Bitterness

I had other plans for what I wanted to blog about this month.  I wanted to go into the details about TCM and my new diet.  I have an appointment with an acupuncturist next week and thought this would all lead to a really upbeat month full of hope, a sense of being proactive, and a feeling of general optimism as I head toward the last quarter of 2013 and prepare for IVF as soon as we can pull everything together in 2014.

But instead I need to get something off my chest that's been nagging away at me.  For several months now, probably beginning back in June when B & I were travelling with friends (who have children, but this was an adults only trip), I've been getting more and more resentful, angry, and bitter about having to "buy" our potential children.

I've been getting so annoyed by the fact that we have to sacrifice and change our lifestyle so drastically, just to pay for the possibility of getting pregnant.  And don't tell me its just a drop in the bucket of what you'll be paying once you have kids.  That's not true because while you just have the normal expenses that come along with kids, I'll still be paying for my IF treatments for years after my first child is born, if I'm even so lucky as to get a live birth out of the whole endeavor.  Seriously, my first child would be in grade school before I've finished paying off their conception.

Which begs the question, how exactly, per se, am I supposed to be able to pay for daycare, and $500-$1000 a month in IF debt, and even begin to think about doing it all over again to try for a second child?  Seems impossible.  It's sounding more and more likely that B & I would be facing a future raising an only child if we don't knock it out of the park with twins on the first go-round.

I'm just so angry that I even have to think about these things!  The only thing holding B & I back from the family we are trying to achieve is money!  And it's holding us back so definitively that I'm leaning more and more toward exploring a child-free life choice.  I just don't know after all these years of bitter pain and sacrifice, if I could even enjoy a pregnancy that I had to pay so much for the way I once could have.  I don't know if B & I would be happy with the life we'd be bringing a baby into under those circumstances now.  I don't know if we'd be happy now, with the way it seems that things would play out.

A baby won't fix all of our problems, just our biggest problem, which is infertility, of course.  But this one big one extends its roots and creeps into all other aspects of our life.  It affects our finances, our home, our relationship, our sex-life our lifestyle, and all conversations about our future.  Maybe choosing to live child-free would eliminate the biggest problem, so that we could work on repairing all the smaller ones and live a simple, happy life together, like the one we had before we started TTC.

I don't know.

Would I regret this choice later?

Once we've solved some of our other smaller problems (mostly financial I'd say), would we then be left feeling that something was still missing?  Would our arms and hearts ache from the emptiness that a child was supposed to fill?

Maybe I don't have to write the whole thing off in order to feel better about things right now.  Maybe just putting IVF off for another year or two while we get other things more squared away would be a better compromise.  Maybe we should pull back and revisit all this in a year or two, while I'm still young enough to have good odds of success.  Before that dreaded 35th birthday...

Then again, maybe I'm just stressed right now, and have been living off the "vacation-high" all summer where the world's grass seems greener on the other side.  Maybe next month, or next week, or next year I'll feel differently and be ready for IVF as soon as possible again.  A cousin once told me that IF is a roller-coaster of emotions.  Geesh, she wasn't kidding!