Baroness von Barrenness

Retraction

Strike that bit from my last blog entry about not crying at the drop of a hat. Or rather, let me add a caveat. I cry at the drop of a hat when I attend church at First Presbyterian back "home" in Ann Arbor. It started maybe even before we were TTC. We would sing hymns and I'd get a little teary-eyed. And then we encountered the fertility problems and I couldn't sit through a baptism without crying. At that point we stopped going to church altogether. That was about a year and a half before we moved to the Netherlands.

We went back to the States over the holidays, North Carolina to visit family and Michigan to visit friends. And while in Ann Arbor I decided it would actually be really nice to get up early on Sunday and go to my "home church." It's not the church I grew up in, but it's the church we chose and the church in which we were married. It's the church where we could feel like we belonged and still feel anonymous. (Sorry Rev. Brouwer!) It was the church where we were challenged by sermons both intellectual and practical, and where we enjoyed a Dave Brubeck Christmas cantata! Such a beautiful and special place.

I figured that with the fertility problems behind us and no baptisms listed in the worship bulletin (PDF), I was home free! And then we stood up for the first hymn. "Angels, from the Realms of Glory." I got a little teary but recovered during the Prayer of Confession.

The Gloria Patri? "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son..." I nearly always lose it anyway, so no worries about a few tears shed there.

The hymn between the scripture and the sermon? "What Child Is This?" I totally kept my cool on that one.

And then came the Prayer of Dedication. Oh goodness.

It being New Year's Eve Day and all, Rev. Brouwer began talking about the past year (not an easy one for me - so many changes with my job and the move and the pregnancy) and about the year to come and - OH MY 2007 IS GOING TO BE A WHOPPER. I lost it completely.

Thank god it was a prayer and (I hope) everyone behind me was behaving like good Christian boys and girls with their heads bowed and their eyes closed because they might have seen my shoulders shaking. If not my shoulders shaking, then they surely would have seen me holding that pathetic, soggy tissue to my face and my face tensed into a grimace, overcome with I don't even know what.

Fortunately for me, the prayer was very close to the end of the service, and for the most part I was able to avoid the lines of people waiting to wish Rev. Beery a happy retirement at the door. It was starting to rain lightly as I made my way back to my rental car. I drove off to get myself a chai and a slice of lemon-poppyseed cake from the Caribou Coffee at Stadium & Packard. The guys at the register and the espresso machine were suspiciously friendly -- was my face splotchy from crying? were my eyes red and puffy? No, a visit to the ladies' room reassured me that my face was normal. And I remembered that the staff there were always oddly chipper anyway. I quickly got over the crying. And I'll return to First Pres (and that particular Caribou) any time I'm back in Ann Arbor.

If I could predict the future...

...and knew whether or not DH was going to get me a Christmas gift, I just might order this for myself. Gotta love CafePress.

Reflecting on our fourth wedding anniversary

Our fourth anniversary! In some ways it seems so much further away than that. This isn't the ideal way to celebrate, with Charles in Poland, but I wouldn't trade the opportunity to be pregnant with having him here this one day. And I know he would feel the same way.

I looked through photos today from the rehearsal dinner, wedding, reception and some from our honeymoon in Korea. I hadn't realized how much of our wedding I've pushed myself away from emotionally because of infertility. We were together almost nine years before we got married. We waited part of that time because of school and part of that time trying to ensure a stable financial situation. But we really didn't move to get married until we were ready to settle down.

As much as our wedding was a celebration of our love and making a public commitment to each other, it was about joining our two families to start one of our own. Maybe more so than the other reasons.

For that reason I was so happy that our parents put together the slide shows of family photos for the rehearsal dinner (even if I was worried about the length). And that Charles' parents presented the hahm with his grandparents' Bibles and halmoni's norigae and the blue and red silks for my Mom to choose from blindly (boy or girl?). And I was proud to perform paebaek and catch so many dried dates in my scarf. (And later to see the very tree they came from at Sanso, his family's burial ground.) It really was a ridiculous number of dates - probably closer to the number of eggs retrieved in our two rounds of IVF than would be even physically possible to conceive and deliver in the course of one marriage. But it was important and it was fun and it was everything our marriage represented.

But in coping with our infertility, in trying to come to terms with the idea that we might never have kids of our own, I distanced myself from that aspect of our wedding. In my mind it was a great wedding, a fun party surrounded by family and friends, a beautiful occasion to celebrate our love. But I'd forgotten about the family focus until I looked through those photos again today.

And it's so nice - to finally be pregnant on our anniversary - to be able to reclaim those memories and the feelings of that special day.

And it helps ease my mind, too, from some of my concerns about giving birth here - about the care I'll receive, about the birthing process, about missing out on some of the traditions that go with having a baby in the States, about how in the world we're going to prepare here all by ourselves without the convenience of a registry and showers and Babies 'R' Us and advice from knitting buddies who've been there.

In five, ten, 20, 50 years, it probably won't matter if I used the Bradley method or an epidural. Or that we didn't have a nursery to decorate in a house of our own. It'll matter that we have a family and lived to see the dreams of our wedding day realized.

Now let's just hope everything goes well with the doctor Friday and maybe we can start sharing the good news with our families. Because this man has waited too long to have a son or daughter.

-The Barrenness

I've moved!

I've moved literally and virtually!

We've been in the Netherlands for a week and a half and have spent most of our time just trying to get settled in and riding bikes. The good news is that our work permits arrived yesterday, so we're legal and can start drawing paychecks again (to pay for our new bikes)!

In the meantime, this blog has taken a back seat to my new blog about adjusting to life in the Netherlands - Krees Goes Dutch. It's a fitting parallel for infertility starting to take a back seat to just living the rest of my life. It's not as anonymous as this blog since I'm using it explicitly as a way to keep friends and family up-to-date - and specifically to keep my mother from freaking out about me. I may still post here occasionally if I have something to say that's specifically related to fertility. But now that most of our acquaintances are also aware of our struggles to conceive, I may just post openly over there.

I hope you'll pop over to see me at the new place. And if you're ever in the Netherlands, drop me a note!

-The Barrenness

My life as a bum

I won't go into all the truly boring details, but the important data points, as Mr. Baroness would call them, are:

1. We are now officially jobless (in a good way)!
2. We are now officially homeless (in a really good way)!

We wrapped up our jobs last week and accepted an offer on the house two days ago. Woo hoo!

We also talked to the Dutch this morning. They've picked a moving company, so now we get to schedule a packing/shipping date and a flying date. They (apparently) are FINALLY getting the appropriate paperwork from the parent organization to apply for our work permits; those will take an additional two to three weeks to come through. But as long as they're willing to pay for shipping and plane tickets, we're pretty sure the work permits will be taken care of. And we can spend a week or two getting settled and playing tourists.

It's finally happening! I guess we'd better get cracking on learning Dutch!

-The Barrenness

Fortunate coincidence?

No news is good news, right? No word yet on the visas, but I don't expect to hear anything until around June 19.

In the meantime, we've started corresponding with one of the researchers there. He's going on a yearlong sabbatical to Australia and is looking to rent out his house, furnished or unfurnished. It has multiple bedrooms, a recently updated kitchen, sunroom, vegetable garden and a shed with a small attached guest house. And the dog is allowed! He lives about 2-3 miles from the office and says he's able to bike to work year-round. He also is looking to sell his 12-year old station wagon.

Despite a population of only 2,500, he describes the village he lives in as "vivid," popular with tourists and with an annual Shakespeare festival that's been running 60 years.  This sounds too good to be true!

-The Barrenness

Growing up

We gave the Dutch the email equivalent of a verbal acceptance of the offers. It'll take a couple weeks for them to get confirmation on our work visas, though, and we won't give notice at our current jobs until then.

In the meantime, Mr. Baroness got a different job offer yesterday from his old boss. I think it's slightly less than he's making now, but about the equivalent of what we'd be making together in the Netherlands. It would be a better career choice, although not ideal. There's a chance we won't get the visas, and Mr. Baroness can't stall him for weeks while we wait to know about the visa status. I suspect he'll take the risk and turn down the offer.

I've been trying to wrap my head around who I've become as an adult. I think I used to be much more self-confident when I was younger. I wasn't necessarily any more outgoing or outspoken, but I thought more highly of myself. At work in particular I feel like I have so much self-doubt. It doesn't help that I'm so indecisive. I look around me and people seem so much more self-confident - arrogant even. So assured that their opinions are the right ones, and everyone else is wrong, if not inferior. But I do wonder if it's just a good facade. I know I try to appear more confident to my co-workers. I'm far more self-effacing with friends. Maybe everyone else has as much self-doubt as I do?

And yet - I'm planning on going and living overseas for a while in a country where I don't even speak the language. How do I reconcile that? Part of it is Mr. Baroness. I know we'll be in this together. Even with the job - we'll be working with each other, and I know he can help guide me along.

I do wonder where my self-confidence went, though, or why. Sometimes I think Mr. Baroness might be the cause of that, too. Not that he has made me think less of myself because of how he's acted toward me - but because of the example he's made of himself that I don't usually feel I measure up to. Or maybe it's the six months I spent looking fruitlessly for a job in San Francisco. Or maybe it's humility taught by my parents or Lutheranism or growing up in the Midwest.

A friend from high school sent me a really interesting email the other day. She'd been reading through my old blog entries about trying to conceive, and she wrote about how much she admired me and wanted to be like me "when she grew up" (or something like that). She seemed to have read some more admirable qualities into my writings than I would have thought were there.

Part of it is, with something like dealing with infertility or IVF, people who haven't gone through it either don't understand (or don't try to understand), or they make it out to be something even bigger or braver or more courageous than it feels to the person who's gone through it. In my case, there wasn't really a choice to be made at all. It was a matter of accepting what we needed to do to try to conceive.

Regardless, her email made me think that maybe I need to listen more to others and believe them when they compliment me like that.

-The Barrenness

I lied...

About three minutes after my last post, I received the following email from Mr. Baroness:

sent a note to dutch early today just to make sure i did not miss an email. mike replied and said that thigns are busy over there and is hoping for something today (he sent me a note at 5pm his time).

assuming that means he'll need to review it.

i guess the new timeframe is end of week...

sigh...

No word yet

No offer from the Netherlands yet as expected. My guess is it's just taking a while to get the paperwork done, especially since they have to get visas for us.

In the meantime we've started preparations to the sell the house and move. With the help of a couple good friends, we're repainting one of the spare bedrooms. The "Margarita Room," so called because of its color rather than what we like to do there, is getting a lighter shade of paint and some new white baseboards. I also took up the long-overdue task of scrubbing the soap scum out of our shower; it looks so much better!

I also took El Perro to the vet to make sure he's up-to-date on his vaccinations and to get his entry certificate filled out. Bad news there. The EU requires a three-month wait between his rabies serological test and when he can enter the country, which means we won't be able to take him with us right away. My parents have volunteered to take him, but I worry that they won't be able to exercise him enough and that my mother will spoil her grand-dog rotten. I fear he'll be a holy terror when we get him back.

So I've also asked his breeder if she might be able to take him at all. A month spent racing around every day with his relatives would be great for him. But it's also a lot to ask of someone with a family, a business to run and two dogs of her own. But my fingers are crossed.

-The Barrenness

Half-baked philosophical ponderings

I don't believe in fate. Or destiny. I wouldn't even say that I believe God has a master plan for ME. (There are just too many MEs down here.)

But I can't help but wonder if this opportunity to go to the Netherlands isn't related somehow to us not having children yet. If we did have a child, it would undoubtedly change the way we approach this decision. Same thing for my career ambition. If I truly loved this job or this line of work, the decision would be different.

Maybe somehow it's meant to be?

-The Barrenness