Before the days of blogging, I had a LiveJournal.  I used it as a way to keep the feelings I had swirling inside my head and heart from driving me past the brink.  This is an entry I found that I am glad I had.  I will never forget where I have been and how it affects where I am today.

Another Christmas with Only Two Stockings
Today was one of the hardest days I have had in a while. But before I get into that, I think I would like to give a little background. My husband and I have been trying to conceive our first child since our honeymoon, which was August 11, 2002. After a year of unprotected love making, and still no baby, I went to what is known as a Reproductive Endocrinologist. After a surgery/procedure to check my “Mommy parts” to see that everything physically was OK, answering some of the most embarrassing questions about our love life, and my husband having to do something his mother told him he would go blind if he did – we were given a diagnosis: I have a hormonal imbalance in which I produce too much testosterone and not enough estrogen. Therefore, my body does not produce viable eggs – they are there, they just can’t grow in the chemical makeup of my body. Ok. Now what? Well, as it turns out I would have to do the one thing I feared the most, shots! 7 days a month my husband would have to give me an injection in my stomach. Then when my follicles were ready to be released, more shots to make that happen (called a “trigger shot”) But, you know what? I didn’t care. I was of the school of thought, “THIS is all I have to do to have a baby?! DONE.”

Fast forward 11 months, 54 shots, $7,000, and 4 Intrauterine Insemination (IUI) later – no baby. So, this brings be back to why today was a really hard day. We just found out that our 4th and final IUI failed and that we will have to move on to IVF, commonly knows as the “test tube” method. One try, which is never guaranteed is $10,000. Who has that kind of money? So, we have to wait until we have a couple of bills paid off before we can financially swing it. Sooooo….

Today we got out our Christmas decorations. Last year we bought a cute, wooden decoration that is shaped like a moose and it is holding a ribbon (also made of wood). On that ribbon is pegs on which you hang your stockings and over those pegs it reads, “And the stockings were hung…” This was our solution for not having a fireplace in our new home by which to hang our stockings. We had this moose stocking holder personalized with our names and our puppies names (Golden Retrievers). There are two extra pegs and they are blank. We purposely did this because we thought that by this Christmas we would have another name to add to the pegs. This memory came rushing back to me as I hung “Daddy’s Senna’s Ripley’s Mommy’s” stocking.

I lived through it. Then, after a hard day of lugging boxes up stairs, finding out why only half of a strand of lights were working, and unwrapping decorations with last years newspaper around them, we got hungry and went to McD’s. In front of us in line were 2 young, teenage girls with newborn babies in car seats being waited on a cashier to who looked to be 8.5 months pregnant. Then, they all had to stand there and talk about their babies – how big they were when they were born, when the baby is due, who is going to be in the delivery room. Hell, I think they talked about breast feeding. All the while my face was getting redder and redder – not from anger, or embarrassment – but from misery. When we finally got to our table with our burgers, fries, and sorrow I threw the napkins on the table and just sighed. Jim, my husband, at first ask, “What” and then said, “Oh, I know…..” I wish I could just go on and not look at every body else’s pregnancies and babies as a constant reminder that I don’t have one. I wish I would stop being so judgmental and thinking that a single teenage girl on Welfare doesn’t “deserve” a baby as much as I do. I wish I wasn’t dealt this hand to play with, but in the game of life – God is the dealer and there are no re-deals – so I have to bluff my way through it and hope the next time I ask for a hit, I am given the cards I need to make this home a full house.