Who is It?

Well! Turns out blogging CAN be beneficial! And lower cholesterol! I'm sure there's a weight-loss gimmick hidden here somewhere, or maybe money to be earned at home! But wait, there's more! Turns out just by writing that freakin' last little piece on my reproductive plate of spaghetti, and reading through your most edifying comments, I discovered (lo) that when I cut through the underbrush I have essentially 3 options when it comes to expanding my family:

1) Cut my losses, pack it up, move on. (Strangely appealing, this one.)

2) Adopt. (Entire scores of blogs on the travails of this, will leave for another time.)

3) Try again of my own uterine accord.

Item (3) contains the following three (well, two) sub-options:

A) Use our own stuff: go on met'n whilst shootin' up the prog'one, and GO FOR IT! Um, not. Niobe, I too am not a gambler when it comes to dead babies. Miscarriages are one thing, but dead kids after 41 weeks? Not so much, thanks. With you here. It would get ridiculously fascinating though, were they to unearth Maddy's issue and come back and say "AHA! It's gene [biological-gobbledigok]!" Because what would we do then? Cruise forward a few times hoping we could get by CVS at week 11? (Do I even have a "few more times" within me?) Move right to IVF/PGD even though it's expensive and not entirely skewed toward a sunny outcome and the picture becomes even less sunny (apparently, according to recent studies) if PGD is thrown in the mix? Would that we could sift through these. But I'm 'fraid not. (A) is out. That leaves us with

B) Use donor egg

C) Use donor sperm

So! Like many of you insightful readers (really, I'm feeling like such a Grief-Poser here that I didn't think of this myself) my therapist also suggests that I "try on" a few options for size in my mind's eye, and project myself into the future by a decade and fantasize about what it would be like to be tall, thin, busty, driving a hybrid BMW 6-series convertible, er, AND TO BE A mother of one, mother of two but one totally unrelated, mother of two but one somehow related. You get the point. So far this is excruciating difficult. When I was on a certain antidepressant that starts with a Z I ran a little experiment (shhhhhh) and tried to contemplate suicide to see what my mind and the drugs would do. No worries please, this was never an option for me -- not even why I went on antidepressants in the first place -- and I actually had to think through some methods via favorite TV programs because I'm just that removed from this particular time zone. Anyway, I was fascinated to see that the drugs (I guess) sllllooowwwwed down my thoughts to the point that by the time I should have been visualizing turning on the car in my enclosed garage I was so bored with the process that I had already leaped umpteen degrees away wondering what to have for dinner, or what color scheme I should use in my flower beds. I bring this up because, strangely, I'm having the exact same problem here trying to visualize me as a mom circa 2017, and no, no drugs involved any more. I try for the life of me to project myself in the future with more children (or not) and my brain just comes to a screeching halt, and suddenly I'm wondering whether I should get brown boots or black this winter, and just how to go about trading in my used station wagon.

I'm wondering if this means, like Megan and Kate described, that I don't have hunger. Or thirst. Or pretty much any food-like or further-mothering interest whatsoever. Back after my miscarriage in '02 when I was a total reproductive novice, I had the hunger. I researched and googled and message board-ed to the end of the earth and finally crashed through the door of the RE's office and said "hey, as fast as you can dude. Bring it on." And when I was ready for child #2, I had that thirst again -- not like we can get pregnant by accident here -- so I drove back to the RE and re-upped, and re-tested, and re-biopsied, and re-whatevered and got pregnant with Maddy. But now? Nothing. I haven't even called my RE to tell him how this all turned out. (He's in another state now, so I don't feel quite so guilty or shitty about this as I probably should. Not like he's getting the call again.) I haven't googled anything about egg or sperm donation. Or adoption, for that matter. I'm really very stuck.

So, the question becomes, am I stuck because I'm grieving (coming up on nine months here) or am I stuck because this is it, my gut is sending me a message to close down the shop and turn off the lights? I try desperately hard not to second guess my grief. It is what it is, and I think I do a reasonably good job of letting myself pass through it. But it's very hard now to try and figure out what is what in my poor fried head: is it the grief talking, or me?

Postscript: I'm sporting a rather big lot of bandaids on my thumb for some wacky nail issue, and hence I've made an embarrassment of myself on a number of your comment sections. I apologize. If my imac actually could run through the "Preview" comment option without spewing smoke and starting to gurgle, I'd do it. Many apologies.