awesome sister.

The big goodbye

2009-06-12T07:10:00.000-07:00

It's time to say goodbye.

No, not to the blog, dear reader. And also not to my dreams of another baby. But as of next week, Mystery, Eggbert and I will be leaving Korea permanently. I'm feeling a bit strange about it all.

The strangeness comes in waves. Sometimes I feel like it's not really happening. Then I realize that it is, and I just don't know what to do with that information. Am I happy? Am I sad? I'm not sure. For the past several weeks, I've been so focused on the details that I haven't had much time to think about what the move means for me.

There are some things about leaving that are bittersweet. I do feel sad to say goodbye to the city where Eggbert was conceived, born, and lived her first 19 months. It makes me sad that she won't remember our lives in Korea. I'm also worried that she might feel dislocated by the move. She's leaving the only home that she has ever known, going to a place where everybody looks different, the language is different, the food is different, EVERYTHING is different. Mystery, her toys and clothes, and I will be the only familiar things that make the trip. For me, moving back to the USA is a homecoming, but for Eggbert, it's a whole new world. On the other hand, the fact that we're leaving WITH Eggbert is just amazing. We came here a family of two, and are going "home" a family of three. So, in some ways, taking Eggbert to the US feels like a huge triumph.

There are also things about leaving that are just plain sad. I will miss my friends here terribly, as well as my wonderful colleagues. The job that I've been doing way was in many ways one of the best jobs that I could ever hope to have. While it has been challenging in many ways, it has also been an absolute dream in terms of flexibility and everyday working conditions. That is something that I will really miss. I will also miss Korean food, having everyday access to the few amazing palaces and monuments here in Seoul that survived the Japanese occupation, the Korean war, and the frantic wave of modernization that is still sweeping away much of the "old Korea." I'll miss the parks, the Han river, and the funny quirky things about Koreans that make me laugh while at the same time constantly making me question my own expectations and judgments about human behavior. I'll miss feeling safe and secure despite the fact that I live in a metropolitan area with a population of ~20 million.

I won't miss never knowing what on earth is going on. I won't miss the pushing and shoving. I won't miss the fact that strangers almost never smile or make eye contact (unless I'm with Eggbert, in which case everyone is suddenly Miss Congeniality). I won't miss the noise. The smells. The motorcycles driving on the sidewalks and nearly mowing me down. The raw aggression of the drivers. Feeling invisible yet completely exposed at the same time. Squid.

One thing that I do know is that it's time. I may not know how I feel about leaving, but I am ready to go. There are still a few boxes to pack, people to say goodbye to, and details to sort out (many, many details to sort out, alas), but barring major changes between now and then, when the appointed date comes, and we get on that plane, I may feel a bit wistful, but I won't look back.

New beginnings

2009-05-15T03:59:00.000-07:00

Well, it's official. The beta was negative. I told the doctor that I wasn't pregnant before the beta, and once I described the bleeding to my doctor, she started shaking her head and said "I don't think you're pregnant either." Sometimes I hate being right.

My doctor knows that I'm leaving Korea next month, but I asked her whether based on my response this time she thought it would be worth it for me to try again in the USA, and she didn't even hesitate before saying "yes, definitely." She said that while my age is "not good," (you've got to love the directness, I am very fond of my doctor) my response and embryo quality were quite good for someone of my age, and that she definitely thinks there's a good chance of success if we persist.

That is food for thought, but realistically, we can't even think about cycling again for several months. The town that we're moving to is two hours driving from the nearest RE (who, weirdly enough, is also my old pre-Korea RE--he moved too). So, it would be hard to visit the RE without taking at least 1/2 day off, and of course IVF involves many many visits. Given that I'm starting a new job, and really can't be systematically shirking my duties like that in the first few months, I can't even imagine how I could cycle again before the December holidays (I will have two weeks or so off then.) Meanwhile, my ovaries will just be getting older and older.

Sigh. I'm not at all sure that we'll do it. We'll really have to think about our priorities carefully. We already are lucky enough to have an amazing Eggbert, and it might make sense to spend our time, energy, and money on the wonderful child and life that we have, rather than focusing on the child that we don't have.

Mystery is much less sad than I am. He is mainly sad because I'm sad, not so much because of the failed cycle. He is quite content with one child, although he agrees that it would be nice for her to have a sibling. Given that I'm the one that is old, and therefore the reason that we're under such time pressure, it is comforting for me to know that while my body may have failed me, it hasn't failed him. I just wish that I could convince myself that it hasn't failed Eggbert too.

Now would be a very good time to share the reasons that you enjoyed being an only child, or wished that you were an only child, or have decided to have only a single child, or really anything else positive that you might have to say about only children.

Enter the fat lady

2009-05-13T04:54:00.000-07:00

I started bleeding heavily today (like a period). I hadn't been planning to do a hpt before Friday (the day of the beta), but given this new development, I thought it was best to start facing facts now. It was negative, of course, a vast expanse of blank white unsullied by even the faintest hint of a line.

I know that things could change between now and Friday, but I am confident that they won't. I just don't feel pregnant at all, and I had no bleeding at all with Eggbert. I think this cycle is over.

Not sure how I feel about it yet. So far, I'm not as upset as I would have imagined. We'll see if that comes later.

******************
Edited to add--it's now even heavier than a normal period. I don't think there is any question anymore.

There goes my cool again

2009-05-12T06:17:00.001-07:00

I was going to write a post today about cosleeping and the safety issues concerning it, but then I lost my ability to focus, so you, dear reader, are going to have to make do with a status report instead. I'll try to get back to our regularly scheduled programming once my brain returns to normal functioning, whenever that happens.

I was doing OK until yesterday. Really I was. Going about my normal business, and only thinking about the contents of my uterus or lack thereof every few minutes. I had in mind that I would find out on Friday, and was doing OK with that. Then yesterday, I woke up with something that was not quite a headache, but also not quite NOT a headache, if that makes any sense. Then I remembered the hideous migraine that signaled the failure of my first IVF cycle. Then I realized that it was 7 days past the 3-day transfer, and that if it's bad news, it could arrive any second now. On my first cycle, I had the telltale migraine on day 8, and the spotting started on day 9. The more I thought about it, the more the evidence seemed to accumulate that the cycle had failed. I had an almost-headache. I didn't FEEL pregnant. I had cramps. Oh wait, the cramps went away when I farted (sorry, tmi), so they were probably intestinal in nature, and therefore don't count. Regardless, not looking good.

Then today I woke up with a clear head, and still no signs of spotting. Back to square one, but rather the worse for emotional wear. Unfortunately, trying to "read the signs" is a genie that doesn't want to go back into the bottle, so about 60% of my mind has spent the whole day analyzing every signal from every nerve ending in my entire, not insubstantial, body, which is exhausting. So far, though, the magic 8-ball continues to say "too soon to tell."

Beta is Friday. I hope I can keep at least the other 40% of my mind engaged in my day-to-day life until then.

Defensive much?

2009-05-05T03:23:00.000-07:00

My IVF clinic is a nice, but no-frills operation. The staff are very caring and professional, the facilities are clean, beautifully designed, and state-of-the-art, but wait times are long, privacy is minimal, and at times you feel like you are being herded (I have described it in more detail here). On the whole, I quite like it.

The up side of the absence of frills? This whole cycle cost $2000, including meds. Of course the weak Korean won helped, but the main reasons for the low prices are much lower doctor salaries and the fact that they are able to serve so many more patients in so much less time.

Being less concerned with appearances, the clinic doesn't phone every day with updates on my embryos. There is no "fert report." I just normally get a phone call the day before transfer to tell me when to come in. The first time, my doctor phoned me personally (after I hounded her), and gave me the details over the phone. The second time, a nurse phoned and just told me when to show up. This time, though, I just got an SMS with the transfer time (probably because nobody was brave enough to attempt a phone call with me, given the language difficulties). I didn't even see the doctor until I was already in the stirrups. So, I knew that at least one embryo had fertilized and made it to day 2, but otherwise had no information.

Transfer was yesterday. I was on the table and looked up to the monitor and saw two little blobs. I knew from earlier experience that they would transfer everything that survived, so I figured that was it. My first reaction was disappointment. Out of six, only two made it? Then the perspective on the monitor changed, and I saw two more little blobs. The doctor told me that four had fertilized (two naturally, two with ICSI, but I'm not sure if it was rescue ICSI or if they did ICSI right away--it all happened very quickly.) Within a few more seconds, they had transferred one "good" embryo, one "so-so" embryo, and two "less good" embryos. So, a total of four.

While I didn't technically make the decision to transfer four, and it sounds like a LOT, I'm fine with it. It's within the guidelines of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine for a woman aged 40 (although I suppose that technically I'm in a "more favorable" treatment class, since I have a history of successful IVF), and after all, I've been here before (on my first cycle--they transferred four then too, none of which stuck). Still, in light of recent events, I'm feeling a little defensive. I've noticed that when I tell my friends, I tend to preface the news with a bunch of statistics about the very poor per-embryo implantation rates in 40-year-olds to try to head off quadruplet jokes. It's frustrating to feel like I have to defend myself. I suppose that I could just point out that the doctor made the decision, not me, which is true, but kind of a cop out, since I suspected that she'd transfer four if four survived, and I didn't try to stop it. I don't know what she would have done if five or all six made it, but that didn't seem like a scenario that was even worth thinking about. Similarly, I know that technically I could end up with twins or more, but that doesn't seem like a scenario worth worrying about either, given the overwhelming odds against it.

It frustrates me that on top of the misery of infertility and the misery of IVF, I've now also become completely paranoid about being criticized for every decision that I make. I suppose that's the fate of any infertile that ever reads a newspaper (as Marie-Baguette pointed out in the comments on my last post), watches television, or talks to people, though. Sigh.

Edited to add--An additional factor here is geography. If I had transferred three, what to do with the fourth? Put it in a freezer in Korea? I'm leaving Korea in June. Would I really ever fly back to Korea to transfer a single not-that-great embryo, assuming that it even survived the freeze and thaw? Or should I have just thrown one away? Really? One out of four of my chances to have a child? There really weren't any good solutions. I'm a huge fan of elective single embryo transfer, and if I were five years younger, I absolutely would have chosen it, but at my age, it just doesn't make sense.

The five stages of infertility

2009-05-01T19:16:00.000-07:00

First things first: Retrieval was yesterday. I was expecting it to be horrible, but actually everything went fairly smoothly. I was on time (which is kind of a feat, considering that Mystery insists on making his "contribution" at home, which is totally understandable, but adds an unfortunate element of unpredictability to the proceedings), they called me in fairly quickly, and it was much less painful than usual. I was conscious, but the stabbing felt more like sharp prodding, which was a vast improvement. I don't know if the anaesthetic just worked better this time (there was a longer delay between the injection and the procedure, so it's possible that it just had more time to work), or if pregnancy has rearranged my parts, making my ovaries more accessible, but either way, I'll take it. It was also remarkably quick. The yield was six eggs. Not spectacular, but not dreadful either. In my first-ever IVF cycle, they retrieved 9 eggs (negative, nothing to freeze). The second time, only 2 eggs were retrieved (one of which ended up becoming Eggbert). So, I have learned that it's not all about quantity. I'm just hoping that one of those eggs turns out to be "The One." I guess time will tell.

The night before retrieval, I had trouble sleeping. Part of it was straight-up cowardice about the anticipation of pain. For some reason, I can remember the feeling of my first two retrievals in sharp technicolor, whereas the pain of labor (which I know was MUCH worse) is something that I can remember in theory, but I can't actually imagine the feeling itself. I guess that my body somehow instinctively knows that the pain of childbirth is "good" pain, whereas being stabbed is generally something to be avoided, so it sends the signals to the conscious mind accordingly.

The other issue on my mind, the huge possibility that this cycle will not yield a child, was probably the greater problem, though. I found myself endlessly crunching numbers in my brain--"If I get 8 eggs, and half fertilize, and all of those make it to transfer..."--and searching for the magic number that would allow me to relax. Of course that number is one. One more healthy baby, that is, not one egg. After several hours of fruitless effort to put these thoughts out of my mind, I realized what I was doing. I was "bargaining," the third stage of grief. This got me to thinking about infertility and grief in general.

I can clearly see that I have been through all five stages (although not necessarily in that order, and often moving forward and backward between stages) regarding my infertility in general. And I think that I have reached some level acceptance, and that I stay there most of the time. So, it surprised me to find myself at bargaining again. Then I looked back and realized that I have made very recent visits to denial and anger. I guess I'm not as far along in accepting my reality than I had thought.

A date with Mr. Stabby

2009-04-28T04:21:00.000-07:00

Today's scan showed 7-8 follicles (it looked like 8 to me, but that may have been just wishful thinking), all close to the same size. I trigger tomorrow, and retrieval is Friday.

Part of my brain remembers clearly that retrievals really hurt (my clinic doesn't give you a general anaesthetic for retrieval, just light sedation). I remember being quite surprised both times about how much being stabbed with a big giant needle really hurt. The other part of my brain, though, is looking forward to it. It's partly curiosity. I want to know how many eggs the old ovaries can produce. I have a bad feeling that there may also be little bits of hope around the edges too, though. I wish there weren't. BFN's are hard enough without coming by surprise.

So far so good

2009-04-24T16:58:00.000-07:00

Scan yesterday showed at least seven follicles, all about the same size. And my ovaries also ache, which I'm taking as a good sign that something is going on. Now I just have to hope that it's something good. Next scan is Tuesday.

Nervous

2009-04-23T06:35:00.000-07:00

I have been in such denial about this IVF cycle that even though I've got a belly full of needle tracks, I hadn't really thought about it much beyond the logistics until today, when I realized that if my ovaries have given up in the last two years, I'll probably find that out tomorrow at the first scan. I remember being incredibly nervous before each scan the first time around, and much less worked up about the scans the second time (it's hard to get worked up about scans with a failed cycle under your belt--I had learned the hard way that there isn't any easy equation that converts x follicles to y babies), but I realized just today that it's all totally different this time, because, well, I'm 40 now. I mean I knew that the odds weren't great, but I hadn't thought through the fact that in one of possible bad scenarios, my ovaries don't respond to the meds at all, and that if that's going on, I'll find out tomorrow.

I guess I'm starting to feel a little invested. I suppose it was inevitable. Sigh.

To distract myself, I thought I'd tell you about our recent trip to the land of Mystery.

In a nutshell, it was a bit of a debacle. We have taken Mystery to her other homeland before, and she had a great time, but during that trip, we stayed at Mystery's brother's houses the whole time, except when we were in hotels (of our choosing). Mystery's brothers live in very nice villages near major urban areas, so we had short drives and relatively easy access to consumer goods and medical care. Not that we needed them. On that trip, the Egg was still breastfeeding almost exclusively, and anything worked as a toy, so she was pretty much all set as long as she had me.

This trip was different. Mystery was aching to take her to his parents' house (she did see her grandparents last year, but they had traveled to his brother's house for the occasion). I was reluctant, both because there is malaria in the area (not much, but more than none), and because it's a much longer drive, which makes a short trip far less pleasant. Oh, and then there's the no electricity thing. It's never been a problem for me, but it does make things a bit more complicated with a toddler.

But off we went. It seemed only fair. Or something like that. Anyway, we went. And within three days, Eggbert had developed a horrible case of diarrhea, had the worst heat rash ever, and had been bitten by some mystery insect that left a welt the width of her entire (not insubstantial) thigh. She had also gone on a hunger strike, accepting only water as sustenance. She wouldn't even drink milk! (Admittedly, this might have been due in part to the fact that only powdered milk or milk in those little UHT boxes was available, and Mysterious milk in boxes tends to have strange flavors added to it, for no reason that I can discern).

That was all just background, though. The real source of stress for me was that Eggbert's grandparents' house is a the exact opposite of childproof. (What on earth would the word for that be? Child-eating?) I spent every moment trying to keep her from running out the door into the busy street, to keep her out of the woodburning stove, to keep her away from the collection of knives and machetes, to keep her from knocking over the flimsy rack on the floor on which all of the (glass) dishes were carefully stacked, and to keep her out of the big jugs of cooking oil, motor oil, and other various and sundry forms of oil that were stored in corners of the house for no good reason that I could discern. There were also human hazards. Neighborhood "aunties" repeatedly came over to meet her, and then tried to take her home for a while, presumably to show her to their friends and families in the comfort of their own home. They were surprisingly hard to dissuade. Mystery once told one of them that Eggbert couldn't go out because she hadn't had her breakfast, and the auntie said "no problem, I can feed her!" By the time Eggbert got her first ever mystery fever (39 degrees C in her armpit, so probably about 39.5 orally), and I realized that the baby ibuprofin had spilled in our luggage and we had only one dose left, and were a three-hour drive from the nearest pharmacy (luckily, the baby tylenol hadn't spilled), I nearly lost my mind.

It was hard, dear reader. It was hard. We all made it home alive, and none the worse for wear, but I definitely have some new frown lines to show for the trip.

I realized after we got back to Korea (once I had stopped kissing the ground) that the reason that I found it so hard related in part to a difference in philosophy about the role of children. In the USA, and in Korea, adults shape their spaces and their habits around their children. We childproof, we clean, we plan our days around naptimes, etc. In the Land of Mystery, children live in the same world as adults. They learn to avoid hazards by experiencing them from very early in life. Nothing is hidden or sugar-coated for kids. They are cherished and adored, but adults don't reorganize their lives around kids. I can see the merits of living like that in theory, but in practice, I couldn't hack it. I am so glad to be "home."

Bilingual

2009-04-21T06:31:00.000-07:00

Eggbert has been learning to talk for a while now, but over the last few weeks, the new words have been coming fast and furious. We planned all along to raise her bilingual, so Mystery only (usually) speaks to her in Mysterious, and I only (usually) speak to her in English. We do have linguistic "accidents" from time to time, because some words just sound or feel so much better in one language or the other that it's hard not to slip them into a sentence of the other language, but we are working on it, and get things right at least 95% of the time. The one place where we're not terribly consistent is in our conversations with each other in front of her. We tend not to pay attention, and to either mix languages, change languages in midstream, or each speak in our "own" language in the same conversation (i.e., Mystery asks a question in Mysterious, I answer him in English, he asks a follow-up question in Mysterious, and so on.) We were really curious to see what would happen when the Egg started to talk.

Her first word was the Mysterious equivalent to "uh-oh", and her second, as I have discussed elsewhere, was "boobie." Since that time, it has been about 50/50, although some weeks are more English, and others more Mysterious. One thing that we noticed with interest was that she seemed to only learn each word in one language. So, for example, things are cold in English, but can only be hot in Mysterious. She had never given any sign that she knew which language "belonged" to which parent until yesterday, when for the first time, she added a word in English that she already knew in Mysterious. She has been saying "kiss" in Mysterious for a couple of months now. Last night, though, at bedtime, she was stalling about going to sleep (as is typical). She sat up in bed (we cosleep), crawled over to me, kissed me on the cheek, and said, very clearly "kiss" (in English). When I smiled, she did it again. And again. And again. Thus delaying bedtime by at least ten minutes, and making her mommy very very happy.

So little time

2009-04-20T04:11:00.000-07:00

I have so much to blog about, but can't seem to find the time to write a proper post. Therefore, in lieu of such a post, I'm just here to give a quick update so y'all will at least know that I'm still alive.

For the first two weeks in April, we were visiting Mystery's family in the Land Of. It was a long, hard, thought-provoking trip. There's definitely a post about that coming up, so I'll just leave that topic for now. Just mentioning it now, because that's the reason for the long silence (well, other than the whole no-time issue).

Yesterday my period finally arrived, so today I trudged off to the RE, despite the Worst Migraine Ever. Had to wait for three hours because she had a series of emergencies (I could see that was true, since she kept getting called out of her office and running to various parts of the clinic). Luckily, I had already phoned in sick to work, due to the WME, so I just sat there in the clinic with one eye shut and fingers pressed hard into my temples, and tried not to vomit or die. Doc was apologetic and kind, which I appreciated, and has changed my protocol from last time. Even less suppression now (only three days of Suprefact, which is great news to me, since the injections tend to cause an itchy rash), and a dose of stims big enough for an elderly horse. Hopefully if there's any life left in my ovaries, this will cause them to spring to attention. Next scan is on Friday.

The die is cast

2009-03-16T06:07:00.000-07:00

After yet another cycle in which I managed to foolishly get my hopes up (or at least not to assume that there was no hope, which is pretty much the same thing these days) that I might just get pregnant without intervention (I know, I know), my period arrived yesterday, a full three days ahead of schedule.

So, today I trundled off dutifully to the RE. I hadn't actually seen her in person since Eggbert was born, and it was surprisingly nice to get the chance to thank her in person for the incredible gift that she helped to give Mystery and me.

After conferring frantically with the calendar, she confirmed what I had suspected--that I will only have time to do one IVF cycle before leaving Korea in June. If my period had arrived three days ago, we could have squeezed in a second, but now it is truly out of the question. So, that's where I stand. One chance. I really don't know yet how I feel about that. On the one hand, Eggbert took two tries, and I was two years younger then, so obviously the odds are not on my side. On the other hand, the odds wouldn't be on my side in two cycles either, or even three. We will have to call it quits sometime, so at least this draws a pretty sharp line in the sand for us. Once we are back in the US, I will have infertility coverage, but with a lifetime maximum of $5000, which means that the out-of-pocket costs would be about $10,000 for one more cycle, and with odds of success of only about 20%, that is not a terribly appealing proposition. I guess we'll see how we feel if/when it comes to that, but right now, it's looking like this will be my last IVF cycle.

I'll start BCP tomorrow for one month, and then the fun will begin.

Baby steps

2009-03-09T06:05:00.000-07:00

This isn't a confession that I am proud to make, but before I started trying to get pregnant, there was a part of me that was dreading the first few weeks of my baby's life. I figured that spewing forth a live human being from my loins (or a big old incision, if it turned out that way), and then being subjected to an intense sleep-deprivation experience all while bleeding from my chewed-on nipples and having a hormone-storm the size of Katrina raging in my body would be fairly unpleasant. It seemed that this was just something that I'd have to endure to get to the good part, which would come later.

As my pregnancy progressed, and it eventually became clear that an actual baby was likely, I realized that I was already not sleeping, and somehow had remained alive, so I thought that if I survived the whole huge head meets small vagina event, all that I really had to fear was post-partum depression. After the great long depression that was infertility, I expected that PPD would happen, and thought that the only real question was how bad it would be.

Boy was I wrong. Birthing was indeed as painful as I had imagined, and it's true that I didn't sleep for more than three hours in a row for the next ten months or so, but Eggbert's first days were absolutely glorious for me. I remember in the days, weeks, and months after her birth wondering if there was such a thing as hormone-induced post-partum Euphoria, and praying that if that's what I had, I would never be cured.

A lot of things were hard in her first year, but they were a good kind of hard. The kind of hard that made me feel strong and empowered and even perhaps a bit proud. She was a needy little things, but as it turned out, her wish was not only my command, but also my wish. There was nothing that made me happier than meeting her needs. And her needs were fairly simple--food, warmth, comfort, and about a gajillion diaper changes/day. Not necessarily easy, but at least straightforward.

As she's grown older, I have struggled a lot more with the whole meeting her needs thing, because sometimes it is very unclear what she actually needs. Despite her fairly limited vocabulary, she is fantastic at communicating her wants, but since her wants include things like chewing on her shoes, jumping on the bed, playing in traffic, and eating only corn and animal crackers, I have found her guidance to be increasingly unhelpful in allowing me to identify her actual needs.

Up until recently, I had never questioned my belief that we are lucky that Mystery is a stay-at-home dad. I love it that they have this time together, that they have such a special relationship, and that I can go to work knowing that my child is being taken care of someone who loves her more than anything else in the world. I know that not everybody has the option of having a stay-at-home parent, and I do think that we're lucky. However, lately when I watch my own little Egg and compare what I see other people's children doing, I kind of wonder what she is missing out on by not being in day care. In my most insecure moments, I wonder if somehow we're cheating her out of the chance to learn from child care professionals, rather than just her goofy parents, and even if we're somehow causing her lasting harm.

The thing is, while Mystery and I are both patient, involved, and interested parents, we both find it very hard to teach little Miss Egghead anything. She has always marched to the beat of her own drummer, and while her development is on average right on track, it's always been wildly uneven--she was walking very early, but at almost 16 months she still has no interest in using a spoon or fork, and I gave up in despair at patty-cake months ago after she left me hanging one too many times. She is curious about the world, but seems absolutely determined to do things her own way. I am 99% proud of this, but there is 1% of me that worries when I see other mommies and babies playing out scenes right from parenting books, and realize that not only has Eggo not read the book, but she likes to rip the pages out and eat them. She has been talking for about three months now, but to this day, she only says what she wants when she wants to, and no amount of questioning will elicit words on cue (although bribery does work if animal crackers are involved). She won't follow instructions to make animal sounds, or point to things, or really to do anything at all that she didn't already mean to do (although we have made some headway in stopping her from doing things that we don't want her to do). I see other moms and toddlers walking along in public, hand in hand, or even just side by side, while the very thought of unleashing a free Eggbert on the public makes me shake and sweat. When we take her to the park, the only place that she's allowed to walk outside, given her tendency to bolt, she starts sprinting the second that her feet hit the dirt. Nothing that we can do, short of picking her up and turning her around, has any effect on her trajectory. We can scream and shout, or sing and dance, or offer her all of the tea in China if she will just for the love of God STOP RUNNING TOWARD THE CLIFF/PIT/RABID DOG! but she will ignore us completely and do her own thing. I end up running along behind her holding onto the back of her jacket just to keep her from running off of the edge of the world.

Lately, I've noticed that my apparent inability to lead, guide, or discipline the Egg effectively has been getting me down. It's not her behavior that bothering me, but rather my concern that her behavior means that I'm doing something wrong. I can't really put my finger on it, but she's just so different from other people's kids that even though I am for the most part delighted by the differences that make her her own unique and special person, they also make me worry.

Last Sunday we had kind of a bad morning. I had spent days searching through all of the wrong stores to find some crayons so she could start to learn to draw. Finally I found them, and we had the big "reveal" on Sunday. I let her hold all of the different colors, showed her how to use them, scribbled a little myself, just to show her that it was fun, and then she poked the crayon into the paper three times, looked disconcerted, sat there for a minute doing nothing, and then bit the end off of the crayon. After which she picked up the paper and started shredding it while I fished waxy bits out of her mouth. Not quite the tableau that I had envisioned. Then I tried to do a puzzle with her and she just wanted to throw the pieces, and I tried reading a book and she walked away, and I put on some music so we could dance and she wanted no part of that either, yet when I decided to let her play alone, she got upset about that too, and spent the rest of the morning whining. Nothing was wrong, but we were just obviously not on the same wavelength. That had never happened before, and it really took me by surprise. For the first time, my recent worry about her made the leap from the category of "things that I occasionally think about idly in moments when my brain is otherwise unoccupied" to "the sick feeling that something might be really really wrong." I started thinking things like ADD and autism and attachment disorders and leprosy and things that go bump in the night. You know, the usual suspects.

That afternoon, I popped the Egg in the baby carrier and took her to the park, even though it was kind of cold. As usual, when I put her down she was off like a shot. She ran straight to the muddy ditch, then to the rusty grate that looked like it had been infused with some kind of special military-grade vaccination-cracking tetanus spores, then to the big pile of cigarette butts. Every time I redirected her by physically picking her up and moving her to another region, she found something more dangerous and filthier to race for. I kept trying to interest her in pinecones, trees, birds and other pretty and nice things that she could look at, while she kept her head down and her legs spinning as she searched for some kind of dirt-encrusted toddler holy grail. Within a few minutes, she looked rather a lot like Pigpen. Eventually, we made our way over to an area with a lot of trees, each surrounded by its own individual mound of dirt about 1 meter high. Upon spotting the mounds, she immediately stopped her aimless running and spent the next several minutes walking straight up to a mound, falling down when the grade got too steep or the ground too loose, getting up, marching right back up the hill, falling down, getting up, falling down, getting up, etc. At first I tried to stop her, but then I realized that the ground was soft, she was well-padded in a winter coat and hat, and she was having a good time, so I just let her be. After many failed attempts on a big mound, she looked around, chose a smaller mound, and started working on that one. Within 10 minutes she was running up and down the small mound, after which she moved back to the big mound. A few minutes later, she was standing at the top beaming. Then she came down, ran right over to me, and hugged me. I picked her up and started talking about something-or-other, and she somehow picked out the word "tree," (which she hadn't used before) and started saying "twee?" "dwee?" I pointed at a tree, and said "tree", and she then pointed to every tree on the landscape, saying "dwee! dwee!" Then just to make sure I got the point, she wiggled until I put her down, ran over to a tree, patted the trunk, and said "dwee!" Then I showed her a pinecone, and she held and patted it and carried it around for several minutes before giving it back to me, I assume for safekeeping.

The whole way home, she beamed out at all of the passers-by, and the second that someone so much as looked at her, she started waving cheerily at them. Our walk home was punctuated by a trail of "awwwww's."

I think my little girl is going to do just fine, as long as her mama can just relax and let her be herself. I'm working on it.

The best-laid plans

2009-02-22T03:19:00.000-08:00

My RE doesn't take appointments (except for retrievals and transfers), she just has office hours, and the patients show up and are seen in the order of arrival. It may sound inefficient, but in fact, the waits to see her aren't any worse than they were to see my last RE in the US, even though she sees about 10 times as many patients. My RE usually likes to see patients on CD2 at the start of a cycle, so I thought I'd go on CD2 this time, in anticipation of starting an IVF cycle in March, so she could do any tests that she might want to run in the mean time (like bloodwork or whatever). However, my body had other plans.

About two weeks ago, I started a new self-improvement plan. Since the Egg was born, I haven't been getting nearly as much exercise as I should. I do walk a lot (about 25 minutes each way to work every day, up a huge hill, plus recreational walks with the Egg whenever I get the chance), so I'm not a total couch potato, but I really wanted to start doing something that raises my heart rate a bit more. So, I decided to start running. Truth be told, I hate running. However, it has two features that make it very appealing at the moment: it's free, and it's outdoors. Living in a huge, densely-packed city, the last thing that I want to do is to spend more time in stuffy buildings, so joining a gym doesn't particularly appeal, and I kind of hate the idea of paying to exercise. So, I found a gentle running program on the internet that guaranteed it would get me comfortably running a decent distance in 8-9 weeks without doing me any damage along the way. Sounded good, so off I went. The first two runs went well. A local university campus near my home has some nice paths for running, so it was actually quite pleasant, and astonishingly easy, given that I hadn't run in almost two years. So, for the third run, I decided to add some interest by adding some hillier paths (while still sticking to the recommended distances and times). By that night (when I posted last), my knees were throbbing, and by the next morning, I could barely walk. I did manage to hobble to work that day, and by evening, both knees and one ankle were hot, swollen, and very, very sore. Luckily, I had some work I could do at home, so I stayed home the next day. Then it was the weekend. After a couple of days off, I tried walking to work again on Monday. HUGE mistake. I ended up having to take the next day "off" also and work at home. I tried taking a taxi on Wednesday, but couldn't get a taxi home due to the odd location of my office, so I once again had to limp home. Thursday was the day that I should have gone to the RE. However, going to the RE would have required, at the very least, walking from my apartment to a cab, and from a cab to the doctor's office, which was about 100% further than was possible, given my condition. I finally took my knees to the doctor the next day (tendonitis: rest, ice, and ibuprofin, which was what I had been doing all along), but still haven't made it to the RE.

As a result of this incident, I have learned two things: First, running on hills is really bad for your joints. Don't do it. Second, icing your knees right after you hurt yourself really does make a difference. How can I tell that it was the ice that helped? Easy! I did a home science experiment and only iced one knee. They both hurt the same amount, but I iced the right and not the left, and now look! The right is tons better, but I can still barely walk on the left.

When I realized that my experiment had successfully answered my research question, I was filled with the righteous glow of scientific discovery. It lasted about five seconds. Then I realized that if only I had just iced both knees right away like Dr. Google said, I wouldn't be in pain anymore. Doh!

Infertile days

2009-02-17T03:48:00.000-08:00

As an infertile mom, mostly I feel like an ordinary mom. My life is too busy and full with Eggbert, Mystery, work, and, well, life, to think too much about my own infertility. But there are days when it all does come crashing back.

Today was one of those days. I was already having a frustrating day, because I have somehow managed to injure both of my knees, making me hobble around in a piteous manner, and forcing me to work from home (since work is at the other end of a big steep hill that I just can't navigate in my current condition), and then my computer decided that it was time that I be taught a lesson, so I spent the whole day trying (unsuccessfully) to accomplish one fairly simple task. Then my period arrived.

It shouldn't have been a big deal. Eggbert is only 15 months old. My arms and heart are full. But it was a big deal. I admit it, I cried.

Before my next period arrives, I will turn 40. In just a few months after that, we will leave Korea, the land of cheap IVF, forever. Clearly, if I am serious about wanting another child, then it's time to start gearing up for an IVF cycle ASAP.

I don't want to do IVF. I don't want the needles, the expense, the mood swings, the risk of crushing failure. I don't want any of it.

But I do want another child. Just one more.

Once again, I am angry to be in this situation. I know that I'm one of the lucky ones. And when I look at Eggbert, I do feel incredibly fortunate, but it still does kind of grate on me that 85% of couples can just plan their family and have their kids, without ever having to face these kinds of days.

Becoming a Repatriate

2009-02-03T04:01:00.000-08:00

Knowing that I'm leaving has changed my relationship with Korea. Things about Seoul that I found annoying before now provoke only amused sighs. Things that I always liked shine a bit brighter. My friends here seem smarter, kinder, and more interesting. OK, not really the last one. They were always pretty interesting, actually. But you know what I mean. Once we stopped trying Korea on for size, both Mystery and I have both been able to relax and admit that it's not perfect, but it's an interesting place, and we've had a nice life here.

While moving to another continent is a pretty daunting endeavor, we've done it together twice already, and I had already done it a few times before I met Mystery, so we pretty much know the drill. Luckily, we didn't bring too many possessions to Korea when we came, and haven't acquired much here (other than tons of baby stuff, most of which we'll just give away). We're also not moving until June, so we have plenty of time to figure out the details. So, while our lives will be upheaved for a while, I'm not particularly stressed about it. And just to make things even better, we have already managed to arrange the rental of a gorgeous house for our first six months back in the US from a family that will be overseas themselves. So, we don't have to look for housing right away, and can look around a bit and see what neighborhood we'd like to live in and what kind of a home we want.

So, on a logistical level, everything seems to be going well. The one thing about this move that has me a little disconcerted is my own emotional reaction to moving back to my own country. I'm mostly feeling good about it, from a practical perspective, but I am feeling a bit wistful. I'm not sure how I feel about not being an expat anymore.

Many years ago, in a former life, I had a friend who went to Japan after graduating from college to teach English. After a couple of years in Japan, she returned to the US. I asked her how it was going, and she said that she was having an identity crisis. When she had been living in Japan, and people in the US asked what she was doing (meaning what was her job), she responded that she was living in Japan, teaching English. The living in Japan part came first. The teaching English was an afterthought. Living in Japan was, for her, the daily accomplishment from which she derived her sense of accomplishment and self-worth. Once back in the US, she went back to being one of millions of relatively new college graduates without much in the way of marketable job skills. She eventually found her way, but for a while there, she felt really lost.

I'm in a different situation, obviously. I am established in my career (which does not involve teaching English), have a husband and child, and have made quite a number of trips around the sun already, so I have a fairly secure sense of who I am. Moving back to the US won't, for me, result in a psychological demotion in the workplace, and I'm moving back with a job in hand. However, I admit that I am feeling a little strange about giving up the perceived glamor (for lack of a better word) of living "overseas". Of course, living in Korea isn't actually any more glamorous than living anywhere else (although the man-purses that I see in huge numbers every time I go out in public do make a compelling argument that Seoul is more self-consciously fashionable than most places). My life here is fairly ordinary on the surface. I go to work. Come home, have dinner. Sometimes get together with friends, etc. But, there is an automatic special something about living in a country that isn't your place of origin, at least for me. The fact that the sights that I see, the sounds that I hear, the smells in the air, and the tastes of the food are different from those that I think of as "ordinary" puts an extra little sparkle on my day on most days. After over two years, I am used to living here, and some of that sparkle has faded into the clear light of day, but there are still moments every day when I take a deep breath and just appreciate the incredible luck that I've had that allowed me the experience of living here.

And soon it will be over. There will be new joys, new sparkles, and new adventures. I'll be able to put down some tentative new roots without any immediate expectation of pulling them up again down the road. I'll be closer to my family, most of my friends, places that sell the foods that I have been missing for so long. These things are huge, and I'm excited about them. But I don't know when, or if, I'll get the chance to live "overseas" again, which makes me a little sad. And I wonder if, when I get back to the US, having seen what I've seen, learned what I've learned, lived where I've lived, I'll fit in.

The Year of the Ox

2009-01-22T16:52:00.000-08:00

This weekend a four-day holiday starts, celebrating the end of the Year of the Rat and the beginning of the Year of the Ox. The stores are now stocked with beautifully packaged gift baskets, as gift-giving is a part of the tradition. Lovely boxes containing carefully-chosen, individually packaged fruits can sell for exorbitant prices, as can other foodstuffs, like fragrant oils, honeys, and such. A few days ago, though, I saw a gift box that absolutely blew my mind. In a nice yellow box, swaddled in tissue, lay four parallel rows of shiny, clean, cans of...

wait for it...

Spam. Yes. Good old-fashioned spam. Apparently nothing says Happy New Year like processed pig parts.

Happy Lunar New Year!

(P.S. I took the job. It's now official. USA here we come.)

Limbo

2009-01-14T05:14:00.000-08:00

I'm still here. Just having trouble organizing my thoughts. The last couple of months have been pretty intense in a lot of ways. Not bad, just intense.

The big gap in blog posts was originally precipitated by a trip to the US. We were there for almost a month, visiting friends and taking care of some life details. The trip was non-optional for us if Mystery wanted to keep his green card, since staying outside of the USA for too long will get it canceled, and his re-entry permit (basically a permit to stay out for two years) expired, so he needed to get himself firmly planted back on US soil before the expiration date. It was a pretty welcome trip for other reasons as well, though. I have a new nephew that I hadn't met, several of my dearest friends had new kids too, and of course I'm pretty fond of lots of adults in the US too (and previously existing kids), so it was fantastic to get to meet the new people, and reconnect with the "old" ones.

Eggbert had a fantastic time, other than the jet lag which she decidedly did NOT enjoy. (I didn't enjoy getting up for the day with her at 3 am for what seemed like weeks either, but I guess that's the price you pay for switching sides of the Pacific.) It turns out that she loves other kids, even if she doesn't quite know how to play with them yet. It was quite sweet to watch. And of course, the time that we spent with my parents spoiled her rotten--she LOVED having a staff of four, rather than just the usual two. I think that returning to Korea was a bit disappointing for her.

Arguably the most eventful event of the trip was a job interview for me. As I posted some time ago, Mystery and I have come to the conclusion that it just doesn't make sense for us to continue to plant roots in Korea, so we've been working on an exit strategy. Well, that strategy now seems close to fruition. Nothing is finalized yet, but it looks like we'll be moving back to the US in about six months.

I'm really happy and relieved that in this economy, I have managed to find a decent position, but I'm also having some anxiety about leaving Korea. I never quite felt at home here, whatever that means, but it has grown on me, and I know I'll miss it. In the mean time, my mind is neither here nor there. I think it'll be easier to cope once the final decision is made, and it's all official.

I finally get it

2008-11-18T06:42:00.000-08:00

It's now about four years since I first read an infertility blog and more than that since I found message boards. During that time, I've read a lot of heartfelt posts and comments that have hit me right in the gut because I could connect so completely with what the writer was saying, experiencing, and feeling. Other posts, I didn't have the personal experience to relate to, but I could imagine the situation, and could feel profound empathy, even though I had never been exactly in the same place. But every now and then, I've read something, obviously coming from a place of sincere emotion, that made me think, "hunh?"

The community affected by infertility is large and diverse, so it's probably not surprising that we sometimes have different emotional reactions to the same basic set of problems. I've always thought of myself as someone who makes a great effort to try to understand other points of view, and who usually eventually achieves at least limited success. However, I have been genuinely mystified by some things that I've read over the years.

The "primary vs. secondary infertility" discussion is a great example. Anybody that's been around the web block a few times has run into this classic debate: which is worse, primary or secondary infertility? I have always been dumbfounded by people who claimed that secondary infertility was worse, or even in the same universe as primary infertility. It's not that I don't believe that they believe that, but it has always been clear to me that there is something that I'm not getting, something that they're not getting, or both.

I once read a message board post on a board for women who had been trying to conceive their first child for several years in which the writer explained that she wasn't so much upset that she didn't have children, but rather that it wasn't her choice. A number of other women agreed. I was flabbergasted.

Finally, I've never been able to really grasp how someone could struggle with infertility for many years without seriously pursuing medical help if they could afford it. I've seen lots of women that I admire and respect choose this option, and I respect their choice and believe that it must be best for them, but something in my heart has always cried out, "but don't you want to at least TRY?"

A few days ago, I was thinking about this, probably prompted by this post, when suddenly, I had what was to me a revelation. Probably everybody else already knew this, but just in case, I'll spell it out: Grief about infertility is a different problem from grief about involuntary childlessness. Infertility is at the root of both, obviously, but these problems are made of fundamentally different stuff.

Infertility is by definition a failure to be able to (easily, at least) do something that most people can do--have sex and end up with a baby just like that. Learning to live with the fact that you can't do something pretty basic is hard. Since most people or couples are not aware that they're infertile until they try to conceive, it is usually a shock, and feels like a loss: of self-esteem, of control, or dignity, of hope. Many feel betrayed by their bodies. Made less a man or a woman. Frustrated and helpless as they watch others effortlessly (and in some cases, without even wanting it) do this thing that they can't do. It's hard.

Involuntary childlessness can happen for a number of reasons, including medical problems or the absence of a committed partner coupled with the unwillingness or absence of means to become a single parent. It seems that people react to involuntary childlessness in a huge number of ways. For some, it marks every day with sadness and the feeling that there is something very important missing, while for others, it seems to fall closer to the feelings that I have about my own involuntary mansionlessness, which can be summed up as "it would be nice, but whatever".

It seems to me that a lot of the things that I haven't been able to grasp about people's varied responses to infertility can be explained by the idea that while most infertile couples are upset by both the fact of their infertility and their involuntary childlessness, the relative importance of each of these factors varies dramatically between people.

It seems to be a spectrum. On one end, there are the people that don't care at all about being infertile, they just want a child. For people of this type, the realization that they are infertile often leads to an immediate decision to adopt. On the other end, there are the people who are gutted by the loss of their fertility, but bothered less by childlessness itself. In the middle, there are people who are bothered by both to a fairly equal extent.

I'm in the middle, but closer to the first type: I was more bothered by childlessness than infertility. For the first year that I was trying, I was definitely upset about infertility itself. It seemed so unfair that I couldn't just have sex with my husband and get pregnant like a normal human being. Teenagers can do it. People with serious substance abuse problems can do it. People who make godawful parents can do it. Why couldn't I?

At some point, I got over that. Five stages of grief later, I think I really am at a place where the infertility part of infertility doesn't really bother me too much. Of course it would be lovely to just have sex with my husband and end up pregnant. I still fantasize about that happening for us, but no longer in a desperate, unhealthy way. It would be nice, but the main thing that would make it nice is if it resulted in a healthy live baby at the end. I am no longer concerned at all about the process. For me it's about the outcome.

When I think about infertility and childlessness separately, all of a sudden, I "get" what other people have been telling me about their feelings. It DOES suck to be left out of a great miracle like natural (unassisted) conception and reproduction. If that was your dream, then I can see how IUI's or IVF or donor conception or adoption wouldn't feel like a solution to your problem at all. And I can also see how secondary infertility could seem particularly cruel--having experienced the miracle once without even realizing that it was your one and only time, only to find out that what you thought was the trial run was really the final event.

For me, while infertility itself was a blow, it was one that I could take. What brought me to my knees was fear of childlessness. Fear of not having a child that was genetically part me and part Mystery, but also fear of not having a child at all. So to me, secondary infertility already feels a bit like the promised land.

I still am bothered by the fact that I may not end up being able to give the Egg a sibling. I will try, but failure is a very likely outcome. And if I fail, it will hurt. But this time, I know I'll be OK. I am not childless. I have a little Egg who sets my heart aglow with joy every day.

My period arrived on her first birthday. I am now officially trying to conceive again.

The power of speech

2008-11-15T02:47:00.000-08:00

Well, Eggbert has finally decided to grace us with a few words, and at the same time to cement her reputation as a nursing-obsessed drama queen. Without further ado:

Her first word (in Mysterious): Oh no! (it's one word in the Language of Mystery)

Her second word (first in English): boobie

Needless to say, I'm mortified that I taught my innocent child such a silly name for the human breast. Nonetheless, I plan to tell this story at her wedding.

View from the other side

2008-10-30T07:14:00.000-07:00

If you're wondering where I've been lately, the answer is sleeping. For the first time since Eggbert was born, I now have a reasonable expectation of 7-8 uninterrupted sleep every night. It doesn't happen every night, but it happens more often than not. Several times in the last two weeks or so, I've caught myself thinking "what is this feeling, I feel great!" and then realizing that this is what it feels like not to be sleep-deprived. Now I've never been one to take sleep for granted--I've always had a healthy respect, nay, love, for the stuff, but I am still finding myself astonished at how much of a difference a good night's sleep makes.

Yes it's true that I'm still bf rather a lot, despite the closing of the all-night bar. I had originally planned to exclusively breastfeed until age 6 months, wean by 9 months, and be doing another IVF cycle by now. It kind of cracks me up to think about it. I clearly had never met myself, or Eggbert, if I thought that was going to fly. It might have worked if Eggbert had been a different baby, actually. I do have a spine somewhere under all of the mush, but I just wasn't equipped to deal with denying the boob to a baby that was (well, actually, is) absolutely passionate about it. I expected that she would like it, but I had never expect that she would love it so much. To this day, she cackles with glee when the boob comes out, and dives on it, making little happy sounds, whenever she sees it. Every. Single. Time. It doesn't matter if she just ate 3 seconds ago. The boob always fills her with delight.

I did try to get things under control earlier. I tried night weaning in August, and it was a disaster. The first time she woke up at night and a boob wasn't forthcoming, she screamed blue murder for what felt like an hour. She never really seemed to settle down, she just finally seemed to collapse with exhaustion. I was holding her and trying to calm her for much of it, but she was just so angry and upset that nothing that I could do helped. It was awful. I really think that even the staunchest CIO supporter would have been shaken. I held out for three nights, counting the minutes until the sun rose, so it would be "morning", and I could give her the damn boob already. After the third awful night stretched into the third awful day (she was horribly cranky, I was horribly cranky), I decided that maybe for whatever reason, she just wasn't ready. Since then I have felt like a terrible wimp, so it felt really validating to my instincts as a mom that this time, she whined a little for five minutes the first night, was easily soothed, and that was pretty much that. I don't think she's even woken up at night in a week, and when she does, it's just for a quick cuddle and then back to sleep (and let's face it, that's almost better than uninterrupted sleep).

So here we are. These days, I'm nursing her in the morning, and then not again until about 7 pm, then again at 8, and occasionally again when I go to bed, if she happens to wake up. I stopped pumping over a month ago, and will finish my frozen breastmilk stash early next week, so she'll soon be on cow's milk throughout the day. There are still no signs of my period, but I'm trying not to stress about that. In a while, once I'm sure she's doing well with the cow's milk, I'll work on phasing out the 7 pm feeding. After that, well, I don't know. We'll have to see.

That wasn't even what I was going to post about. Last weekend I spent some time with a friend from my Korean language class that I hadn't seen since the week that Eggbert was conceived, because she no longer lives in Korea. She is now 15 weeks pregnant with her first child. I realized that this was the first time that I'd had a friend be pregnant for the first time after me. All of my friends had their first kids years ago (mostly about 10-20 months after I started trying to conceive, as if to torture me), so it was my first time being the one in a position to offer advice. I'd love to say that I was graceful about it, and carefully kept from spewing assvice, but honestly nothing could be further from the truth. So many words spilled out of me on a huge number of topics from birthing and breastfeeding to how to choose the right stroller/pram, that I thought I might drown in my own verbiage. It wasn't pretty. Luckily, my friend had the patience of a saint. I hope that she understood that I was just excited for her.

The most interesting thing about this encounter, though, was seeing how nervous she is about this pregnancy. She conceived easily, and has never suffered a loss, yet even at 15 weeks, she can't stand to buy anything, or plan anything, because she's so conscious of all of the things that could (but probably won't) happen. She could barely even mention the due date without saying something like "if we make it that far", and she admitted that she had tried to arrange an ultrasound during her four-day visit in Korea, just to reassure herself that the baby was OK. Hearing all of this really challenged my own stereotypes about "fertiles", and the difference between "fertiles" and "infertiles". It turns out that there are nervous types on both sides of the fence, and that conceiving easily doesn't necessarily guarantee peace of mind. Who knew?

The bar is closed

2008-10-19T06:24:00.000-07:00

Dear customers of Mommy's Milk Bar,

This notice is to inform you that MMB will no longer be providing 24-hour service due to staff exhaustion. Our new hours of operation are 7-8 am, 6-10 pm weekdays, and 7 am-10 pm weekends and holidays. We apologize for any inconvenience, and as always, we appreciate your loyalty.

Sincerely,

The Management

Bedside manner?

2008-10-07T06:54:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Eggbert and I went to the doctor for flu shots. We have been going to the same International Clinic (nested within a major hospital) since we got here, so the nurses all have known me and Eggbert since before she was born. Eggbert's appointment went swimmingly. She was weighed and measured (15th percentile and 12th, respectively), had her temperature taken, and was pronounced cute, smart, and healthy by the doctor. She didn't like the shot much, but got over it quickly when offered a boob. (My doctor's office is great. They have a private place to nurse little ones right there.) All in all, a good visit.

Then it was my turn. I had to go to a different doc to get the vaccination prescribed. I didn't request my normal doc, since I wanted to get an appointment right after Eggbert's for the sake of convenience. They ushered me into an office, and there was the Asian version of Doogie Houser. I swear this kid was 12. He said that he was a resident and would be taking my medical history. I wasn't thrilled, since I knew this would take forever and Eggbert and Mystery were waiting outside, but I know that residents have to learn somehow, so I said OK. He asked a million questions in just about the worst English that I've heard since I've been here. (This isn't a criticism--my Korean is abysmal and I'm grateful that there is a clinic where I can get care in English--I'm just setting the stage here.) I answered them all to the best of my ability--3 or 4 times in some cases because his comprehension was about as good as his speech. Then he asked the question. "When was your last menstrual period?"

I laughed and said "it's been almost two years now--well, not quite, I think it was February 2007. I had a baby last November and am still breastfeeding."

He stared at me and said "two years?"

"Well, not quite," I said, "more like 20 months. 10 months since the baby was born."

"Is there something wrong with you?" (Remember, this is the DOCTOR!)

"No, I'm still breastfeeding and haven't had my period yet. I have a baby. I'm breastfeeding."

"Have you been diagnosed with menopause?" (Again, remember, this is the DOCTOR!)

At this point I was shouting. "It's called lactational amenorrhea. It's perfectly normal!"

He kept staring at me, lip trembling.

Finally the "real" doctor came in, and prescribed the damn shot.

I am still livid. I really don't feel that I should have to PAY for the privilege of explaining the facts of life to a so-called professional. I wish that I could attribute it to language problems, but he clearly understood the word "baby", and had my chart right in front of him, so the information was all there. And the bedside manner? Imagine if I hadn't been a neurotic infertile (which he obviously didn't know, because he clearly hadn't read my chart), and didn't know that lactational amenorrhea is, indeed, normal. I probably would have been terrified.

Actually, I am terrified. I'm terrified by the fact that someone could pass medical school without learning even the basic facts about female reproductive biology. Horrifying.

Perfect moments

2008-10-01T17:16:00.000-07:00

Since I started the IVF cycle that ended up producing Eggbert, there have been, interspersed among the normal ups and downs of life, a series of moments so perfect, so sublime, that they take my breath away. The moment that the second line popped up on the pregnancy test. The first time I felt movement. The first time I saw her, wet and confused and so, so beautiful. Her first smile. Her first laugh. A million quiet moments just being with her. Kami reminded me the other day that these moments are worth sharing.

Last Sunday, I had one of those moments. It was the first cool weekend at the end of a long, sweltering summer. While I'm a hot-weather fan in general, the weather has put a damper on our ability to take Eggbert on fun outings, since she tends to get too hot and fussy pretty quickly. So, we were quick to take advantage of a cool but sunny day.

The Han River runs through the city of Seoul, and a long narrow park runs along much of the south bank of the river. It's a typical city park--only 50 meters or so from one side to the other, but it's a precious green space in a sea of concrete. There are bike paths, playgrounds, and lots of nice places to sit and just be. We took Eggbert to the park, and she had her first ride on a swing, and took her first steps on grass. She was both confused and delighted. Watching her toddle along, wearing a cute outfit coupled with the ugliest shoes known to man (more on those another time), holding Mystery's hands and laughing. I realized that I was completely, perfectly happy. There is more to me than being a wife and mommy, but I can't think of anything that could bring me such complete joy than just being with the two people that I love most in the world, healthy and strong, sharing an adventure on a sunny day.

I heart my commenters

2008-09-29T17:51:00.000-07:00

Thanks to all of you, and especially those who weighed in about the bottles. You didn't all agree with each other, and my path is still not entirely clear, but hearing your opinions made me feel a lot better about both options. Sometimes it's very helpful to get an outside perspective, and it's also reassuring to get confirmation that the answer isn't obvious. Sometimes I wonder if I'm just getting myself worked up over nothing.

In response to Jenn's comment about waste management--excellent point. Their waste management is dreadful. They typically burn garbage or just leave it in piles to "rot" (which of course plastic doesn't do, so it eventually ends up in the river). It's pretty horrible. However, since their solution to bottle feeding is buying plastic bottles, my donating a few won't change that equation. There is an active resale market for usable items, though, and extended families share and support each other, so if I give my bottles to someone, they are likely to be used for many years to come by a variety of different women. Surely that isn't any worse from a waste management perspective than going into a Korean landfill or incinerator now.

For the record, Mystery thinks it's a no-brainer and that we should give them to the villagers.

An ethical dilemma

2008-09-27T17:52:00.000-07:00

One "nice" thing about having a husband from a quite poor country is that whenever we have gently used, or even sometimes very heavily used, items that we want to get rid of, we know a place that we can take them where they will enjoy a second lifetime of use and them some. We routinely take all of our used clothing and many other items to his parents' village, and it's like a very subdued party when we break them out (subdued because Mysterious people are not into effusive thanks, so they just accept the items silently, but then glow a little in appreciation).

The weather in Seoul has changed seemingly overnight, from so-hot-I-think-I-might-die to slightly chilly. Eggbert had mostly been going Al Fresco (except for a diaper) for months, but now I finally get to break out the fun fall clothing (yay!). So, one of yesterday's adventures for me was going through the summer stuff (such as it was) to figure out what to retire and what we will still use into the fall. That process involves an additional two steps for us--step one is deciding which of the "retired" clothes we want to keep in case we get lucky and end up with a #2, and which we want to donate, and then deciding which of the clothes should go to which village--Mystery's parents' village is always hot, and his brother's village is always cold, so we choose our donations accordingly.

When searching for an adorable shirt that I knew I'd stashed somewhere, I found myself rummaging through the drawer of abandoned bottles. We bought an array of different bottles when we were in the US last December, including Avent, Dr. Brown's, and Medela, not yet knowing which Eggbert would prefer. It turned out that she didn't care at all, so we used them indiscriminately for a while. Then came the Health Canada decision to prohibit the sale of baby bottles made using BPA (including both Avent and Dr. Brown's, but not Medela). I try not to be alarmist, but I'm quite fond of Canada, and tend to think the people of that fine nation quite reasonable when it comes to issues of safety and health. So, away went the Dr. Brown's and the Avent (I should mention that both companies have responded by creating new lines of BPA-free bottles, but the bottles that we have are the old versions).

So now here we are with a supply of perfectly good, almost-new, but possibly toxic bottles, which creates a dilemma. Some people in Mystery's village use bottles. Everyone breastfeeds from the beginning, but sometimes things go wrong and people are forced to switch to bottles. The parents can often ill-afford bottles and formula. Awareness about industrial toxins there is poor, and bottles there are certainly not deliberately made to be BPA-free, although it is possible that some local brands happen to be BPA-free for other reasons. So, it's hard to see how we would be doing any harm by giving them our Dr. Brown's and Avent bottles. However, it also feels very uncomfortable to give poor uneducated people something to use with their precious children that I don't think is good enough for Eggbert, even though it would save them some money, and is likely to be equivalent to the product that they would otherwise buy. It just FEELS wrong, even though I can't come up with a logical argument against it.

If you're reading this, what would you do?

Small but mighty

2008-09-19T06:37:00.000-07:00

Eggbert turned 10 months old today. I absolutely cannot believe how quickly the time is flying by. This time last year I was waddling around with her kicking me from the inside, and now I have this huge active funny little girl. Amazing!

Well, technically she isn't huge. We haven't weighed her yet this month, but she's in the 8th percentile for height, and last month she was only around the 20th for weight, so she's actually quite small. She seems to be growing steadily at her own pace, though, so no worries.

One advantage of being a short girl is that she is comfortably close to the ground, which is a very good thing because she falls over constantly. She has just learned to walk (my little girl walking? how did that happen so fast?), but she tends not to look out for toys, adult feet, or anything else that she might trip over. This morning she slipped and fell when moving at top speed on some condensation from her sippy cup (which I had put in the refrigerator in a misguided attempt to make it more appealing). She also gets so excited sometimes that she just falls over for no good reason. It's hard to watch, but she's so fast that we can't catch her every time either, so we're learning the hard way that babies are tougher than they look. The amazing part, though, is that no matter how many times she falls, she's always up and moving again 10 seconds later. I have no idea where she gets that toughness, but I am most impressed with it. I never would have figured the Egg for such a brave little soul. Especially since she's terrified of pop-up books.

In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king

2008-09-16T06:09:00.000-07:00

When I first encountered virtual spaces for the infertile, I did so through a common point of entry, the internet message board. And on these forums I learned many things, including a ridiculous set of jargon (AF=Aunt Flo for menstruation, what is this, third grade?), the normal stages of an infertility workup, and that some people can't help turning everything into a contest.

On the mommy boards, it's "my nine-month-old child is walking, discussing philosopy, and training for the Olympics, while building a photography portfolio in her spare time", or "any parent that vaccinates/doesn't vaccinate is a child abuser" and on the infertility boards, discussions often degenerate into either "my infertility is worse than yours" or its equally unappealing cousin, "I'm not as bitter as you are." Both games are not just unpleasant, they can be actively damaging. I've seen infertile women trip over themselves to beat up another infertile for expressing a negative feeling, just to stay in with the fertile "cool kids", but on the other hand, women with children, even infertile women with children, are occasionally flayed for daring to claim that they have problems. It's a jungle out there.

Seeing all this really was an education to me about how little we actually know about how others perceive us. I will forever be grateful for some of the lessons that I've learned through the magic of anonymity--study after study has shown that people are much less likely to lash out at you when they can see your face, which means that the internet boards provide a rare forum in which to learn how people really feel about certain opinions (or innocent statements made using an unfortunate choice of words) once the kid gloves are off.

One of the claims that invariably gets a rise out of the primary infertiles is that secondary infertility is worse, because once you have a child, you know what you're missing. The first time I heard that one, I thought "wow, people really can rationalize anything," yet that idea is put forth so frequently, and with such obvious sincerity, and by such thoughtful and rational people, that it seems unreasonable to dismiss it out of hand. Clearly some people do have the experience of discovering how much they want children only after the birth of their first child. However, that was not my experience.

I have wanted to be a mommy for as long as I can remember. I vividly remember a day when, having recently learned where babies come from, I asked my mother how long I would have to wait before I could make my own baby. My mother, to her credit, did not have a heart attack or rush me to "Chastity Belts R US", but rather calmly explained that most girls start menstruating at between 12 and 14 years of age. I remember feeling utterly dejected, since that seemed a lifetime away. I also remember telling my college roommate (at the ripe old age of 18) that my ideal age for having my first child would be no later than 24. Well, my life didn't work that way, but it wasn't because my goals changed, it was because a happy marriage was part of the picture for me. I wanted a husband AND children. And I didn't find Mr. Mystery Right for the longest time. During the single years, I never really worried about finding Mystery. I knew that he was out there. And so he was. But I did worry about children.

Then Mystery came along, but the children didn't. And I worried. Oh how I worried. Being single was no problem for me, but being infertile felt like a disaster. I have never been able to imagine a life in which I felt good about not having children. At 34, and then 35, and then 36, and then 37, I had a lot of time to contemplate the picture of a childless life, and it always looked awful.

Now that Eggbert is here, I can finally say with conviction that for me, primary infertility was worse, infinitely worse, than secondary infertility (although I exclude infant loss from that statement--that's a whole different kettle of fish). While we were trying to conceive Eggbert, I was consistently miserable. Every time I tried to get a little bit happy about something, one of the million little emotional land minds associated with infertility would blow that joyful thought to smithereens. Now that Eggbert is here, I am happy. I still have problems sometimes, but as long as the Egg is safe, happy, and healthy in my arms, infertility no longer has the power to suck all of the joy out of me.

Having said that, I am beginning to get a glimmer of understanding of what other people say when they say that before you have a child you don't know what you are missing. I don't agree at all that it's better to be childless than to have to settle for a family size that isn't quite what you had in mind, but I do see now how having one child makes you lust for more. Before I started trying to conceive, I planned to have two children. Then I just hoped and prayed to have at least one. Now that I have Eggbert, I sometimes indulge in lengthy fantasies of having three, four, or even more. I can see how it happens that people who didn't plan to do so end up with really big families. Children are addictive.

On that topic, the update on my fertility is that there is no update. Eggbert is almost 10 months old and there are still no signs of my first post-partum period (or PPAF, as the cool kids say). So, while we have been "trying" all along, it hardly counts. I have been assuming that we'll need IVF again, but thought that we'd at least give it a couple of months of the old-fashioned way first, but either way, no period means no go. The obvious solution to this problem is to wean Eggbert, but that is easier said than done. Some kids don't seem to care one way or the other but Eggbert LOVES her some boobie. I have stopped pumping at work, and am just relying on my freezer stash to get me through the day, but she still nurses a lot at night and in the morning. When I get home from work, she throws herself at me and clings to my boob like a drowning man to a life raft. Her face lights up when the boob comes out, and she dives at it ecstatically. All of this does not give me the impression that what she really could use is a nice bottle of formula! I suppose I could just cut her off, and eventually I'll have to if I want to have even a chance of success in trying for #2, but she really doesn't seem to be ready for that yet. So here I am, with plenty of extra time to google things like "postpartum amenorrhea" and "natural conception after IVF". But as of now, I'm still googling with a smile on my face.

Shades of gray

2008-09-04T17:15:00.001-07:00

I think that I was at least 20 before I realized that I was white. Of course, like every American, I had filled out 20 billion forms before then asking for information about my race and ethnicity, but the little box that I checked had never seemed to offer any substantive information about who I was; it was kind of like being asked my shoe size. Like just about every kid, I figured out that I was female early on. And I cared. Being female is a huge part of my experience in this world, and of my identity. I learned that I was American when I was two, and my family moved to England (everybody talked funny). I learned that I was from the northern United States in elementary school, when my (southern) grandparents came to visit and my friends giggled at their accents. Yet even though I grew up in a pretty diverse community, as US goes, my race had never entered my consciousness prior to my early adulthood.

I think that there are at least three reasons for my failure to grasp the fact that race matters in America. First, I was raised by liberal intellectuals, who had accepted as the ideal the concept of "color-blindness". They never talked about race, and disapproved intensely if others did so. I was taught that everybody was equal, and in their formulation, equal meant the same.

Second, my friends of color (some of whom were transracial adoptees or biracial) seemed almost as confused as I was, at least in the early years. Our parents didn't talk about race, and neither did we, so if they had experiences that made them uncomfortable, they weren't given the vocabulary or the forum in which to explore their feelings, so I never knew that these feelings existed.

Third, I was white myself. It's easy to deny the importance of race when you are in the majority, and especially when you are in the empowered majority. I think that I unconsciously thought of whiteness as the default, in a manner analogous to the way that nobody seems to think that they have an accent when speaking their native language. They are just normal. Everybody else has an accent.

But I am white. Boy am I white. So white I'm almost blue. I like the vast majority of things that white people like. I even dance like a white girl (so embarrassing).

Mystery is not white. He's medium brown. He is, of course, also not American. He grew up in a country where most people looked like him. Therefore, he also tends to see his own race as "normal" and not particularly noteworthy. So, there we are, brown and white. Living happily together. Tra la la. People look at us funny sometimes no matter where we are, but I'm really not sure whether that is because we look mismatched or because we're so darned cute (I'm kidding; he is cute, I am quite frumpy). Either way, it doesn't bother us.

So, where does that leave Eggbert? She's either half-and-half, both, or neither one thing nor the other, depending on how you look at it. She is the only one who can really decide. In the mean time, we think that she's both, and that she's perfect. People in both of her countries of origin tell us that she's beautiful, and seem proud to claim her as their own, which of course warms the cockles of my heart, but to be honest, I worry.

I worry that she will be discriminated against. I worry that she'll be exoticized (lots of people think that "mixed" kids are beautiful, and to be honest, I agree, but sometimes it goes a little too far, and becomes kind of disturbing.) Worst of all, I worry that these things will happen, and I won't see it, won't "get" it, won't know how to help, or even when to try, because her experiences will be so vastly different from mine.

It would be nice to say that if she does experience hardship when we move back to the US, at least she has Mystery. As a brown man living in a non-brown country, he should not only understand her experiences but provide her with a strong role model for how to handle the challenges of being different, right? Well, perhaps, but I think that it's quite a different thing being both foreign and a racial minority than being a racial minority in your own country (and biracial kids are in the minority in pretty much any country). As I said, Mystery grew up in a place where everybody looked like him, so even though he's in a minority in the US (or Korea), he developed a strong and secure sense of self before he ever set foot in a country where discrimination was even a consideration.

Living in Korea has really brought home the lesson that race does matter, as much as you might prefer that it didn't. In Korea, as anywhere, when we're together, Mystery and I stand out like a pair of sore and mismatched thumbs. However, when we're alone, people react quite differently to him than to me. I get a lot more of both friendly curiosity and overt hostility, whereas he is more likely to be completely ignored (in a way that implies that he's invisible, not that he fits in). I have been physically assaulted on the street twice since I've been here (both times by people who were obviously mentally ill) while other people just scurried by and pretended it wasn't happening. Luckily, in both cases, I was twice the size and half the age of my assailant, so I managed to chase him off pretty easily, but it was still jarring. I have also been approached by the creepiest of men, spewing forth the rudest propositions that you can imagine, in ways that can't possibly have been designed to do anything but basically accuse me of being a prostitute. Given that I look about as sexually enticing as Oscar the Grouch on most days, there is absolutely nothing that should make these people pick me out of a crowd other than my race. On the other hand, I also have experienced acts of unusual kindness and generosity from complete strangers. Mystery gets none of the above.

In Korea, racial discrimination is not only common and overt, it's expected. I once got a greeting card from a former intern that said only "you're the nicest white person that I've ever met." I think that was supposed to be a compliment. Another former intern told me that she had a dim view of "foreigners" because of an unpleasant encounter that she had with an Englishman, but that when she met me, she realized that not all "white" people are bad. Another day, I was in a coffee shop and picked up a local student newspaper written in English (a huge score!). In the paper there was an article about students that volunteered in a local orphanage. They interviewed one of the students, and quoted her as saying that one of the babies was going to be adopted by a foreign couple, and that she cried and felt so sad that this poor child was going to be raised by foreign people that don't look like him. Now I am not criticizing this student. I think that there's a lot to grieve about any time a child loses their birth family and country, but I do think that it's noteworthy that she thought that being raised by parents of a different race was the main problem with this picture.

Knowing that people think of me more as a representative of an entire race affects me. It makes me think twice every time I step outside. Do I look too sloppy (Koreans are very neat; the answer to this question is always yes)? Do I smile too much? Too little? Should I push and shove in crowds like the Koreans do, or will it seem rude? Did that guy just bump into me a little harder than necessary on purpose?

And do I care? Is it actually my responsibility to be a "credit to my race"?

In the land of Mystery, it is similar. When living there, I was frequently asked if I was capable of doing things like eating certain foods, as if my digestive system might be fundamentally different from that of local people, and was sometimes told that I would like my food a certain way, because "that is what white people like". I once had a lengthy argument with someone over whether it was possible that I liked sugar in my coffee (I do), because he had seen other white people that didn't like sugar in their coffee, and therefore concluded that we all must have the same preference. It is also utterly ordinary there to refer to someone as "this white person" in front of them, even when their race has no relevance to the discussion (e.g., "this white person would like to buy some soap" from one shopkeeper to another), as if afraid that someone might fail to notice that, yes, this person is white. White women are also the victims of fairly relentless sexual harassment. I have asked Mysterious men why they react to white women in that way, and am invariably told that it's because they see white women in pornographic films. This information is delivered in a tone that makes it clear that the speaker thinks that this is a reasonable explanation.

In Korea, both laws and customs distinguish among races. Korean-Americans, even those born overseas who don't speak Korean and have never been here, are described simply as Korean, whereas Korean-born people of other races, including those that have lived their whole lives here and speak better Korean than English, are considered foreign. You don't believe me? Try this on for size. Male Korean citizens are required to do two years of military service. Ethnic Koreans holding dual citizenship must fulfill their duty or renounce their Korean citizenship. However, the requirement is optional for Korean citizens with one ethnic Korean parent and one Asian parent of a different nationality. Mixed-race Koreans with a non-Asian parent, meanwhile, are not accepted into the military. In Korea, ethnicity is virtually synonymous with citizenship. The notion of granting citizenship to people born here or foreigners that marry Koreans is as alien to them as the idea that ethnicity defines citizenship is to me.

While you would think that the longer that I was here, the more I'd feel like I fit in, but in fact, it has been the opposite. The longer I've been here, the fonder I've grown of the place, but the less I've felt like I fit in. When I walk down the street, or go to work, or pop into a shop, or take Eggbert for a walk, I feel blindingly, conspicuously white. Every minute. I don't mind the feeling. It just is what it is. It's interesting, albeit often uncomfortable. But I wonder if I could be so sanguine about it if I hadn't had the experience of growing up in a place where I was in the majority. And I wonder how I would feel about it if I couldn't leave and go back to a place where I wouldn't stand out. I wonder if that's what it feels like to be a minority in your own community in the USA. I guess that's something that I can never really know.

Last December, on Eggbert's first trip to the US, we had a layover in the San Francisco Airport. Eggbert was still a tiny thing, only five weeks old, and a number of people came up to ask about her. I was still basking in the glow of new mommyhood, so I was pleased to chat with anyone who was interested. At one point, a woman approached me, complimented Eggbert, and then started going on at great length about how much she wanted to adopt (after offering the information that her kids were all older, and that she was too old to have more). I didn't really know what to make of this, so I wished her luck and moved along. It was several hours before the penny dropped and I realized that she had been assuming that Eggbert was adopted.

I don't really know where I'm going with this post. I'm hardly the first mother to worry sometimes about the fact that we can't protect our precious children from the big bad world, and I'm also not the only person to gain insight into their own culture and identity by living abroad. I guess that the real bottom line is that once again, I am realizing how complicated this world is, what an incredible responsibility I have to Eggbert to try to help her grow up with her self-esteem intact in a world in which some people may value or respect her less based simply on her appearance, and how utterly ill-prepared I am for the task.

New Month's Resolution

2008-09-02T16:56:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, I popped over to Rachel's blogs to see what was going on in her fascinating life, and found to my enormous surprise and pleasure that she had given me a "kick-ass blogger" award. I would have thought that being such an irregular poster would have ruled me out of consideration for such an honor (really does it get better than "kick-ass"?), so I am rather beside myself.

One of the things that I like about Rachel's blogs (and indeed most of my favorite blogs) is that she doesn't just tell you what she thinks about a select range of topics, she also offers you a little piece of herself with every post: sometimes it's photos, sometimes it's personal stories, sometimes it's stories about her kids; it's always a treat. Thinking about these personal touches, I realize that I've been rather stingy in that regard, mainly because I try not to offer personally identifying information. When I first started this blog, anonymity was an imperative: I had just been relocated to a new country for work, and was on a short (renewable) contract, so having my boss find out that I was trying to get pregnant could have been a disaster. Even though my boss (or coworkers) were unlikely to be reading infertility blogs in English, it didn't seem worth the risk. It still doesn't. I also try to protect Mystery's personal information to the extent possible, because it just isn't mine to share. He wouldn't mind, but I think that if he really wanted to be the subject of a blog, he'd write one himself. Then there's Eggbert. At this point, she can't give me her permission to write about her in a public forum. I do so anyway, but I am careful not to reveal enough of the whole package to make her vulnerable to e.g., identity theft. Finally, I have a rather unusual biography that would make us pretty easy for a determined stalker to identify if I connected the dots for you. The up side of anonymity is that it allows me to be unflinchingly honest. Everything that I tell you here is true (other than the names). The down side is that I sometimes feel unable to share as much of the real me as I would like.

Having said that, I'm going to try to be a little more open. While I am reluctant to post tasty treats like photos or our social security numbers, I am going to try to stop playing it safe by avoiding controversial topics, as has been my policy to date. I will also start including a bit more reflection on my life in general outside of infertility and motherhood.

So, to start off this new leaf, my next post (which will be posted soon, I promise!) will be on a humdinger of a topic. I hope that it makes me more friends than enemies.

But before I run off to write that one, I first get to share the joy. It is so hard to pick just five people that kick ass, but here goes:

Thalia has always been one of my favorite bloggers. She is a wonderful and insightful writer, as well as being astonishingly supportive to her fellow bloggers. Nonetheless, she doesn't hesitate to educate her readers when they need a little kick in the, well, ass. I always enjoy her posts, and usually learn something.

Jenn is one of my oldest on-line friends (i don't mean that she's old, I mean that we're old friends.) She's kind, wise, and posts wonderful recipes from time to time, which always scores bonus points from me. She doesn't post much, but when she does, she is full of home-grown wisdom, and always cracks me up.

Kymberli needs a blogging award like she needs a hole in her head. She is already smart, hilarious, and so chock full of kindness that it could make you weep if you weren't already laughing so hard because she's so darn funny. She's an infertile mother of four plus one, a gestational surrogate, and if that wasn't enough, she's also an 8th grade teacher. This woman kicks more ass before breakfast than most people do all month. If you're not already a fan, go check her out. If you already are a fan, head on over anyway and tell her how much you appreciate her.

Miss Chris has a couple of blogs, including an infertility blog and a blog that describes her adventures as an American expat living in France (recently returned from Mexico). It is the latter blog that has me completely hooked. She's an amazing photographer and keeps me mesmerized with her gorgeous pics of her family, Mexico, and now France. If you haven't already, check it out.

Kami is a tough cookie. She has been through infertility and infant loss, and is now mother to the beautiful Little Butterfly through the miracle of egg donation. LB is only a few months old, yet Kami manages to write frequent, thoughtful, breathtakingly candid posts every few days. She has taught me a lot about what it means to be strong, and it's such a joy to see her come out the other side.

The minimalist mom's guide to baby shopping

2008-08-18T06:33:00.001-07:00

Life doesn't always go the way that we plan. On our third date, Mystery asked me how many children I wanted, and I said "I want to have one, and then maybe one more, what about you?" He told me that he had it all figured out. He wanted to have two really close together, so they could be best friends, and then wait a long time, until he missed having a baby, and then have one more. I laughed and pointed out that if he was serious about that plan, then he had better look for another woman, since at my age (I had just turned 31), I'd be too old for that third baby by the time we got around to it.

There are several things that are noteworthy about that anecdote. First is that we knew very early on in our romantic relationship that we were going to be together, and that we wanted children to be a part of our future. Second is the fact that I was undoubtedly the worst third date ever. Pointing out your aging ovaries to your new boyfriend is always bad form, but when that boyfriend is nine years younger than you (yes, I was a cradle robber, but I swear, he was a very mature 22), it could almost be seen as an act of willful self-sabotage. Nonetheless, Mystery stuck around, and has put up with me ever since. Mystery is a good egg.

After a couple of years, we decided to move back to the US and to get married there. Then the USCIS (formerly known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS) got to have its fun with us. It took one year and about $4000 to get everything sorted out with his visa and flights, and about another $1500 to get his green card once we were married. I was in graduate school at the time, and therefore a bit financially challenged, but we managed, and were happy.

Then infertility struck. We were luckier than some, in that our insurance (which came with my post-graduate job) covered 50% of diagnosis of infertility, and 50% of some treatments, but we still spent several thousand dollars on tests and treatments. Unfortunately, our insurance specifically excluded IVF, so at the end of it all, we were still childless, sadder and poorer.

Things started to turn around when we moved to Korea. Rather than facing a $15,000 bill for an IVF cycle that had only about a 35% chance of resulting in a viable pregnancy at my age, we were looking at $3000/cycle. Not trivial, in fact rather painful, but given that it would likely take 2-3 rounds to work, manageable. So we went for it. And it worked.

And $10,000 later (with all of the fees for prenatal care, the fun fun trip to Singapore for amnio, and then the copay for the delivery), there was Eggbert.

She was worth every penny and more. However, that didn't change the fact that we had a lot less in the bank than we might have liked, especially given that we have been a one-income family since arriving in Korea (Mystery can't legally work here).

I had long ago abandoned as irrelevant any dreams that I had about decorating a nursery or shopping for baby clothes, or what have you. Infertility had made it clear that such things are just the wrapping on the present. Throughout the early stages of pregnancy, I didn't even think about shopping for baby things. It was so hard to believe that after everything, I could end up with a take-home baby. I contented myself with enjoying the journey as much as I could. However, eventually it became clear that some preparations would need to be made. At that point I realized that I had two problems:

1) a tiny one-bedroom apartment in a very expensive city

2) all of the baby items that I had been taught were indispensable cost $1 million each, or weren't available in Korea at all

Problem number 1 could have been solved by moving to another neighborhood. However, we love our neighborhood, and it's so central and convenient that we can walk everywhere, including the grocery, hospital, and my work. Moving would not only result in higher rent (assuming that we moved to get a larger apartment), but would also probably mean that we needed to buy a car. And then drive that car. In Seoul. Which would solve all of our problems by making me die of fear.

So we decided to stay put and just manage, which meant that we didn't have to decorate a nursery, because we weren't going to have a nursery.

That meant that we had to fit all of the baby's things (purchased for the low low price of only $1 million each) into our tiny apartment. That process has given me a real education on the difference between need and want. It turns out that while there are a bewildering variety of almost-irresistible baby items for sale, you really don't NEED much at all to take care of a baby. In fact, I think that the average first-world family spends enough on completely unnecessary baby products in the first two years to fund at least one round of IVF at US prices.

Here are the things that I actually needed in Eggbert's first nine months:

-a car seat (we don't have a car, but do take taxis from time to time)
-about six outfits of each size (plus extra onesies when she was a newborn)
-swaddling blankets (when she was a newborn) and a few other blankets
-a breast pump and bottles (only necessary because I had to go back to work)
-baby wipes
-diapers (well, I suppose that I could have gone diaper free, and substituted some additional outfits instead, to make up for the greater frequency of laundrering)
-a baby carrier (I use a baby bjorn)
-a blender (we make our own baby food)
-a small spoon
-some towels and rags
-baby nail clippers (a nail file also worked when she was a newborn, but now she's far too impatient)
-baby tylenol (I felt like we needed this although we actually never used it)
-baby soap/shampoo

I think that's it. We do HAVE more stuff, some of which we use, but I think we could have managed without any of it if we had to. For example, we have a crib, but since we cosleep, we just use it for naps, and as a safe place to put her when we need to do something without her underfoot. We also have a stroller, which I LOVE, but don't strictly speaking need (although I do think it would be hard to manage with no stroller and no car-my back is only so strong). We have approximately a billion toys, all of which were given to her, but honestly, she's as happy playing with an empty plastic bottle or my (cheap waterproof) watch as she is with the fanciest toy. We also have some lovely books, which I'd hate to do without.

And about a zillion adorable outfits that she outgrew before she ever wore, all gifts.

When I was thinking about Eggbert's material possessions, it occurred to me that the most noteworthy things were those that didn't make the list. For example, Eggbert doesn't have a high chair, or a bumbo chair, or any other kind of chair. She did have a baby tub, but she mostly bathed in the sink as a newborn, and now in the shower (Mystery is very clever in developing age-appropriate bathing techniques). She doesn't have a diaper genie (just a normal garbage pail with a lid), or an exersaucer, or a pack-n-play. And it's fine.

It will be interesting to see what happens when we move back to the US (probably in about another year). Will I go crazy buying her things just because I can, or will I be able to stick to just getting things that actually make a difference in her quality of life (or ours)? I don't even know what to hope for. On the one hand, I must admit that I am dying to get a room ready for her (assuming that I ever get her out of my bed!) On the other hand, I kind of like having a minimal amount of stuff. It works for us.

Another interesting moment on the subway

2008-08-17T06:33:00.001-07:00

The Korean obsession with appearances is a frequent discussion in mixed (Korean and foreign) groups here. Aesthetics are considered very important in every arena of human activity, from the obvious (art, design, architecture) to the astonishing (beautifully gift-wrapped juice boxes), but nowhere is the focus more intense than on personal beauty. South Korea has one of the highest rates of plastic surgery in the world. I've seen at least three people with the bandages indicative of a recent nose job in the last month, and apparently eye surgery (to add a fold and make the eyes look rounder) is even more common. People of all ages are generally neat and well-dressed any time that they appear in public; I look quite the slob by comparison.

I mostly don't bat an eye anymore when I get into a mirrored elevator (it's very common for all four walls to be mirrors) and see everybody taking opportunity to shamelessly preen during the 30-second journey. In fact, it's quite liberating to know that nobody will look down on me for checking myself out (although rather less pleasant to realize how badly I will fare if I ever have a run-in with the Seoul fashion police).

I thought I was used to all of this, but today I saw something today that stopped me in my tracks. In a subway station, there was a vendor selling undergarments--mostly bras, but also some other items--all lacy, but also sturdy and serviceable, probably targeting women in their 50's. Bras here seem to be padded about 90% of the time, so everything was holding its shape quite well, but there was one shape that looked a little off. Upon closer inspection, I realized that I wasn't actually looking at a bra at all. It was a pair of heavily reinforced biking-short-like underwear, complete with two full round pads right where the arse should be: padded control-top underwear for women that find themselves having a crisis of gluteal inadequacy on the subway.

Now I've seen everything.

To pee or not to pee

2008-07-25T06:55:00.000-07:00

I realized today that I haven't written anything about life in Korea for a very long time. Being a mom gets a lot more of my attention these days than being an expat. Nonetheless, I continue to marvel at the ways that living overseas can make you think about things that would ordinarily never cross your mind.

I give you exhibit A. I have been living in Korea for almost two years now, and I have never heard a Korean woman pee. This is not a result of failure to frequent public bathrooms. I drink a lot of water while I work, so at least twice a day, I visit the nearest bathroom, where I get the choice of sitting on an western-style porcelain throne or squatting over an Asian-style porcelain hole. (My choice depends on my mood.) This bathroom is shared by women from a number of different offices in the building, so there is generally at least one other person in there. When I see them go in ahead of me, they go into the stall, close the door, and then... nothing. When I finish peeing, they're still in there, and nothing has happened. Alternatively, if a door is closed when I go in, I sometimes hear a flush and someone leaving. However, I've never, ever, heard anyone actually make the telltale sounds associated with pee hitting porcelain.

So what are they doing in there? And how? And why?

I got a clue a few days ago, when for the first time, I was in a different public bathroom (now I'm sounding creepy--I don't actually seek out opportunities to pee in public, I swear) and saw a button on the wall enigmatically labeled "etiquette bell". I pushed the button, out came the sound of a toilet flushing. As I doubt that most people find the sound of a flushing toilet intrinsically pleasant, I am forced to conclude that the purpose of this device is to cover up other sounds. Is it possible that this entire nation is so shy of bladder that they have to make flushing sounds to be able to "perform"? If so, what is it that they want other people to think that they are actually doing in there? I have always thought of peeing as the LEAST offensive thing that one might be doing in a bathroom stall.

I had honestly never previously considered the possibility that an adult woman might go that far out of her way to avoid having someone hear her pee. The sound of pee is just water on water. It is what it is, and everybody does it, after all. I admit that I don't relish the thought of listening to people performing other bodily functions (something that Mystery assures me is a constant assault to the senses in men's bathrooms). But peeing?

So now I have become self-conscious as well. I don't know how to pee without making a sound (how do they do it?), and I certainly don't want to become known as "that disgusting foreigner who makes the peeing sounds", so these days, I make sure that I pee alone.

Limbo

2008-07-25T06:40:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of reasons that I haven't been posting lately. I've been incredibly busy. It's so hot and steamy in Seoul that every time I try to gather my thoughts, my brain melts. Eggbert the 8-month-old big girl takes even more of my time than Eggbert the tiny baby did. But really, I think I've been struggling because the thing that I most want to blog about is giving me a blog identity crisis.

This started life as an infertility blog. I was desperate for a baby. Yes desperate. I admit it. That word has all kinds of negative connotations, but it is also the right word. Those were dark days, and putting my thoughts and feelings down in black and white helped. Getting feedback from so many kind readers helped even more. I really don't know how I would have managed without all of the support.

Now, my life is very different. I'm happy, and I'm a mom. Having Eggbert was by far the best thing that has ever happened to me. I thank my lucky stars every day. Every minute of my life isn't perfect, but every minute is better because she's here. While so many people experience post-partum depression, I feel like I've been in a place more like post-partum euphoria. Which makes it hard to blog. The thought of infertiles who are trying to conceive their first child coming here and reading about how great having a baby is makes me feel physically ill. They KNOW how great having a baby is. That's why infertility sucks so much. So what to do? Lots of people decide to make a fresh start at this point, either by retiring, or by starting a new mommy blog. That seems like a great option, except for one thing. I want another child, and somehow I doubt that infertility is done with me yet.

So, for now I'll stay here, and try to make the infertile mommy thing work somehow. If my brain doesn't melt first.

One step forward, two steps down

2008-06-24T01:55:00.000-07:00

In case you've been wondering about the long silence, I've been on blogging hiatus since I'm currently in the Land of Mystery visiting the in-laws. We've been here for three weeks now, and are for the most part having a lovely time. Eggbert has proven herself to be a wonderful traveler. I'm not sure that it says anything good about our lifestyle that her first tooth came in at 35,000 ft on the flight here, but it definitely speaks well of her that she remained her normal cheerful self throughout.

We have run into one little bug in the system. Here in the Land of Mystery, there aren't cribs. All babies cosleep. It's a good system, mostly, or at least it was for a while. However, we have found that beds in hotel rooms are not as readily baby-proofed as our own bed at home.

A few days ago, Eggbert learned how to crawl. She promptly celebrated by waking up at 2:40 am and crawling off of the bed. She is fine. Not a scratch. However, I almost died. I normally pride myself on my cool head in a crisis, but Mystery assures me that I was completely hysterical. I just remember her screaming, then me screaming. Then she was OK, and my heart started again. It was horrible.

I may never sleep again.

More on milk

2008-05-28T06:30:00.001-07:00

The other day, I read Julie's post about breastfeeding #2. I have been thinking a lot about breastfeeding lately (yes, this is yet another boob post), partly because I'm supposed to be stopping soon. The plan was to exclusively breastfeed for six months (check), start introducing solids (check), and then start weaning. This all sounded logical and good when I made the plan. I want to try for another baby. I suck at getting pregnant, so we must assume that it'll take a while, and that IVF might be involved. I'm 39 years old. Clearly time's a-wasting here. Given this scenario, lactational amenorrhea is rather inconvenient, so the sooner we can bring it to an end, the better.

The only problem? I like breastfeeding. It works for me. It is the one step of reproduction that my body seems to be able to handle on its own. I couldn't get pregnant naturally even on the most romantic of vacations, while relaxed, thinking of "just adopting", and doing acupuncture. I failed Clomid 101, 102, and 103. My infertility ate IUI's for lunch. Even my first round of IVF failed. Pregnancy was great, but I had scare after scare, and could never quite relax and enjoy watching my body do its thing. This breastfeeding thing has been different, though. My milk actually came in, on its own, without any heroic measures on anyone's part. Eggbert had an awesome latch. Yes, there was a cracked nipple here and a sleepless night there, but on the whole, it worked. It works! So remind me why I'm supposed to stop doing the one thing that I'm good at to go back to doing the thing that I suck at again?

Julie's post, though, made me wonder about something else. Is it really true that total strangers actually accost bottle-feeding moms to criticize them? I had never imagined that even the most militant breastfeeding advocates could be so insensitive, judgmental, and just plain rude. I guess I've been out of the US for so long, but I had no idea that the mommy wars had gotten that out of hand.

I was also mildly taken aback, at first, when I read a comment that said, in part "That story made me all weirdly booby-achy and wanting to nurse other people's babies. Which is by far the creepiest instinct I've ever felt." For a second, I thought "wow, that IS creepy". Then my mind flashed back to a few days ago, when I was walking home from work and stopped to look at a kitten. I was just thinking "damn that's cute", when I felt a gush of milk came out.

All of a sudden wanting to nurse other people's babies doesn't sound so embarrassing after all.

Speaking of sucking

2008-05-27T04:05:00.000-07:00

People, you are not going to believe this. If infertility doesn't suck enough, how about having the clinic LOSE your last best embryo? I don't mean lose as in it dies. I mean lose as in they can't freakin' find it!

It's a true story folks. Please go give Kate a big hug.

Worst blogger ever

2008-05-22T06:00:00.000-07:00

Wow. I suck.

Over a month without a post. It's not that I don't have things to say. I'm overflowing with things to say. They're coming out my ears. I recite them to myself as I walk down the street. I think about them so loudly that I swear people in Brazil must be able to hear me. But the more thoughts build up, the less able I am to write them down. I seem to be caught in a trap, having too little time to post something long, and feeling like the longer it is between posts, the more I should say. So, I wait for that mythical free hour in which I can pour out my soul, and it never comes around.

This working mommy gig is hard. Wonderful, but hard.

I'm very lucky. I like my job, and I LOVE being a mom. I am not coping with post-partum depression or lingering medical issues, and my daughter is healthy and delightful. Heck, I even hit my pre-IVF weight a few weeks ago while still maintaining a healthy chocolate intake. You can't ask for more than that.

Well, actually, yes you can. I would like about five extra hours in each day. Four for sleeping, and one for anything other than working and playing with the Egg (like cutting my toenails, combing my hair, emailing my sister, or blogging). As things are, I get up, take care of the Egg, go to work, come home, take care of the Egg, go to bed. Lather rinse repeat. Mystery is a rock star when I'm at work, and does pretty much all of the housework AND cooks dinner so I can focus on spending time with the baby when I'm home, but still, it boggles the mind how busy I feel.

Seriously, working moms that also blog, how do you do it?

I realize that there are other options, like putting Eggbert in a playpen (oh, I'm sorry, play yard) for an hour, even though she whines, or foisting her off on her daddy more often, but I worked so hard to have this baby that I want to spend every moment with her that I can. It's the highlight of my day.

So here I am. Happy. Busy. Haven't had a decent night's sleep in months (another story for another day, I think). Somehow managing to steal a minute to READ blogs from time to time, but not managing to write much.

I guess that's OK. It's going to have to be.

I do want to say this one thing, though. I have composed this lengthy post in my head that will probably never make it to light reflecting on the meaning of infertility after the fact. Here is the essence of it: infertility is not a psychiatric problem. It is so often treated as such--as if the infertile is creating her own misery by not accepting her fate or coping with it more gracefully. The fact is that infertility is upsetting, stress-inducing, depressing, and potentially life-altering. It often CAUSES emotional problems. However it is not an emotional problem itself. The best cure isn't an attitude adjustment, it's a treatment for the condition itself.

For me, it was simple. I was infertile. I was miserable. I did IVF. I got pregnant. I had a baby. I felt much, much better.

Infertility? Not a fan

2008-04-13T11:10:00.000-07:00

One of the life lessons that I've always struggled with is that life isn't fair. Since I was a young (and rather whiny) child, I've been unable to keep myself from whinging "but it SHOULD be!" I drove my parents crazy by starting to cry whenever I saw e.g., a panhandler, because I thought that they should somehow save the day. I still struggle with the idea that I should somehow accept that sometimes life sucks, and that, well, that's life. Because it SHOULDN'T suck. Right?

It wasn't until I discovered my own infertility that I realized that not only is life not fair, but that many people, far from having compassion for people in pain, actually despise them. Having a rather Pollyanna-ish view of humanity (no, really, I do!)I tell myself that this is just a protective mechanism. To look at someone in pain and to attempt to truly appreciate what they are going through is to open yourself up to a world of hurt. It's easier to just slam your heart shut, and think of a thousand reasons that it's somehow the person's own fault (and therefore, that it could never happen to you).

When you're infertile, you really can't win. If you're under 35, then you obviously bought it on yourself by not having the good sense to "just relax", you uptight bitch. Or just maybe you secretly hate children. Or maybe you don't want it badly enough (just ask J-Lo!) If you're over 35, then you were selfish and waited too long, squandering your fertility while you held out for Mr. Right, or put your career first, or did something else that was ridiculously self-indulgent (because after all, wanting your child to have a loving father and a roof over his or her head is pretty unreasonable). If you are diagnosed with an actual medical problem, then obviously you must have contracted it during your former (or current) career as a filthy slut.

If you have somehow brought this bad karma on yourself, then the first thing that you must do is accept your fate. Obviously you should "just adopt". There are so many children out there that need a home. No wait, if you do that, then you are kidnapping a child from his birth parents (if it's a domestic adoption), and from her home and culture (if it's an international adoption), causing the child a "primal wound" that will never heal. How selfish can you be?

Obviously you should seek treatment. Insurance doesn't cover it? Well why should I pay for your problems? Look, do you want a child or not? If you're not willing to remortgage your house, sell your car, and live in a cardboard box, then do you really expect me to feel sorry for you? Really, if you can't afford to spend $50,000 on treatments, how do you expect to support a child?

What? You're doing IVF? But it's so unnatural. Who are you to "play god" like that? Are you really so in love with your own genes that you can't open up your home to one of the millions of children who are just begging to be adopted? You must be really "desperate" to spend tens of thousands of dollars to try to have your own child. Why can't you just give that money to help poor women raise THEIR children?

Considering donor gametes? Listen, buster, buying children is wrong. It is unconscionable to deprive a child of her connection with her genetic parents. You sick bastard.

NOT considering donor gametes? What is the matter with you? Are you so narcissistic that you can't love someone that doesn't look like you?

Obviously it just wasn't meant to be. You should live child free. Never mind that this means that the very thought breaks your heart. Not everyone is meant to be a parent.

Choosing child-free living? See, I KNEW you were too selfish to be a parent. You deserve your infertility.

Conceive without intervention after many years of trying? See, I TOLD you you were just being a drama queen.

Conceive with help? Boy are you lucky. Don't you dare even think about whining if you have trouble conceiving a second. Don't you know that thousands of women would give anything to be in your position?

If you've read this far, then you're probably wondering where on earth this all came from. Aren't I supposed to be off on a cloud somewhere relishing every moment with my beautiful healthy girl? Well, for the most part I am. I am happier now than I have ever been in my whole life. Eggbert is delicious (and currently asleep, hooray!)I love being a mama. My dream has come true. However, having come out the other side doesn't seem to have allowed me to just shake off all of the bad feelings. Not so much for me (although I'm starting to really struggle with the question of whether and how to try for #2, but that's another topic for another day), but for all of the other couples still dealing with primary infertility. I know that chances are that medical science will never get to the point at which no couple has to deal with this problem. To some extent I can accept that (although I hate it). Life isn't fair and all. However, every time I read yet another hateful article in which infertile couples are pilloried for whatever they've done to try to deal with their situation, the old bitterness comes rushing back. We as a society may not be able to get rid of infertility, but why on earth can't we at least lose the attitude?

(I thought about posting links to articles or comments that put forth every single ignorant opinion depicted above, but even looking at that stuff makes me feel horrible, so I don't want to inflict it on anyone else.)

On a sweeter note:

Do you remember my friend H, who lost her twins at 19/20 weeks last year, and had been on bed rest since week 9 of her next pregnancy (also with twins)? She made it to 34 weeks, and delivered two beautiful healthy girls! They are now home. Sleepless and loving it.

Night and day

2008-03-16T18:33:00.000-07:00

I recently arrived back in Seoul after a ten-day trip (during which my internet access was limited--hence the lack of new posts) overseas. It was a great trip, but it's good to be home.

Seoul is more and more feeling like home, which is kind of ironic, since it has become clearer and clearer lately that we won't be staying too much longer. I was originally hired with a verbal agreement that I would be employed for three years, and a one-year contract. The contract is written so I have the option to quit whenever I want, though, which is nice. We are now a year and a half into our stay, and while there has been talk about making my position permanent, it has become clear that this would not be the best decision for my family. While I have grown quite fond of living here, Mystery is having a very hard time. He hasn't made any friends outside of our "couple" friends, who are really my friends and their mates, doesn't speak the language, so he feels really socially isolated. He also really misses living in the US. This is also not a great place to send a foreign kid to school. She would never be accepted socially in a public school, and I really don't want to send her to international school (too expensive and isolating). Given that none of these things are likely to change, we are starting to talk about our exit strategy.

Realizing that my time here is limited has made me see the city with new eyes. I recently realized that while Korea is not a particularly nice place to be pregnant (or to shop for baby things), it is a wonderful place to be the mother of a young baby. Not only did I get a government-mandated three-month paid maternity leave even though I am foreign and a newcomer, but people have bent over backward to make having a baby a pleasant experience. I don't mean that my coworkers had a nice shower for me. They did, but that's something that would happen anywhere. What wouldn't happen just anywhere is the way that people go CRAZY for Eggbert whenever I take her out in public. It isn't just the grandmother types and little girls that you sort of expect to pay attention to babies. Young men, old men, teenagers, other kids, as well as mothers and grandmothers stop to stare and admire her. I can't go anywhere without a chorus of "cute", "beautiful", "look, a BABY!" following me. While I don't normally like being the center of attention, when it's directed at my beloved baby, I bask in it. It makes me feel like she is embraced by the community, and is safe and loved. People are also MUCH more considerate of her needs than they ever were when she was still in utero. I get jostled a lot less, and routinely get offered seats on the subway (ironic, because she's really light, so standing isn't a problem now, but I sure could have used those seats when I was 8.5 months pregnant and had ankles the size of tree trunks). I don't think it's just because she's foreign, although curiosity may be a factor. Babies are just so rare here that people seem to appreciate the fact that they are truly special and miraculous creatures.

In sharp contrast, I ran into an American acquaintance the other day (a youngish man) who hadn't yet met Eggbert. She was in the baby bjorn, so he couldn't look at me without seeing her, yet throughout our entire 15-minute conversation, he never once asked about here, commented on her, or even looked at her, even when a gaggle of Korean kids stopped to look at her and squeal in glee. It was a pretty amazing display of disinterest. I think that if I hadn't been so amused, I might have been offended.

All better

2008-02-23T02:10:00.000-08:00

Well, that was fun while it lasted, but the Great Boob Crisis of February seems to be over. Whew! I don't know what it was, but after much massaging, heating, and (unbelievably painful) breastfeeding, the lump is gone, and most of the soreness has dissipated.

The lovely M-B asked how I got my supply up on the left. I'm not really sure what actually worked, but what I did was:

a) ALWAYS fed Eggbert on the left first. Sometimes I just let her finish on the left (she was usually happy that way, which is why I was always suspicious that it was a pumping problem, rather than just a supply problem), and sometimes I switched her in mid-feed.

b) When pumping, if I needed e.g. five oz, I didn't just pump until I had 5 oz (which invariably resulted in 4 from the right and 1 from the left), but rather pumped until I had half from the right (or a little over half, in the beginning), and then stopped pumping on the right and just continued on the left until I got the other half. My left is MUCH slower in production, so pumping for the same time on both sides meant that my right was doing all of the work. If I didn't get enough from the left in a reasonable period of time, I stopped, but then pumped again in a half-hour or so until I had enough.

c) Breast compressions on the left both while feeding and pumping (thank you Hadjare for this suggestion). I was absolutely amazed at the difference that this made while pumping. I often got an extra ounce or ounce and a half after I thought that the left had completely given up.

After a few days of this strategy (which was kind of a PITA, and probably wouldn't have been possible if I was working full-time), the left started producing WAY more. It was kind of amazing, actually.

So, I'm going to stop obsessing about my boobs and move on to something else now. Thanks for listening.

More boob issues

2008-02-21T15:46:00.001-08:00

I had big plans to write a contemplative post about what it means to be infertile with a child, but I'm having a little crisis, so we've interrupted our normal programming for this bulletin:

My boob hurts. I don't mean that it's a little sore. It REALLY hurts. It hurts all of the time, but when Eggbert nurses, it feels like I'm being stabbed. There's also a big hard painful lump near the base of the breast. However, I don't have a fever or redness, so I don't think it's mastitis. I have a doctor's appointment on Wednesday, but that seems like a very long time from now. Any thoughts? Tips? Sympathy?

This is the boob that was underproducing. The funny thing is that after an unhealthy level of attention and cosseting, it had started producing like a champ. Yesterday it yielded 4.5 oz pumping, which was a new record. I do think it was partly just a pumping issue (it still takes a lot longer to pump on that side), but the supply is clearly up too, since the letdown has gotten a lot stronger. Could this pain be related to its new productivity?

The twins--not identical after all

2008-02-07T14:48:00.000-08:00

Someone in my household is suffering from a severe case of nip*ple confusion. It's not Eggbert. She has a very clear philosophy regarding nip*ples, which can be summed up as "Gimme NOW!" Silicone or skin, it doesn't matter. Every nip*ple is a wanted nipple. I feel rather guilty about what an easy time we've had of the whole breast/bottle issue, and give 100% of the credit to Eggbert's voracious appetite. She's small, people, but she eats like a big girl.

I'm not actually sure if I'm the one suffering from confusion, or if my nip*ples themselves are confused. I think everyone would have been 100% happy if I were a stay-at-home mom. However, I have started back to work part-time (remember, the Egg has a stay-at-home dad, so somebody's got to bring home the bacon) two weeks ago, which has given the pump a central role in my daily routine. I've managed not to have to pump at work yet, but that means that I have to pump first thing in the morning, and then again right when I get home from work. Eggbert usually can manage with just one 4 oz bottle during the four-hour period that I'm at the office, but occasionally has two, so we have to have two ready, just in case. Anyway, every morning, when I stagger out of bed, place a milk-drunk Eggbert (who has been feeding off and on for the last hour or so) in her crib (while Eggbert has no interest whatsoever in sleeping in her crib at night, she doesn't mind at all hanging out in there for a little while in the morning), grab a cup of coffee, and sit down to pump.

Did I tell you that I have a new pump? After my initial misadventures with the Med*ela Mini-Electric* (pain, bruised nipples, and very little milk, the trifecta of pumping), my sister got fed up with my whining and got me a Pump in Style** for Christmas. I also followed the recommendations of two brilliant commenters and got a bigger size of breast shield. Clouds parted. Angels sang. Not only did pumping no longer hurt, but it actually resulted in milk. Amazing!

The only snag is that every time I pump, while a fountain of milk gushes forth mightily from my right breast, my left breast refuses to yield anything for a good long time, and then FINALLY relents by producing a slow trickle, that drip drip drips into the bottle, producing a total of about 1-1.5 oz (the record to date is 2.5 oz, but that only happened once) in the time that it takes the right to produce 4-5 oz. I suppose this isn't actually a problem, since between the two, they're producing enough for the Egg, for which I am tremendously grateful, but why on earth the disparity? This may sound like a weird place for vanity, but I've always been pretty happy about my boobs. By all accounts they're a good size and shape, and I have always thought of them as symmetrical. However, while they still look the same, their behavior is so different that I just don't know what to make of it. Is the right actually producing 3-5 times as much as the left? If so, why? I make every effort to put the baby to each breast in turn, and obviously they both get the same amount of pumping, so how can the one be getting so much more stimulation than the other? Also, the baby seems equally happy with both, and feeds for the same amount of time at each, which I wouldn't have expected if the left was under-performing so dramatically. Or alternatively, do they just have very different opinions about the pump? Could it be that my left is very choosy, and prefers to only give up the goods for the baby, while my left is of looser morals, and will give it up for anyone that asks?

Does any of this actually matter? Probably not. As long as the baby is happy and healthy, I hardly see uneven pumping to be an actual problem. However, I do worry a bit that taking more out of the right every day will tend to reinforce any asymmetry in production that already exists, especially when I go back to work full time, and am pumping a lot more. And would that be a problem? I guess not, but it might make me look kind of funny.

Tell me the truth, dear readers (if anyone is still reading, given that I'm so bad about posting these days), am I the only one? Any tips for getting the left one a little more enthusiastic about the pump?

*Why didn't I buy a better pump in the first place? Only the Swing and the Mini-Electric are available in Seoul, and the Swing is the equivalent of $250, which is a lot to pay for a sub-par single pump. The Mini-Electric was about $150, which is still very steep, but more reasonable, given that I had it in mind that I might have to upgrade later in the US.

**I've heard rumors that the Symphony is even better, but I tell you that compared with the Mini-Electric, the Pump in Style is an embarrassment of riches.

Hindsight

2008-01-24T09:28:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, out of the blue, Mystery asked me, "Do you ever think about what would have happened if our first IVF had worked?"

I looked at Eggbert and said, "what do you mean?"

He said, "you know, if you had gotten pregnant the first time, with a different baby."

My immediate reaction, "that would have been terrible!"

It's amazing how one's perspective changes, isn't it?

When bad news starts sounding like good news

2008-01-18T09:00:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, I posted an update on my friend H, who is pregnant with twins again after losing her twin son and daughter to PPROM and preterm labor at 19-20 weeks last spring. When I posted, everything with the current pregnancy was looking good. She was on bed rest as a precaution, but everything was holding steady, with no signs of trouble.

Three weeks ago, that all changed. She went in for a weekly cervix check at 23 weeks and found that she had lost most of her cervical length, and that what was left had started funneling. She is also having regular contractions, so she is once again officially in preterm labor. She was given various meds and sent home to try "complete bed rest" (no showers even).

The good news is that the meds seem to be working. She hasn't lost any more cervical length, and the babies are still growing. She's now at 26 weeks, and her doctor thinks there's a very good chance that she'll make it to 28 weeks (when the chances of survival are much higher).

The bad news is that our standards for good news have dropped dramatically. When last I spoke with H, she said that she and her husband have stopped even worrying about minor disabilities resulting from prematurity. They will just be grateful if they get to take two living babies home. It's hard to argue with that. I just wish that things had gone differently, and that she could be happily decorating a nursery together and making a birth plan, rather than stewing in her own juices (that's four shower-free weeks now) on her left side in bed, praying that her babies survive.

They're little girls, by the way. Is it too much to hope that one day in the not-too-distant future, H and I can sit and watch our healthy children play together?

P.S. In response to the anonymous poster's question, no, this is not the tragedy that I was referring to, but since you asked, I thought I'd post an update. Thanks for thinking about H. She needs all of the positive thoughts that she can get.

The accidental co-sleeper

2008-01-16T01:29:00.000-08:00

I never wanted to be a co-sleeper. In fact I was adamant about Eggbert sleeping in a crib. While I am not against co-sleeping in general, in our case, it seemed inappropriate for several reasons. First and foremost, Mystery and I are flailers. We both toss and turn, and have (accidentally, I swear) each awakened the other with a smack across the head more than once. So, we are particularly poor candidates for co-sleeping. In addition, I have a (perhaps irrational) fear that co-sleeping with an infant will lead to co-sleeping with a 10-year-old. Mystery and I like having a little "us" time in bed, and I don't like the idea of being accompanied by even the delicious Eggbert for years and years. Also, I have a friend who lost a six-week-old baby to SIDS, and while I am not completely convinced that co-sleeping is intrinsically a risk factor (the studies suggesting that it is are seriously flawed), I know I'd never forgive myself if something happened while co-sleeping. Finally, we do plan to keep Eggbert in our room for at least the first year, so having her in the bed too seemed a bit much.

That was then.

My plan was simple. I moved her crib right next to the bed, so that when she woke up in the middle of the night, I could pick her up right away, move to the glider (also conveniently placed nearby), feed her, and then lovingly return her to her crib. Putting her down while sleepy, but not asleep, would teach her to put herself to sleep, and ensure us a lifetime of all-adult bed time. Are the moms out there laughing hysterically at my naiveté yet?

Eggbert's plan was also simple. She would cry anytime I put her in the crib alone. Ever. After I fed her into a nice stupor in the glider, she would respond to my slightest movement toward the crib with howls. After several almost completely sleepless nights, I got the brilliant idea of nursing her in bed, so she'd already be lying down on her back, and I could just gently shift her to the crib without waking her. In response, Eggbert developed an exquisite radar system that allows her to detect breaches of the crib perimeter with uncanny precision, leading her to sleep soundly until my hands lowered her within the border, at which point she started awake and began whimpering.

We went back and forth for the first few nights, with her falling asleep in my arms, or later in the bed, but waking the second I put her in the crib. Then it happened. I fell asleep with her in the bed. We got four hours of delicious sleep, but I was absolutely horrified. I confessed to Mystery (who had adjourned to the guest bed prior to this incident in an attempt to both get some sleep, and give me more room in the bed to nurse Eggbert). He promised to check periodically to make sure that we weren't co-sleeping. And it worked. A few times. By worked, I mean that I fell asleep with the Egg in the bed several more times, and a few times he came in and noticed, and put her in the crib, at which point she howled.

I also won a few battles. Once in a while, she fell asleep and stayed asleep for a few hours in the crib. After a while I thought we were making real progress, when she spent over six hours in the crib each night.

Then we went to the US. In Korea, we can keep our tiny apartment at about 75 degrees F without much effort or expense. However, it would be impossible to raise my parents' house above 70 F without depleting the entire strategic oil reserve. So, the Egg no longer required her uncanny senses to determine that she was alone. The absence of a nearby adult was immediately detectable through a several-degree drop in the local air temperature. No matter how warmly she was dressed, she never slept for more than a couple of hours in the crib that her grandparents had so lovingly provided. I told myself that the (increasingly frequent) co-sleeping was temporary, and that we'd get back on track once we were back in Korea.

Now here we are, and last night she spent four hours in bed with me, and four hours in the crib. Can we call that a tie? I would, except that after a 1:30 am feeding and diaper change, I caught myself putting a sleepy Eggbert back in bed with me after the diaper change. The diaper change had been precipitated by a feeding (you've gotta love that gastro-colic reflex), so I couldn't even pretend that I was putting her in the bed to feed her. It's now official. She has trained me to co-sleep.

Now what to do? We're working on getting her to take naps in her crib (not easy after two weeks of being held 24-7 by a team consisting of both parents, two grandparents, an aunt, and about a million other visitors), but even that is hard, and generally results in very short naps. Does anyone have any tips for how to get the baby back out of the bed into the crib where she belongs?

I should mention that:

A) I never move when sleeping anymore. I wake up aching from head to toe from having spent the whole night (or at least the most recent sleeping bout) in exactly the same position. So, I'm no longer worried about Eggbert's safety, but I'm increasingly worried about my own.

B) Aches aside, I must admit that co-sleeping is the most delicious thing on earth. However, I still don't want to co-sleep with a toddler, and I would like to let Mystery back in the bed on a more consistent basis some time soon!

The lovely M-B asked for photos, so here she is:

What a difference...

2008-01-15T14:58:00.000-08:00

...a year makes

The year 2007 slunk into the room with a decidedly hostile look on its face, only to catch me in the act of kicking 2006 in the ass and shoving it out the door. On December 30th, I had realized that our first IVF cycle seemed to be a big flop, a conclusion confirmed by a negative beta on January 2nd. Mystery and I, recent arrivals in Korea, spent the holidays feeling rather alone and blue. Not the most auspicious start to a new year.

We greeted 2008 in the USA, at my parents’ house, as the parents of a new baby daughter. While we didn’t plan any particular festivities, an impromptu party developed when two of my father’s siblings made an unexpected visit from the east coast (warning us only the night before of their imminent arrival in the morning), and my best friend, her finance, and their two-year-old son dropped by. It was an odd mix of people, but it just worked, and everybody had a fantastic time. We didn’t manage to stay up until anywhere near midnight, but it was still the best New Year’s Eve of my life.

...a month makes

A month ago, Eggbert was approaching her 4th week of life. She was the light of my life, and yet I must admit that charming as she was, she didn’t actually DO very much. Eating and sleeping were pretty much her only activities, and her only signs of recognition of Mystery’s and my presence were the shrieks that she emitted when our service as general comfort-providers wasn’t up to standard. Now, only a short month later, she spends much of her day smiling, flirting with her daddy, and generally delighting us with all of her new skills. She can hold up her head. She can even “stand up” if her upper body is supported. She’s a whole new person, even though she’s still our beloved little girl. It’s just amazing to watch her grow.

...a day makes

The day we returned to Korea after spending the holidays in the US, I put the Egg down in her crib for a little while to attend to something else. After a few minutes, I heard cooing coming from the crib. I went over to investigate, and found Eggbert staring at a toy that I had hung from the bars of the crib a few minutes earlier. At first I wasn’t sure that she was really looking at the toy, rather than just in its general direction, but then she started to bat happily at it, cooing louder when she made it swing. And just like that, my baby showed me that after seven weeks of complete disinterest, she had finally discovered objects. Every day seems to have a new surprise in store for us both.

...a generation makes

Spending time with my parents, my parents’ friends, and my friends’ parents as a new mother was absolutely fascinating. Not only was it moving to introduce my child to her grandparents for the first time, it was also really interesting to hear the comments that were made (many obviously inadvertently) about my parenting. For example, I couldn’t count the number of times I heard various forms of the sentence “it won’t hurt her to cry”. Generally this occurred when the senior citizen in question was holding the baby and the baby started screaming. While I had in most cases already explained that Eggbert is a really predictable child, and pretty much only cries when either 1) she’s hungry, 2) she has a poopy diaper, or 3) she wants to be held. As my visit to the US coincided with her six-week growth spurt, the vast majority of crying episodes involved option 1. So, when I heard her crying, my natural instinct was to take her and feed her. However, the instinct of everyone else in the room seemed to be to discuss her crying, and then to jiggle her ineffectively for several minutes while talking about how crying wouldn’t hurt her. At first, I was bewildered by their apparent callousness, until I realized that when THEY were parents of babies, they were actually told not to “spoil” their newborns by reacting to their cries by promptly meeting their needs. It was pretty amazing to see that even though they realize that parenting styles (and the advice of parenting experts) have changed radically over time, they still reacted instinctively by (implicitly) criticizing me for attempting to feed Eggbert on her own schedule, rather than mine. Well, either that or they just didn’t want to give her up. In a few cases, it took quite a bit of doing for me to get the baby back to feed her. I have similar problems in Korea, where middle-aged and older women routinely stop me on the street to scold me for taking the baby out of the house while she's so small, in an inappropriate fashion (a baby sling), and inadequately bundled up (I would think that four layers is enough, but apparently not here in Seoul). I don't understand everything that they're saying, but the subtitles in my mind read: "WORST MOTHER EVER!!!" However, Eggbert's smiles and giggles, the new layer of chub on her little thighs, and the additional chins that developed over the last few weeks reassure me we're doing just fine, regardless of what the village elders may think.

...a baby makes

Now that I’m a mother, I can no longer do many of the things that I used to take for granted. Most of them I don’t miss. During the first six weeks of Eggbert’s life, we mostly stayed at home. We don’t have a car in Korea, so I hadn’t had to deal with the joys of car travel with an infant. After two weeks of frantic activity in the US, I can now safely say “Wow. What a hassle!” She’s a pretty good traveler, mostly sleeping in the car, but once you get her out at your destination, anything can happen. Shopping trips took twice as long as she invariably realized (and announced to the world) that she was STARVING right after we got her into the car seat, or produced an enormous eye-watering poop the second we reached our destination, forcing me to immediately become very familiar with the nearest bathroom. The real shocker, though, was realizing that while being there for a friend in need has always been a priority for me, having a baby makes even that impossible in some cases. One of my very dearest friends suffered a horrible tragedy a few days after we arrived in the US, and my first instinct was to rush to be by her side. As fortune would have it, I was only a five-hour drive away, rather than half-way around the world, yet I realized that I might as well have been on Mars for all that. Previously I had only considered the way becoming a parent expands your ability to love exponentially, I had never even thought about the possibility that it might also force me to become a bit more selfish, or at least self-centered, as I focus on caring for the one individual who needs me most.

...a family makes

Throughout my first two months of being a mother, I have repeatedly thought about how incredibly hard it must be to parent alone. Spending time with my parents, sister, and extended family while Eggbert is still so small was such a joy, and while there have been some moments when I could strangle Mystery (e.g., when he slept in until 11 am on days that I was up at 5), he’s a fantastic dad. While our road to parenthood wasn’t easy, having arrived makes me realize how incredibly lucky we are not only to have finally reached this moment, but also to be able to share it with all of our closest loved ones.

Happy New Year! I hope that 2008 brings good health and happiness to all of us.

News roundup

2007-12-22T16:52:00.000-08:00

So much to say, so little time. Eggbert had her one-month birthday on Wednesday. I can't believe that I've already been a mama for a month now. It's gone so fast, and yet I can't remember what life was like without her.

She had her one month checkup on Thursday, and all was more or less well. She's still tiny, but is growing well. Her latest stats: 3.4 kg (~7 lb, 7 oz), and 52 cm (~20.5 inches), up from 2.8 kg and 44 cm at birth. That places her around the 10th percentile for weight, and the 25th for length. Her head is above average for her age, so she's a real Egg head. She's also grown a very fetching double chin, which makes me quite proud. The doctor was very pleased with her growth, and congratulated me for exclusively breastfeeding, which was nice. The only less-than-pleasant part of the visit was a hepatitis B vaccination. Eggbert does NOT like having needles shoved into her thigh, as it turns out. She turned purple and screamed for about three hours straight. Not fun.

While we love her with every molecule of our beings, and think that she's just about the most perfect creature on earth, there are no signs yet that she is a rocket scientist. Twice now she's started screaming hysterically because she had a fistful of her own hair and was pulling. It took several seconds (and a lot of resistance on her part) to pry her fingers out of her hair. You'd really think that this lesson would be one that you'd only have to learn once, but apparently not.

Aside from occasional mishaps like the above, though, she's a pretty cheerful girl as long as she gets her way. Unfortunately, her way involves her being on the boob 24 hours/day, which can't always be arranged (I haven't quite managed to master the art of changing her diapers without pulling the nipple out of her mouth, for example). So, she occasionally gets the opportunity to give her lungs (and our ears) a good workout.

Breastfeeding has been a bit of a challenge, but it's going well at this point. I was pretty sore for a while, and it took her a while to figure out how to latch, but now we're both old pros at the feeding thing. We also tested the bottle out a few days ago, just to start easing her into things in anticipation of my return to work, and she took it graciously, although she then slurped it down in one nanosecond, and wailed until I pulled out the boob. Oh well. We'll just have to put more in the bottle next time. The one real fly in the ointment so far is that while feeding her is going well, pumping is not. For some reason, I find pumping really painful. My nipples are sore for hours or even days each time I pump. I've tried setting the pump on the lowest setting, and that helps, but it's still a bit much. I'm thinking I might need to get a different kind of pump (I have the Medela mini-electric). Any thoughts?

One final thought--why is it that while everybody warns you about cluster feeding, nobody says anything about cluster pooping? Just wondering...

A reader asked for an update on my friend H, who is pregnant with twins again shortly after losing her much-wanted twins at 20 weeks in March. She has been on bed rest since 14 weeks, and is now at 23 weeks, and holding steady. There haven't been any signs of trouble, so we're now all cautiously optimistic that she'll make it to her doctor's goal of 30 weeks. Obviously 36 weeks would be even better, but her doctor thinks that they should have an excellent shot at good health if they at least make it to 30. Thanks for asking, dear reader!

Happy holidays!

Three weeks ago

2007-12-10T12:44:00.000-08:00

I can't believe that my little girl is already three weeks old! Time really flies. I had thought that the first three weeks would be hard, and in some ways they were, but they were also absolutely wonderful. We're not getting much sleep in La Casa Lower, but we're having more fun than I ever could have imagined.

Even though I'd read book after book about caring for a newborn, I still found myself completely clueless when she came home. We had several false alarms (e.g., Oh no! She has diarrhea! She must be sick! Oh, wait, never mind. The poop of breastfed newborns is supposed to be watery. Oh no! She's on the boob all day long! She must not be getting enough milk. Oh, right, cluster feeding), but she's shown remarkable patience with her idiot parents. She's feeding like a champ, prolifically producing poop, and giving us enough adoring glances to make us completely melt.

Anyway, before too much time passes, I thought I should post the story of the birth. In the interest of honesty, I should admit that I wrote out the story shortly after the birth. I just didn't get around to posting it here until today. It's amazing how hard it can be to find a free minute.

The birth was really difficult, but ended up being wonderful, kind of like this whole journey has been so far. I started having occasional contractions and my mucus plug passed on Saturday, November 17. Then at midnight, a few huge blood clots came out. That freaked me out, so we went to Labor & Delivery (my doctor had told me a zillion times that if something happened, don't try to phone her, just go to L & D). They said it was OK, so we were back home by 2 am. I woke up at 4 with some stronger contractions. Then at 7 am Sunday, my amniotic sac broke in the middle of a contraction, so we were off to L & D again.

When I got there, they checked me out quickly, then put me into a room, and did all kinds of things to me, including putting me on an IV and a fetal monitor. Nobody really spoke much English (and I don't really speak Korean yet at all), but nothing that they did surprised me too much, since my doctor (who does speak fabulous English) had told me to expect the IV, monitor, etc. The one weird thing was that they offered me an epidural right away. Not only did that seem odd given that I wasn't in too much pain at that point, but also because I was only dilated to 1 cm, and my doctor had told me that she doesn't allow epidurals before 4 cm. I told them I wanted to make that decision later, and they pushed a bit, saying that it takes anaesthesiology a while to come, so I should at least get the port put in right away. I refused.

Then they pretty much left us alone in our room. Within an hour or so, the contractions were fast, furious, and really painful. I also felt horribly dehydrated, but they wouldn't let me drink anything, telling me that the IV was hydrating me. They kept coming and turning up the IV, but I kept feeling worse and worse. About four hours later, my cervix still hadn't dilated at all, but I was pretty much in agony. The pain really freaked me out, because I hadn't expected early labor to be so bad. Given that active labor is supposed to be much worse, I realized that I wasn't going to be a happy camper at all without pain relief, and asked for the epidural port to be put in. To my surprise, when the guy came and put it in, they turned it on right away. When I asked why they allowed it even though I was nowhere near 4 cm, they said "for induction patients we allow epidurals right away". I said "oh, you're going to induce me"? And the doctor on call (still not my doctor) said "we put you on pitocin right when you arrived. You've been on it for five hours". To her credit, she was pretty embarrassed that she had neglected to mention that little detail! No wonder the contractions were so much worse than I had ever imagined in early labor.

About half an hour after the anaesthesiologists left, the epidural started to work. For a while, all was wonderful. I could still feel the contractions, but they were completely bearable. Then a few minutes later, they took my temperature and said that I had a fever.

They put ice packs around me, and took my temperature again every few minutes for many hours. After a few hours, the doctor on call said that it was probably because I was dehydrated, and FINALLY turned up the fluids and let me have a few sips of water. The fever stayed high until morning, though, which was so scary, since I was afraid it would hurt the baby. It was also worrisome since my water had been broken for several hours at this point, so even though they had me on antibiotics, there was a real risk of infection. This whole time, I'd been on the fetal monitor, which was pretty miserable, since it only worked when I was flat on my back, which was of course the most painful position. However, I could handle it with the epidural. After about two-three blissful hours on the epidural (I wasn't keeping track of time), the doctor came in again looking worried. She said that the fetal heartbeat and movements weren't looking good, and that she thought that the epidural was to blame. So, she shut the epidural off again. (I was still only at about 2 cm at this point). Within 30 minutes, I was once again writhing (still 2 cm). Later that night, they turned down the pitocin a bit to give me a break, but I still didn't get any sleep at all, and was an absolute wreck by morning. At about 6 am (about 22 hours after they started the induction), they cranked the pitocin back up again (still 2 cm). Soon after, my doctor arrived. I talked her into trying the epidural again, but again, the baby responded badly, so they had to turn it off. At this point, I was just about ready to give up. Honestly, if she had offered me a c-section, I would have said yes. But she didn't offer it (bless her), and instead told me that I was now at 5 cm, and that she expected that I would be able to push within 2 hours. That was a huge relief. After 24 hours, I knew I could handle 2 more. I just knew I couldn't handle 12. Anyway, by about 10 am or so, I was allowed to push. That part was amazing. I know it's weird to say this, but I really loved the experience (although I don't want to do it again for a while). I have never felt such intense focus, and for once, my body seemed to know what to do. Even though there were about a million doctors and nurses running around me, the only people in the universe were me, the baby, and Mystery, who was holding my hand. The doctor told me that this was the part that I had to actually DO rather than just experiencing. She said that the speed of the delivery would depend on how well I pushed, and that I had to be active, and not just wait it out. So, I pushed with everything I had.

She was out within 30 minutes of pushing (with an episiotomy AND a tear), 27.5 hours after my water broke. I didn't feel the episiotomy or the tear at the time, but I did feel her coming out, which was amazing. Mystery was bawling, and I was just stunned. They put this gorgeous little thing on my chest right after she came out (and let dh cut the cord), and she immediately opened her eyes and looked at me. At that moment my life changed forever. They let me hold her for a second, then took her away to clean her off. They then gave her back to me swaddled so I could let her try to latch on while she still had that reflex right after the birth. It was only then that I realized that I didn't know the sex yet! My doctor has known for months, so I guess it just didn't occur to her that she should say "it's a girl!" The first time I held her, when she was still naked, it didn't even occur to me to look. Nothing mattered but that she was healthy and I loved her. I guess I was a pretty loyal team green member!

So, the rough part was that I was afraid throughout much of the labor, because of the fever and the baby's unsteady heartbeat, and that I ended up having an anaesthesia-free labor and delivery (which I had wanted to try, but wasn't particularly a goal for me), but one with an extra side of pain, thanks to the pitocin). But, in the end, it was absolutely wonderful, and worth every bit of the pain. I'd do it again in a heartbeat, but even if I never get to do it again, I'll continue to thank my lucky stars for this amazing experience.

Time flies

2007-12-02T17:09:00.000-08:00

I can't believe it's already been almost two weeks since Eggbert was born. Time really flies. We haven't slept in days, but these have still been the happiest days of my life. Being a mom is absolutely wonderful. Words fail me.

I don't have time to post a real update, but just wanted to check in and say that we're still alive, still doing great, and that Eggbert is an absolute joy. She is a creature of many moods, including hungry, clingy, whiny, chipper, and sleepy. Well, I guess that's not so many moods, but given that you never know which you're going to get in the next minute, it feels like a lot. She keeps us on our toes, never lets us sleep, and enchants us anew with every passing moment. I can't imagine how I lived without her. I remember that living without her pretty much sucked, though.

I'll try to post the birth story in the next couple of days. Really.

I can see my feet (and so can people on the moon)

2007-11-24T21:56:00.000-08:00

Thanks so much for all of the good wishes, and sorry for the abrupt cessation of communication. After all of my whinging about having made no progress at my last checkup, to my great shock, I passed my mucus plug and started having contractions two days later. The morning of the third day, my water abruptly broke, so off to the hospital I went. The following morning, November 19th, Eggbert arrived.

The birth was difficult, but the ending was wonderful. I'll tell the birth story in detail soon. Meanwhile, I just wanted to announce her safe arrival, and give the vital stats.

Eggbert is a little girl. Born at 40 weeks, 6 days, she weighed in at only 2.88 kg (6 pounds 5 ounces). She is healthy and voracious. We love her passionately. I'm tearing up just writing this.

While she is utterly perfect, her mama is still a bit of a mess. My feet are so swollen that I swear they actually make a sloshing sound when I move, I had an episiotomy and a tear, so things down south are a bit fragile at the moment, and my pelvis is improving, but slowly. I can now walk without crutches, but it still hurts, so I'm trying to minimize my movements. None of this matters at all, though, because she's HERE!!!

Thank you

2007-11-16T11:29:00.000-08:00

Thank you dear friends in the internet for your words of encouragement, and also for in some cases undoubtedly biting your tongues when you wanted to slap me upside the head. You said exactly what I needed to hear, and I am truly grateful.

It has been a hard week. I think that the thing that made it the hardest was that I genuinely did not expect this to happen. The third trimester has been so generally drama-free (other than the IUGR scare) and comfortable that I had stopped preparing for bad things to happen. And so when something relatively minor happened, I freaked out, and acted like I was the first person in the world ever to be miserable after going past their due date. Oops!

Before we moved to Korea, Mystery and I lived in southern California. His work was only about five minutes away from my work, so we drove in together in the mornings. Every day, we'd listen to the news on the way. One day, there was a human interest bit about a book on happiness. It wasn't about the philosophical underpinnings of happiness, or the meaning of life, or anything like that, but rather a series of practical tips to maximize your chances of making good decisions for yourself. The author's main thesis was that people are absolutely terrible at imagining how they will feel in a given situation that they have never actually experienced. We all THINK that we're pretty good at it, but we are wrong more often than not. Therefore, the author advocated talking to people who are actually IN that situation and finding out how they feel about it, rather than trusting our own imagination. His point was that if you're considering a new job, or a move, or what have you, you should talk to people who actually DO that job, or live in that place, and see how they like it, and give their reactions some real weight when making your decision.

At the time, I was struggling with infertility, and it really struck me how right he was about the fact that it is just about impossible to imagine how infertility feels if you're not actually infertile. I don't think it's possible to go through the day as a "fertile" and really see how many little insults and booby traps are out there. The happy moms. The pregnant bellies. The "innocent", but shockingly painful questions: "do you have children?", "do you ever think about having children?", "why did you decide not to have children?" or my all-time favorite "when do you think you'll start a family?" The commercials, oh god the commercials. Nobody who hasn't had to sit through the "having a baby changes everything" commercial the day of yet another BFN and managing not to cry, vomit, or strangle the nearest person simply out of sheer indecision as to which would be the most profitable course of action, or had to attend a baby shower after two years of trying, or endured the 25th pregnancy announcement that month (14 of which are described as "accidents"), can really understand what it's like.

Up until now, pregnancy hadn't been much like that author said, though. The conception was, rather obviously, quite different from the standard experience. My first trimester, I was so distracted a family medical crisis that I barely had time to feel the morning sickness. The second trimester, which is supposed to be such a breeze, was a bit of a nightmare. And the third trimester, which is supposed to be so hard, was rather a breeze. Add to that living a million miles from my family and old friends, and living in a small, obviously temporary, flat, so no baby shower and no decorating of the nursery (the baby will share our room), no choices about cloth diapers vs. disposables, dealing with unfamiliar baby products right and left, and it's not really surprising, I guess, that I had been feeling like my pregnancy was fairly unique in the history of the world. Well, of course it IS unique to me, but it was hardly realistic to think that mine was really that special or different, odd though my life circumstances may be.

So, I really shouldn't have been surprised to find out that the last few weeks of pregnancy are hard, and that going past your due date is frustrating. EVERYBODY says so. All of the books. All of my friends (in the computer and "real life"). All of the strangers who so generously share their experiences on the internet. My mother. My sister. My cousins and aunts. And yet, it turns out that I had been imagining myself sailing into labor and delivery and just popping Eggbert out without breaking a sweat.

Now that I'm over the disappointment, I actually think that my hubris was kind of funny. So here I am to tell you that, guess what? The last few weeks of pregnancy are hard. Going past your due date is frustrating. Labor must REALLY hurt if people mainly talk about that, rather than the week or so leading up to the delivery.

I saw my doctor yesterday. Still no signs of progress whatsoever. Eggbert is in a position that most babies reach by 28 weeks. I will be induced next Thursday (the 22nd) if nothing changes between now and then. I'll be 41w 2d.

Bloggers remorse

2007-11-14T22:50:00.000-08:00

Well, it's been only four hours since my last post, and I'm already drowning in guilt for complaining. I know that so many people would do just about anything to be in my situation. Heck, 40 weeks and two days ago, I would have done just about anything to be in my situation. I am thrilled to be here. Really I am. It's a dream come true. I'm just having a bad day, and my butt hurts.

No more Mrs. Nice Preggo

2007-11-14T18:36:00.000-08:00

OK, now I'm just pissed off. The pain on the left side of my pelvis has gotten worse, and now it feels like I'm being stabbed every time I try to take a step. So, I'm overdue, in pain, and can barely walk, and yet people are STILL not rushing to do my bidding. What on earth is the matter with them? Why I just hobbled to the bank today (all of about 50 meters from my apartment), and people didn't even get out of the way of my mammoth form as I lurched awkwardly down the street, leaning so hard on Mystery's shoulder that I had serious concerns about breaking it. One young woman, a member of a high-heeled gaggle of college students walking in parallel, actually plowed right into the fist that I was holding threateningly at my side in an attempt to stop people from crashing into me. And I wasn't even sorry. THAT's the state I'm in.

Of course then I got to the bank, and it took me about half an hour on my rapidly-swelling feet to convince the teller that yes, I really did want to pay my bills there, even though it was the WRONG BRANCH, and they would therefore have to charge me an extra dollar, which I could easily save just by walking an extra two blocks and paying at the right branch. Unfortunately, my Korean is simply not up to the task of saying "if it's two blocks away, it might as well be on the moon to me these days", or "I'm willing to pay an extra thousand if you can induce labor while you're at it!".*

If you were ever wondering whether I am a great big whiner, or just play one on TV, please put your doubts to rest. I'm the worst. I realize intellectually that I am incredibly lucky. Against all odds, I have managed to carry a pregnancy to term (and beyond). This is incredible. I should celebrate. And I will, as soon as someone gets this long-awaited baby out of me!

Eggbert, honey, don't be upset. We've had a good run. I've loved having you in me. I cherished those kicks, my growing belly, the sight of you on the ultrasound, even the digestive issues that ensued, because I wanted you so badly, and love you so much. Being pregnant with you has been one of the highlights of my life, and I know that when it's over, I will miss it. However, all good things must come to an end, and I am now ready to take our relationship to the next level. Don't you think it's time?

____________________________________________________________________________________
* (If the whole paying bills at the bank thing doesn't make sense to you, bear with me, it doesn't make sense to me either, but nothing about the financial world in Korea does, and yet things hum along here with astonishing vitality, forcing me to admit that as foreign as the system is to me, it does work. For other people anyway.)

Well, that's interesting

2007-11-12T02:57:00.000-08:00

I had been thinking that as long as I didn't actually say how utterly amazed I was that I hadn't had any lower back pain at all during this pregnancy, I wouldn't jinx myself. Well, it turns out that thoughts can jinx too. Yesterday I woke up with a sore sacroiliac joint (the back of the pelvis), and by mid-afternoon, I couldn't even walk. So much for my plans to work right up to my due date (tomorrow). I spent today at home in my pajamas instead. Not so bad, I guess.

Only one week until induction if nothing happens sooner. If my pelvis doesn't get better, it's going to be a very long week.

Still no progress

2007-11-08T22:52:00.000-08:00

Today, as the doctor completed my internal exam, she didn't say anything. She just gave me a sympathetic look and shook her head. Then once I was clothed again, she started talking about the induction that we'll schedule at my exam next week. So, I guess there's no need to pack my hospital bag yet.

Remind me never to leave the house

2007-11-04T17:06:00.000-08:00

So, today I thought I'd run one final baby-preparation errand. I realized a little while ago that we don't have any diaper/nappy rash cream. So, I thought I'd run out and pick some up at the (somewhat fancy) store near our flat. Mystery said "don't you think it might be a little expensive there?" I said "yeah, probably, but how bad can it be? It's diaper rash cream!"

The answer: $34.00

On what planet are people willing to pay $34.00 for a little bottle of something that you spread on your kid's butt?

No progress

2007-11-02T20:13:00.000-07:00

Well, I saw the doctor on Thursday, and the official cervical prognosis is "no progress whatsoever". Eggbert is still fine, healthy, and in training for a brilliant soccer career, but doesn't seem to have any interest in coming out soon. Who knew that my uterus was such a comfortable spot?

Infertili-time

2007-10-27T03:46:00.000-07:00

While most people would have us believe that time marches forward at a steady pace, infertiles know otherwise.

The cyclical ebb and flow of time associated with each cycle of trying to conceive "the old-fashioned way" are familiar to us all, as the days speed by in the exciting peri-ovulatory period (if ovulation occurs at all), and then slow to a glacial pace during the dreaded two-week wait.

For those of us who have upped the ante by adding medications or other interventions to our attempts, time crawls by as we wait to start a cycle, rushes by at the speed of light during the early days of the cycle, and then once again slows to something approaching unbearable as we stare down the barrel of the beta gun, which we know is capable of delivering both unbelievable joy and crushing despair.

When one of us is lucky enough to "win" one of those rounds of Russian roulette, time starts acting up again. The first few days feel like years, as we wait for repeat betas to either confirm our joy or dash our hopes, and then for that first ultrasound, and then for a date, in some cases arbitrarily chosen, and in other cases cruelly established by a history of loss, at which we have promised ourselves to believe that the pregnancy will actually stick.

When that date finally arrives for us lucky ones, most of us still don't really believe, yet time nonetheless speeds up a bit. Several weeks pass in the blink of an eye. All of a sudden you're in the 3rd trimester. Almost there...

Then time stops completely.

And that's where I sit right now. It's not a bad place. It's actually pretty wonderful. I can no longer deny that there is a real live baby inside of me, and that there's every appearance that this baby will be arriving in the next few weeks. I'm not on bed rest. I don't have hyperemesis, gestational diabetes, pre-eclampsia, or any other known pregnancy complications. Eggbert has finally admitted that he/she was just being a drama queen, and doesn't have Down Syndrome OR IUGR. On the whole, all is well. Yet for some reason, days pass like years.

I saw the doctor today, and thus far, my cervix is neither dilated nor effaced at all, and Eggbert is "definitely not engaged". So, I'm on standby. I could go into labor tomorrow, but it could also be another three weeks.

I'm not complaining. I always wanted to carry a child to term. Now I have. It's a glorious thing that I celebrate every day. It's just that now that we're at term, I'm kind of ready to move on to the next life goal, which is the birth itself, and then being a mother. However, my body clearly has its own plans once again. And so once again, I wait.

Grade A Jumbo Eggbert

2007-10-20T16:54:00.000-07:00

I had the growth scan this morning (exactly three weeks after the doctor uttered the dreaded words "growth restriction") and I'm happy to report that all of the eating that I've been doing has not been in vain. I had gained two pounds in the last two weeks, and it turns out that's all Eggbert! The weight estimate has been revised upward from 3 pounds 10 ounces to 5 pounds 12 ounces. Yippee! The Egg is still a little behind, but is growing at a steady clip, and is even catching up a bit with gestational age. I didn't actually see the doctor today, but she instructed the nurse to send me on my merry way until next week. It's looking like I may get to go to term after all. I may just be the happiest mama in the world today.

An open letter

2007-10-15T19:18:00.000-07:00

Dear Korean people,

I came to your country about a year ago, and have found it to be for the most part a delightful place. My friends and colleagues here have shown me incredible kindness and loyalty, the dynamic city of Seoul has kept me entertained, fascinated, and amazed with its rich mix of high technology and modern and ancient culture, and the natural beauty of the mountains and forests can take my breath away. So, it is with deep respect and admiration that I offer you the following (admittedly unsolicited, but hopefully not unwelcome) advice.

I read today, not for the first time, that the birth rate in Korea is among the lowest in the world, which is leading to rapid aging of the population, and fears of associated social problems in the years to come. While the reasons for this trend are complex, and cannot be addressed using a quick fix, I nonetheless recommend that if you are interested in increasing the number of women interested in having children in this great nation, you adopt the following policy: stop being so mean to pregnant women.

By mean, I don't mean the alternative (older) definition which is to be stingy or ungenerous. While many people have noted in public communication spaces that the prices of baby-related goods in Korea are absurdly high (to the point at which my Korean birthing class instructor and my Korean OB/GYN both recommended buying such basics as car seats and strollers overseas and bringing them here), I am enough of a believer in the power of the market to rest assured that an entrepreneur will soon notice the opportunities available for the first business to market low-cost, high-quality baby goods here, and solve this problem. Rather I am referring to the everyday practices of jostling and pushing pregnant women, pushing the "close doors" button on the elevator in blissful disregard to the pregnant woman shuffling toward the door as fast as she can on her swollen feet, elbowing pregnant women in the belly to encourage them to take up less space in the elevator, and denying even the most heavily pregnant women seats on the subway.

I know that my descriptions of these behaviors may come as a bit of a surprise to you. Do you really jostle and push pregnant women? Well of course you do. You jostle and push everyone. While I understand that this behavior is considered acceptable (although not necessarily polite), what to a normal person is a slight inconvenience can be a real danger to someone who is suddenly burdened with 10-15 extra kg, has had a dramatic shift in their center of gravity, and has the softening ligaments associated with late pregnancy, throwing their balance off, and rendering their movements distinctly wobbly. Just today, I was knocked over by someone, apparently someone in a hurry, as I walked down the street and fell so hard that I have badly bruised my wrist and shoulder, and skinned my knee. Luckily, I twisted during the fall, and managed to avoid landing on my huge pregnant belly. However, the fall was shocking, painful, and frightening. To add insult to injury, as I lay on the ground gasping for breath, not a single bypasser (and there were many) bothered to check and see if I was OK, or to help me up. Now I'm no expert on human behavior, but I would have thought that seeing an 8-months pregnant woman fall flat on her face should cause witnesses to feel some kind of concern. However, it seemed as if I could die or miscarry right there on the pavement in a busy public place without anyone being much disturbed.

Then there's the subway. Now I know that nobody likes to stand, and that seats are distributed on a first-come first-served basis. However, I noted with admiration on my pre-pregnancy trips on the subway that special seats are designated for the use of the elderly, people with disabilities, and pregnant women. This is a wonderful design feature of the Seoul subway, and one of which the public transit system should be proud. However, it is now apparent to me that many of the people of Seoul are apparently unaware of the purpose of these seats, as just yesterday, I, a hugely pregnant woman, was forced to stand on two separate subway rides while young healthy families sat in the handicapped seats. On the second trip, I tried to gently remind one young family of their civic duty by pointing at the sign indicating that these seats are reserved for the elderly, people with disabilities, and pregnant women, then pointing at my belly, and then pointing at the seat. The family thought that this was a very good opportunity to enjoy a detailed conversation with their young son about the fact that I am this funny shape because there's a baby in my belly while resting comfortably in their seats. Now I'm a big fan of education, and do believe that this was undoubtedly an important and special moment in their parent-child relationship. However, I nonetheless was somewhat disconcerted by their obvious comfort in sharing this happy moment while I stood on my hugely swollen ankles right in front of them, fuming.

Now I know from my interactions with people with whom I am actually acquainted that the Korean people are by nature kind, generous, and loyal. You have much to be proud of in this great nation. Therefore, I am confident that a little more attention to the etiquette of pregnancy will address this problem, leading to positive effects on the feelings of women here about pregnancy and childbirth, and hopefully an improved birth rate.

With respect and friendship,
Sara

Still at large

2007-10-14T19:50:00.000-07:00

According to the non-stress test that I had on Saturday, Eggbert is doing just fine. Two different doctors commented on how active the Egg is (no kidding! last night's kick count broke 200). I was proud, of course, but also a little frightened to think about what that level of energy will mean in a toddler. Anyway, I had been expecting an ultrasound as well, but it turns out that will be next week. Based on my recent weight gain (worthy of Miss Piggy), and the non-stress test, I have been released on my own recognizance. So, unless something exciting happens between now and the ultrasound, it looks like Eggbert will get to stay on the inside at least until 37 weeks. Whew!

There are worse things than a BFN

2007-10-11T21:47:00.000-07:00

I spoke with an old friend this morning. H has featured in my blog before, when she lost her IVF twins at 19 weeks and 20 weeks last spring to an incompetent cervix. This was followed by a life-threatening uterine infection. H has been through a lot.

Since I've been in Korea, we had been in touch every few days or at most every week for a while, when she suddenly went completely silent in late July. I have been worrying a bit, but thought that her silence might just indicate her inability to cope with my ongoing pregnancy in light of her own losses, which would have been completely understandable, so I didn't push. Finally, though, a few days ago I phoned her with a whole speech planned in my head about the fact that I didn't want to talk about me, but just really wanted her to know that I am thinking about her and that I am here for her any time she wants to talk about HER. Well, she wasn't there when I phoned, but then this morning she surprised me with the news that she did another round of IVF in July, and is now 12 1/2 weeks pregnant.

With twins.

Her high-risk OB/GYN estimates that her chances of ending up with living babies is only about 50%, in light of her history of preterm labor and her twin pregnancy.

I just don't know how to react. On the one hand I am ecstatic that she has a shot of having the family of her dreams after so much unhappiness, and I am SO proud of her for not giving up. It took a lot of courage to walk into the RE's office again, and I really admire her for finding it somehow. I congratulated her from the bottom of my heart, as I do feel that every pregnancy for an infertile mom is something to be celebrated.

On the other hand, I simply cannot understand how a medical professional could transfer THREE embryos (two good-quality embryos, one poor) to a patient with a history of cervical incompetence associated with a twin pregnancy. Yes, she had a slightly higher chance of pregnancy with a multi-embryo transfer, but she had a much better chance of actually taking home a living baby with a single embryo transfer. Is the BFP really worth the risk of the loss of TWO more babies?

I am hoping and praying for a good outcome. But I'm also terrified. And angry.

I'm too tired for this post

2007-10-08T18:54:00.000-07:00

Well, the good news is that Eggbert's training for the baby Olympics continue. We haven't had a kick count of less than 50 since my last post. I know that this is silly, but it seems that the kicks are reaching higher up under my ribs, too, so I've decided that the Egg is still growing.

The only fly in the ointment is that I'm suddenly so tired that I can barely cope with getting out of bed. I see the doctor again on Saturday, and now I'm actually secretly hoping that she puts me on bed rest. It was my worst nightmare until recently, but at this point, I could really use a good excuse not to haul myself to work every day. Of course it would be better yet if Eggbert got a clean bill of health, and I started feeling better too. Still, at this point, I'm getting quite ready to hunker down and just wait for the big day.

Lord of the dance

2007-10-03T20:47:00.000-07:00

Thanks so much for the advice, encouragement, and good wishes. I'm trying to just take things as they come and to keep a close eye on Eggbert's movements.

Here are the kick counts for the past three days (one hour each day). My doctor ordered me to go straight to labor and delivery if the count is ever below 3.

Sunday--37
Monday--32
Tuesday--122

Obviously Eggbert hasn't looked at the ultrasound, since his or her preparations for the baby Olympics continue.

Over a hundred kicks/hour. No wonder I can't sleep.

This I did not expect

2007-09-29T19:42:00.000-07:00

Being a sensible, rational person, since getting pregnant I have spent a lot of time worrying about things like the RE having mixed up the embryos, Eggbert being born early because of my being elbowed in the belly by an aggressive middle-aged woman who REALLY wants a subway seat, or Mystery losing Eggbert at the mall. You know, the normal stuff. However, since the karyotype came back normal, and everything was going so well, more recently I've been focusing my attention on irrational worries about the birth instead. It's quite normal to be convinced that the baby is breach and that I'll need a c-section, and that the nurses in the hospital will then mislabel Eggbert, feed him/her so full of formula that breastfeeding is out of the question, and let him/her cry all night long, while giving us someone else's baby. Because that's pretty much standard practice at most hospitals, right?

I have been so busy worrying about things like that that I completely forgot to worry about Eggbert's health for the past few weeks. So, this morning when I went in for my "final" ultrasound before the birth, I was completely focused on whether the head was up or down. I was ecstatic when the tech put the probe on the lowest point of my belly and a little head showed up. I was even more delighted when he found two little feet on the top, two little hands down below, and a butt wedged under my ribs. I floated back down to the doctor on a cloud, only to be told that while Eggbert was measuring pretty much right on date at the 28 week scan, at 33w 4d, Eggbert's abdominal circumference is dating to only 30 weeks. So, in five weeks, my poor little Egg has fallen three weeks behind. The head is still measuring on date, but my doctor is now officially worried. The weight estimate is only 3 pounds 11 ounces, or less than two kg. I have to go back in two weeks for another ultrasound and a non-stress test, and if the results aren't improved, I'll be admitted to the hospital, and Eggbert may have to be delivered early and tiny.

Now I miss my irrational fears.

Desperado

2007-09-22T14:35:00.000-07:00

So are you ready for another "life in Korea" post? Well, ready or not, here it comes. I've added a little pregnancy-related blah-blah in too, just to keep things true to theme.

Living in Korea is good and bad, fun and frustrating, inspiring and annoying. Kind of like life anywhere, I guess. I don't actually know what it's like to live in Korea as a Korean, though, so I really shouldn't make sweeping generalizations. I just know that as an expat I am routinely both delighted and horrified, often within minutes of each other.

One of the great things is how unbelievably kind and supportive my Korean friends and colleagues are. It really does amaze me how many different ways they find to express their concern and consideration for me. I can go to work, or to lunch, or what have you in the foulest of moods, and they never fail to make me feel warm and fuzzy within 10 minutes of my arrival.

One of the bad things is how unbelievably rude (from the perspective of a different culture) strangers are on the street. In the last week, I have been elbowed in the belly (yes, my 7-month-pregnant belly) TWICE in elevators by people who were in such a hurry to get in or out that they couldn't be bothered to notice that there are other people in the world. I also got into a shoving match on the subway with a healthy middle-aged woman who really thought that she deserved a handicapped/elderly/pregnant seat more than I did. There is a queue to get on the subway, and I was ahead of her. She reached out and shoved me out of the way as the train started to move into the station. I thought that maybe she didn't see that I was pregnant, so I just calmly returned to the queue in my original place. Then as the train doors opened, she shoved me again, and ran past me (with the agility of a cat--there is no way this woman was disabled in any way) to grab the last seat. While I was actually only going one stop, and therefore didn't much care about the seat, I made a point of going right up to her, looking into her face with an appalled expression (I can't communicate well in Korean, so I have to pantomime sometimes to get my point across), and then standing up and shoving my belly in her face. To her credit, she was absolutely mortified and then leapt up and offered me her seat. Still, I was annoyed for hours.

That wasn't really what I wanted to tell you about though. I promised a while ago to tell a bit more about my childbirth class, and my feelings about the class are very much tied up with my feelings about living in Korea as an expat. Being foreign, looking different, and not speaking the language isolates Mystery and me in many ways from the main flow of life here in Seoul. Nonetheless, I have assiduously avoided the "expat" scene since I've been here, since I don't like the idea of being one of those people who moves to another country only to surround themselves with people just like those in their place of origin. So, when I walked into the childbirth class for foreigners, it was the first time that I'd been around more than one or two non-Koreans at once in months. To my great surprise, I found the situation absolutely delightful. Not only was it thrilling to be surrounded by other big pregnant bellies and to be able to gush about my pregnancy without worrying about annoying everyone around me, but it was also delightful to be able to do so in fast English, without worrying about my manners. I hadn't realized until that moment how on guard I am every day to try to remember not to make comments about anything Korean that could be construed as negative to my Korean friends and colleagues. Many of these things aren't really negative at all, but I'm always so conscious of being a guest and so concerned about being a good one that I do make strenuous efforts to be polite. In this mixed group (a few Americans, several Germans, a few Koreans that are married to foreigners, a Kiwi, some Brits), I found myself exploding with words that have been kept unsaid for months. A lot of it was just the typical "you have leg cramps? me too!" kind of stuff, but I could also finally actually talk about the subway experience, or how kimchi feels in my heartburn-plagued digestive system (not good), and the difficulties that I've experienced in finding "normal" baby things here without feeling guilty. It was wonderful!

It was also embarrassing. I don't think I drew a breath for up to 15 minutes at a time because I was so anxious to release some of this impacted commentary. I also very much liked everyone there (fertile and oblivious though they were), so I was fairly frantic to make enough of a connection that it wouldn't be weird to invite them to lunch or whatever after the class was over. I was aware the whole time that I probably was coming off as desperate for companionship, but just couldn't stop myself.

Luckily, they were all quite kind, and tolerant of my irrational exuberance. I think I may have found some mommy friends in Korea at long last. Now if I can just manage to let them get a word in edgewise, I'll be in business.

Language again

2007-09-16T14:42:00.000-07:00

Thanks so much for all of the helpful hints about strollers and preparations for the big event. Thanks especially to M-B for devoting a whole post to helping me out. You're the best! Mystery and I do LOVE the Xplory, especially the idea of having the baby up high, but they're over $1000 in Seoul, and that's just for the basic one without any of the fun accessories. If we decide to go for it, then we'll probably just buy it on our next trip to the US, which is scheduled for about 6 weeks after Eggbert is due. Is that completely insane?

In other news, yesterday I learned an important life lesson. As it turns out, it is not a good idea to let someone with whom you can't communicate at all cut your hair. My Korean really hasn't progressed much (or to be honest, at all) since I became pregnant, and as a result, I didn't have the vocabulary to truly describe what I wanted to the pleasant-faced woman holding the scissors in the salon yesterday. I thought that gestures should suffice, but as it turns out, either a) I'm not very good at charades, or b) she was annoyed and decided to punish me, because my head now looks very much like a Christmas tree. A big, frizzy Christmas tree. Not quite what I was hoping for.

On a happier note, I saw the doctor yesterday, and everything was fine. Eggbert's heart is still beating, my belly is the right size, my weight gain is right on target (her target, not mine, I didn't really want to gain those extra three pounds since three weeks ago), and my bp is still normal. I go back in two weeks for the FINAL ultrasound.

Still infertile after all this time

2007-09-11T23:19:00.000-07:00

While I realize that this would be impossible to tell from my posting rate, the last week or so has been a whirlwind of activity here in la Casa de Eggbert. Mystery and I had a childbirth/baby care class three times last week, and while it was great fun, it also kicked my well-padded ass energy-wise. I'll post about the class itself another day (too many stories, too little time). In the mean time, I want to talk about infertility.

For the past few months, I'd been feeling a little post-infertility. I don't mean that I was suffering from amnesia, or anything as sinister as that. I will never forget where we've been, and will never stop caring about my infertile sisters and brothers and their struggles. I just meant that I have been in a phase of excited anticipation, rather than one of sadness and fear. Oh I still have fears, I fear that Eggbert will come too early, that Eggbert will spontaneously die for no good reason, that I'll be such a basket case of a neurotic mother that Eggbert ends up hating me, that Mystery will be so relaxed as a dad that he accidentally sets Eggbert on fire. You know, the normal stuff. However, I have now started to believe more and more firmly that there will actually be a baby in my life in a few months: two months and two days, plus or minus a week, to be precise. I even ordered a crib yesterday. An actual crib. Sleeping spot for an actual baby. Pretty much useless for anything else. So, I wasn't really in an infertility head-space, so to speak.

Then I went to childbirth class. The instructor was a mother of four, who clearly gets pregnant at the drop of a hat, as she regaled us with tales about how her last was an "oops". I was surrounded by big bellies and glowing faces. I heard crack after crack about how sex during pregnancy is fine, because "how do you think the baby got there in the first place"? I thought about raising my hand and saying "with the help of a team of crack embryologists and a big syringe", but thought the best of it. Had there been an opening, I suppose I should have spoken up. Part of me wishes I had spoken up. The other part reminds me that this falls squarely into the "too much information" category as an announcement to a group of complete strangers. So I just sat there and squirmed. It didn't help when the instructor went on at great length about how breastfeeding makes you more fertile (?!?), and the importance of using contraception while breastfeeding. Or when the other students started talking about what month would be best to conceive #2. For the first time in a good long while, I felt thoroughly infertile.

Being a pregnant infertile isn't a bad thing. It beats the hell out of being a non-pregnant infertile, that's for sure. I'm mostly very happy and at peace with my situation. However, it is still jarring to be reminded of how little the "normal" population understands about how infertility, and how off their radar we infertiles really are.

I've also (stop reading here if you don't want to hear something that sounds so ungrateful that it may make you want to club me over the head) found my mind wandering to a very wistful place whenever the topic of shopping for baby crops up (which happens a lot). My decisions about how much to spend and what to buy are constantly affected by the twin realities that a) We're unlikely to be lucky enough to have a #2, and b) We probably won't live in Korea forever. So, every object that I buy is likely to be used for only one child, and then will have to be a) given away or sold in Korea, or b) shipped overseas. So, rather than buying the perfect crib (I found it, for the low low price of only ~900 USD), I bought an adequate crib (~120 USD), and rather than buying a changing table, we're going to make do with whatever surfaces present themselves. As for a cute dresser for baby stuff? Well, how about a set of plastic drawers from the Korean equivalent of Wal-Mart instead? I realize that none of this stuff really matters. All that I really care about is a healthy baby. Still, I feel like I'm missing out on yet another one of those little joys of first-time parenthood. Each time these thoughts pop into my head, I can't help but spend a moment wallowing in the thought that this is likely to be the first and the last time that I ever get to experience pregnancy. That makes me sad. Still, I am so grateful to have had the experience once. It is enough. It may have to be.

We ARE going to buy a good stroller, though, dammit! Recommendations are very welcome.

Eggbert's new game

2007-09-02T14:14:00.000-07:00

Last night, Eggbert discovered a new fun thing to kick. It's firm and round and full of pee (even 30 seconds after the last time I peed). Like a rubber ball. For added enjoyment, it makes me jump and squeal every time he kicks it. Fun for the whole family.

Confessions of a beached whale

2007-08-31T07:38:00.001-07:00

You know how once you get a new life experience, you sometimes realize what an asshole you've been all of your life? What, that doesn't happen to you? Well, erm, that's embarrassing then.

When it comes to most things relating to fertility and reproduction, I think I've always been on solid ground. I am positive that I never in my pre-infertility life told anyone infertile to "just adopt", and I know for sure that I have ALWAYS given my subway seat to pregnant women, and insisted that they go ahead of me in the bathroom line. However, I actually only recently realized that saying "you're huge!" to a pregnant woman isn't the heart and soul of courtesy. I am fairly certain that I have enthusiastically gushed about the tremendous size of the bellies of several of my pregnant friends in the past, and now consider myself fortunate that nobody ever actually slapped me upside the head. I meant it in the nicest possible way, I swear. I LOVE big pregnant bellies, and think they're gorgeous, so it never really occurred to me that people might not like having theirs pointed out. It wasn't until a pregnant friend complained to me about people saying that she was huge that I realized that this comment could possibly be interpreted in a different way. Sometimes I'm a little slow.

The other day, Nina's post in which she discussed her feelings about being called "fatty" because of her pregnant belly, made me think about how my feelings about this issue have and have not changed with my own pregnancy. Here's what I came up with:

Being a bit hormonal, I am even more mortified than ever that my comments might have made my gorgeous friends feel anything less than wonderful about themselves and their bodies at a time when they may have been feeling fragile. On the other hand, I don't mind a bit if people point out that I am huge. You know why? Because I AM huge. Enormous. Gargantuan. I can't believe that I'm already this big at not-quite 30 weeks. Having an enormous belly does create many logistical and emotional issues. I can't sleep, it's hard to negotiate small spaces, and hauling this thing around is no picnic either. I'm also worried about stretch marks, sagging muscles, etc. However, when people comment on my size, I nonetheless take it as a compliment. Because I'm not fat, I'm pregnant, dammit, and I refuse to conflate the two in my mind. Mystery has no such compunction, and has taken to calling me a name that translates roughly to "fatty" as a pet name. I suppose that I should be offended, but really I'm not. It actually annoys me more when people say "you're not that big", because given how supersized I actually am, it's obvious that they're lying, which makes it clear that THEY think that being huge is a bad thing. I'd rather that people just said "you're huge, and so cute!" That way I can at least pretend that they're being honest in both parts of the sentence.

Maybe one of the reason that being pregnant doesn't make me feel fat relates to my prepregnancy body shape. I've always been a curvy girl. I have big round boobs, have until recently had a small waist, and then a big old butt. I've described it as a J Lo ass in previous posts, but to be honest, my ass looks like it ate J Lo for lunch. It's not a fat thing, it's just the way I am. Losing weight doesn't help. Surprisingly enough, men seem to love it, but the fashion industry does not. I've always had trouble finding trousers that have enough space for my arse, but have a small enough waist that you can't look straight down the back. For the last few years, with the "low rise" trend, it's been even worse. Pants that look great from the front don't have enough fabric to make it all the way around the curve in the back, leaving several inches of crack flapping in the breeze. So, while I have plenty of body issues, my body issues don't relate to my belly.

Being pregnant has made only three discernible changes to my body shape. First, my boobs got bigger. Then my belly got huge. Now I am sporting a rather impressive set of cankles. Well, I could do without the cankles, but two out of three ain't bad. My butt actually looks small now, in comparison with Mt. Eggbert in the front, and maternity pants fit great! So, while I realize that I'm likely to start puffing up in strange places in the next 10 weeks, I'm actually pretty happy with the way that I look right now, at least above the knee (and below the neck--am I the only one with pregnancy-related frizz issues?)

Still, I'll never call another pregnant woman huge again. Even though I embrace the term, I do feel like an idiot for missing the boat on this issue for so many years.

In other news, I'm still having heartburn, and I never sleep anymore, but otherwise, I'm doing well. I am beginning to realize that the last trimester is going to be a bit of an uphill slog as my weight increases and basic functions become more difficult, but still think that so far I've been pretty lucky. Last week I asked my doctor how long she'd let me go if Eggbert is overdue, and she said only 1 week, so at the MOST I have only 11 weeks and four days to go. Hopefully my luck can hold out for that long.

10 weeks later

2007-08-26T23:49:00.000-07:00

Tuesday will be the 10-week anniversary of my amniocentesis, which was done reluctantly, after a "positive" quad screen for Down Syndrome. One would think that after 10 weeks, I would have formulated some coherent emotional/intellectual response to the events surrounding the amnio, and some conclusions about screening in general, but honestly, I'm just as confused about it as I was during that scary time. I've sat down to try to process and summarize my thoughts and feelings several times, but every time I ended up walking away. Well, with the 10-week mark approaching, it seems like it really is time to clear my head, so hear goes.

I'm normally an information girl. Inquiring minds want to know, and all that. So, upon becoming pregnant at age 38, you would think that I would naturally have signed up for every kind of screening possible. However, after almost three years of infertility, I was not only reluctant to take any chances whatsoever with this precious pregnancy, but also, to be honest, I was reluctant to even think about the possibility that something could be wrong with little Eggbert. So, while my doctor, citing my 1 in 200 risk of chromosomal abnormalities, recommended amniocentesis at 16 weeks, I declined. I did, however, let her do the quad screen, which involved a nuchal fold translucency screening at 12 weeks coupled with a set of three blood tests at 15-16 weeks. Denial being my friend, I never seriously considered the possibility that the result might be "positive". But then it was, predicting an estimated risk of 1 in 35 of Down Syndrome.

That positive screening result turned my world upside down. While before I actually did the test, odds like 1 in 35 didn't sound too alarming to me. I had been very comfortable with my age-based risk of 1 in 200 (a result already scoring as "positive" on most screening tests), and even at 1 in 35, that means 34 times out of 35, all will be well, right? Well, while that is technically true, there is another factor involved in estimating the psychological impact of a risk estimate. When reacting emotionally to risk, I find that there are two factors that matter to me: the probability that something will happen, and then the suck factor--how much it will suck if it does happen. So, a risk of 1 in 35 of rain tomorrow doesn't cause me to bat an eye, whereas a risk of 1 in 35 that I will drop dead tomorrow would cause me become hysterical. It drives Mystery crazy that I freak out if he e.g. goes clambering around on coastal rocks like a mountain goat, displaying his natural athleticism and incredible sense of balance to all within visual range, because even though I realize that the odds that he will fall are low, the suck factor involved in watching my love plunge to his death would be enormous. The thing that I hadn't really thought through about screening was that a chromosomal abnormality diagnosis comes with a huge suck factor. Yes, children with chromosomal abnormalities can go on to have wonderful lives in some cases, but nonetheless, hearing that there might be something wrong with your beloved child is not something that's easy to take in stride.

It was hard. I freaked out. I cried. I despaired. I whined and pouted. I decided to have the amnio after all, not so much because it would affect the outcome of the pregnancy, but because I couldn't go on another 21 weeks in that mental state. I needed to know, and I needed to know RIGHT THEN. So, I had the amnio, and after several stressful days, I found out that Eggbert has the right number of chromosomes. We were in the 34 out of 35 category. That was a tremendous relief. Words can't even really describe the feeling. Honestly, it was kind of like getting the positive beta result--one of those days that changes your life. Still, it didn't change my life back to quite what it was before. One of the things that I realized during my fit of self-pity was that there's nothing special about me or Mystery that should make us exempt from the normal and abnormal stresses of parenthood. Infertility not only doesn't buy you a free pass from miscarriage (as we all know, many from bitter experience) or stress during pregnancy, but it also doesn't exempt your kids from the risk of disease, injury, death, or bad hair days. There is actually no reason to think that I "deserve" a kid with DS any less than anyone else. It was a sobering thought.

But back to my real focus here--having been one of the many "false positives" resulting from a quad screen or triple screen test, and as a result having suffered profound stress and worry unnecessarily, how do I now feel about screening in general?

I really don't know. I don't even know what I'd do if I were lucky to become pregnant again in the future.

From a logical perspective, the argument for doing the quad screen is unassailable. Crunching the numbers makes that clear. The risk of miscarriage from amniocentesis, if it is done between 16 and 20 weeks by an experienced practitioner at a high-quality facility is estimated at around 1 in 1600. The risk of a chromosomal abnormality is about 1 in 200 for a woman my age. The risk of doing no screening is that you will be blindsided on your child's birthday by a diagnosis that not only changes your life forever, but also may require immediate and effective intervention you your part to advocate for the best interests of your child. The risk of a "false positive" is about 5%. So, if you take a group of 1600 women like me, and

They all do amniocentesis right away, then on average:

1591 will receive a clean bill of health
8 will receive an early diagnosis of a chromosomal problem, and
1 healthy fetus will die.

If, on the other hand, they all do the quad screen first, then on average:

1520 will receive a clean bill of health
80 will get a positive screening result

If the women with "negative" results then refuse amnio, and the women with "positive" results all have amnio, then on average:

1592 will receive a clean bill of health
1-2 will receive a clean bill of health, but will then be blindsided with a chromosomally abnormal child on the birth day
6-7 will receive an early diagnosis of a chromosomal problem
0 healthy fetuses will die

So, if the choices are screening and going directly to amnio, from the perspective of the baby's health, the choice is clear to me. Both procedures will diagnose almost all cases of chromosomal abnormalities, but by choosing to do the quad screen first, the overall risk to the group of 1600 women of an amniocentesis-induced miscarriage is reduced to a negligible level. If I was a doctor, I'd recommend that my patients have the quad screen, based on these numbers. However, these calculations overlook two things:

First, once you actually GET that positive quad screen, your risk of miscarriage from amnio is still 1 in 1600, so given the outcome, you are still facing a difficult choice

Second, getting the positive screen is tremendously stressful.

How do you quantify the cost of that stress? I don't have any idea. Is it actually worth it? I don't know. What would I do if the situation came up again? I have no idea.

I did leave out one of the options. It's only fair to consider them all.

If nobody does any testing:

1582 will have chromosomally normal kids
8 will be blindsided with a chromosomally abnormal child on the birth day

Is that better? Is that worse? After 10 weeks, I still have no idea.

I do think that if the amnio result HAD shown a chromosomal abnormality, I'd be glad that I did the tests. But of course there's really no way of knowing.

I do know that I am beyond grateful for the fact that my little Eggbert has the right number of chromosomes. I realize that doesn't guarantee health or happiness, but I'll take it.

Mind your manners

2007-08-21T22:07:00.000-07:00

Many years ago, I took an intensive language course in preparation for a study abroad program. The course was great, in that it tried to prepare us not only for the linguistic challenges that we would face, but also for the cultural issues that would almost certainly arise. Going into the course, I had fancied myself a sophisticated world traveler, and therefore not in need of a lesson on cultural differences, so I wasn't entirely receptive to this message at first. However, I was struck by a metaphor that the instructor used. She described a situation in which you visit a culture in which the standard polite greeting is to spit in your face upon meeting. Since you KNOW this about the culture before you go there, the first time it happens, you're started, and perhaps a little disgusted, but not annoyed. The second time, you're less startled, still disgusted, and moderately amused. After the 10th time, though, it's just about impossible not to become annoyed. The intellect can only overcome one's own cultural baggage to some extent, and beyond that, it's just about impossible not to have an emotional reaction to behavior that is considered unacceptable in your own culture, even when you KNOW that no offense is intended.

I've found that indeed, in every country where I've spent a sufficient period of time, there is some habit or custom that I find difficult to accept. Well, after 11 months in Korea, I am now fairly certain that I have identified my Korea-specific Achilles heel. You see, I don't like to be pushed.

I don't mean metaphorically pushed. I mean physically pushed, either by a hard jostle with the shoulder, or by actually having someone reach out their hand to push me. Koreans are lovely people when you know them, but apparently it is 100% acceptable to push a stranger who is in your way, even if you can see with your own eyes that that person doesn't actually have a choice about being there. Impatient to get off of a crowded train? No worries, just push the person in front of you until they slam into the person in front of them. It won't get you out any faster, but it'll make you feel better. Are you having trouble negotiating your shopping cart through a crowd? Just slam it up against the legs of the person in front of you. Sure, they're stuck too, so the only result is to make them yelp with pain, but hey, wasn't that more amusing than just standing there waiting? What if the person in your way is elderly, disabled, a small child, or a pregnant woman? No worries. This is a democracy. What if they're not in your way at all? Oh heck, push them anyway.

At first, I interpreted the pushing as subtle expressions of anti-foreign sentiment. I do stick out like a sore thumb here, so I assumed that the pushing was related to my appearance. However, the more I looked around, I realized that everybody pushes everyone else, and nobody seems to get mad, or even to notice.

This is hard for me. Americans are particularly orotective of their personal space (ask any European, Asian, or African), and in that way, I'm typically American. I don't even like being crowded, and having a stranger make avoidable physical contact for no reason feels like an act of aggression. I have been particularly sensitive to this since I've been visibly pregnant. It is just very hard for me to understand how someone could really think it's OK to push a pregnant woman when she's not in the line of gunfire or something. I'm trying to learn to cope with it, but it's hard.

Being hugely pregnant actually raises lots of issues about manners and etiquette, no matter where you are in the world. Should people let you ahead in bathroom lines? Should you be annoyed if they don't? Should people give you a seat on the bus/train? Do they? Does it bother you?

Since I've been showing, I've spent time in three countries: Indonesia, Singapore, and Korea. Here is the score:

Long bathroom lines encountered:

Indonesia: ~100
Singapore: ~10
Korea: ~100

Times someone has offered to let me go ahead:

Indonesia: 0
Singapore: 0
Korea: 0

Rides on trains/subways when empty seats were not available:

Indonesia: ~10
Singapore: ~10
Korea: ~10

Times someone offered me their seat:

Indonesia: 1 (an old man who was then immediately given a seat by a young healthy man, who had been ignoring me)
Singapore: 0
Korea: 4 (but that number includes 2 Americans)

Unimpressive, all around.

In Korea there are specially designated seats on the subway for people who are "elderly, disabled, or pregnant" (that's what the sign says), and generally, people that don't "qualify" don't sit there, even if there are many empty "special" seats, no needy people, and the rest of the train is full. However, people from the "normal" seats pretty much never give up their seats. So, it's all about rules, not about the "honor system". I suppose that's fair enough. However, the "honor system" IS used by people deciding whether they qualify for the "special" seats. When do you become elderly? Well, according to my own observations, some people seem to become elderly at age 50. Then, once sitting, people in the "special" seats don't seem to give them up, even to someone who fairly clearly needs them more. I have actually only seen a sitting passenger get up from a "special" seat once, and that was when I got up from a "special" seat, because there was a very old woman with a cane standing. Apparently this shamed the healthy 50-year-old man next to me to the point at which he then offered me his seat. Does that count? I don't know.

What's it like where you live? Do people give up their seats for pregnant women? Do you?

The third trimester

2007-08-17T07:27:00.000-07:00

I really don't know how this happened, but somehow I've found myself in the third trimester. It's become clear to me that pregnancy has its own time frame, which is completely different from every other kind of time that I've ever experienced. TTC time feels like dog years. Each month seems to take almost a year off of your life. Before TTC, a month took about a month, more or less. But in pregna-world, a month seems to take about five minutes.

Don't misunderstand me, they are an action-packed five minutes. I laughed, I cried. In the last month, I've experienced constipation, anemia, hypoglycemia, diarrhea, bizarre navel pains, a level of sweating that MUST put Seoul in danger of flooding, and many other strange symptoms. Still, pregnancy III, The Belly Strikes Back, has somehow snuck up on me. So far it's kind of like pregnancy II, but with hem*orrhhoids.

On the one hand, I'm thrilled. Somewhere along the way, I've started to believe that there might actually be a baby at the end of all of this. On the other hand, the fact that my due date is now less than three months away forces me to start actually preparing for the arrival of this so-far fictitious baby, which freaks me out. We now have baby clothes in the house. And bottles. Ack! We almost bought diapers the other day, but at the last minute we choked. As for the big-ticket items, well, it turns out that Korea had another trick up its sleeve for us. We have now spent three straight weekends shopping, and STILL haven't found a single crib for sale. Or a decent stroller for under $1000. Or for that matter, a Baby Bj*orn or a onesie. If I don't find where these items are kept, I may be forced to draw the conclusions that Korean parents keep their babies at home and naked until they can walk. Surely there must be another explanation, something that involves mandatory cosleeping, a preference for separate pants and little tops, and a belief that strollers are foreign luxury items, rather than basic necessities. Still, it's pretty alarming. We can always buy the Bj*orn on line, and we plan to visit the US while I'm on maternity leave, so we can wait and buy the stroller then. The crib issue is a more vexing problem, though. While I love the idea of cosleeping, the reality is that both Mystery and I are terrible flailers. We regularly whack each other upside the head in our sleep. Somehow I just don't think this is the ideal sleeping environment for a newborn.

A newborn. Holy cow. If everything goes well (please let it go well!) Eggbert will be a newborn in only three months.

News from the world

2007-08-11T14:22:00.000-07:00

M-B was induced yesterday, three weeks early, after a very difficult pregnancy. Please go visit and wish her luck with the delivery and with her new baby SON.

Things that end in -emia

2007-08-10T22:18:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

I would have posted more in the last week, but honestly, I've been too damn tired. Ever since I got back to Korea, my energy has been ebbing dramatically from day to day until as of Monday, I could barely crawl out of bed. I was just starting to think "this is not normal" when an email from my doctor arrived, informing me that I got an F- on my last hemoglobin test, and tanked the glucose tolerance test too. No, I don't have gestational diabetes, it seem to be rather the opposite. My blood sugar wasn't too high, but rather too low. After extensive consultation with Dr. Google, I came to the conclusion that this probably just means that I need to eat more often, and avoid sugary foods. My doctor, though, had different ideas, and made me repeat the glucose tolerance test. Have I mentioned that the syrup that they made me drink is unspeakably vile? Well, if not, it is, and it didn't get any better the second time. Luckily, I managed to register as alive the second time through, so I managed to skate with a heavy-duty iron supplement (for the anemia), and advice to eat more often (for the hypoglycemia). After only two days of iron, I'm already feeling better, so hopefully I'll be back to something approximating normal soon (well, whatever version of normal has a belly the size of Texas, anyway).

In other news, my belly button is KILLING me. Seriously. I had never imagined that a belly button could be so painful before, but mine is incredibly sore. Is this a normal part of the process whereby an "innie" becomes an "outie"?

25w3d

2007-08-03T04:22:00.001-07:00

I can't believe that I'm almost at the six-month point. I never thought I'd get here. I've had six months to get used to the idea, but I'm still sometimes astonished when I look down and see my belly. Then I think "where are my feet? I thought I had feet?"

The lovely M-B asked if I knew the sex. The answer is no. My doctor(s) know the sex, but I have asked them not to tell me. Why? I can think of a few different answers, but I really don't know which one is the true motivation. It seems to change from day to day. Really the bottom line is that waiting to find out feels right for me and Mystery. If it stops feeling right, then we'll call the doctor and find out.

Reasons, in no particular order:

-To keep from getting flooded with pink or blue gifts (yes, I do realize that this means that we'll get green and yellow instead...)

-To keep from projecting a personality onto Eggbert before we even meet. Let's face it, some girls hate pink, and some boys love dolls, but it can be very difficult not to project one's own expectations about sex/gender-appropriate behavior onto a child. De-emphasizing the sex in our own minds at this point is one way for us to practice being open-minded about the little person that we hope to welcome in November.

-To avoid disappointment, part I. I don't think that either of us has a strong preference, but that may just be denial speaking. I can't imagine feeling anything but joy on the actual birth day, whereas finding out now, before we have an actual baby to hold, opens us up to the possibility of disappointment.

-To avoid disappointment, part II. Right now, I am very much enjoying both boy fantasies and girl fantasies. Since I don't know Eggbert's sex, the world is my oyster. I can dream about whatever I want. I think that finding out now would expose me to a sense of loss, since it would render half of my fantasies infeasible. At least on the birthday, I'll have a baby to console me.

-To do at least one thing the "old-fashioned" way. Given the years of infertility, the multiple interventions, the high-tech conception, and the intensive monitoring associated with this pregnancy, I'm enjoying the fact that there is still a little mystery left in the process.

I totally get why other people want to find out. I always thought I'd want to find out too. I can see a huge number of arguments for finding out. In the end, though, it doesn't make any difference to the baby, so there's not any "right" or "wrong" thing to do. For us, this decision feels good, and in the end, this decision IS all about what we want. So why did you decide to find out or not?