White flag

Thoughts about starting IVF

Tonight’s post is in fragments, composed of journal entries and phone notes from the past few weeks.

Photo by Oliver Sjöström on Unsplash

The end of summer brings with it many things, and this year it has brought heat, big feelings, and an expanded vocabulary of medical terms. Which is to say, I’ve officially started medication for IVF. 

I have many feelings about this, and my thoughts often feel like fireflies: electric, flittering about, going bright and dark at random. I mostly feel energized to finally be doing something after three years (three years!) of trying and failing to conceive. Of course, there is the fear too. What if it doesn’t work? What if we go through all of this to only end up in the same place we are now? I never imagined we would end up at this point, I never envisioned a notepad on my desk scribbled with big financial numbers and clinical terms: embryo, blastocyst, PGT testing. Hovering is the best word I can muster. I am hovering over my body and a box of syringes, feeling defeated and elated, exhausted yet awake. I just want whatever comes next. I am ready to move forward.

If I’ve discovered anything in the past few weeks it’s that life is funny in how it changes us drastically. We think we know who we are until we don’t. Circumstances force us into shapes we never imagined. Everything is an illusion, then clarity. Colors turn grey then vibrant again. I swim in the lake and my body feels shocked by the cold, then wrapped in it. The droplets that moments earlier felt sharp and piercing are suddenly soft on my skin. I realize everything is only perception. We become stronger, more calloused and scarred. Yet joy finds us through the cracks. Joy finds us in the prospect of getting to keep living. 

Infertility has changed me. It’s changed my writing, my marriage, my body and my face. It’s changed the way I will someday be a mother. God how I wish for that statement to be true. I took it for granted for so long, believing I could have whatever I wanted when I wanted it if I just put my efforts in the right place. If this journey leaves me with one lesson, it’s to never take anything for granted again.

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A recent dream: A white flag waves in the storm with a wooden pole buried deep in rock and sand, immobile and steady. I’m not ready for this fight, and yet every step has led me to this space, prepared me—prepared us—to surrender control and also to regain it within this surrender. Perhaps my body has always known it would venture through this door. Perhaps we are all just walking towards whichever door swings open, to whichever direction the white flags blow.

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If I can be honest, I don’t like writing about this. I find myself cringing at my own words, yet they crawl their way out without permission, force-feed themselves with empty pages. Writing about infertility is like swallowing air after minutes of holding one’s breath. I guess writing about anything painful and meaningful feels that way. It’s how we sort through the mess, the senselessness of it all. 

Maybe that’s what writing is. Rather than polished and linear, it’s simply words that spiral inward and lead us home. Back to our hearts. Back to the rhythm we can hear and feel to remind us that we are still alive and breathing. We are still here despite the world feeling so complicated, so beautiful, so heavy. 

My therapist says I’ve lost myself to this diagnosis, in this quest to have a baby. Who was I before moving to Los Angeles, before the supplements and acupuncture and pee stains from dried tests on the bathroom counter? These are the questions I attempt to answer on the fifth floor of an old office building. She’s not wrong. 

Here is what I know: Life is bigger than this. I want to know how to zoom out and see that there is so much more happening in and around me, outside of me, outside of the four-block radius I wander in the heat. Yet this process begs for surrender, as so many moments in our lives do. IVF is not unique in this way. Sometimes these things become your everything. They have to. You become it.

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I recently had dinner with a friend who is also going through IVF. This is the thing about painful journeys—you have to find the other people walking the same path as you. They are beacons and hands to hold while wandering in the dark. They are also the ones you get drunk with in dimly lit bars, crying and laughing over your shared circumstances, silently screaming in the void together.

This is my life, and I don’t want to miss any of it, she said.

I’ve been mulling over her words every day since, in the quiet moments when the sun hits my hardwood floors, when my dog curls up at my feet.

With infertility—with anything really—we want to skip to the end. For me, I want the positive test. The noticeable bump. To see my husband hold our baby. I want to miss this moment because it’s painful and scary. I want to fast forward to some arbitrary life I may or may not have in the coming months or years.

And yet this is the life I ended up with. How perfect and beautiful and painful it can be, and all at once. Every night I walk my neighborhood streets and hear dishes clattering, birds singing a farewell song, cars in the distance driving home to friends and lovers and safe spaces with sweats and netflix.

It’s the small moments, the ones that happen in between, that make up the majority of our lives. We can miss them, or we can notice them. We can avoid them, or we can embrace them. Whether we like them or not. Whether we want this hand we were dealt or not. We get to choose how we feel. We get to choose to feel anything at all.

And so. We started IVF this week. I don’t know if it will end in a baby or how long it will take us to become parents. I do know that I want to be present for all of it, for the waiting rooms and daily injections and held breaths between appointments. For the shots and the supplements and the online portals with results that lead to hope and heartbreak. I don’t want to miss it. 

Because this is my life. I don’t want to miss it.