Hello. I’m Ava, I’m new to this site. It’s nice to know you are out there. I won’t go through all the details of the journey. A lot of it is familiar to you I can tell by your posts. I’m so glad to find you all. I have never posted anything (not even a review of a dress LOL). I don’t know where else to go. I can’t tell anybody else. I feel like I’m talking to myself or talking to God. Do you feel like that? Okay, here we go. The newest thing: I am well past my two week wait—2 WW. It has been almost four weeks since ovulation, no period! But I’m scared to death to find out. I ovulate on day 17 through 20 (I know! Way late!) and now I’m waiting. Again!
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I haven’t been on birth control for about nine years. But my first pregnancy was only about six years ago. Followed in three weeks by my first miscarriage. My second miscarriage was eight months ago, the last one was almost five months ago. I have never had a successful pregnancy. NO BABIES. I’m scared. I have had Intrauternine inseminations (IUI) several times, way too many drugs. The doctors don’t know what the deal is. He’s been checked out too, by the way. I had IVF once, but I can’t really afford it again. I will have to get another mortgage on my house and I don’t have enough equity. That’s all the ready money I’ve got. I think this is my last shot. It feels funny to even write that. Wish me luck. Who would have thought after years of trying not to get “knocked up,” I’d be worrying like this. LOL
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Anyway, I don’t have any major symptoms. Did anybody else get a BFP—BIG FAT POSITIVE (don’t you love this language? ?) without symptoms? My natural pregnancies came on like tsunamis. I guess this is natural too. Assisted is the word, right? I did have one little moment three days after the hormone injection. Six sharp pains in my ovary or at least in that direction. Six of them like little chicken pecks. But nothing since then. PRAY FOR ME. Any information you have will be appreciated. I will pray for you all. Ava2WW
Ava picked up the laptop and moved it from the counter to her kitchen table. She never thought she’d post to one of those sites, telling her business to a bunch of sad strangers. She could talk to Jenny, the youngish white woman at work who had made several overtures of friendship to her. They had gone out for coffee a few times and walked together through town at lunch in their dresses and tennis shoes. They had even gone out to dinner and once to a movie. But Jenny was gossipy and needy, too eager to latch onto someone, anyone, and it didn’t seem to matter who. A couple of times Ava gave in and decided that they would be friends. Why not? Both of them could hold the other as a placeholder until the real friend came along. Wasn’t that better than nothing? Apparently not. Ava just couldn’t stand her. Did people, grown people spend time with folks they couldn’t stand? Sylvia never had, but Sylvia was mostly alone. Not on purpose (but who ever does it on purpose?), Ava had ended up with a life like her mother’s. But she could change, couldn’t she? Just writing the one web message had made Ava feel oddly hopeful, like she waited for the arrival of a friend. Ava could change.
Jenny recommended a Chinese herbalist in Raleigh who had helped Jenny’s hairdresser’s daughter with acupuncture and herbs. The daughter had gotten pregnant right away. Ava couldn’t count how many stories she had heard just like that one. Some woman was struggling with infertility and click, the right switch got turned on from an unlikely source. Ava knew it was pathetic to believe every story. But you get in too deep, you start to figure what the hell? Why not? What could it hurt? You start to see logic in every dumb idea you heard. One weekend Ava pretended she had a work retreat and drove to Raleigh to visit the herbalist. Turned out the man worked out of an inside booth at the flea market.at the State Fairgrounds. The herbalist watched her walk in, sized her up, looked over her body with not a shred of sexual interest, and then asked her age. When she told him, he’d stared at her like she was crazy, sighed audibly with scornful resignation. “You too old,” he’d said and shook his head. Ava had been so frustrated she felt like crying. The man reached behind his counter and gave her some tea leaves in a mesh sack that she was supposed to brew and drink every morning before she ate. Ava boiled water for the tea one morning, but didn’t drink it. Whatever was in the mix might work against the drugs she already took. She’d later flushed the sack down the toilet.
She backspaced over the PRAY FOR ME. That sounded wrong. She’d never asked anybody to pray for her in her life. She then backspaced over the I will pray for you. She reread the post and retyped I will pray for you. She would pray. In her way she prayed all the time. Ava pushed send and closed the laptop. The women on the site would answer. That she was sure of, since she’d spent entire evenings reading their posts. So many stories just like hers. Some worse. Ava was glad she could reveal herself without shame online. If you had a secret in the old days, your family held your story in the vaults of their hearts until you died or until they did. The weight of the shame, the sorrow, the terror stuck and dragged down a body in the world. But you could survive, if the particulars did not emerge or emerge completely, if the family could be discreet. Ava had never heard of a discreet family.
Ava’s great-aunt Lula, dead for at least thirty years, had not married or had children and had lived in her mother’s house and then her sister’s house until she died. Whatever had made her stay out of the commerce of ordinary life was a mystery that Ava did not know and had never attempted to find out. Maybe she was content or maybe they all wanted to avoid the inconvenience of her pain. What would Aunt Lula have written online to her secret best friends?
Ava closed the computer and put some clothes in to wash in the basement. In the morning she would have to remember to put them in the dryer or she’d come back (not for the first time) to them half dry and mildewed, her attempt at industry having backfired and giving her more work to do. When they’d first moved into the house she was a kid and afraid to go to the basement alone. She still didn’t love this dimly lit, dirty part of the house, with so many hidden nooks, but it interested her. No wonder they made horror movies about damp basements where the disgraced items of everyday life moldered, not in the bowels, though she could see that metaphor easily, but in the ovaries waiting to reemerge damp and changed. Would anyone but an infertile woman think that? She laughed out loud. She could still laugh about it. Now that had to be progress, right?