December 2007: I Tell Momma to Cut It Out

In December, we decided we were ready to do the HSG. So we went through everything again, the Cytotec, the hospital, the billing lady who told us there were going to be charges but wasn’t able to tell us exactly how much those charges were going to be. The test itself was funny to me. Here I was on this big x-ray machine, with all this high tech stuff. But the way they get the dye into your tubes is by making you sort of wriggle around on the table, lifting your hips to the left and the right. After all that, the dye and the machine and everything, it’s still good old gravity that proved my tubes worked just fine, thank you very much.

December was also the month of family togetherness, what with Christmas. My mother had been hinting, for years really, that she wanted grandchildren--not in an offensive way, but in a cute, happy "I can't wait to take them to the zoo" kind of way. So when we started having trouble, I'd told her almost immediately, so that she knew not to bug me about it.

Or I thought she'd know. Maybe it was too difficult for her to understand, given that she gotten pregnant and popped four children out without blinking. (When I asked her if labor hurt, she told me, "It really wasn't that bad." How is that possible?) Anyway, it was at Christmas Eve dinner that she chose to remind me that she had yet to be blessed with grandchildren.

I thought it was rather tactful of me to ignore her, so I didn't say anything. But then she asked me, louder, in front of 10 other people, "Did you hear me?"

I am not trying to suggest my mother is insensitive, because she's actually not at all. She's actually a wonderful, supportive person. But, like her daugher after her, she's also a woman who likes wine with dinner, and before dinner, and after dinner. She likes to say, "Oh, my lips feel numb." So I don't think she was particularly aware that, with family members and friends gazing on, this question was embarassing and humiliating for me.

Like I said before, I cry easily when someone's nice and kind and sympathetic, like Dr. J. Ironically, when someone is thoughtless, though, I tend to bite their head off. I don't think I overdid it or anything, but I just looked her in the eye and said, "I heard you. Stop it. You know where things stand, and when you remind me, you just make me feel worse."

That was the first time I realized that I didn't have to let the infertility shame me all the time. I knew that interaction wasn't my fault. It was a few glasses of red wine too many that made a loving person a careless one (my mom has since apologized and been very, very supportive throughout my ordeal). But I didn't have to buy into it. It was probably a good way to end 2007, not pregnant but not a weeping mess either.