I’m not quite sure where to start with this post, but it’s been brewing around in my head for awhile. It started last Friday night when I was having a beer via google hangout with my follow PAIL blogger contributors (I love technology!). Traathy asked me what was up with #2 since I haven’t talked about it for awhile on my blog, and I answered her honestly that I’m terrified of getting back into the mindfuck that is TTC for me, so I’ve just been completely blocking it out. You can’t get your hopes dashed if you don’t get them up in the first place, right?
Ha.
Then last night I was nursing Stella before bedtime, rocking for the millionth time in the glider in her nursery (hands down the best purchase EVER – glide+recline=key), and it occurred to me that part of the reason I’m afraid to wean her is what if I can’t ever do this again?
I mean, if I can’t get pregnant again, I’ll never get to nurse another baby, and that makes me so, SO sad.
Also, our health insurance premiums jumped again this month (by $150/mo I think?), so we moved our plan up to the $5k deductible ($10k family), which essentially means that a hospital birth would now cost us roughly $7k out of pocket. As reference, all of my bills from Stella’s birth amounted to $8k. What a savings, eh? 😛 Fucking insurance. I tell myself that it’s okay, if we’re blessed with another pregnancy that it will be another piece of leverage for me with my husband to lobby for a midwife assisted home birth (which runs about $4k in our area). Still, that’s insane, and I didn’t even hesitate to make the decision to increase our deductible because it’s hard for me to believe it matters.
I routinely vacillate between some inner belief that it will happen…that we’ll get pregnant with #2 naturally like so many of my IFer friends… and complete and utter despair filled with thoughts like ya right, one and done. We have to be happy with that.
It’s one thing if you only want one child. But I don’t. I want two. I want Stella to have a sibling. I want “my kids.” Lately Charlie and I have been trying to talk ourselves into being happy with just one, but invariably one of us will admit in the middle of the night that no… we really want a second child.
We used to talk about adoption, but now that I know how much that costs and all of the emotional heartache involved with it, I just don’t know if we’ll ever be able to (financially or emotionally!) afford to go that route. Same goes for IF treatments. We lucked out with a BFP that led to Stella after our first injectibles+IUI cycle, and it still cost us $10k once it was all said and done (intial workup/testing + shit ton of meds b/c I’m a slow responder which caused a lot of monitoring appts at $500 per day + travel costs = $10k). We also don’t want more than two, and because of that, it seems silly to risk fertility treatments again. With the protocol we were on, we had a 1 in 4 chance of multiples on our cycle with Stella. Granted I still only had 1 mature rockstar egg (go Stella!), but the increased chance exists, and my husband is petrified of twins now that we already have Stella.
I just hate that we can’t choose to have a second baby and within a couple of months, BOOM, be pregnant. I’m beyond thankful that we have Stella in our lives, but it still doesn’t seem fair that this has to be such a struggle for us… for so many of us. I’m afraid to even TRY for #2 – I’m afraid to wean Stella and find out my cycles are still a mess – I’m afraid of being jealous again of my friends who easily get pregnant – I’m afraid of feeling like a failure again.
I hesitate to even hope for another miracle, because the let down seems like too much to handle.