Things that shall not be named....

for FEAR of them becoming real. You know, how sometimes, you write stuff and then it happens. I have this irrational belief that as long as I don't say it out loud it is not there, that I can hide it, make it disappear, just like Snow White's dwarfs when they were cleaning.

(Source)

That I can pretend It's not there. I was going to write about it, but I don't dare to. Anyhow, yesterday, clicking through links over at APW, I found this text, thanks to Sarah, Albie's mom  and I thought I would share it. I could relate in more than one way, and somehow it gave me hope.

Welcome to Holland
by Emily Perl Kingsley.

When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. Michelangelo’s David. Venice. The Cinque Terre. Roma. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting.

 After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, “Welcome to Holland.”
“Holland?!?” you say. “What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.”

 But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay. The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a place full of pestilence, famine and disease. It’s just a different place to where you thought you were headed. So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.
It’s just a different place. It’s slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around. And you begin to notice that Holland has windmills. Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts. (and Vermeers)

But still everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy. They are all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say, “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.”
And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away, because the loss of that dream is a very, very significant loss.
But if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about Holland.

We're struggling, but there are lovely, lovely girls out there that make me think that this situation will change. It is a weird thing, spending 8 years of your life studying Physiology, Biology, Reproduction only to learn you can not control anything. That it is not about knowledge. That there is no switch that you can simply turn on when you so feel like.  I am thinking it is more about magic. And on bad days where I cry, where I want to break things, it feels cruel, it feels like punishment, it feels like I am a failure. And I find it hard to get my faith and my hope back. I know for a fact that every baby is a miracle, that there are no accidents, I know. I know all the things that can happen to a zygote even before it can nest, I know that it is less than 30 % of conceptions that make it to term. Lots of times you conceive and you don't even know it cause the tiny thing disappears before you get your next period. I watch MTV's sixteen and pregnant in awe cause I really don't know how that happened to all those girls. How you can get pregnant from 1 night of drunken sex. Those stories feel like a bad joke to me now, and a mean one at that. Of course you could say I am old (biologically) after all 16 is not the same as 31, and I know that the "ideal" age if your body was to decide is somewhere around 22.  But that can't be it, because I have friends my age and these days Facebook is a baby festival. After all, if a cow under metabolic stress  can get pregnant with half a dose of frozen semen... I should be able to?