On Fear

Does anyone else find themselves composing posts in their heads at work, eating breakfast, in the middle of the night, in the car? I've been thinking about this one for the last few days, and have finally gotten around to getting it up. Partly because work takes every spare ounce of my energy, partly because I keep thinking if I don't post about my fear then maybe it will go away.

But it's not going away.

I am a mess these days, and a huge pain in the ass to be around. I'm quick to anger, irritable, cranky, peevish, and generally in a bad mood most of the time. I'm sure that some of this can be attributed to the fact that, physically, I still feel pretty lousy. I'm bone tired and still fighting some nausea, so that's not helping, I guess.

Yet I know that my emotions can't be blamed just on these physical things, even though it is hard to keep perspective when you're so tired you want to cry. No, at the heart of my moods is fear, pure and simple. I am anxious and scared. This fear is, of course, much different -- and much more welcome -- than the fear I experienced during the hell of trying to conceive. No doubt about that. But during those months, I felt sure that if I could just manage to get a positive beta, and survive the first week or two, then the clouds would lift and I could finally be happy again.

The clouds did lift, as the misery of my infertility seemed finally to abate, but it's not all rainbows and unicorns now that I'm on the other side. Now I have a beloved, tiny creature inside of me, and I am terrified that something will happen to it. I think that not finding the heartbeat at home has really exaggerated these fears for me. Even though I know, thanks to your helpful comments and my doctor's, that it might just be too early. But rationality is not the issue here. Of course, the chances are good that everything is just fine, and that this journey will end with a healthy baby. But logic and statistics got nothin' on the raw emotions of a woman who wonders every day if the bad news she got so used to while trying to conceive will come back to haunt her once again.

So I live with this quiet but profound fear, wishing I could look through a window in my belly to see if the fetus is still okay. (Didn't Tertia or Julia once suggest this as an invention?) And this deep-seated fear fills me with a strange kind of rage. I know that must sound really weird, and oddly aggressive. I guess I'm just not handling the uncertainty well at all. I don't sound very well-adjusted do I?

There was a big discussion a few days ago, over at Jen's and Sherry's, about what should happen to an infertile's blog if she gets pregnant. It started because Jen was upset about the overly happy comments from a couple of pregnant bloggers, and I recognized the awful pain that prompted her post. Yet when I was struggling, when I was in the midst of my own infertility hell, some times it was the complaints of pregnant infertiles that I found difficult to understand, more than the positive posts. (Not all the time, just every now and then.) And now here I am, pregnant and therefore damn lucky, but complaining and full of fear. If the past me was reading posts by the current me, I might have been annoyed. I really didn't expect to feel like this. And I certainly didn't expect these dark feelings to compete so vigorously with my happiness. But it feels like the fear is winning, at least this week, and I don't really know what to do about it.

Today there's another good post at Jen's, about whether there should be a kind of code of behavior for pregnant infertiles' blogs. One question is whether the title should be changed, so that the blog is clearly no longer about infertility, which would protect innocent infertiles from stumbling on -- and being hurt by -- pregnant postings. I completely understand the reasoning behind this, but I've kept my title so far. I haven't even changed anything in my "About" section. For me, I couldn't even think of making these changes until I've made it through the first trimester. I'm so scared something could go wrong, so that seems to me to be the earliest time I could even consider morphing publicly into a different kind of blogger. I have planned on making some changes, though, at the appropriate time, because I really don't want to introduce any more pain into the lives of those who already are suffering. And hopefully by then, I'll be riding one of those unicorns instead of this damn bull of fear.

Comments

[pazel]

I feel like I could have written your post, and I've tried. Maybe not so eloquently, but here I am at 30 weeks and I still think that some things are too good to be true so I keep waiting for rug to be pulled out from under me. We get so used to bad news, and we don't want to get our hopes up, plus we know too much about all the bad that can happen.

On the other hand, we have to keep the belief that sometimes good things do happen. There's Tertia and Julie with their babies.

I can't make the fear go away, or I would have for myself. But, when you do get hit by feelings of joy, don't supress them but allow yourself a mini vacation from the worry and fear.

[Joanne]

I don't consider the expression of fear and fragility a complaint. For me, the key is: does the blog read specifically like a pregnant infertile's blog? Or does it read like anyone's pregnancy blog? If the latter, well, it's just not something I can deal with -- I hear enough about that in real life. If the former, I may not be able to relate, but it's still part of the infertile experience and therefore relevant (except on very bad days when all hope is gone).

Either way, I care about you, LG, and I'm sorry about your fears.

[Menita]

Well said. Very well said.

[Jen P]

I had this belief that once I got to the 2nd trimester I would feel this sense of relief, this giant deflating of fear, of apprehension and of all this crap I carry around deep inside. But it didn't go away, and I think the reason is that you're suddenly 100 times more aware of what you can lose.

Just because I'm not actively tc at the moment, and am pregnant for NOW, I still have 25 more weeks to go...and until then, I'm still in the game.

Wishing you the best and thanking you for this post.