It’s funny to be a 35-year-old childless person and have, say, the guy at the grocery store just assume and wish you a Happy Mother’s Day. Even though we’re still working on it and aren’t quite there yet, I accepted the Mother’s Day wish, picked up a bag of mini chocolate chips, and proceeded to enjoy the day. It was a busy-ish day at the end of a busy-ish weekend but, I must say, if you’re going to stay busy, you may as well fill your time with incredible music, friends, champagne, dessert, state parks, family, and good homecooked meals. Can’t complain about any of it, and I hope you had a wonderful Mother’s Day too! Here’s to NEXT year!

By this time, halfway into our vacation, M had been bleeding a couple of days. We had a feeling the bleeding was a miscarriage. On the way back to where we were staying, we picked up a pregnancy test to be sure. About two and a half weeks after the positive test – through the sore breasts, the increased urination, the crying-over-nothing, the vivid dreams, even the need to stand away from me because the glass of wine I was holding smelled absolutely foul – this HPT that came after Mount Constitution was negative.

Even now, nearly a week later, it’s hard to wrap my head around it. We’ve done everything right. Exercise and diet, herbal supplements and tea, acupuncture, hormone injections, hormone pills, tracking every cycle. We’ve inseminated nine times at the clinic and twice at home. We’ve waited patiently through two week spurt after two week spurt for over a year now. We’ve had a chemical pregnancy that ended in the longest, most protracted and bizarre, uncomfortable and frustrating period (or whatever that was) over Christmas, of all times.

Just hours before the bleeding started this time, we had breakfast with friends who were so eager to learn about the fertility journey that we went ahead and told them she was pregnant. “There’s no reason to believe what happened last time will happen again,” they said. We’d agreed. But, then…

Frustration doesn’t cover it. Sadness is even inadequate.

People don’t talk about miscarriage. Either because they don’t know what to say or because it’s an indelicate matter. Or because so many women who miscarry go on to carry perfectly healthy pregnancies to term, and then there are children to focus on and who wants to spend time talking about how hard it was to get them there? The child is here in the world, and by the way, smearing poo on the wall.

I know the poo-smearing will soon become a very real, pungent reality for us. I believe it will because we aren’t swayed by disappointment and we’re healthy people, and we have two uteruses to work with, at the very least. But right now, this is what’s real. Right now, we have to adjust and run tests and talk to doctors and make choices about things.

It’s easy to feel disappointed and discouraged, to get frustrated about the frustration itself. To wonder why your body is doing this, when you’ll be able to return to normal. But then there’s the looming fact of things – that having children is a different kind of normal than anyone’s ever used to. Making the conscious decision to deliberately attempt to have children is a different kind of normal altogether. It’s the decision to turn off a road you’ve been on. You turn away from the fast lane and veer toward Candyland and Mother Goose’s shoe. (Or was it Old Mother Hubbard in the shoe? Or, shouldn’t Old Mother Hubbard have lived in the cupboard?)

Things are different now. We’re now a couple of ladies who have spent a year trying to get M pregnant, through two miscarriages. There are people who can’t relate to that, and others who don’t want to talk about it. We’re ladies who now know intimately the right timing to catch M’s ovulation at the most opportune moment for the fertilization of an egg. Now we just need to become ladies who know enough about her body’s operations to know what hormone she needs more of, in order to support that fertilized egg for months on end.

It’s no fun to have a miscarriage at Christmas, or in the middle of a vacation on the other side of the country, taken in order to attend a friend’s wedding. But both these things have happened and life goes on. Even in the middle of this one, we were able to explore one of the most beautiful islands in the country, visit friends and see some great live music. We had the chance to drive to the top of a mountain on a beautiful day, and see for miles.

As you may be able to tell, I’m trying to look at this in new and different ways. If I look at this whole process too closely, it’s just an island we’re on, separated from so much of the rest of the world, in a strange place, alone. But if you drive to the top of the mountain – too high to hear all the things your senses want to tell you – it’s easy to see the world, in every direction, and we are not the only ones, after all.

Welcome to the new face of GnomeAndFairy.com. The time came to renew our domain, and we opted for switching things up a little bit. We hope this new look will make it more fun to visit the site and easier to find things. You’ll notice the new nav on the right hand column, where you can self-select your way to whatever you love most about this site – recipes, limericks, tales from our fertility journey (which is ongoing, by the way, and you’ll see an update on that tomorrow). In the meantime, poke around and get a load of the new look. 

We went to a circus of cats!
(Also chickens, and groundhogs, and rats.)
They all worked for food.
It was surprisingly good.
I never saw anything more awesome than that!

Okay, the Grand Canyon might trump the Cat Circus, but…only maybe. These cats were amazing, and I particularly loved Gregory Peck, the tambourine-playing chicken. Since our mission this IUI cycle has been humor, this cat show seemed like a no-brainer. What an awesome way to cap a really outstanding weekend (visitors, friends, happenings, and plenty of ice cream). We’d definitely recommend the Acro-Cats Circus when it rolls into your town in its amazing cat bus.

Years of practice and lessons, however, taught me the importance of study, and I eventually realized there was more to getting the music out than simply waiting. Then again, there was something to that preschool logic…I did need to wait til I was older and had developed the dexterity and intellectual understanding of music as a language, before I could communicate what was in my head. You could have tried to explain that to me, but I still would have seen it all as a big wait. I’ve had trouble with anticipation ever since those first piano lessons.

Nineteen years later, I found myself in a bathroom in Portland, Ore., having a discussion I very much wanted to…someday, in the future, well beyond that actual moment. It was the first time someone I was dating suggested we start a family together. Not in a “someday” sense, but rather “let’s do this now, while we’re young and have energy”. Luckily one of the other most persistent characters in my life story kicked in and I actually chose to wait. (Indeed, next to Legendary Impatience, my Gut has driven many a tale.) The fact that Gut managed to supersede Lengendary Impatience was quite a feat. I’ve never forgotten that moment. It’s one for which I’m quite grateful.

Needless to say, that relationship didn’t last. It turned out we were too young and full of energy to grow together rather than apart. In two more relationships after that, I would be the one doing the asking; being met with decisive declarations of “no” or “later” or, simply, laughter. Until both Legendary Impatience and Gut conspired to land me in Asheville, NC, across the table from a stunning young doctor. The rest is history.

It helps to look back over things like this, to understand the way puzzle pieces fit together, as I try again to surmount Legendary Impatience and head it off at the pass. Earlier in this process, I told myself perhaps the point of the struggle of all this getting-pregnant stuff would be to slay my nemesis Impatience once and for all.

There’s a theory that we regress when faced with undesirable beliefs we carry around, about ourselves. For example, according to this theory, you might say I developed the undesirable belief of impatience when I was about four years old. Since I was incapable of surmounting it at that age, it became a habit in my life. Now, when I feel impatient, I regress to a four-year-old brain and feel inclined to grimace and call Patience a “dumb-dumb fart-face doody-head” for keeping me from slickly gliding through life snag-free.

Indeed, the requirement of patience comes up in so many facets of life, whether waiting for a delayed flight or waiting for conception to work, then waiting the nine months until birth. Et cetera. Through the years, I’ve employed all kinds of tactics to cram myself into the role of Patient Kim. When I discovered the Tao, I tried simply waiting and looking around me, soaking in the quiet and stillness, in all its transitory peacefulness. If only I could appreciate the meantime, the thing I was waiting for would be that much more fantastic.

Nope.

I decided to read all the Pulitzer prize-winning novels for a while, trusting that these impressive literary accomplishments, if I kept one on me at all times, would not only keep me sated when I had to wait for something, but would implicitly instruct me on the most artful, nuanced ways to tell stories. Busying myself with reading would make me a better writer. I would kill two birds with one stone.

Turned out I have no hate for birds and no interest in killing any with stones. Besides, only some of the Pulitzer novels are truly that addictive. Many of them are so artfully written, they’re a chore to get through unless you have an entire attention span to pay.

I got first an iPod and then an iPhone, tried my hand at being more interested in technology than the world around me. I was more interested than I thought I’d be, but the world is still far more attractive.

I challenged myself to strike up conversations with strangers and egg them on even when what they were saying was boring, because people are always interesting, right? No! No, not right. Some people are just not interesting.

And so Legendary Impatience reigns. It turns out being patient doesn’t get you any closer to what you’re waiting for than does impatience. Time still ticks away at the same rate, and patience is just as painstaking and problematic as is its devilish counterpart. Besides, is it really so bad to be the kind of person who is simply so excited about eventualities? I’ve learned to at least contain my impatience so I don’t look like that Kristen Wiig character who is always so impatient and excited about what’s to come.

It’s been more than a year since we first visited the Impregnators. One hysteroscopy (NOT a hysterectomy), one miscarriage/”chemical pregnancy”, and nine IUIs later, we’re still waiting. Sure, there’s more to the wait than “simply waiting.” M assures me I’m doing quite a bit to move things along – making calls, signing things, feeding her fertility tea and prenatal vitamins – but it’s all still waiting. The only thing I can say for myself at this point is, when all these IUIs finally work, I’ll know I can wait until the day the baby comes…because I’ve already waited these nine months without absolutely bursting. That has to be worth something, right?

Now seems as good a time as any to get this blog up and running again. We’re still trucking on the fertility journey, having passed the big one-year mark since starting our relationship with the Impregnators. (We haven’t quite made it to 12 IUIs yet, and we’re hoping that doesn’t become necessary. You’ll remember there was the hysteroscopy – not a hysterectomy – and a couple other blips and stutters along the way so far.) In other news, this week, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments about DOMA and Prop 8. Everyone else seems to be talking about it on every other blog. Made sense to bring it up here. Other things going on this week – Easter! If we can keep the blogfires burning throughout the week, I’ll be back here next Monday with a limerick about egg hunts and peeps. 

It’s been two years since we started dating and it feels like way longer at the same time as feeling like it couldn’t possibly have been that long. All in the best possible ways. So, to get a little rest and relaxation, we’re packing President Margaret Wagpants in the car and heading out to the beach. We had originally planned to go to Puerto Rico to celebrate, but you can’t take a dog there very easily, and Maggie is part of the travel plans now. So, look for photos and other updates from the beach this week.

We gathered at a friend’s house last night and watched the entire Oscars telecast. It was long, whoa boy. I’m still tired and will probably be recovering all day. We were both surprised Beasts of the Southern Wild took home absolutely nothing, but happy to see Life of Pi walk off with all the awards for, basically, beautiful things. I have no clue who Seth MacFarlane is, and felt like perhaps that was my entry into being an old person who’s out of touch with pop culture? I don’t know. Regardless, I thought his making fun of the nine-year-old girl was a little ridiculous (why does a grown man need to make fun of a child in front of the whole world, for a laugh?). Captain Kirk was right. Amy and Tina should have hosted. They should host everything. Maybe next year.

By the way, in case you fear we’ve stepped off-topic a bit here, for a while, fear not. We’re still trying to get pregnant. Promise.