Five stages of grief

May 17, 2006 at 10:27 am | Posted in First Comes Love - Then Comes... GonalF? | 47 Comments

Denial:

That’s not an empty sac. She just must not have found it yet.

Anger:

At the smiling lady who held the door for us as we left the clinic.

At the ad for the new maternity suites at the local hospital that I passed on the highway afterwards.

At the book on tape I’m listening to, which happens to be a story about a pregnant teenager.

At the bubbly people on the stupid lesbian TTC list I still read out of some sort of masochistic streak who post their expected due dates and talk about names the minute they see a positive pee stick – and who don’t get smacked down by g-d for their hubris.

At myself, for getting my hopes up and for even mentioning it to people and for imagining how I was going to send my mother a copy of the ultrasound with my wishes for a happy belated grandmother’s day and how I was going to post it here with a title “meet tootie”. I should have known better. Good things do not happen to me. And now I get to disappoint my family once again.

At the homeless guy who held up traffic when I was just trying to get here to work.

At my straight friend who just started trying and was going on about how inconvenient it will be if she doesn’t get pregnant this cycle.

Bargaining:

What’s to bargain about? Dear god, I know that it took us 1 fresh cycle and 3 FETs to get to this point, but if I give up taking your name in vain will you actually give us a real baby out of our four remaining embryos? If I hadn’t picked up that damn fit pregnancy magazine at the gym, would today have been different?

Depression:

Check.

Acceptance:

Do I have a fucking choice?

Like I said: Reality is the sand blowing into every crack of the traveller’s skin, the hot wind stealing what moisture remains from his eyes…

Pili urges me not to see this as part of some greater global narrative in which the overall message is YOU SUCK YOU SUCK YOU SUCK. But I can’t really see any alternative narratives.