Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Nothing Much...

It's that time of year again. The time when I am tired of being home. I know, I know. I never thought I would say this, but I am done with summer break, and I am ready to hit the classroom again. I miss my kids. The only bad thing with this coming school year is that I won't have my same kids. I loved A4. I will dearly miss A4. Hopefully there will be another class that I adore.

This year's schedule is great. 2 sections of Creative Writing (Never been done...my program's growing), 2 sections of co-taught (where I teach with another teacher and half the students are resource) and 2 sections of regular English 10 (YAY! This is what I love. I mean, where else will you find students who fight over reading the part of John Proctor in The Crucible just so they can say "Whore! Whore!" as loud as they can? No where, I tell you.)

This year will be nice and refreshing. For the first thing, I am no longer considered a "new teacher." I have gotten through my third year of teaching, and about to embark on the fourth, and that means I am a seasoned veteren. The other wonderful wonderful thing is that I don't have to be evaluated for another three years!!! Natalie will know that this is certainly a relief. And even better, after year four I will be released from my scholorship/loan obligations! YAY!

I have been wasting away my summer by reading, reading, reading. Reading blogs, reading books, reading fledgling novels written by one of my former Laurels. I am going to work on a "Must Read" book list for anyone who needs a good story. I don't quite know how to do it, but I will somehow. I have read Twilight, the seqeul New Moon, Anne of Green Gables (again), The Secret Life of Bees, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Bridge to Terabithia, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 4, and now I am currently looking for a new one. I still have three weeks left! Any good books?

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Literary Rant

Okay, so online journal. Who thought of that? What ever happened to the little girls who write their secret crushes (Chris Hanmer 3rd grade) in their diaries and hid them under the mattress so no one could read it? Now here we are, publishing our lives for one and all to read! But, when in Rome. Besides, I have the writing itch right now, and this alleviates my urges to write ridiculous little romances.

Lately, if anyone has had a conversation with me in the past oh... year, they know that my husband and I have been trying to become parents for the past year with no success. It was just last week that we realized that the stork wasn't real. When I found out what made you pregnant, well you could've knocked me over with a Maxi pad. Just kidding. We knew. Anyway, in a fit of frustration with my brainless first doctor, I wrote a harmless little rant. Really, I don't mean to brag, but I felt it was one of my better ones. So I am going to post it here. My goal isn't to toot my own horn (kind of), but rather it is to let people out there know that there ARE people in Utah who are struggling with infertility. And like I said, it is a RANT. Therefore, the tone is a little...let's just say angry.
(Working on Title)
The process of getting pregnant isn’t as simple as all those promiscuous teenagers on Maury Povich make it out to be. There’s a lot more to it than just sleeping around once in a while—or in their case, several times a day. First, you must understand that your body is your mortal enemy. It never does what you want it to do. If you want to get pregnant, you don’t. If you don’t want to get pregnant, you do. You tell the doctor you are a regular 28-day cycle-er, and then you have a 56 day cycle, but you’re not sure because you just went off birth control, so it might still be in your system, although that doesn’t really make sense because your sister went off birth control, and then like the next hour was miraculously pregnant. AND SHE DIDN’T WANT TO BE. It’s as if your body is a cruel practical joker that is in cahoots with that damn Murphy from Murphy’s Law. What ever you want to happen won’t, and your worst fears are confirmed, all the while your ovaries, pituitary gland, and breasts are all figuratively rolling on the ground in uncontrollable glee. HA! This one’s on you!

Then, to make things worse, your body operates on an “open when least convenient” policy. Listen to this: The first week of a four week cycle is useless. Granted, it’s doing very important stuff, like shedding last month’s layer of blood to prepare for the hoped for baby, but really, it’s a wasted week. You can’t even pretend to try for a baby because you have that constant reminder every time you go to the bathroom. Change your pad. You’re not pregnant. Use a tampon. Oh yeah, you’re not pregnant. Cramps again—by the way, in case you forgot, YOU’RE NOT PREGANT. Then, in the second week, your body only gives you ONE DAY to get pregnant. And—here’s yet another not-funny practical joke—you don’t know which day it’s going to be! Sure, you can guess day 14, but what if your cycle goes long? Or goes short? Then you’re screwed. Both literally and figuratively. Oh, sure, there are a couple of things you can do to make your guess work a little easier. You can use those ovulation predictor kits. But if you’re like me, you can’t figure out the stupid line thing (is that the same color as the test line? Well, it’s just a tad lighter. Does a “tad” make a difference?), or you can chart your temperature. This process is a story in itself.
Let me explain the BBT chart. BBT stands for Basal Body Temperature. Basically, what you are supposed to do is take your temperature the moment you wake up, before you even get out of bed. Oh yeah: you have to do this at the same time everyday. So, if you’re like me, every morning at 5:45 A.M. the wretched alarm goes off, and the first thing you think is, “better take my temperature because I’m not pregnant.” Then you take your temperature. And then you chart it. The next morning, you do the same thing. And the next morning, and the next morning, and the next morning. Eventually, you get to the point where it’s just a habit and you don’t think about your babyless life anymore. It’s more a nuisance than anything, especially on Saturday and Sunday because you still have to take your temperature at 5:45 A.M. to keep the data accurate. The idea is that your body’s sleeping temperature raises .4-.6 degrees after you ovulate. That’s right, after you ovulate. So by the time you notice a temperature hike, it’s over, and you’ve lost your window. So why do it? Well, the word on the street is that you do it for a couple of months to get the pattern, and then you can guess easier. Now, to all of you Fertile Myrtle’s out there, let me tell you a bit of truth: saying “a couple of months” to someone who is trying to get pregnant and failing miserably is like telling you, “Don’t worry. You are stuck with your child for mmm… only twenty years.” Sounds like a very long time, doesn’t it.

Week three. Ahhh. What can I say about week three? Nothing good. Suppose you do everything right: you chart your temperature, your body actually decides to stop laughing at you long enough to ovulate, and you actually “do it” five days in a row, day 12-16 (too much sex for even the friskiest of all men) to make sure there are some swimmers up there so your egg has no chance of not being violated. So what happens in week three? Nothing. Now, if you are pregnant, your little sperm/egg combo does some amazing things like multiplying a bazillion times so that it then gets upgraded to a zygote, and making the long, treacherous journey out of the fallopian tube and into the uterus where it burrows in the lining that was formed that first sexless, useless week of your cycle. But if you’re not pregnant, then your malicious body decides that it’s going to start up on its practical jokes again. First, it thinks, “Ha! She’s waiting for the tell-tale sign of pregnancy: the sore boobs! Perfect. Okay, boobs, you with me on this? We’re gonna start hurting. Go ahead. Swell up, get bigger, and make her feel like she’s carrying very very ripe peaches on her chest. It would be even better if you could make them really touchy too, so she can’t fold her arms for a week. That would be great.”

And then the boobs, with no mind of their own, begin hurting! The woman’s mind is thinking, “Oh my! My breasts hurt? But how much?” and then she commences squeezing and pushing and poking her own breasts to determine if they hurt enough to “feel pregnant.”
And then the exhaustion sets in. I get so tired, I can’t open my eyes in the morning. My students don’t have to do anything for week three, because I am just too tired to operate. Again, the thought enters your mind: “Could I finally be pregnant?” But you don’t dare hope.
Because hope is the most devastating part of this whole getting pregnant thing.
As a society, we have chosen the word “hope” to represent strength and goodwill. We all have hopes that we will be happy. Religious people talk about the hope that the Savior brings to their immortality. Generally, hope is a very good thing. But while struggling to get pregnant? Hope is most damaging. Because you continue to believe, pray and feel that someday you will be able to have a child that looks like you, and maybe has your husband’s sense of humor (but please not his nostrils!). Then your breasts hurt, and you get tired, and you feel so crappy that all of a sudden you are the happiest person in the world, because that little bud, that little seed of hope that, incidentally, you have struggled to keep down and stunted, sprouts and roots and begins to grow until the fourth week.

Then: cramps. Shit. And then the tears. Crying has become a part of the cycle, just like the bleeding and the ovulating and the waiting. Crying comes with the territory. My husband claims there has been more than enough tears cried this past year to put the actual Trail of Tears on the back burner of importance. But here’s what he doesn’t really understand: I don’t cry because I’m not pregnant. I cry because HE’S not pregnant. He wants children almost more than I do. He is better with little kids. He knows how to talk to them and to love them perfectly, whereas they make me nervous because of their inability to verbally communicate. But him? He speaks their language; he plays their games. And because he chose to love me, he can’t be a father. I cry for his loss, not mine. I cry because if he would have chosen anyone else, he would have a family. Little boys with large nostrils would be running across the yard, playing catch with Dad, and laughing at his jokes. When I tell him this, he gets mad because he loves me more than anything, and if I can’t have kids, then we can’t have kids, and we will be in it together forever.

I know he loves me. I know more now than I ever did before all the crying happened. He sits with me on the bed during week four and watches me cry and blubber and drool. He doesn’t say anything; he just pats my hair and wipes my tears so I don’t leave big black smudges on the pillow cases, because he knows I will hate myself for them later. He strokes my hair and blows on my forehead because I sweat when I cry; he holds me. I have ruined many of his shirts with my makeup-filled tears, and he doesn’t care. He just lays there and holds me in my sorrow. And then it starts all over again. Bleeding, charting, waiting, crying. A vicious cycle, with no end of disappointment, and no end of love.

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