Why I will never close this blog and making my grass greener

I know I don’t write here anymore folks and, well, it is what it is. Two kids (one that doesn’t sleep well) leaves me spinning most days. I hardly get any me time and when I do I’m just not pumped to write.

My brain writes posts all the time. But then the act of sitting down to type them up is more than I can bear. I’ve been through writing slumps like this before. And maybe I will come back to it but for right now, I’m just taking it one day at a time.

One thing I have feeling the urge to do lately is to start tending to my own metaphorical garden. I feel like my grass is lacking all the things it needs to be the green of lovely tended lawns. Right now, my grass looks like it has been through a long hot summer with little to no rain. It is limp and brown and dry but with patches of green as I get a bit of self care in here and there.

As I emerge from this fog that is baby’s first year I am feeling a yearning now more than ever to figure out what makes me sing; what gives me a buzz from the inside. And my intuition tells me it is a creative pursuit. I have no flipping idea what it is but I need to tap into that shit as I feel like it is bursting to get out of me. So that is my new focus. Or going to be anyway.

Try doing new stuff until I have an aha moment.

This blog will continue to live on though, even if I don’t write on it. While it was never set up to be a fertility blog exclusively that is kind of what it became and where it has been most useful. A few months ago I woke to this wonderful comment:

Emily, I wanted to write to you and let you know how important your blog became to me over this last year. I wanted to contact you privately but couldn’t find a way, so here I am! Anyway, this last spring I was on my own fertility journey when this blog came up in a google search about L-Arginine and whether I should try it for TTC. By this time you were already successfully pregnant and I was desperate to know more about how you made it work. At that time I’d been trying for almost a year and had started all the tests to see what could be wrong with me or my partner (also an Eric!). The ONLY thing that came up on any test was endometriosis. I didn’t have all the classic signs so I didn’t know I had it. Still my fertility doctor told me she didn’t think that was my issue and basically told me IVF was my only option. After hearing your success with laparoscopy I wanted a second opinion. The second doctor said he’d definitely try laparoscopy before IVF for me and so I went for it, and six weeks later – PREGNANT! I couldn’t believe it! I am now 20 weeks along and am sooooo grateful I ran into your story. My insurance here in the USA wouldn’t have covered a dime of IVF, but a laparoscopy was covered. Thank you so much for sharing your journey! I cannot express how much it means to me. Though, having gone through the journey yourself, I am sure you can imagine. I am also expecting a little girl.

Folks, this issue with silent endometriosis is REAL. IVF will often fail if you have it. I’m not sure why so many specialists completely ignore this fact. My first one did too and it cost about $30k minimum in failed IVF cycles because he just wouldn’t pop in to my belly and have a look see. Yes it is a tad invasive but ummm, so is IVF and he had no such hesitation in pumping me full of hormones over and over and over again. It is CRAZY. New specialist, a wee bit of surgery and boom, natural conception; TWICE.

This will not be everyone’s story. I am well aware of that. Some peeps will still need IVF and some will still struggle to conceive but your odds of conceiving are so much better if the damn disease is removed. I truly urge all those struggling to conceive to fight for this surgery. You need to know. Your body and you deserve to be given the chance before transferring your life savings to your local IVF clinic.

So this blog will stay here. And I may or may not post from time to time. Or I may just keep writing posts in my head. Who knows? I need to go edit my About page as it says I’m a single mum and we all know that Eric lives here these days but truthfully, that whole situation is hanging on by a thread which I (we) may just cut loose before the year is out. We have a family holiday to Asia over Easter and I think we will take a serious review after this. That whole story deserves more than a brief paragraph at the bottom of a post but I’m not sure I can say more about it than that right now as I feel like it is ever evolving and I don’t want to post on it at every little interval. But I don’t really feel that we are for each other in a forever sense.

On that note, I’m going to go tend to my garden a bit more. Kisses. And those of you still on your journey to baby, may it all come together for you soon.