First, the fabby, lovely, wonderful news that I had my 2nd antepartum testing yesterday. Only heartbeat/bloodflow monitoring. U/S is only done once a week.

My girl, she passed in flying colors, and very quickly. I ate just before I left, so that helped get her going as well.

I don’t think I’m going to get sick of these tests anytime soon.

I had a breastfeeding dream last night. It was the most natural and lovely thing… it was easy, Baby Girl took right to it. It was one of the nicest pregnancy dreams I’ve had.

To add to my happiness, I stumbled across a woman (through work) who trained as a midwife and has all kinds of advice she is happy to share with me. I wish I had the money to hire a doula, but I do not and we’ll be flying solo on this thing. But we have each other, and that is already so much. I figure if I really get in trouble, I could probably email her, maybe even hire her for a few hours if I really had to.

On top of that is my friend who has offered babysitting and making the quilt… God is not leaving me totally alone to get through this. I do have female support around me. Even our account rep at the bank has been so lovely to me, making kind conversation every time she sees me. Today I showed off the belly (and I’ve seriously got some belly to show these days!) to her, and it felt great.

Not to mention all my bloggy friends out there… I am always touched at the support that comes in through these pages.

I think I’m going to make it. [smile]

* * *

An amazing article came out in the NYTimes today: Divorcing Your Parents. This one hit dead-center for me. At last count there are 24 pages and almost 600 comments. All mostly from men and women, who like myself, were forced to make the very difficult and painful decision to estrange themselves from one or more family members.

It’s not really the article itself that is amazing. I actually found the author’s writing to be a little disjointed and frankly, wimpy, on the subject. There are many, many therapists who recommend separation as a key survival skill to those of us who have suffered at the hands of less than appropriate parents.

It’s the comments (still streaming in as of 7pm PST) that are so heartwrenching and affirming all at once.

I haven’t spoken much about my past here. I’ve often wanted to. There is a direct connection between what happened to me as a child and how I ended up requiring donor eggs to conceive and bear children. As I’ve said before, my family-induced ‘infertility’ was the final slap in the face to me after all I’ve been through with them. It’s why they will never know, if I can help it, that we conceived with donor egg. The last thing I plan to take from them are clueless, insensitive or downright mean-spirited remarks about my so-called fertility when I am 100% positive that I never had a fertility issue to begin with. What I did have, was the need to run so far and so fast and for so long from real commitment and (god forbid) children that I ended up giving up my best years to have children.

In reading the comments today, it really struck home for me how direct the connection is between my past and my need for donor eggs. So many women posting in the comments spoke of how fearful they were of having children of their own, not wanting to recreate the horrors they lived through. Or simply being so disabused of the notion of family and children that they simply no longer wanted it.

I don’t write these words to inspire pity. I write them because I have suspected for a long, long time that there is a subset of women in the DE community who, like myself, ended up running too long. I want to connect with these women, but I have no idea how to do so. I’m hoping some of them somehow end up here because I feel that those of us in this subset have to endure a particular pain around conceiving via donor egg. It’s a pain that reinforces what happened to you. Your most precious innocence was stolen, all the way down to your ability to procreate. You end up changed to your very core and it so easy to feel over and over again how someone got away with something really, really wrong.

I’ve always felt ‘different’ within the IF and DE communities, and this is why. I don’t fully relate to those women for whom infertility is a terrible, deep, dark pain because I’ve already been to that place. I am realizing today/tonight that along with my childhood innocence, I lost the innocent assumption that most women bring to childbearing. It was over for me before I ever even had a chance to get it started. I made damn sure that my choices in men and relationships took me farther and farther away from the possibility of ever really being able to have children. I never realized how hard and fast I was running until today.

Fortunately, I got help. The two years of therapy I did saved my life and led me to my darling DH who understands much, although not all, of what I went through. I have confidence in the job we’ll do as parents. And I so look forward to creating a life for my daughter (and maybe a 2nd child, if I am so lucky) that will be so different from my own. Or rather, a better version of what I got.

I want to blog about this (as I’ve hinted at in the past) and then again I don’t. Part of me just wants to move on, live a happy and joyful life, the one that I always deserved. I am wrestling with how I can work that into a new blog about DE motherhood. Maybe I simply need to try it and see how it goes.

If you’ve ever had a friend who ‘divorced’ him or herself from their parents and/or family and you’ve struggled to understand how they could ever need or want to do such a thing, I highly recommend you read the article, and especially, the comments. Listen, if you can, to the voices of those who have suffered the most terrible of nightmares and you might come to understand a little better why we have chosen the path of separation. It ought to be called a path of survival. It certainly was for me.

Oh, and if any of you are reading this and are left still scratching your head, you can check out this study as well, posted by one of the commenters: http://acestudy.org/

If you run across anyone that you think could relate to my post today, I hope you will point them here. I know there are others out there like me out there. I may ask Stirrup Queens to put up an announcement in Lost and Found. We’ll see what happens from there.

Either way, this blog is going to evolve soon. I will finish up the ‘what I learned’ pages and once she is born, I am going to turn a new leaf and start a new one. I hope y’all will join me in the biggest adventure of my life!

Later, peeps. And happy trails.