The John Locke Approach to Infertility

I’m really lucky. I have a pretty rockin’ marriage. Sure we fight and get snippy or stay up until 1am with the occasional shouting match, but we also have a lot of fun, take care of each other, and stand by one another. I’m very grateful for sharing my life with Larry.

So, it makes this next sentiment sound a bit ungrateful, but I’m going to own how I feel: after three years, I thought we’d be parents by now. You can see how that might not be the most grateful thing to think of or say the day after your wedding anniversary. The thought flittered through my head at one point yesterday, and I deliberately pushed it out. Not today, I told myself, today is about celebration. Today, I feel awful that I feel this way at all.

When we got married, in fact, on the first day of our honeymoon in front of Peter Pan’s Flight in the Magic Kingdom, we talked about our family planning timeline. Three years, we told ourselves. I, of course, always bet on the early side of things so in my mind at the time I’m thinking: three-year anniversary = babymaking night of bliss. And of course, because the media has told me so, BAM! September 2011 baby it would be. In a way, finding out just a few months after our first anniversary that I have POF was a blessing in disguise, saving us from heartache later down the road and pushing our timeline back even further.

And, as it turns out, we’re still basically on track. I casually, off-handedly asked Larry the other day if he thinks I’d be pregnant by 30 (this very stubborn benchmark I’d set for myself years ago) and he thinks so. I may not be popping out a baby on May 25, 2012, but well on our way. We’re hoping to get the DE/IVF ball rolling by December. So technically, we’re right on target with our original plans.

Still, even with my diagnosis, I feel like there’s this sense of urgency, even though in a lot of ways, infertility allows us to really put family building on our own timeline more than just natural conception. My biological drive only exacerbates the “you can’t do this the way you wanted to” scenario.

Which brings me to our dear John Locke.

Locke had a saying on LOST: “Don’t tell me what I can’t do.“ It was his mantra. Did that drive him on an insane power trip that nearly cost the lives of all the islanders, including his own? Yes, but now we’re straying too far from my metaphor.

Shocker: I don’t handle being told “No” very well. I’m a fighter. Some might call me stubborn or even needy, but what it boils down to is that I put up one helluva fight. I wanted to be a mom by age 30 and/or my third anniversary, whichever came first. I’m told I can’t have my own children so making those milestones might not happen the way I hoped I’d be able to.

And thus, the John Locke Approach to Infertility™: Don’t tell me what I can’t do.

Like John Locke, instead of making me power-hungry, being infertile has made me baby-hungry. Hm, that sounds uncessarily cannabalistic. Infertility has made me motherhood-hungry. So while I feel bad about how I feel today, I own it. I’m not pushing it aside or wallowing in it. I take ownership of the fact that I’ve been told I can’t have something I really effing want… which of course makes me want it more.

And like Locke, I’ll have to get creative in order to get what I want. For Locke, that meant pushing a button every 108 minutes, killing a Portuguese mercenary, and periodically traveling through time (yanno, like ya do). For me, it means using donor eggs and utilizing IVF.

But don’t tell me what I can’t do… because I’m only going to fight that much harder to do it. I’ve got the fighting spirit down – now I just need the patience.