Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Thank god it's Christmas

My sister texted me this afternoon to ask why I hadn't posted recently, and I figured that, if it's come to a text from her, I should dig up something.

This morning, I saw my psychiatrist, who wrote me a prescription and asked how the baby thing was going.  She's a birther, so I didn't know how she'd react to my run-in with the Baptists, but she was appropriately indignant (while writing notes in my file, presumably about whether I was delusional in my quest to reproduce unnaturally).  Then she made a weird comment about Hilary Clinton, putting our relationship back on its traditionally ambiguous footing.

A couple hours later, I went to get a haircut with my very sweet stylist, Katie.  (When I got home, Heather said, "Oh.  You got rid of your pretty bangs.")  Katie and I were chatting about strange jobs and giggled about gynecologists.  "You know, I have a friend whose sister is a gynecologist.  She's supposed to be just amazing, but I don't know if it would be weird."  And, because life is like that, the gynecologist/sister is Dr. King.

The bitch of these semi-regular appointments is that, every couple months, I'm reminded that we're no further along in the baby-making than we were the last time I got a trim or a refill.  At all.  The most recent excitement we've had is the arrival of Heather's new insurance card, which means we can finally set up appointments with the fertility clinic that won't treat her and the one that will.  Going to Nashville to see the gay-friendly (gay-tolerating?) clinic sounds like a big step, but there have been so many steps and so many appointments that I can't buy in.  Remember when ICI was thrilling?  I got teary-eyed when Heather picked up our first sperm shipment, for heaven's sake.  There have been six more since then.

After submitting the final forms to the Nashville clinic, I, wearied of both sudoku and the biography of Louisa May Alcott and her dad, scrolled down my Kindle library to open a book about baby-making.  Stupid.  I don't know why I do this shit.  I need to pick up the IVF ball and run with it.  The book is about how couples often choose IVF without exhausting all their options for natural conception-- for example, choosing to see "not yet pregnant" as infertility that must be attacked with chemical/surgical shock & awe.  If, they say, you don't know why you aren't pregnant, you need to find out what the problem is instead of skipping straight to in vitro.  Which is exactly what we're doing.

I was reluctant to mention it to Heather with, as it turned out, good reason, since her face turned stormy as soon as the words were halfway out of my mouth.  No.  We aren't going to wait.  We've waited long enough.  I want to ignore the book, delete it, and take the easy route.  Nothing about IVF will be easy, I'm sure, but I can't help yearning to hand over the reins to someone else.  Let the clinic get her pregnant; we'll pay for the privilege of giving up responsibility.  Fuck, Heather ignored a phone call from the Nashville clinic because she didn't know who they were, so we (I) have to call them back and set something up-- four hours away, during the holiday season.  That alone is irritating to me.  I want somebody else to tell Heather what to do, what to eat, what to give up, and I want them to make it so she has a baby and we can quit with the goddamn every-third-month updates with casual acquaintances about how we're still nowhere.

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