January 9, 2017

News for 2017

It's now 2017 and I fell off the Earth again.

But this time I had a good reason. Well, as good a reason as any I guess. In October we found out that against all odds, my husband and I are going to have a baby.

I don't want to turn this post into a long diatribe on the failings of private school sex "education". But I also want to share a little bit about why in particular I feel this might just be a miracle.
Don't want the blah blah blah? Skip to the end past the ----

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I have PCOS or Polycystic Ovary Syndrome. If you have heard these letters in this order, you know already what I am going to say, but as a topic no one really talks about I'm betting you have no idea, so I want to educate you. This hormone imbalance is something that if you know you have, you can take steps to manage, but that's about it. In women, it causes extra hair growth on your face, skin tags, a tendency to be overweight, and to have irregular cycles, to the point where skipping three months is common. But as a teen and in college I did not know that this was even a possibility, so rather than freak out all the time, I started taking the pill. I was on it for seven years.

Two years into our marriage, I stopped taking it after we decided we wanted to try to have kids. I've never been good with kids or babies, never baby sat, or wanted to coo around newborns... And I cried after the first time we were intimate knowing from years of schooling that unprotected sex = pregnant = life over. Looking back I guess scaring kids into not having sex seems the best route to prevent teen moms, but as an adult, that conditioned fear did not go away.

After a year of trying they said I had unexplained fertility issues and we started blood tests every month and rounds and rounds of medications, which often did nothing more than make me sick. It was at this time that they finally said, oh, must be PCOS, and the blood tests confirmed it. Four years later, we were still trying and I was getting frustrated and hopeless. The pill had been regulating my cycle so without it I went back to skipping months at a time, and each time we hoped it meant I was pregnant only to get our hopes dashed. To say it was hard is an understatement, but I started talking to other women in my life, only to hear the same story of how hard it can be for many couples. Thank goodness for good friends.

I guess I just wanted to share so that you can maybe understand both why I am both more terrified and excited than most. Please have compassion when you are talking to married couples without kids. I had so many people ask and assume, and society makes it seem so natural and easy. But for some of us it is genuinely a miracle to look down and a see a little red plus sign.
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So, where does that leave this blog? Well I do have a few finished crochet projects to show off and I will schedule those posts to go in the future. And now that I'm safely out of the constant nausea period, hopefully I can finish those other projects I've got started. I want to continue making things, but forgive me if I am a bit more focused, at least for the near future, on making something a bit harder than crochet...a person.

Thanks for the support. Let's all work to make this new year less awful than the last through compassion, kindness, forgiveness, and perhaps most importantly, patience.
- Angela