Trying and trying and trying and failing

I started back to work when my son was about 3 months old.  I extended my maternity leave a week to recover from my dermoid cyst removal surgery. 

After the surgery I was sore.  I managed to never tap into the heavy drugs they had sent home with me from the hospital.  I took it very slowly when laying down or sitting down, and then again when getting up.  Stairs were a challenge.  Picking up my baby was a challenge.  Bumpy car rides were the bane of my existence!

Showers were also weird.  At first I couldn't expose the wound to water.  Then I didn't know what to do.  I was afraid of the incision.  I didn't want it to get infected, but I didn't want to touch it either.  Luckily, my ambiguous neglect was okay.  The follow up doctor visits showed it was healing fine.  Finally I was able to have the stitches removed.

By the time I started back to work I was moving fine.  I was still uncomfortable in the car, and standing the 15 minutes in a moving train during my light rail commute was pure torture.  But I could walk and pick up my baby without pain.  That's all a post operative girl can really ask for.

While I was on maternity leave I had been reassigned from the project manager of my dreams to the project manager I had prayed to never be assigned to.  The project, without me to work on it, was several weeks behind and very off kilter.  I was in for a lot of late nights and a lot of time away from my new baby.

I felt vulnerable and overwhelmed.  There was no way I would even consider having another baby.  It took me two years after the birth of my son to begin feeling that I could handle another pregnancy, another birth, another baby.

The first month we started trying to conceive we "baby danced" every night.  We would HAVE to get pregnant, there's no way we could miss it, even if I ovulated at some weird time of the month.  Really I had no idea how this stuff worked, so I went with the blanket method.  Cover all the possibilities with one big blanket.  I was shocked when we weren't pregnant, discouraged and tired... so very tired...

After that I decided to get smart and downloaded an app on my new smart phone that gave me a half flower on my fertile days and a full flower when I ovulated.  It was based on the theory that every woman has a 14 day luteal phase, so after the first month it knew exactly the day I ovulated based on my cycle length.  Brilliant!  Except that we still weren't getting pregnant.

In the mean time my now three year old son had gone crazy, I mean totally over the deep end.  It would take me an hour to calm him out of a screaming, kicking, running, punching, sobbing meltdown after picking him up at school.  I had started going in to work early and leaving early to pick up my son.  Except when my husband was out of town for business.  Then I went in late and left with early, with little or no change in with load.  I had switched over part time when my firm, devastated by the financial meltdown, asked employees to volunteer to go part time so they didn't have to make more lay offs.  My husband was out of town more and more as he had to look outside of our once flourishing town to find work.  I was falling off the deep end, too, and we were still trying to have a new baby, when we had the time and energy - both at the same time.

After my hands returned from a week long trip out of town I asked him, "when are you going to get a big raise so I can quit my job?"

"Do it!"  He said, deadly serious.  "Just quit."  So the next day we took a look at our finances, I even started up late and put together a spreadsheet.  The following day we let it soak in and the third day I gave my notice at work.

Okay, now that my stress load had just diminished by 75%, I would get pregnant.  Simple.  Except I didn't.  It had been a year and a half of trying and trying and trying and failing. 

It was time to see a specialist.