Good To Bad To Worse

Today started out normal enough. I got up and fixed the little one some cereal, checked Facebook and emails, checked my business page...the usual. Then I started thinking about this summer and going to the beach. We didn't get to go last year, so we decided that we really wanted to try to go this year. We have some money saved up and I talked to my sister in law about going with us, so that we would have help keeping an eye on our rambunctious two year old. I had a few minutes before I needed to start fixing food so it would be ready when my hubby got up, so I pulled up the website of our favorite place to stay at the beach. Wouldn't you know it? I found the exact room we wanted for the exact dates we wanted (Mustang Week) for about three hundred dollars less than what it was the last time we checked. I saved the page and had a little extra pep in my step now that I could almost taste the salt air.

Fast forward an hour and we have eaten a pretty awesome meal of kielbasa with banana peppers, blueberry pancakes and eggs. I had told him about the reservation I found and he agreed that I could go ahead and book it. The cancellation policy got me some brownie points since we could cancel at least a week before we got there and only lose thirty four dollars of our deposit. There have been talks of a lay off at his company for months, but in the oilfield there is ALWAYS talks of a lay off. This new round of lay off talk had us in a discussion about whether or not we should take our camper home. My vote was that we should take it home because we would save a lot of money. He had changed his vote to leaving it so that we weren't pulling it as much and our daughter and I could still come to work with him. Well...my vote won, but not because he saw the light or anything like that. I happened to sit down at the table and see that he had gotten an email. I almost just trashed it because it didn't look like anything interesting, but opened it anyway and got a lovely surprise. It was an email from his company stating that sometime between March 1 and March 14 he would be laid off permanently.

Within just a couple of hours my day went from one extreme to the other. Now we are trying to think of what job he could possibly do. The only thing he knows and the only thing he is trained for is the mines and rigs. In case nobody noticed, the oilfield is crashing hard and coal is basically non-existent in southern West Virginia now. I know we will figure something out because we always do, but it's just so frustrating. The little town we live in is almost dead. It's so sad to see our whole county and many around us slowly dying. It affects everyone in every job. The people that lose their jobs are having to move out of state to find new jobs just to feed their families. Those people moving means there isn't anyone to spend money at the gas stations, grocery stores, hair dressers, etc. These families have been in these little towns for generations. Some of them, like my family, have been there since these towns were founded. It's more than just a home or just a place to live and they are being forced to leave. I really don't know what everyone is supposed to do and my heart breaks for them, for us and for my daughter.

By this time I should have already had the camper packed up and cleaned so we can head home tomorrow, but I've spent all evening job searching on the internet and talking to some people that may be of help. At this rate I'm going to be up all night trying to get everything situated to leave in the morning. It would be easier if we could take the camper with us tomorrow, but the snow still hasn't melted off from the blizzard. We will have to come back for it in a few days when the rest of it should be melted. If it's not moved by Monday we'll have to pay rent for the lot it's on again.

To top the day off, I just found out that a beloved family member passed away today too. Seems like everything gets you at once. I don't do this very often, but please keep my family in your thoughts. *Baby Dust*

Life After Infertility?

I don't know that I believe in such a thing as "life after infertility". There is no cure for infertility. It never goes away. It's always there, lurking in the background. Even if you make the decision to stop trying for a baby or if for whatever reason you have a hysterectomy or even if you have a baby, it doesn't make you any less of an infertile. It doesn't change everything that you've been through. No, it's not life after infertility. It's coping with life after infertility. It's that moment when you realize that this disease has taken over every aspect of your life and you have no idea where to go from there. Do you keep trying? Do you stop? Do you take more drastic measures? Do you sign up for that new trial? There are so many directions and so much information that it gets completely overwhelming and all you really want to do is get your life back to some kind of normal. Some people are better at coping than others. Some people never reach that point and they walk aimlessly through this journey completely lost.

I had my moment. My moment where I made the decision that this isn't going to control me anymore. I have always considered myself to be very strong, to make the tough calls when others wouldn't. I lost that part of myself with infertility and my other medical problems. I let them decide how I lived my life. It's time that changed. I'm taking my life back and living the way I want to. My moment came a couple weeks ago. It was pretty late and my hubby and daughter had already gone to bed. I went to the cabinet where I keep all of my meds from the last injectable cycle we were going to do. I laid everything out on the table and just stared for at them for a while. All of those meds and all of those needles and I just kept asking myself, "Am I ready to go back to all of this?". The answer is no, I'm not. Not right now anyway. At some point, if it comes to that, we will go back and try that all over again. Right now isn't that time and that's when it clicked. We get so tied up in timing when we are intimate and charting and temping and medications...every second of our life is carefully planned out. We become a slave. I'm not ready to go back to that. I want to live. I want to have some peace and not be constantly worried about every single little thing. Emotionally, the way we treat ourselves when we start that infertility journey is honestly probably not healthy. I think everyone needs to take a break from being a slave to infertility at some point. You need time to regroup, rekindle the romance in your relationship, let the stress go and just live.

To keep myself busy I have my daughter, my pets, my hubby and work. This little girl for sure keeps me on my toes at all times and is most definitely a full time job. A lot of the time that would normally be filled with thinking about my problems is now filled with her and I am so thankful for that. I know not all of you have that kind of distraction, so you need to find something that you are passionate about. Do you like to paint? Are you a writer? Have you always wanted to take a class? Love video games? Now is the time to put that to use. Fill your time with what you love to do. You will be amazed at how much weight is lifted when you actually go back to doing the things you love, instead of planning out every minute of your day.

I am very lucky to be a stay at home mom. My hubby works his butt off so that I can be the one to be home with our daughter. However, there are times when she visits other people or when she is asleep and those times let my mind start to wonder. The old worry starts to creep back. How do I cope with that? I became a work at home mom. I found a company and product that I am passionate about and that I love. I sell Pink Zebra. Working from home gives me a sense of purpose. I love staying home, but I have always felt that I needed to contribute to the finances in some way. PZ lets me do both, which eases my mind at a time when layoffs in the oilfield are at an all time high. We never know how long my hubby will have his job, but we now have plenty saved up if something does happen. I really love what I do, so I can also throw myself into my work whenever I need a distraction.

Do me a favor...find something that you are passionate about and start donating your free time to that activity as much as possible. Give yourself a break, you deserve it. Lots of baby dust to all of those ttc.

And The Cycle Continues...

Well, here we are a little over a year since my last post and not much has changed. My cycles are still even more irregular now than they were before I had our little girl. You would think I would have come up with some type of coping mechanism for dealing with the uncertainty every month, but I still haven't. I still allow myself to go buy pregnancy tests and be disappointed several times a month. I started back on the Pregnitude. It did such an amazing job of regulating my cycles before I got pregnant that I decided to give it another shot. I really hope it wasn't just some fluke and that it makes things even out again. I still get those really weird muscle twitches that feels like a baby kicking. After some research it seems that many people that have been pregnant still feel what I call phantom kicks, even years after giving birth. We still haven't had any luck getting pregnant. Our baby just turned two in December and I haven't been pregnant once. I am thankful that there haven't been anymore miscarriages, but disheartened that it seems my baby journey may have ended. When we were trying to get pregnant before I got pregnant at least every other year.

Every time I look at our little girl my heart breaks for her. Not knowing the joy of growing up with siblings. Not knowing what it's like to have someone that always has your back at the times when your parents can't. I hate the thought of her being alone if something happened to me and my husband. Sure, she has other family and I'm sure that they would keep in touch. It's just an entirely different kind of bond you have with a sibling and I feel like a failure for not being able to give that to her. Before we had her I felt like I was failing my husband and now that she is here, I feel like I am failing her. Don't get me wrong, I know it's not my fault. However, it is MY body that can't preform a basic natural function.

I suppose at some point we will go back to our reproductive endocrinologist. The time just doesn't feel right yet. I don't look forward to the feeling of being a lab rat. The poking, prodding, procedures and medication...I just don't think that I am emotionally ready for all of that again. A big piece of me wants to just throw in the towel, wave the white flag and get a hysterectomy. Just be done with all of it and all the emotional and physical trauma that goes along with it, but I can't. I'm not a quitter. I know I would regret it if I did that. As long as I have all the essential parts, there is hope. I just can't find it in myself to dash that little bit of hope away.

As for our little girl, she just celebrated her second birthday. She has my blue eyes and unruly curly blonde hair. She has her daddy's temper and because we are both stubborn, she can be hard to handle. I wouldn't have expected anything less coming from the two of us. She will be a fighter and she will be strong. I have no worries about the life that she will make for herself. She is laying in the floor at my feet sleeping as I type this, wore herself out throwing a temper tantrum.

At this point, my blog will become more of a journey through my everyday life and not only about my infertility. My life is so much more than that and I refuse to let infertility define me anymore.

For any of you reading this that are currently ttc, lots of Baby Dust!