spring? bah humbug.

A few short days ago I was starting to try to think about maybe getting into the spring spirit. The weather has been a little on the cold side (at least during the hours of the day when I am walking to and from work) but in a nice way. Spring seems to be starting. Pregnancies are popping up again on the Fertility Friend board (which I admit I still read even though I have stopped posting there altogether – I refrain even when someone asks some really asinine question – that’s a good post for another day) just as they did last Spring. Things are blooming around the neighborhood. Our daffodils have practically lived out their whole life cycle, growing ridiculously tall as all our flowers have to do to attempt to eke out some sunlight for themselves in our darkish backyard. It seemed that I should start planting and smiling more. That maybe it was time to let hope back in.

It seems lame to complain too much, since I’m not the one with the broken foot, but I’ll go for it anyway. When have I ever been able to hold myself back from a good old fashioned whine-fest, huh?

Really, my complaining today is predictable. We had a rough evening. We got in a fight-ish sort of spat. There were tears. One of us went to bed before primetime while the other stayed up too late, alternating between TV and wallowing weepiness. It was, all told, pretty much what I would have guessed would occur if you said to me, "Suppose Wes breaks his foot the same week you are scheduled for the HSG and trying to finalize decisions about the next couple of baby tries. What would that look like?"

To some extent, Wes’ misery is made worse because we couldn’t get him in to an orthopedic surgeon yesterday or today – he has to wait until tomorrow. Since he is under rather strict orders not to go anywhere until he has a cast of some kind on the foot, he is homebound. And as much as it kills Wes not to clean on a massive, macro level whenever he is inside the apartment, it kills him about five times that much not to be able to walk the dogs and do errands and just be out and about. On any regular, non-broken-footed weekend, for example, if we were doing things around the house all day and I suddenly realized that Wes hadn’t gone anywhere, I would try to be sure he did some sort of big dog walk or something and even then I would be preparing myself for a very grumpy evening.

As we all know, I can stay home and do nothing ad infinitum. Ad nauseum, even. I am ridiculously jealous of all this time Wes has on his hands, the hours not spent at work, the handy excuse not to even go up and down the stairs too often, but just to sit and sleep and do things on the computer. Even though I have a lot of time off in my profession, there are only a couple of glimmering weeks per year that are really like that – most of the summer isn’t, since GMB is around and proper slothiness requires solitude, in my opinion.

And there’s a part of me that, no matter how well I know him, doesn’t understand why Wes can’t sit back and enjoy it. Hell, he even has Percocet! It’s like a surprise three day vacation! In this way, I am just the same as Wes – you see, I am always harping on him for his inability to understand the viewpoints of others and to accept their choices as valid. People who live in the suburbs, for example – Wes can’t understand them to the point that he actively complains about them if we drive through or near a suburb. To be truthful, he can pretty much not understand why anyone lives anywhere other than New York, and even then there are limits – there are reasons to live in Manhattan and a small handful of neighborhoods in Brookyln and beyond that he just can’t fathom it. This was discussed in my Bensonhurst post last week, so I won’t go on. Suffice to say that I pick on him about this constantly and am always trying to get him to broaden his understanding of humans’ differences of preference.

But really I am just as bad. I don’t understand his need to move around so much. I don’t understand how it is that he enjoys exercising. I don’t understand his over-the-top aestheticism. And, as it is for him, that which I do not understand is fodder for ridicule and complaint.

I am cranky because we’re hitting that horrible wall we hit every time we go back into this baby game. We’re at the part where it’s close and scary and we know what we’re heading into all the better each time we have to do it. If all goes well with the HSG, there will probably be a try this month (#6) and it will definitely be my last unmedicated attempt. We know the pains of these kinds of attempts, the ovulation test crap, the panicky overawareness of bodily twinges, the two-week PMS of progesterone supplementation, the overuse of pregnancy tests, the slow crash and burn at the end. Sure – we try to imagine that it will be different, that the radioactive dye will brush the cobwebby whatever-it-is from my tubes and make possible something that has become unimaginable. We can maintain the cute hopeful thing for only so long, though – a couple of days, a week maybe. Then we are back to our old tricks. Doubt and worry and constant second guessing and fear. So much fear.

We’ll wait a little longer to plant flowers this year. I just don’t know if I can take all that cheerful, colorful life springing forth in my own back yard.