Pardon the emotional mess

The other day I freaked the fuck out over some numbers.  Allow me to explain.

I have always been a perfectionist, by which I mean I didn’t want to do anything if I could not do it well.  I never had the ambition to be the best, but I wanted to be well above average.  And if I couldn’t be, then I gave it up.

Fortunately, I naturally excelled at many things without trying very hard, including schoolwork and music (but not including sports).  I took all kinds of lessons as a kid, but I always hated to practice.  I got good grades, even though I didn’t study.  One of my older sisters taught dance lessons in our family room, and I was one of her students.  But if I didn’t like that particular class or was having a hard time learning a new step, I simply ran upstairs to my room.  Mid-lesson.  I may have been a bit of a spoiled brat.

I often wonder, if I really had tried when things got difficult, how much better would I be?  As a person.

Well, I just had my first big test.  And while I didn’t fail, I didn’t ace it, either.  One chart I found, courtesy of Dr. Google, put me within a few points of the 10th percentile for my age on my AMH.  I’ve never scored that low on a test in my life.

This round of tests knocked me down.  I was feeling pretty shattered that whole day.  At one point, I committed the cardinal sin of infertility, actually saying to Hubby, “Can’t we just adopt?”  (This was partially fueled by the fact that I had seen several white adults with black children in tow–not necessarily adopted children, but it started the wheels turning.  And led to a whole conversation about why we can’t actually “just adopt,” at least, not until he has a job and we’re settled somewhere.)  But at this point, my need for a child is so great, so all-consuming, that I don’t care how s/he gets here.

So I got back up.  I am admittedly impatient, but becoming a mother and making Hubby a father may be the only difficult thing I’ve wanted badly enough that I’m willing to do the hard work to make it happen.  That likely includes IVF.  I’ve always known we were destined for it, but somehow looking at those numbers shot a hole in any hope I may have had that we could do it any other way.  I know now that there’s no reason to be so defeatist about it.  That it’s just a number and actually, in the whole scheme of things, probably means very little.  But it was like a grade on my fertility, and I didn’t like seeing that it was below average, something I’ve tried my whole life to avoid.

Still, I know that time is not on our side.  Before we had started Hubby’s treatments, and even now that (I hope) we’re making progress, my mantra has been “one of these days.”  One of these days we’ll start treatments.  One of these days we’ll have some sperm.  One of these days I’ll get myself checked out.  (Look how well that went.)  One of these days we’ll be able to do IVF.  It seems we’re already running out of days.

A couple things about this video: 1) You may have heard the song about a gazillion times by now, and 2) How many other people connected it to infertility?  Come on, who’s playing along?  (Warning: there are a couple of children at the beginning of this video, but just for a moment, I promise.  The rest is a lot of thrashing around and Dave Grohl whipping his hair a lot, so it kind of rocks.)