Maybe

My insomnia didn't take very long to come back... I didn't fall asleep at all last night. I am woozy and exhausted today. I finished my page proofs and emailed them in; also verified that my next book's cover and release date were launched on my publisher's website, so I'm finally able to announce them on my FB page. Took care of that this morning.

But I've realized that every book release I've ever had has occurred during a time of chaos in my life, a time when I didn't have the emotional energy to commit to promotion or psyching up my readers or anything else. And it's happening again this time. The book comes out in March... a while back I had made a long checklist of action items I was going to do in order to promote it - website updates, contests, surveys, some promotional giveaway items, a launch party and so on. Now I'm depressed. And I know that sounds stupid, but the joy just isn't there. I want it to be, but it feels hollow. Writing is the one dream that I have actually achieved in my life, the only one that hasn't been taken away from me. Yet I want a baby so much more that the whole book thing doesn't feel exciting, just tiresome. A big responsibility, that I had wanted to tackle with brightness and energy this time around, and instead just feels like a poor substitute for what I really wanted.

I was going to announce my pregnancy right around the book release date. March was going to be one of the most awesome months of my entire life. Now, I'll be lucky if I get to spend some of it in Greece, trying again.

I've been lying in bed for hours now, unable to sleep. Finished my page proofs super early this morning, so next on the list is house cleaning. There's tons to do. Kaitlin asked me to do one thing in particular, while she's out taking her PLACE exams today, and I can't remember what it was. And I don't want to lie in bed anymore, but I also don't feel like cleaning. I know, intrinsically, that if I force myself to do it I might feel a little better. Maybe I would feel like we were moving on. Like I'm hitting the reset button on life, getting to the acceptance phase of this whole grief process, and getting over it. It's not like there's any other choice. And that's what makes me angry, I guess, not having any other choices.

A clean house would be a start. But some part of me resents it, doesn't want to pack away Christmas and straighten the house and try to get back into life again, when it's not the life I wanted. Some part of me wants to sit and be angry. Some part of me is furious that I don't have the option to reject this, to declare it unacceptable, to wave a magic wand and be pregnant through sheer force of will. And that part of me is sitting sullenly in bed. As if, by boycotting life until it gives me what I want, I can somehow make the universe feel sorry for being so mean to me. Like some sort of whiny victim who imagines herself the Gandhi of miscarriage.

It doesn't get much more self-centered than that, does it? And if that's the attitude I'm going to have, my misery is self-inflicted and I don't have the right to complain.

Not sure which stage of grief you'd call this. Pretty sure Anger, mostly because Denial's not an option. Probably going to skip over Bargaining, because... well, I've got nothing to bargain with. And Depression's in there too. May even get worse BECAUSE I have to clean the house, and go back to work, and focus on money and my cycles and all of that again. And I have the uncomfortable feeling I'm not going to be able to achieve Acceptance until we are actually able to launch another round, and that it may be contingent on whether or not a second round is successful.

I am afraid of expecting too much from a second try. Google seems to think that a person is more fertile after miscarriage. That statistically I am unlikely to miscarry twice in a row. I find myself starting to feel pretty damn entitled - OF COURSE I will get pregnant right away on our next try, and OF COURSE I will get to keep it then, because I have most certainly earned it by now, right? I keep having to remind myself there's the chance I'll go back and not get pregnant at all. Or go back, get pregnant, and miscarry again. Not everybody gets a happy ending. And then what? How many times can I do this before the money runs out? Before I'm so deep in debt it will take me the rest of my career to pay it off? And what if I do get pregnant, after saddling us and our future child with so much debt that all the things I dreamed of being able to do with and for our child are now impossible?

I "what if" things to death. Right now March is my beacon of hope. We won't get to try in January. If I'm lucky this bleeding will stop soon and my HcG will zero out on its own. Then we have to skip February while I file my taxes and wait for an AF to come and go. And then, maybe, if those things will happen quickly enough, maybe we can take our next try in March. And maybe, if that goes right this time, I will still have a baby by Christmas. Maybe.

Or maybe I will be deleting this blog and giving up.