The Honeymoon is Over

This week, I knocked off my first two books of 2013. Work has been so busy since school started up again that this feels like a major accomplishment! Reviews will be coming in the next few days. In the meantime...

For our honeymoon, my husband and I went to Hawaii. We spent a few days on Oahu then cruised around the islands onboard the Pride of America. It was incredible. Our first time in Hawaii, our first cruise, being newlweds, everything about it was wonderful. We came back trying to convince everyone we knew that they had to go to Hawaii. This month, one of our mutual friends made the same trip. He's been posting pictures this week and while they are beautiful, I've been finding that looking at them just makes me sad. 

We got married three and a half years ago. I'd just finished school. The whole world felt like it was full of possibilities. A new career ahead, a new life ahead with my husband, full of all kinds of plans and dreams. Fast forward to now and while some things are the way I'd planned,  many things are not. I look at our friend's pictures and a part of me is happy for him, but an even bigger part of me just sees everything that didn't turn out like I'd hoped and wants to have a pity party.

I feel silly thinking like this because, in the grand scheme of things, we've been very blessed and are doing fine. But while I know that in my head, I still can't help feeling disappointed. It feels like time is passing but we're just spinning our wheels. A lot of it is work related. Neither of us are particularly happy with our work situations, for various reasons. Changing either of our situations is complicated, though, and in the current economy, very challenging.

A large part of it is also related to our family plans. We've been trying to have a baby since last July. Today marks the beginning of month #7. Every time the month count goes up, it stings a little. I naively thought that I'd finish my birth control, we'd start knocking boots on the regular, and after a few cycles, bam! Pregnant. In reality, it's now been six full months. In that time, my body has been through four cycles. Only three of those had good timing because we were both sick during the last one, so it was a complete wash. Six months. Three kicks at the can. It's now been almost a month since I got sick and I'm not convinced that my ear infection is completely gone, so this cycle is up in the air too. The hell?!

Charting has been a saviour during this time because I can see that things appear to be working as they should be, though delayed, but it is getting frustrating. I'm a planner and I like to be in control of things but this is a situation that I have very little control over. My body will do what it's going to do, whether it's hormone issues or illness, and I can only do so much to help it along. Most of the time, it's a matter of
waiting. Endless waiting. And in the meantime, any other plans we might want to make are up in the air because everything rests on "am I going to be pregnant/will we have a baby by then?" There is so much about the emotional parts of this process that I wish I had known from the beginning.

Again, I feel silly thinking like this because I know that there are many women out there who have been trying for far longer than we have, who have more difficulties than we have had so far, and who have experienced losses. I know that it could be so much worse and so much harder. I absolutely do not mean to be insensitive to that or compare my situation to that. I know it's totally not the same. But this is where we are and what we're experiencing, and on milestone days like today, it is hard.

One of the ladies from the The Bump forums (which have been keeping me sane) recently blogged about the same subject and she said it perfectly: "the unknown waiting every month of TTC is slowly eroding who I used to be." I look at those pictures of Hawaii and wish I could have that naive happiness and optimism back.