The Surrender

Thank you to you all for your amazing support and comments, you have been a lifeline to me in a very dark week.

I'm okay and not. I'm getting there and not. We already had plan b (plus plan C and D) in place before the negative was 100%. The plan being that I will go back on my own to Thailand for another FET but not for another 6 months. We need a break, we need to regroup and we definitely need time to heal. The last few months have been tough.

I was reading a lovely website called the Fertile Heart where I saw the questions 'what if The failure of your last IVF was the key That begins to unlock the mystery of your misconceptions? What if spending time with your tender broken heart can balance your hormones and help you heal every other failure that you Have avoided experiencing in your eventful life?' these questions resonated powerfully with me and I have been thinking of them ever since. For starters it has helped me to avoid the spiral of self recrimination and bitterness that normally accompany a cycle failure and that can only be a good thing, right?

Secondly, it has awakened me to a war that I have been fighting for years, a bitter hate filled war of disappointment and loathing. The sad, dismaying truth is that I have been waging a war upon and against my body for most of my life. I say things to myself that I would never say to even my bitterest enemy. I am constantly disappointed and deeply loathe how my body looks, feels and performs. I have tried for years to beat it into submission, to bend it to be what I think it 'should' be. I never give myself any credit for the successes that my body, or even my core self has achieved, not even the fact that I carried and bore the most beautiful and perfect human being imaginable. In my mind, I tell myself that it was luck (and that he was tenacious) and that that any successes that I have had are in spite of myself and my body and not because of it.

I have also realized that this is at complete odds with the persona that I display in all forms of my life. I want everyone to see me as perfect, strong, capable and successful where inside I credit myself with none of those things. Even blogging anonymously hasn't coaxed me into realizing this or publicly admitting it until now.

So I now have a profound feeling of sadness and grief at so many years wasted at odds with that which should be my closest ally. But how to start to align myself back to, well, me? I said 'back to' though off the top of my head, I can't think of a time when this hasn't been the case though surely when I was a child there was no hatred and self recrimination there, right.

I have decided to surrender. I am raising the white flag. I'm declaring peace in my time. What comes next? I'm not really sure but firstly, I'm going to try and be friends, I guess after all, surely all good relationships begin in friendship?