Diarrhea of the Mouth

Today, I did something I swore up and down I would not do when we started this process: I talked openly with my mother about it. And now I wish I could turn back the clock and take it all back.

It had started to come out slowly. Several weeks ago, early in the IVF cycle, I told her I had PCOS and that we were "pursuing treatments" to try and have a baby. I suppose there's not a huge leap between telling her that and talking about IVF, but it seemed like talking about it in general terms left a veil -- however thin -- of mystery around it. "Treatments" could be almost anything -- injecting yourself every night with FSH before having your eggs harvested, or eating more broccoli. She didn't know the particulars, the mechanics.

Then came the miscarriage and I just felt like that changed everything. I found it impossible to get through Christmas Day without telling her -- it was an ugly elephant in the room -- so when we found ourselves alone that night and she guessed that I'd lost a baby, there was nothing to do but nod my head. I was tired of suffering in silence. And she made me glad that I told her. She was unconditionally supportive and it felt great to have another source of comfort, another outlet for expressing my overwhelming emotions.

She came over today to help me with a sewing project (lest you be impressed with the sound of that, rest assured that we didn't get very far with the sewing), and somehow I just started talking and it all came out: the Clomid, the failed IUIs, the arrival at IVF, the excitement of learning I was pregnant. I spent most of last night wide awake, thinking about everything that had happened, and I think it felt like a relief to talk about it for a while. To tell the whole story.

For a long time, I've wished that I could have my mother's support through this time. It just felt like too much of a risk to seek it. Our relationship, like many between mothers and daughters, is complex, and it makes me feel vulnerable to have shared all of this with her. I worry what she might do with the information, how she might process it, whether it might come back to bite me somehow. I worry about other people finding out. I'm not embarrassed about needing IVF (I've long been desensitized; it now seems more "normal" to me than doing the deed to get pregnant), and over the past year have grown more open about it. In fact, I see myself more and more as having a responsibility to share my story, as if in the telling I might somehow help another infertile woman somewhere. But I am still cautious; talking about it feels like revealing something deep and true about myself.

I wish I could take it back, but clearly my only option is to trust whatever instinct told me to put it out there today. And hope that soon, there will be a baby -- a child and a grandchild -- in front of us, and how he or she got there will be a distant memory and a minor concern.