Promises I Can't Keep

The holidays are coming up quickly.  Because of all the stuff going on with moving and my husband's training schedule, I barely even noticed it sneaking up on me.  But all of a sudden, it's nearly Thanksgiving!  And I know that I'll blink and it will be Christmas.

There is an awful lot I am thankful for this year, but it is a struggle to not let infertility overshadow all the wonderful things in my life sometimes.  I've got a wonderful marriage, have made some great friends in the last year, got a new car (well, new to me!) late last year and we're about to buy a fabulous house.  We've got a great dog who we love spoiling, our families are generally quite healthy overall.  We've been able to save money.  My brother got engaged to a fabulous girl.  Our nephew was born.

Overall, it's been a good year!  Except this time last year, I was still hoping to get pregnant before Christmas.  And I remember that I took a pregnancy test on the morning of Christmas Eve, which was disappointing.  And I had to deal with period cramps all night on Christmas Eve into Christmas morning, barely sleeping.  I remember promising myself that it would all be okay, because by next Christmas, I would probably be a Mom or at the very least be pregnant.

Yeah, right.

So it's not just that I'm not pregnant - it's that I broke a promise to myself.  I believed so fully that by this time, I'd have a baby or be pregnant.  Because of course, why wouldn't I be?  We're healthy, we're young, my cycles are clockwork regular, we've got a healthy sex life.

And yet, here we are, 12 cycles since last Christmas and 16 cycles total, and no pregnancies.  And a bunch of testing, about $500 in co-insurance costs towards a variety of tests that showed very little in the way of explaining our lack of success.  Sure, we've got some slow swimmers, and they're mostly a bit odd shaped, but there's quite a few of them!  And surely in the past 16 months, one of them would have found an egg?

That broken promise hurts.  I feel like I let myself down.  I got my hopes and expectations up, and now I'm just miserably disappointed.

So this Christmas, I get to deal with infertility.  I have to struggle with the knowledge that I can't so blindly promise myself that by next Christmas, we'll either have a baby or be pregnant.  Because I just don't know.  I don't know exactly what's wrong, I don't know what it will take to fix it, I'm not positive that we can fix it, and I definitely don't know if we can afford to continue trying indefinitely.