However you count it, it’s been a long time.
Today is one of those days I dread months in advance: our now-familiar annual anniversary of when we started trying to do this one simple, basic thing. How could it have been this hard or gone on this long?
I don’t really even know how I feel at this point. It’s still hard and I still hurt, but it’s a different kind of pain than it was in past years. I look back at our one and two year anniversaries and think “wow, that was nothing.” Two years is not that long. When I was in it, it was, but now I realize what an insignificant amount of time that is. You have a different mindset once you reach the two-year mark. I don’t want to minimize anyone’s pain who is still under two years, because it sucks, and I remember vividly, but once you get past that, it’s different.
Three years was tough. But four years is just surreal. I remember being at one and two years and thinking there was no way I could be one of those people still trying at three, four, and beyond. I didn’t see how they could go through so much grief for such a long time.
Of course, I understand now.
There are so many children on my (mostly hidden) facebook feed that were born in those four years. Some people, my younger sister included, even have two. How is that fair?
Of course, the answer is that it isn’t. But of course we all know that life isn’t fair.
The pain used to be sharp and piercing – like getting cut with a knife or hitting your head on the corner of a shelf. Crying your eyes out and feeling intense pain and eventually pulling yourself together and taking some pain meds and going on with life. Now the pain is dulled but deeper; like a chronic ache that you’ve had for years that just won’t go away. A stiffled howling inside that no one else can see or touch. Something that can’t be treated. Something so far beneath the surface that it’s just a part of who you are. Like a piece of yourself is missing. Like some part of you has died.
I am not who I used to be.
I haven’t dealt with these years very well overall. I’m trying to dig myself out of several holes now, but some of them are so deep that I don’t really see a way out.
I honestly thought this would be over by now, one way or another. I can’t believe we’re at 4 years but still at least 2 or – more likely, as I discovered doing some math over the weekend – 3 months away from doing IVF, and we’re willing to try a second round if the first doesn’t work. So we’re facing the possibility of being at or close to 5 years. And then what if I still can’t give up?
Because it’s almost like a drug and I sometimes feel like an addict. “Just one more try, just one last round, then I can stop, I swear, but I just need this thing so badly I can’t give it up.” And we do it again and again, expecting or at least hoping for different results, subjecting ourselves to pain every time. But I can’t let it go just yet.
And so we carry on. Will we see 5 years? Maybe, maybe not. The only thing I can say for sure is that I have no idea what the future will be. I just hope this next year will be kinder than the last four.