Good news! It’s been a year now since I last got pregnant, not that that worked out, and I think I may actually finally be mildly interested in getting pregnant again! After the miscarriage I was stunned, then overwhelmed with the move, then apathetic and frankly too busy at the beach to care, then in a bit of denial, and now a little ready.

Not that it matters, since I won’t. I mean, hello, we’re in the middle of an international move. Sweden’s national health plan also won’t cover your pregnancy if it starts before you get enrolled. And just a few months after getting there I’d like to start an intensive year-long course in Swedish, after which I’ll need to go through the teaching (re)certification process. And then there’s the renovations we want to do. And passing the Swedish driving exam. Plus learning how to drive manual. That last one’s like a full-time job. Not really a good time to see about creating new life to care for.

But Little Girl’s three-and-a-half already. And let’s see, we wait another year-and-a-half or so to try, I get pregnant in a reasonable time-frame, I actually stay pregnant and don’t have to start over, then the baby’s born…I don’t know, that’s a lot of math, but that’s a really long time from now! Little girl’s car seat will totally have expired by then. I don’t want to buy a new one! I don’t think you realize how expensive that thing was.

And I’m starting to like babies a little bit (blame our one friend here; she has a two-week-old that never cries! It just gurgles and grabs your finger! Aww!). I’ve looked at old videos of Little Girl, too. She was so cute! If you leave breastfeeding out of it, maybe babies aren’t so bad! They can’t run away when you want to cuddle them!

Even if I decided not to do such a hardcore Swedish language program, which is my main mental obstacle to getting pregnant in the next year-and-a-half, Husband isn’t anxious to have babies. He wasn’t with Little Girl, either–it wasn’t an unbearable need for him like it was for me–though of course she’s the absolute center of his life now. Her fleeting preschool whim is his command. I’m not worried about that. He’d get on board.

But there are a lot of potential pitfalls here. The isolation of a new baby (not that I had that with Little Girl, but I have no idea about Sweden) wouldn’t be a good combo with a new country with a foreign language. Hello, postpartum depression! And Husband is having a hard time finding a job there (he’s been looking) that doesn’t require a lot of travel. Can you imagine–winter dark and cold, preschooler with cabin fever, no friends, stupid incomprehensible language, can’t drive, half-finished kitchen, bathroom with no bathing apparatus, all alone in the countryside, fussy newborn who fears and loathes my breasts? Holy shit.

That’s the worst-cast scenario. Maybe things could go differently. It’ll be a while before it makes any sense to roll the dice on this one, anyway. But it feels a little healing to want to hold a baby, even if I still have to hand it back immediately if it starts to even look like it might want to fuss.

2009 has been rather dramatically unpleasant for us. I even kept a list of reasons why:

high-risk and expensive pregnancy
extended and expensive miscarriage
weird and expensive horseback-riding situation
moved
moved really quickly
got rid of most possessions
left friends
left good teaching job
Husband traveling all the damn time to Europe
Husband commuting five hours every week
Husband work stress
my work stress
realtor problems
lost lots of money selling house
cat Tang died
Husband car accident
moving to Sweden stress and worry
roofing scam
lemon dishwasher
driveway problems
lost my glasses
constant construction/yardwork etc. noise in neighborhood
beach house living weirdness with mom
chronic arthritis pain
grandmother’s Alzheimer’s decline
granddaddy’s strokes and decline
money continually going away
two speeding tickets
broken washing machine, useless dryer

Nothing on here about Little Girl, though. So that’s good. On to 2010! It has its own massive set of risk factors, but I guess it might be okay.

By the way, today was supposed to have been my due date. Though if past experience is anything to go by I’d have actually had a baby weeks ago. Anyway, feel okay about it–I’d had some heightened awareness of the date for the past little while, but when today came, it wasn’t until the afternoon that I realized. Did awesome things (besides clean) like body surf in a roiling ocean and drink a nice Riesling at a good restaurant that I would have been too, let’s see, altered to do otherwise. For that matter, we wouldn’t be having this totally awesome Year of the Perpetual Beach Vacation if I had continued being pregnant. I understand that sometimes the distress from a miscarriage comes up more strongly during a subsequent pregnancy, but for now, for the life we have currently, for the limbo we are in, the miscarriage feels less like a loss than fact about my life, like so many others.

It makes sense, of course. We’ve had a hard year. Husband’s had lots of work worries; I got pregnant to mixed feelings; we realized we had to move out of our neighborhood, newly plagued by crime; I had a lengthy, expensive, painful miscarriage; we sold/gave away many of our belongings and had the rest packed away; we moved; we sold our house and lost a shitload of money; we’re in limbo until the next move; Husband is gone more than half the time for work.

So I’m not surprised that Husband and I are, let’s say, less than delighted with each other these days. We’re having a hard time getting along, being friends, liking each other. Usually my prescription for this kind of situation is more sex, but like I said, he’s gone a lot, and the master bed here in the beach house has this weird bed frame where the headboard is a shelf with all these knick knacks on it and, well, it just makes things ungodly loud. Plus I am all freaked out about getting pregnant again which is also an enthusiasm-damper.

I’m sure any couple in this situation would be testy. I hope once we’re settled in Sweden–and perhaps after his parents, with whom we’ll be living for a while, move out–we’ll get back into some normal relationship mode, that’s not only switched on the four days of the week, max, we see each other. We’ll feel like a team instead of the combatants we sometimes find ourselves these days. And it’s not all bad, now. Today we’re buddies.

It’s just that sometimes, horrifyingly, I’m content to see him leave, and I don’t miss him when he’s gone.

You know sometimes, you read a post, and the comments are all, “you brought me to tears, that was so ___” and I always figured that for hyperbole, maybe a figure of speech. But then I read something about how women on average spend 2.5 hours a week crying, and wondered. Is crying really that common? I was pretty hysterical when I realized my cat, Tang, who just died, was so sick, and I had cried a bit (maybe about ten minutes?) the night before the surgery for my miscarriage.

In fact, I can tell you about every time I’ve cried at least since getting married: when my rabbit was killed; a bunch of times during all the infertility stuff; the newborn phase, mostly for breastfeeding reasons; and weaning. That’s it. Evidently, compared to most people, that’s not a lot.

I understand each tear contains the hormones related to the emotional upset, and shedding them releases your emotional burden (I’m glad this is a blog and I don’t have to find a citation for this assertion–but I read it somewhere respectable enough). It’s possible I just don’t get as emotional about things as others, but more likely that I’m just not showing it. I’ve had enough therapy to realize that it all stems from my problems with my mother. With her, my way to assert myself was nonchalance. Whatever, mom, it doesn’t matter what you say. I was all about the sangfroid.

Husband can’t stand this about me. When we’re arguing and I’m being condescending about his upsetness instead of being hurt myself, he thinks it means I don’t care about whatever the topic is, or his feelings. That’s not true, but I also can’t let myself show any vulnerability. The way I was raised, showing your feelings was the quickest way to get them pummeled further. So now, for the most part, I do sadness as anger, and injured feelings as brittleness.

I’m trying to teach Little Girl it’s okay to be sad, but I know actions speak louder than words. Maybe her father–who is never afraid to show his feelings–will be her guide there.

Recently Husband’s little brother’s teeny tiny wife gave birth, one week late, to a perfect baby girl, Saga, who weighed nearly ten pounds. Laughing gas and a vacuum extractor were involved which I think is pretty typical from Sweden (at least it’s been the story with both sisters-in-law so far). She looks just like her father except she’s got her mother’s distinctive nose. She likes to sleep and eat. You know, the normal stuff. Living in Sweden as they do, her parents have literally years of maternity and paternity leave to divvy up and take like they will from their typically Swedish jobs at a state-run daycare and Ericsson. They’ve just bought their first home and move in next month, and have scrapped their crazy plans to renovate the kitchen immediately, what with the tiny human they have now.

Although I was obviously aware a baby was on the way, when she was finally born, the sadness totally surprised me. I mean, I was supposed to be having a baby, too. Part of the reason I had wanted to get pregnant last winter was, semi-consciously, because V was. She’s always said she wanted to time her first baby with my second, a sort of shimmery, pretty idea that proved too perfect for real life. First she miscarried, then I did. But now we both have little girls. And after my initial reaction, I’m very happy for her, for the whole family, that this new little person we’ll get to watch grow (and whom I do not have to wake up with in the night!) is here. She and Little Girl have visited over the webam several times already, and as Saga snuffles in her sleep, couched in her father’s arms, my girl likes to sing her melodies that eventually all turn into “Twinkle twinkle little star.”

Tonight I attended Part 1 of my high school reunion (you may guess which one). In preparation, last week I got a haircut that, well, did not go as anticipated, and this week I bought what can only be described as a minidress. It is made out of a tissue-thin cotton material in black and possesses a neckline that does fantastic things for my breasts. I had to try it on in front of Husband like six times before he semi-convinced me that I was not too old and motherly for it. So tonight I show up (Husband-free, indeed the only person not to bring a partner), and I see an old friend, the organizer, and the first thing she says to me is, “How’s the pregnancy going?” OMIGOD MINIDRESS FAIL.

I’m not sure if it’s worse that what actually was going on was that I had, apparently, told her that I was pregnant, back when I was, and then neglected to tell her when I was not. So then later, when my high school BFF showed up (the one who married my high school boyfriend, which still weirds me out), and I was relating this story, instead of laughing at the end, she’s telling me she’s so, so sorry. Huh, something had gone seriously awry with my anecdote. It seems I hadn’t ever even told her I was pregnant to begin with, so here she was getting a very large amount of information stuffed into an aside about a story about someone else. And then I was hastening to tell her it was okay, I wasn’t too upset about the miscarriage, in fact otherwise we’d never have gotten to live at the beach!, and I could tell from her increasingly horrified expression that she clearly thought my affect was all wrong.

Most of the evening was a similar mixture of awkwardness and catching up. I didn’t recognize an embarrassingly large number of people (they were so much older than I remembered!), and once I did have everyone mostly down, I still couldn’t quite remember my relationships with them. Most of us had been in the same very small class since the sixth grade, and friendships had waxed and waned, so I kept having to ask people, “So…were we friends in high school?” And people would tell me yes, you told me about orgasms! or We used to have slumber parties at your house all the time! or We were in physics together senior year, don’t you remember? And no, I totally did not. I remember shockingly little about all those years of forced togetherness.

When that old BFF and BF got married a few years ago, I took Husband to the wedding, and it was increasingly disconcerting to introduce him to one after another guy with whom I had been to at least one of the bases. Tonight wasn’t quite so populated in that way, though a couple of men and I kept our distance and I wore a strange smile when I shook their wives’ hands. I spoke to most everyone. Mostly the topics were jobs, kids, geography. Everyone had all these careers, Ph.Ds, businesses. I recalled a lot of the spouses from high school, which seemed weird to me until I remembered I have been with Husband since then, too; people said they remembered hearing about him. I fell in for a long time with a few other women and I realized we were orienting around each other in the exact same positions we used to in seventh grade at lunch. We shared breastfeeding tales. Somehow none of them was happy.

I’m glad I went, though it wasn’t an entirely good time. It feels like part of my Farewell to America tour, tying up loose ends. There’s another event tomorrow and I’ll go because my friend is the organizer, but I think it’ll just be depressing, and lonely since everyone but me is bringing their families; I’m moving away, literally and figuratively, from my early life’s ties, stretching them thin. Sometimes this long process of moving abroad feels like swimming to the horizon, waiting to drop off.

At the oncologist/hematology office today to see what’s what with that life-threatening, miscarriage-inducing, blood-clotting disorder I have which the OB and maternal-fetal specialist kept going on about, there were several sad-looking older couples who avoided eye contact. And me, with Little Girl, a stroller, a backpack of toys, a sack of snacks, and a huge folder of all my many, many medical records. I think the doctor, who primarily works with cancer patients, was delighted to give someone easy, good news, with no follow-up visit required, and no tests of any sort necessary: as it turns out, I actually do not, in fact, have a life-threatening, miscarriage-inducing, blood-clotting disorder.

It was much ado about nothing, just a weird blip from all the scattershot testing they did when I had my infertility workup. FYI, if you have untreated PCOS, that can do funky things to your measurement of PAI-1, an enzyme or something that does something or other that, despite the diagram and the four explanations to me, as I hunched there squinting seriously at the doctor, I still cannot explain to you, but anyway is involved with blood-clotting. Now that my PCOS is under control with Metformin, my numbers are normal, my genotype was, evidently, always unalarming, and there is no problem. The other doctors clearly didn’t get it, but of course that’s why they referred me to a hematologist to begin with–blood is confusing. Even this doctor carried in his pocket a well-worn cheat sheet illustrating the processes involved.

Ah, it was such a rare pleasure to leave a doctor’s office feeling ship-shape and sound.

No updates on the mom stuff. I sent her a not-all-that-apologetic-but-polite email and haven’t received a response.

Weirdly, I have two friends in their late thirties in their second trimesters of surprise pregnancies who are on blood thinners and are in the processes of readying their homes for selling and moving. Huh. Husband is living with one of them (well, not just with her, that would be odd; with her family) and will, after she and the kids move out of state next week, continue bachin’ it* with her husband at their house (they’re keeping their furniture for staging purposes). The husbands work together and their house is near our old house, so it’s pretty strangely convenient all around.

Shortly after arrival, I become infatuated with the biking-distance Montessori school. We went on a tour. It was very impressive. Little one-year-olds selected an activity (“work”), put it on a table, focused on tonging shapes or whatever for dozens of minutes, then carefully put it away. It’s like they were drugged. And the school had violin classes, Chinese, gardens, art, Spanish-only teachers in every classroom. I became sad Little Girl would only have the opportunity to go there for one year, and promptly filled out an overwhelmingly complex application for one of the few available spots. I also gave them money.

Then I realized that being here was causing me to become confused about my socioeconomic class. Tuition was almost 7k, not including all kinds of fees. I’m not about to pay that kind of money to “educate” a person who is perfectly happy pushing her tricycle around in the backyard for hours at a time chattering about bugs and birds. I don’t even think preschool is necessary, certainly not fancy preschool, to begin with. So I declined the opportunity to take the next step (pay 100 bucks for Little Girl to talk to one of the teachers to figure out what age group she should be in, something I could tell them for free). School can wait. Hopefully we won’t even be here for much of the fall. Not that the general public appears interested in purchasing our house.

My friends never call me here. Sucks.

Thanks to the neverending miscarriage (still not at zero with the hCG, folks) I have now met my maximum of 6k out of pocket for the year. I am considering elective surgery on my arthritic toe, as well as following through with the recommendation from the maternal-fetal specialist on seeing a hematologist to pin down, via expensive testing, exactly which life-threatening blood clotting disorders I have, since bloodwork suggests I don’t just have the blah blah blah they knew about before.

If you could get free medical care, what would you go for?

* Not the looking for sex while the wife’s away definition. I mean, to the best of my knowledge. One can only assume.

My pet rabbit just died. My mom took her (Inga) when I was pregnant, so had her for three years, and I had her for four years before. And last night she was, well, dismembered. By some creature. While in her well-fortified dog run/cage. Somehow. They didn’t find any of her in her home, just some fur, but they did find…pieces…in the yard. Wow. I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried. How sad.

I’ve been trying to figure out which of the bad things I’ve done in my past incurred the karma that seems to be ganging up on me now. I’ve pretty much settled on what it was, though it’s not like there’s anything I can do about it now–and no I am so not going to tell. Just remember the pain I caused and hope this Spring makes us even.

Though I’ve started meeting people here the trainwreckiness of my life right now makes it hard for me to make real connections. If someone asks me if I want more kids, I can’t help but think of my miscarriage, and then try to avoid the topic or, even worse, one late afternoon with wine last week, broach it, then regret that. If someone asks me what my husband does for work, I can’t help but try to explain about his visiting on weekends, travel to Europe, and how that travel was postponed for swine flu. If someone asks me why we moved here, I can’t help but want to go on about drug dealing neighbors and moves to Sweden. It seems like no topic is safe from my abiding unfortunate weirdness at the moment. When I’m on the phone with my old friends I have to ask them, “What was the last piece of bad news I shared with you so I know where to start?”

Certainly if I were to meet me at the park, as a group of nice women did today, if I were to be truly open, I would weird myself out. So I am (which is hard for me) circumspect. I try to keep the topic on the other people. I try to be mildly funny, but bland, and watch what I say, and bring up little that invites follow-up questions. Act normal. Don’t want to be too much myself. And that’s no way to live.

You know what? I think I’m depressed. I have deduced this by noting my constant anger, both generalized and specific. Historically, I do pissed better than sad. Everything steams me up, from the height of a closet shelf to the angle of the sun. “Godammit,” I mutter dramatically many times a day. And then there’s Husband. Lately everything about that man irritates the crap outta me and I have not been hesitating to let him know. Good thing we don’t see him much, living in different states for the time being, though of course his absence pisses me off, too.

And then there’s all the eating of junk food, which started right after the miscarriage. Damned if I was going to force-feed myself more quinoa for a dead fetus; no, French fries were the food for me. Then with moving it’s not like anybody was cooking anything nutritious. Look, I lost a pregnancy; I am having a neverending miscarriage; I left my friends; I moved out of my pretty house; I never see my husband; all my favorite belongings are in storage; my mother is harassing me, and all in a space of three weeks, so if I would like chips and salsa three times a day because it’s easy and it’s yummy and food is my favorite drug, well, I think that’s reasonable.

For now. Slowly, though, the pause in all the upheaval, a schedule, a gorgeous place, fresh air, exercise, a happy child, free time, well, hopefully they’ll create a salutary climate and I’ll get back to normal. If not, I can always investigate, and subsequently get disproportionately pissed off about, my poor mental health benefits.

Last week I had to get another ultrasound and hCG blood draw to see if I was finally done with the miscarriage. It turns out I still hadn’t zeroed out, so the OB wanted me to come in this week for another beta. Um…no. I was leaving the state, sorry. And since it was only 10 I was just going to blow the whole thing off and call it a day on the miscarriage (it’s been over a month, after all).

Yet somehow the OB’s office got my new phone number and called to harass me about getting another blood test. I can’t tell you the trouble it was in a whole new place to find a spot to get the test done, actually have the blood taken, and then get the results sent to the right place, and hopefully get this squared away, but if it’s still not zero this time, then sweet baby Jesus, I don’t know if I can get myself to go in for another test. I seem to recall having had–and paid for–a D & E and ALSO a low-tech miscarriage. WHY IS THIS NOT OVER?

Did you know that I am still not done miscarrying? Stupid hCG won’t go down. Ultrasound and another blood draw the day before we move. Awesome! Oh, and the lady scheduling the ultrasound blithely asked me how many weeks I was. “Uh, that’s all done,” I had to say in the waiting room, waving my arm casually. Fun times at the OB’s today.

The research corporation I work for was just bought. This means massive amounts of urgent paperwork on servers that refuse my password. And as for the actual work part someone discovered this big error and I had to spend all evening fixing it when I had The Dining Room Sorting scheduled, meaning I have to do that–when, exactly? It’s certainly a good thing I’ve taught the class I have now five times because I certainly am not interested in fitting in time for it right now. There are just not enough hours in the day.

Do you know what I am up to? Putting everything in my jam-packed house into three categories: ship to Sweden, take to beach house, get rid of. I’d say just about half is stuff I want out of the house Anyone who comes to the house is harassed to take tables and knick knacks and books with them when they leave. It’s really a nightmare, all this. Sometimes I can’t believe how many thousands of dollars we are paying to continue owning the same crap, too. And I can’t sleep anymore. Midnight to one AM are some of my most productive hours. This is crazy; I feel just this side of a panic attack at all times. I will really need to be at the beach by the time this is all wrapped up, just to decompress, to have nothing to do.

Plus I still have my two jobs, have to get all our medical records, am running around doing a million errands, applying for a teaching job at the beach, had a flat tire, have to go out of town to fulfill prior charity commitment this weekend, get the house ready to put on the market, Husband has to paint everything, I need to do the yard…and…well it’s really just too much. Friends are pitching in, and I am so, so, so grateful, but this is just wildly unpleasant and too, too much, and I hate having to get rid of some of the things, or rushing to go through them, and I am still putting off the baby stuff and…two weeks left, one and a half till the stuff goes to storage, and I can’t even figure out when to schedule the packing what with work and the dentist and the OB and…

Omigod MOVING. Moving INTERNATIONALLY. OMIGOD.

So I am suffering many bed-related problems. Do we store/ship the crib with the rest of the stuff? Little Girl still sleeps in it, but she is two-and-a-half, so for how long? Plus she spends half the night in bed with one of us anyway. She’s pretty adaptable so if we had her in the portable crib or just put her in a twin with guard rails at the beach she’d probably do okay (however the prospect of a toddler wandering the house at night really freaks me out). If we don’t store/ship it, we have to get rid of it, as we’re certainly not going to air freight it later, and which I don’t want to do, being, as with all of Little Girl’s things, overly attached. But if I’m never having another kid*, why take it to Sweden? If only I could predict the future.

And our bed. So I sold ours with this theory that it would be cheaper if it weren’t included in the shipment, and thinking we could just get another in Sweden. Turns out the cost (something that’s just unbelievable, by the way) differs almost not at all, and the size bed I want–king–isn’t actually available there. (The only place I can share a bed with my husband and not get bothered by him is the beach house, and I finally figured out this is due to the bed’s being king-sized, so that’s what we’ll need and why I sold the queen.) The biggest they have is a queen, for practical purposes. So now I am faced with the prospect of buying a king here and shipping it with the rest of the stuff, creating the possibility that I’m the kind of idiot who ships shit from IKEA to Sweden. Gah.

* I do want to try someday, but this recent miscarriage makes me dubious about results.

One good thing about this rapid move situation is that I haven’t had much time to dwell on all the miscarriage-related unpleasantness of the past week and a half. Of course, several people in real life, and perhaps you, too, think this is probably not such a good thing in the long run, but I have to say there’s nothing like selling most of your household belongings on Craigslist to keep you hopping.

Divorcees have been particularly good business; they’re furnishing their homes anew on the cheap and like to come in, point at whatever they like, and then we bargain. Stuff I hadn’t planned on selling has walked out the door that way, and I’ve really learned a lot about myself. Like the marital bed where my child (children?) were conceived? You can have that for $150, but you can’t take my coat rack at any price! Well, any price below $50. I have been particularly motivated to sell, sell, sell after getting the quote from the international moving company (we’re going to have them store stuff until we actually go to Sweden, though). It was, well, stunning, and since we are moving to the land of IKEA, it seems dumb to bring a bunch of furniture. My new rule is if it’s not something nice I inherited or had upholstered specifically for me, it can’t go. Decorations and art are proving more troublesome.

As are all the many, many boxes and bins and stacks of baby crap. Clothes, toys, equipment. I totally recognize I am not really in the appropriate mental space to divest myself of these items, to which I am unaccountably attached, but it just doesn’t make any kind of sense to pay 50 bucks to ship a 5-dollar used bouncy seat abroad when I may never have any other children just because I have fond memories of Little Girl sleeping in it. And there’s a 50% less chance any baby clothes will be useful (given the whole pink thing). Knowing this doesn’t make things any easier.