Soothing the Mommy Inside

So much of dealing with infertility is about waiting.  We are always waiting for the next thing to do.  Right now I am playing phone tag with my ob-gyn about possibly getting this uterine fibroid removed.  Their office closes at 4 and I am pretty busy at work during the day and when I am not, it is very difficult to find a private enough space in which to make a phone call which would involve me saying the following out loud:  pelvic scan, uterine fibroid, frozen embryo transfer... So I usually have to wait until I get into my car to make these calls before I commute home.  At any rate... waiting.

So what do we do in the meantime?  We live our lives.  I try to think about what I enjoy about my life right now, in case hopefully we are in a pre-parenting stage, like sleeping in, going out on weekends without getting a babysitter, enjoying some wine.  You know, the good things about being a family of two.

What else though?  As a hobby, I enjoy scrap-booking but in recent years have lamented not having my children's photos with which to make pages.  So much of this hobby is devoted to children!!! There just aren't that many photos of DH and I other than holidays and it usually feels kind of boring to scrapbook just us anyway. 

So I came up with my plan B.   I have started working on an album of my husband's baby days and childhood.  It is my first digital album which is also pretty exciting to me.  I have a handful of photos and slides of him that I knew I wanted to organize and digitally preserve, so now I have started creating these cute baby pages, birthday pages, bathtub and Christmas pages, and so many more.  They really makes me smile.  It is a little weird not knowing things to write or journal about next to the photos that a mother would usually jot down (DH's mother is deceased and I never got to meet her).  I've already had DH go through and share memories that I can use.  But mostly I just  journal from my own point of view and tell him how cute he looks, how he still has the same lips, etc. 

As I work on the album, I dream about our future children and wonder what they will look like at the same time.  Using an egg donor, I feel at a loss as far as what she will contribute to our child's physical features ( I know she looks a little like me as a kid, but who really knows?).  But when I scan my husband's face as a baby, I love knowing my children should at least resemble him to some extent.  And so I look for them there in his face. Working with these photos has been a balm to my spirit.  I get to create baby-pages with cute artwork that I never thought I would get to use. But I also get to imagine our children, imagine being a mother, and what that would feel like.   For the most part, this process has been comforting.  There are times when I certainly don't feel like it and have let weeks and even a few months go by without working on it.  But when I am ready again, I dive into the creative process.

After this one is complete, I think the next step for me might be to work on a baby album of me. And boy do I think that that one would be an even more powerful experience.  My mother made me a wonderful baby album, so the purpose of this one would be a little different... It would be more about the process of healing the grief of saying goodbye to my own little girl inside. Saying goodbye to those genes that don't get passed along.   Sigh!  I don't think I'll be ready for that one for awhile. 

Anyway, I just wonder, what do others in our infertile community do to help soothe the mommy inside of them? 

Detour City

Guess what?  We are still on hold, waiting for someone to do something so that we can proceed from A to B or in our case we are on about S to T!  I went in for my pelvic scan last week finally and my uterine fibroid is a little over 10 centimeters.  Now I am waiting on my ob-gyn to call me back.  I tried to schedule an appt. but the appointment lady would only take a message since they had probably not received the scans yet (I'm calling BS, I know they were probably emailed the very next day!).  Anyway, so after I hear from her we can find out if she wants to have it removed or what?

In the meantime, I decided to take care of some dental work I had postponed in case I had gotten pregnant.  I had had a tooth pulled last November right before my first egg donor cycle (Sucks getting old, I'm telling you!  Talking about having babies and teeth pulled in the same sentence!)  So I went in yesterday to finally get the implant put in so that my dentist later can put a new cap on it.  Not fun, but I like checking off things on my list.

So that is where we are at.  I go to my support group tomorrow night, so it will be nice to see how everyone else is progressing since my own agenda has been put on hold.  Hopefully I will hear and learn something soon.