Stripping away the guff….

The journey to a baby can be a rocky one and for some lucky ones, they path to a baby is easy – one of the the biggest worries being ‘should we find out the gender of the baby?’.  Sometimes I envy the people who had an easy run.  I wish I didn’t know how IVF worked in intimate detail or I wish that I could unconcernedly tell everyone about the baby before the wee stick is even dry.  In both of our positive pregnancies, we have told our families of our success straight away basically because they knew that we were going to Thailand.for a cycle.  This time was even harder because people knew our history and when my Dad died, my family told everyone that I was in Thailand and they correctly made the assumption that I was there for a cycle.  It was an uneasy first trimester with so many people knowing about the pregnancy so early.

Sometimes, I am so green with envy of my friends that get pregnant ‘as soon as they look at each other’ that I want to scream.  At a Christmas dinner with my girlfriends, one of my girlfriend’s was telling me about how her husband had been booked in to have a vasectomy (they have 3 kids) but with a week to go, they both just couldn’t face the vasectomy, they didn’t want to close the door on a 4th child.  Despite being pregnant myself, I felt sick with jealousy that they have the simple luxury of this choice.  Our choice to have another child would mean finding another minimum of $25,000 to go to Thailand for a fresh cycle, to put our lives on hold further, to decide whether the risks on mine and the baby are worth it once again.    For me, I would love to have another child, indeed, I had always dreamed of having 4.  Sadly, that dream is just not achievable any more, financially, emotionally or phycially.  I don’t know if I have completely let go of trying for three but there is barely any daylight in the crack in that door (maybe if we won tattslotto).  I think our best course of action is to (hopefully) have another beautiful son, thank God, the universe, the angels, the doctors, nurses, friends, family, commenters, and any of the other hundreds of people involved in bringing our family to us and move on with the business of being an actual family.

At this moment, when all I hope and pray is that my second darling boy will be healthy and in our arms in May, I know something this pregnancy that I only suspected last time.  The worry is worth it, the risk is worth it, the financial strain is worth it, they physical toll is worth it. 

The jealousy goes away.  It can still hurt sometimes but when I got home from the Christmas dinner with my girlfriends and checked on JBB in bed, his angel face melted all jealousy into gratitude.  At the end of the day, all of these petty jealousy’s and wishes for change mean absolutely nothing when you are holding a new born in your arms who is dependent on you for everything in their life.

I know that the journey has been hard (hard seems such a small insignificant word for such a tough time), it has changed me irrevocably but I am proud of who I am.  I am proud of the wife that I am to my husband, the mother that I am to my son, the daughter that I am, the sister that I am and most of all I am proud of the person that I am.  I am not perfect, that’s for damn sure but I wouldn’t be the person that I am today without the journey that we have been on.

For now, despite the worry, I am grateful.  I have felt my darling Boo2 kicking up a storm today and every time it happens, I smile.