There are moments when things feel ok.  That feeling of peace is still elusive, but I can mostly continue to do things as we’ve always done.  I have to because of TK and that is a comfort.  Not only a comfort to have him but also a comfort to have a reason not to let the heartache take over.

Then, there are the moments of heartache.  Little moments really but filled with huge emotion.  Moments of grief coming to the surface.  There is sadness, denial and, most recently, anger.

Mostly, it’s anger directed at my body but there is a lot of anger at infertility itself.  Anger I thought I had put behind me.  Anger that I thought had been alleviated by TK’s birth.  There had been many times since we began the quest for a sibling that other bloggers, also cycling for #2, have expressed this anger.  And while I understood it.  I didn’t feel it.  Even after our failed FETs, there was not this anger that I feel now.  I think it is what’s keeping me from peace and closure.

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A couple of nights ago, I went in to check on TK before heading to bed myself.  I do this most nights but usually it’s a quick in and out with maybe an adjustment of one or two toys he takes with him to bed.  This night I was in his room for a much longer time.  I sat in the rocker I used to sit in those early newborn days when he needed almost constant holding.  And I watched my son sleep and remembered the grief that followed when I made the decision to use donor egg.  The grief that I would never have a child genetically related to me.  At the time, I knew it was the right path to travel and it would give me the best chance to become a mom.  But I still felt reluctance and resentment that I had to travel down that road.

Sitting in TK’s room that night it occurred to me that I was once again facing the grief of the death of a dream.  I am reluctant and resentful that I have to let the dream of a sibling die, but something beneath all the emotions and tears still calls out that it is the right thing to do.  It is hard to hear, but in TK’s room that night, while his humidifier hummed in the background, I heard it.

This last cycle was supposed to put everything to rest.  One last cycle to have no regrets with ending fertility treatments and coming away from it with one successful live birth.  A last cycle to be able to tell TK in the future, should he ever question why he was an only child, that we did everything we felt we could put ourselves through to give him a sibling.

I was re-reading my posts from my (failed) FETs and realized that by the end of those cycles, I was more at peace with the failures than I feel right now.  I didn’t know why.  I thought about it and thought about it and finally came to the realization that at the end of those FETs I did not have the utter frustration with my body that I feel now.   Maybe it was because I could still remember what carrying TK was like and could remember that my body did something wonderful carrying him to term.  But after this failed fresh cycle, when the embryos were good and my lining was just ehhhh, I feel like I have no one to blame but myself.  My body which had failed so spectacularly before has gone back to doing it again.  With the FETs, it was easier to think that it was the embryos, that they had been frozen and weren’t strong enough to keep going after thaw (and doing the eSETs didn’t help).  But when the success rate for your clinic for a fresh cycle is 80% and you fall on the wrong end of the stats, who else is there to blame but yourself?

And I now find myself back in that old place, that same place before we moved on to DE IVF and we were still trying to get pregnant on our own and with IUIs.  Where I can’t let go of the idea to keep trying.  Back then, it was the idea of trying with my own eggs.  Now, it is the idea to keep trying with another set of eggs maybe even another set of sperm or embryo adoption.

Yet, I also I can’t do this any more.  I need to move on.  I need to stop setting myself up to come back to this place.  I had been in a good place after the failed FETs in terms of coming to terms with what I had and hadn’t gotten out of fertility treatments.  I had come to a good place about raising TK as an only child.  Although I want to have another child (hell, I really want another 2 or 3 children), I don’t want to go through all the crap to try to have more children.  Because there is no guarantee I will ever get all that I want.

I remember reading about looking around the dining room table and asking yourself if there was any one missing and your true answer would tell you if you were truly done having children.  I have been looking at my dinner table a lot these last few days and realized that there will always, ALWAYS be children missing.  I could have 10 kids and I would still miss my child from my miscarriage and my would-be children from the blasts transferred after TK was born.

I know it is time to stop fertility treatments and it’s the right thing to do.  I had a clearer vision of how to do that when we finished our FETs.  And I was in a more forgiving place with what my body could and couldn’t do.  If it weren’t for the fact that this cycle gave us a chance to meet our donor and a chance for continued contact with her, I would almost regret having gone through it.

I came to a certain peace with my infertility at the end of our FETs.  I feel no such peace right now.  I want that peace again.