# 100; or, Thoughts for Friday

I should have saved my 100th post for something more momentous, right? A BFP, a new diagnosis, an anniversary. Shouldn't there be brass bands and a balloon drop?

It's an ordinary Friday morning, the first day of my Spring Break, the middle of the 2ww, and I'm eating my oatmeal and sipping my tea at the kitchen table, checking in on my bloggie and message-board girls and checking out some calls for papers before hitting the books (Austen and Sarah Grand today).

Picking among the various strands twisting through my mind right now, I could talk about the visit to the hospital on Wednesday to meet the niece (Lou-Ellen served me well that day), or I could talk about Fertility Friend realizing her mistake and changing my O date (but never apologizing for it, the bitch), or the precarious point I'm at in my 2ww (6 dpo, the time when phantom symptoms begin to creep like cats through tall grass, preparing to pounce).

But I fear the dignity of a 100th post would be compromised by dwelling on such a grab bag of minutiae. Instead, I'll touch on some of the things I meant to write around the time of my TTC anniversary but didn't feel like delving into when it actually arrived.

I try all the time to talk up this difficult experience to myself. "You're learning so much," I'll say. "You're growing from this. This will make you a better person, a better mom, a better wife, and daughter, and sister, and friend."

When I sit down to write out what exactly I've learned, it doesn't turn out to be much. I've learned that:

- Life is not a syllabus or an outline and I don't get to decide its chronology.
- What I always thought of as patience is tolerance. I tolerate irritating people, bothersome subway rides, frustrating experiences very well. But patience requires waiting without knowing when the wait will end-- and it turns out that I'm not so good at that.
- I can endure more than I thought possible in March 2009.
- It doesn't matter how other people believe I'm coping or dealing, whether I'm weak and obsessive or strong. I'm the only person inside my head right now, and if I'm satisfied with my progress, that's all that counts.
- The most beautiful moments in life can also be the saddest.
- Ruthlessly judging other people as shallow, ungrateful boobs makes it easier to deal with jealousy. Who cares if they deserve it!

These are pretty obvious lessons. Like, duh, you can't plan everything. Duh, sadness and beauty coexist. The fact that they're revelations teaches me one more thing:

- My life has been pretty fucking lucky up until now.

My greatest disappointment prior to TTC was not getting into my first-choice Ivy League college and having to go to my second-choice Ivy League college. I know, boo hoo. I met my husband when I was 20, and we've been madly in love for a decade. I live in my favorite city and I'm not tired of it yet. I've never struggled seriously with illness or finances. My family is healthy and loving and lives near by. I adore my mother-in-law and she thinks of me as her daughter. I have close, beautiful friendships that have lasted for decades.

See? Lucky. So, so, so lucky. If it's my turn to get the fuzzy end of the lollipop, then it's my turn. I can't say life wasn't good to me before. Maybe I do deserve this in a weird way more than someone else. At the very least, I don't deserve it less than someone else.

I don't have any conclusions. Just some thoughts on a Friday morning.

What's in a Name?; or, Rewriting the Story

When I started my blog in June, I thought I was acting a little prematurely. After all, who starts blogging about "conception troubles" a mere three months into the process (crazy people, that's who (also, me)). I chose the title "Park Slope Purgatory" because so much of my frustrations at the time stemmed from my neighborhood-- a notoriously child-friendly mecca to attachment parenting in which Lawyer Guy and I purchased a home specifically with the thought of making babies. My single friend who visited from L.A. remarked after wandering the Park Slope streets with me, "I have never seen so many baby strollers in my life." Walking around without one was a kind of Dante-and-Virgil voyage through no-woman's land.

When I got pregnant in October, I considered changing my blog title. Park Slope Paradise had a nice ring to it, and wasn't it heavenly to be pregnant? But something stopped me-- just let me feel a little more secure about this, I thought, before I make any changes. I may have been pregnant but I was, as I described it at the time, provisionally pregnant. It was pregnancy as purgatory, as the perpetual in-between.

Today, this blog is a different place than what I intended it to be. I thought I'd whine here where no one would listen for a few months and then shut it down when I got that BFP. I thought the waiting would end with a positive pregnancy test.

I'm on a different journey than the one I planned. I guess that's the nature of Purgatory--you don't get to decide when it ends. You don't even know what the signposts pointing to the end would look like. You just have to keep walking and hope that eventually--with work and hope and prayers--you'll get to heaven.

So I'm still in Purgatory. I'm caught between motherhood and childlessness, grief and joy. I'm an apparently fertile woman who very likely will hit my TTC anniversary without a healthy pregnancy to show for it. I'm "still young," though also "not as young as I used to be."

But Purgatory is a lot less lonely now that I've found all of you.