Just Keep Swimming A wife trying to keep a positive outlook on male-factor infertility

I had a pretty tough day with the baby today.  He cried. all. day.  He only wanted to be held in one position, and wanted to be walked.  If I even sat down, being careful to keep bouncing him, in the same position, he shrieked!  So I spent the day walking laps around the house, shifting from arm to arm.  I ate my dinner standing at the kitchen bar – I had to cut all my chicken first with one hand, and then I eventually had to eat left-handed because my left arm couldn’t hold my 12lb son any longer.  My back is killing me, and my neck needs to be popped.  When he finally went to sleep, my ears rang for five minutes while they got used to the silence.  I’m exhausted and frustrated.  I knew that parenthood was going to be hard, but this is REALLY HARD!

During the year that Bobby and I spent trying to have a baby and then going through IVF and TESE, I bristled every time I heard a person comment that once you have a baby, your life is over.  ‘How could you be so selfish??’ I thought to myself.  A baby is a gift from god, and you’re a bad person if you don’t sacrifice your personal comforts and hobbies for the life of a child!  I thought to myself, my life isn’t so great right now, and I would give anything for this part of it to be over and to start again with something new.  Your life doesn’t end when you have a baby – that’s when it really begins!! I self-righteously thought all these things to myself. But it turns out… it’s not always easy to be so selfless.

I’m ashamed to admit that there are moments with Evan that I think, I want my life back.  Days like today, when he doesn’t stop crying no matter what I do, and the only way to keep him from full on screaming is to sacrifice my body and my time by endlessly walking circles around my house.  I never in a million years thought that I would feel that way, even for an instant.  Struggling with infertility makes you assume that, once you become the parent that you have longed to be, the whole experience will be one big shower of appreciation and love for the baby that you finally have.  Don’t get me wrong, I spend a huge chunk of my time being thankful for my son and not being able to stop looking at his sweet little face.  When he smiles, I just lose it with happiness.  But there are moments when I pause and realize how much I’ve given up, and the veil of mommy love fades and I think… this really sucks.

I mean, really.  I’ve still got 15lbs of baby weight stuck to my arms, back, and tummy.  That’s right folks, this trim 5’3″ size 4 girl now has back fat.  I’ve got deep purple stretch marks covering my abdomen that look like a bad case of road rash.  I thought about naming them, for fun, but there are actually too many.  I have no idea how, but I even have stretch marks on my bum.  My tummy flops out over my jeans WHEN I can even button them, but usually I still have to wear my belly band or my maternity pants, which then makes me still look three months pregnant.  My breasts are huge and floppy and covered with more stretch marks – I went from a 34A to a 36 D!  I’ve gone up half a shoe size and a full ring size, which means I have to buy all new shoes and get my wedding ring rebanded. (Ok, maybe the new shoes part isn’t so bad.)  And after delivering that little guy vaginally, things are all stretched out down there, and my husband is trying to put it nicely when he says it feels different.  I feel embarrassed to be naked in front of him.  My body will never be the same, and I hate that.  I look in the mirror and I miss the way I used to look.

My whole day revolves around trying to keep him from crying and waking up Bobby, who works nights in case you forgot.  Three times in the past week, I have had to get out of the shower without finishing and then carry the baby out of our room and around the house, dripping wet and buck naked.  Some days, I just don’t even bother trying to shower.  I’ve learned to do pretty much everything one handed except pump breastmilk, which is a huge struggle when he wants to be held and bounced and keeps spitting out his pacifier.  I really, really, really miss lying in bed in the morning.  Also, it takes me an entire week to accomplish the chores that used to take me just a few hours on a Saturday afternoon.  I often have to stretch chores out over a span of several days – it takes me on average 3 days to complete any task, from doing a single load of laundry to vacuuming the house.  And I’m SO tired of constantly being covered in spit up – not just the milky drool kind, but the curdled kind that comes from deep in his belly and smells like sour milk.

So yeah, there have been lots of moments in the past couple of weeks where I have been painfully aware of how much my life has really changed now that Evan is here.  Moments where I resent how much control I’ve lost over my body, my schedule, and my feelings.  Times when I feel guilty for wanting a break, wishing I could drop him off at a daycare for an afternoon and have a couple of hours to myself, even wishing I could go back to work early so that I could have part of my day that isn’t fully focused on keeping the baby quiet and happy.

But here’s the thing.  I spend all day wishing that I could put Evan down and take a rest or do something from start to finish.  But then at night, when he falls asleep in my arms, I am so overcome by him that I have to force myself to get up and put him in his bed.  I finally get him to sleep and have an hour or two to myself, but instead I get up every ten minutes to check on him.  Bobby wakes up and offers to hold him for me, and I don’t want to let him go.  My parents come to babysit to give us a night out to dinner, and I don’t want to leave.  When he cries for hours on end, I cry with him because I can’t stand the thought of him in pain.  I love this little boy so much that I can’t even put it into words.

How can I feel both things at once?  How can I go from selfless love to selfish needs, back and forth?  All the struggle we went through to get here doesn’t mean that this part isn’t a struggle, too.  The reality is that parenthood is more than just having a baby, decorating a nursery, buying toys, reading books, and sending a child off to school.  It’s also about curdled milk and ringing ears and walking, walking, walking around the house.

The question is, am I willing to keep walking?  And the answer is yes – to the moon and back.

It’s been over a month since my last post, and I apologize to those of you who like to check in on Bobby and me every so often.  A lot has been going on.  So many times over the last two weeks, I’ve thought “gee, I really need to post!” but I just haven’t had the time to focus on it.  Even now, I’m not in much of a writing mood, but the baby’s asleep and it’s only 9:30, so I’ll do my best to fill you in on what’s been going on.

Bobby’s mother died.  It still feels weird to even type that… If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you know that my MIL has never been my favorite person – she is self-centered and demanding, constantly accusing me of stealing her son away from her and spending all our time with my parents instead of her.  Our history with her is too complicated to really get into now, but to give you a brief idea – when we told her about Bobby’s surgery, she didn’t ask a single question or wish us luck or anything.  She only heard that we were going to try and have a baby – it was as if the whole life-altering diagnosis and invasive surgical procedures didn’t even register in comparison to her desire to be a grandmother.  Then she brushed off our $18,000 price tag by claiming that she paid that much out of pocket for her pregnancy with Bobby’s brother… because she had extra sonograms.  Then she didn’t even attend my baby shower, but gave me a tube of lanolin ointment as a gift.

On Christmas Eve this past year, she went into the hospital with severe abdominal pain.  Within two days, she was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer.  She had tumors on her colon, liver, and lungs.  She was also a ridiculous chain smoker, but the doctors didn’t see the point in even determining whether the lung tumors were a different cancer.  She started chemo, had surgery to remove part of her colon but found that the tumors were inoperable, then was readmitted a month later for fluid in her abdomen.  Eventually she couldn’t keep food down any more because tumors were blocking her GI tract, which is when the doctors decided a couple of weeks ago to send her to hospice.  She passed away within a week.

I spent every day with her in the hospice room, watching her die.  I brought the baby to see her every day, but I couldn’t let her hold him because she had MRSA.  The nurses told me I shouldn’t have even brought him in the room at all.  I felt so bad for not letting her touch him.  But of course, typical her – even after we explained to her that she had an infection that could be fatal to the baby, and even called the nurse in to really be the bad guy and forbid it, she still kept insisting on holding him anyway.  Any other grandmother would have put the health of the baby first, but not her.

It was a gruesome experience.  She had wasted away from lack of food until her entire face was sunken and hollow, but her legs were swollen from fluid retention like big balloons.  She was drooling black mucous that she eventually couldn’t lift her arms to suction out for herself, and her skin turned more and more yellow.  She slept with her eyes and mouth wide open, jaw slack so that her chin slid back and rested on the pillow, and she moaned constantly.  It was truly awful.  I had nightmares the entire week that I was with her, but I still felt it was important for her to see the baby every day and so I kept going.  I was keenly aware of the juxtaposition between this new life in my arms, so desperately fought for, and the life slipping away in the bed in front of me.

When she passed, my strong, manly, cop of a husband sobbed.  He had been so stoic the entire time, but when she actually died, he suddenly became just a little boy who lost his mother, and he sobbed into my shoulder.  I’ve never seen him cry like that before.  I imagine it’s how most men react when their mothers die.  A boy’s relationship with his mother is a special thing.  Again, I thought forward to Evan’s life, and I dread the moment when he will sit at the edge of my own bed.  Or when I will sit at the edge of my father’s bed, or Bobby’s bed.  Life is so precious, and so short.  Bobby’s mother was only 59.

The medical research facility that she wanted to her remains donated to informed us that they would not be able to use her body because she also tested positive for Hepatitis C.  There was no record of that diagnosis that we were aware of.  They’ll be sending her cremated remains back to us soon, and Bobby and his brother will be scattering her ashes in the ocean.  Bobby is the executor of her estate, and there are massive legal problems for us to deal with – the biggest being that she lied on her Medicaid application and didn’t disclose over 100,000 in mutual funds in order to qualify for medical assistance.  It’s terrifying for us to be so young and inexperienced, and to be burdened with figuring out how to ethically close her estate.  She also had a roommate that she requested in an unsigned “will” that he be allowed to live in her house until he dies.  Bobby and I have no interest, let alone the means, to take on a second mortgage and deal with managing a property in a city two hours away, but the roommate is aware of her request and might try to legally fight us.  Thankfully one of my best friends is an estate attorney, and he’s going to walk us through all of these issues as best he can.

So there you have it – an incredibly brief account of what’s been keeping us so busy for the last month.  I almost wish I had thought to blog nightly throughout the whole ordeal because there are really a multitude of nuances to this situation that I don’t have the time or patience to recount.

But I’m sure what you really want to know is – how is the baby?? Evan’s growing beautifully.  It’s hard to believe he’s already two months old… he’s 11lbs now and 22″ long.  A short little porker!  But he’s so, so beautiful.  I never get tired of looking into his eyes and seeing his little life shining inside.  Every day, I thank God that he’s here.