A difficult weekend

Remember my fear of “the big announcement?” Well, this time it was for real: My SIL (my brother’s wife) is pregnant. She’s about 10 weeks along.

In case you haven’t been keeping track, I have one sibling and M has one sibling. They are now both expecting their second children. And here I sit, with only pictures and a memory box to remind me of my one and only child.

I didn’t talk to my brother; M did, because we suspected that was what he was calling about. I e-mailed them a congratulations because I just can’t bear to talk to them. I cried for two hours after hearing the news. I actually heard it from my mom first because my brother had left us a vague message and I wanted to call her and make sure my suspicion was correct. She was upset that I made her tell me. My mother is upset, in general, because she feels caught between grieving and celebrating. When I told her I was going to have M talk to my brother, she couldn’t believe it. “Just try to put yourself in their place. This is so hard for them.” Well, I told her, it’s hard for me too! I’m sick of having to think of everybody else’s feelings all the time. If they feel like they’re hurting me…well, it’s true! I’m not going to suck it up simply to spare their feelings.

(To be fair, I did get a wonderful reply from my SIL to my e-mail. She’s being very sensitive and caring; they wanted to wait to tell me until after Christmas because they figured the holidays would be hard enough.)

To add insult to injury, my mother told me they figure their child was probably conceived the same week Zach died. Talk about irony. Well, at least M and I didn’t choose to carry to term. Can you imagine—all of us would be pregnant, except our siblings’ babies would live (presumably) and I would know mine would die.

This weekend was also rough because I got a temp rise, only to have my hopes dashed by a drop this morning. I never really believed I would ovulate this cycle, but my damned chart gave me hope. Nothing has really changed in our plan, but for a day or two, I actually believed I would be able to start treatment a couple days earlier because my body worked the way it was supposed to. Argh. This, my friends, is the terror that is PCOS. Instead of BFNs month after month, all we get are ovulation false alarms. It’s easy to determine ovulation from looking at a completed chart. It’s not so easy when you’re in the middle of it.