March 19th, 2010. (Not) full term. Again.

Today is my EDD for lucky number seven.  Can you believe how that last nine months has flown?

What I can’t believe is how women can get pregnant and calculate the due date and actually get a baby at the end of it.  Or even more unbelievable, that they can get pregnant and blithely assume (correctly) that they’ll get a real live baby at the end of their term.  I just can’t imagine what having that belief would be like.  It is as alien to me as holocaust denial.  Nope, I cannot get my head around it no matter how hard I try.

This time around I didn’t bother hoping I would be pregnant again before the EDD, like I had hoped in the past.  In fact, I especially didn’t want to be pregnant again before my DE IVF because God knows like I needed another thing to throw a spanner in the works.

So here I am, wholly unpregnant, (still on the pill, in fact, and weighing about 40 pounds/18kgs less than I would have had I been full term today) and congratulating at least three friends on their births/impending births during the last few weeks.  Part of me wants to think, “That could have been me” but a much larger part has no idea how to imagine how on earth that could ever be me.  It’s like fantasising about extreme wealth or fame, or being an astronaut in space – you can toy with the idea but you can’t think about it as though it could ever be a reality.  How it could ever happen to you. Or, more accurately, me.

I am having a go-slow, self-indulgent day today.  So far I’ve had coffee and toast for breakfast (caffeine and wheat, OMG!), and skipped my morning yoga (though I did some meditation in bed).  I’m planning pizza for dinner (MORE wheat! and fatty meats!!) and have made the dough already, giving it all day to rise several times, becoming airy and gorgeous.  I even plan to have a glass of red wine with dinner.  (Alcohol! Gasp!)

Weight training is at 10.30am, and I have a shiatsu appointment at 1pm.  Apart from that, my day is as free as a bird.  All my chores are up to date (I even got the mending done yesterday, a job I had not previously found time for during the last 3 months) so I don’t even have to feel guilty about not doing something in particular.  Having nothing planed to fill in the gaps leaves some place for mystery and spontaneity, which is a rare treat around here.

If only the mystery and spontaneity of today could have been a live birth.  But the notion of that seems so far fetched as to be ridiculous.  Stretching the bounds of credulity.  Mystery and spontaneity don’t stretch to the impossible, like the kind of thing you’d find in a corny plot in a cheesy novel.  This (to date) endless failing to produce a live child seem so much more real than the alternative (Disney ending) ever could now.

Today is about what could have been, and what isn’t.  It’s about someone who isn’t here, and could have been.  I can’t help but compare that situation to those children who, equally, could also have been here this month, but who actually arrived.  I know it is fruitless to question why that is so, but it doesn’t stop my mind from wandering through that ugly tangle from time to time.  Especially on days such as this.

In order to ease the pain ever so slightly, [well, I don’t know that it actually eases the pain, maybe it just takes my sad feelings and puts them into a less difficult (read: avoidant) way of dealing with them.]  I find it comforting and easy to poke fun at those more fortunate than myself.  It seems a very human thing to do, so I am glad I am not alone in this response to jealousy.  Today I make no apologies for my self indulgence, in this, or any other regard.  And so I leave you with Pregnant Women are Smug.  [Thanks to We Are What We Repeatedly Do for posting this a few hours ago, thus bringing it to my attention.]

Because it made me laugh when I didn’t really feel much like laughing.

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