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Originally published at Figures of Text. Please leave any comments there.
I think it’s been around a month since we stared at an ultrasound screen and didn’t see a heartbeat. I’m not sure. Time’s been pretty irrelevantly lately, with days blurring into each other, and sleep coming like a black wave because you don’t want to feel any more.
He was less than eight weeks old, but we’re doing this through IVF (keep the laptop off your testicles, guys, I mean it), so we’d been fighting and hoping for a year, and we had a few weeks of joy before it was snuffed out. deli blogged about it weeks ago, but this is the first time I’ve felt the impetus to do so.
The world feels colder now. There are more things with sharp edges. More sights that make me wince. Other people’s happiness is ringed with knives, especially if it’s connected to kids. I want to scream at them, demand that they acknowledge how lucky they are, how absurdly random their good fortune is, demand that they explain why. There are no words.
I won’t say that I’d made any changes in my life because of the pregnancy, but I’d gotten myself into a mental space where I was ready to make those changes. No-one’s ever ready to be a father, I think - not that I have the slightest clue what “father” means - but I was willing to jump in and do my best. I wanted it.
We’ll try again. We’ve got four more frozen embryos. If they don’t work, then we’re still young enough that another round of IVF would still have moderately good chances, as these things go. It still could happen naturally. And if it doesn’t, we’ll adjust to that too.
Even if it does happen again, we won’t forget what we had, for a brief few weeks in March this year.