Journey into (an overly active) Imagination

Well, here we are in February already without one single blog post. Maybe if it hadn't been gray, constantly rainy and cold for the past week I would have found something fascinating to blog about. As it is, when I'm not working I've generally been wearing thick socks, drinking hot tea and enjoying the comfort of being inside with the heater cranked up.

And just to let you in on the paranoid person I can be: the perfection of a toasty warm house is tainted a little by a nagging fear that rats will discover our attic or (oh, the horror!) our house as a heated refuge from the freezing, damp outdoors.

And that's what living in a large, generally cold and rainy European city (called Amsterdam) filled to the brim with apartment complexes will do to you.

(Not that we ever had rats, just mice. But rats are well within the realm of possibility.)

While spending so much time surrounded the damp, cold, gray of February, here's what I've been pondering. (Because no matter how I try, I just can't help but think about the pregnancy issue at least once a day.) I hear so many infertility stories. So many of them end with miraculous, unexpected pregnancies or four beautiful children.

Maybe we hear the stories with those endings because no one wants to tell the story where being barren is a life-long fact, where a pregnancy never happens, where one day down the road a couple realizes they never had children and now they never will.

But my first thought when I hear the "miraculous pregnancy" stories is sadness. (Unless the stories belong to people I know well and love. I can genuinely be happy for my loved ones while sadness only hovers somewhere in the background.) Well-meaning people tell me the stories to give me hope, without realizing it is sometimes quite the opposite. It makes me hurt wondering if my story will one day be like that....or if mine will be the story no one ever tells.

I hope I can walk through this life with its unexpected problems and always have a story to tell. Stories, after all, don't always have to end happily ever after in order to learn a lesson or grow as a person. That's real life, and I have no problem sharing my real life with people.

I may be thinking more lately about all the infertility because we have been going back and forth with the insurance company to even get them to process some claims we've made from the last couple IUIs. And now, I have to make yet another call to the billing company to persuade them to please, please, please just get me some copies of bills. I will be grateful when this is all over...I give it about six more months.