Moving Forward

Lately I have come to realize that how I feel about my sons and my grief are two separate entities. I am not sure if it makes sense, even to me, but this is what I have noticed lately.

I miss my boys with all of my heart and soul. I love them more than I could ever explain or even understand. Every now and then I cry for them but on my worst days...the days where getting out if bed, making it through the day and reminding myself that the world has not ended is when I grieve what has been lost...the dream of being a family, of being a mommy (not just a mother). I am grieving what could/should/would have been not necessarily my sons. It sounds awful when I write it out, but it is an honest feeling. I have found some form of acceptance (on most days) that my beautiful sons, William and Ethan, are gone forever. There is nothing I can do to change that and I will love them no less as time passes. What shatters me to the core is the fact that I should be a Mommy right now...others get to have that with their own children but I don't.

I mentioned before this is the same kind of heart ache I felt before I got pregnant, before our 1st IVF. Dealing with infertility is a grief all its own...a loss of being normal, of doing it the old-fashioned way...and that is harder for me to deal with these last few weeks. Ironically it is the one thing I can do something to change. I can't go back in time and change the outcome of my last pregnancy. I can't bring William and Ethan back to life. What I can do is try again to get pregnant.

As you can imagine, I am terrified, nervous and all those kinds of feelings magnified by 100. But I am also starting to feel hope. I never thought I would get that feeling back. Hope...possibilities...starting again. Maybe because it is spring and things are flowering, leaves are budding and renewal is in the air. Hope is returning. I am clinging to it like it might disappear. Hope. That is huge.

So I scheduled an appointment with my RE for April 27th to find out what we need to do in order to prepare for a FET (frozen embryo transfer) cycle. I am not too keen on getting pregnant at the same time as last year (avoiding June/July cycles that could result in the same timeline/due date/milestones) so we will either jump right in or hold off until August. I am slightly afraid that if we wait until August I will loose my nerve but it is probably for the best.

One other conclusion I have come to is that there is only so much heart ache I am able to take. We have 5 frozen embies left over from our 1st IVF cycle. If none are viable I will have to seriously consider how much farther I am willing to go. I don't even want to commit my thoughts to writing for fear that it will come to fruition...I want to hold on to that little shred of hope while it lasts.