The latest breakdown

Tonight was the big breakdown that has been building for a while. It was a culmination of anxieties, sorrow and frustration. We were supposed to go to a friend's birthday party but social anxiety, and the fact that one of the guests would be a woman whose accidental pregnancy is due any day now, broke the camel. I snapped about having to bundle up warm to walk to the party and so Brad canceled our outing. I put on my pajamas and crept up into the dark recesses of the attic office to cry.

I stared out the window at the hillbillies across the street. They are prolific that bunch. Teenage girl #1 just gave birth to her second child while teenage girl #2 is expecting twins. They make it seem so easy. But then I thought about it and realized that they don't make it seem easy, they make it seem normal. Normal, as in their female bodies do what a normal female body does when a normal male body has unprotected sex with it. It gets pregnant.

I close my eyes sometimes and imagine a little girl. She is around four years old and has an infectious giggle. Her little nose crinkles up. She has her father's dark copper hair and huge blue eyes, but she also looks like my father's baby pictures. Big round curls frame a perfectly round little face. It's who I imagine she would have been. It's who I've imagined ever since the day of the ultrasound. I have a male version too, but she sticks in my head, simply because she was a she.

But the normalcy my body lacks is what prevents her from coming back to me. I have lost the ability to have faith in my body. I no longer believe that it can do what it needs to do to bring her giggling little face back into the world. IVF is the unknown that will hopefully work, but it may not. It simply may not.

And that sucks and it pisses me off.