My struggles, reflected in pop culture

I'm reading "The K!te Runn3r." I've loved it since page 1. Some scenes are difficult to read and painful to imagine, but I'm always drawn to books of historical significance. The ones that teach me something real about the world that I otherwise wouldn't have known. In this case it's one more dark angle on the inhumanity and conflict in Afghanistan over the past several decades. The characters in the story are made up, their lives never really happened, so this is, in all respects, a work of fiction. But although I'm usually drawn to non-fiction (because truth is often stranger than fiction and because knowing that a story actually happened makes it 10x more interesting to me), the truth in this book speaks to me in a way that has caused me to embrace the crossover. Middle$ex had the same effect.

I was halfway through the novel when I stumbled upon, not one, not two, but THREE struggles involving infertility or stillbirth. I had had no idea when I picked the book up that IF would be a central focus. Not very many pages are dedicated to the subject, but what is written is key to the storyline. I won't say more because there's nothing I hate more than spoilers, but I was taken with the matter of factness with which these sub-plots arose. Oddly comforted that it was treated as a fact of life, a sad one, but one that doesn't ruin the characters' lives forever. They all go on. Their lives evolve. They grow, they have meaningful existences.

I think this struck me because I'm in a place where I wonder how I would ever get through the rest of my life if we don't have kids. I MUST have children. I am obsessed. And unrelenting, judging by (among other things) the nitpickiness with which I am approaching the timing of reentry to TTC. I am not giving myself an option. It's either have kids or die trying. This is an attitude that, while entrenched in the very fiber of my soul, I know I need to free myself from. Somehow.

Interestingly, last night I watched "P.S. I l0ve you" and that too affected me as I sit knee deep in my IF struggles. Specifically it affected me in the parallels I could draw to my own life. The part in the beginning, the marital squabbles, reminded me of me of the discord I've noticed between me and DH. At one point, the heroine says something like "I keep waiting for our lives to start" and her husband responds "it already has, this is it." I guess this can't be too remote from the truth for a lot of couples - I mean, there it was, in a hollywood chick flick. And later in the film there are confessions of friends which struck me to the core as resembling exactly what I was feeling. Without giving away too much, it reminded me of my own friends getting on with their lives while mine stands still. "Still" really isn't the right word. It's more like drowning in misery, grasping at straws, choking, heaving at each breath like it might be my last. It hurt. I cried a lot. At a chick flick. Good lord!

Which brings me to a confession. I am as emotional today as I was when I found out about the m/c. Maybe more so. I cry ALL THE TIME. The HCG hell and The Wait have been torturous. More torturous than anything I could have imagined in my wildest dreams resulting from a "simple" doomed pregnancy. And I continue to resist it, rather than accept it. And I know this resistance is making life all the more difficult but I also know that no amount of rationalizing the issue will make it go away. Some of the emotion I think is coming from the loneliness DH left me with when he went away on sabbatical. I don't even get to talk to him most days because his cell doesn't work abroad. Also, I've always been pretty emotional off the pill. But I don't think these things can explain it all away. All of the crying, and I'm more nervous now. More jumpy. I've never ground my teeth before this year - now my dentist is pointing it out. I'm drinking more than usual...

Every damn day is a struggle. And the way I see it, there is only one way to end it. To have my baby. I don't know if I could ever see it any other way.