The Killing Joke

"At first, [Killing Joke] was used to describe a level of despair…"*

Man, losing your children and much of your hope for ever having children really does some fucked-up things to your sense of humor.

It's a time-honored thing, developing a sense of black humor to cope with especially difficult jobs or horrible experiences. Cops, firefighters, E.R. doctors, soldiers, all tell jokes or make comments that would make "civilians" blanch. Even before we lost the boys, S and I had started to develop a sort of rueful gallows humor to cope with our infertility. If you don't laugh, you cry. Or scream. And if you start crying or screaming, you might never stop. So you find ways to laugh about it, no matter how horrifying it might look from the outside. And that last part, I think, has become more important as the grieving process has gone on.

We were out to dinner with my parents one night, and S made a crack like "when we have kids - like that's ever going to happen", which for us is just standard language, followed by mock-hearty laughter. My parents were horrified - quietly, we're WASPs - and it was one of the moments where we remembered that large chunks of the world don't see things the way we do. That we were talking to civilians. If you've been there, then you know. If you haven't, you'll never understand.

"…but over time, it came to mean the laughter that overcomes all fear…"

That, I think, is something that keeps me going. I hate that I'm a member of this club, but I'm learning how to own it. Our infertility isn't going to go away. Even if we do hit that slim chance of having our own biological children, that doesn't negate years of trying or the loss of the boys. This is part of who I am now. And every day, everywhere I look, I am reminded of what that means - what I do not get to experience, a whole world of which I do not get to be a part. I can't shut it out. I'm always not a father. So what can I do? I can laugh in the face of death, laugh in the face of despair, throw up a middle finger to all of the grief and pain and misunderstanding and incomprehension and cluelessness and judgment and platitudes and ignorant and insensitive assumptions. I can laugh at things that civilians would find abhorrent, knowing that I have faced horrible things and survived.

Sometimes I take a perverse delight in the discomfort of others. At my angriest, I want to throw what I've been through in other peoples' faces, make them acknowledge the death of my sons, make them acknowledge that this is a world in which these things occur, no matter how much we might like to pretend otherwise. I don't want them to be able to ignore it, I want it to get under their skin, I want it to haunt them. Because it'll still just be a fraction of what it is to live with it. But I'm not, you know, an asshole. So I smile and keep quiet and answer questions politely and honestly.

"…when you're laughing, you're not afraid, are you?"

But if they ever knew the things I've said, the jokes at which I've laughed…

S and I driving out to get some lunch and run some errands, pass a minivan with all of the little family stickers on the back window - mom, dad, kids, all the little crayon stick figures lined up in a row. I can't remember who started it, but paraphrased from memory…

"I hate those."

"Yeah, they're like marks on a scoreboard."

"We should get some."

"Mom, dad, dog, two cats…"

"…two little boys with haloes…"

"Nah, they should have Xs for eyes and their tongues sticking out."

"Little tombstones."

"Even better, let's just get a bunch of stickers with little baby figures crossed out, one for each failed cycle, and plaster them on the side of the car like the kill marks on a fighter plane."

"Boom! There goes another one."

Or all of the baby-related merchandising…

"Let's make up a line of bumperstickers and t-shirts." 

"Baby No Longer On Board" 

"A t-shirt with the arrow pointing down…" 

"…and it says 'BARREN'." 

"Yeah, or 'BABY', but it's crossed out." 

"My child would be an honor student, but he didn't make it to term." 

"I would be proud of my Eagle Scout,  but he died in the womb." 

"Ask me about my nonexistent grandchildren." 

"I'm spending my children's inheritance, because they aren't alive to enjoy it."

"I spent my children's inheritance trying to get them conceived."

I won't even get into the awful shit I say to the television.

I can't imagine the shocked, hurt looks, the deep offense, the "that's sick!" Or maybe I can and I just don't care.

But it keeps me sane. It is the laughter that overcomes all fear.

*(italicized quote from musician Jaz Coleman, on his band's name)

Radio Silence

So our internet connection at home has decided to just stop working for irregular intervals of time, and the only thing worse than that for me is having to call the almost apocalyptically incompetent customer service people at our cable company. I'm writing stuff offline until I have a chance to post it from my work connection. Now that I'm actually in a place to say stuff, I can't say it. Wish I could say that wasn't emblematic of our whole experience, but there you go.

Dust: In the wind, and elsewhere.

When S and I first started trying to conceive, she read various and sundry message forums for information, support, etc. I noticed a couple of things about most of them right away: They were damn near treacly in their optimism, and weren't very big on realism. I don't just mean that they weren't a good source of accurate information, I mean the prevailing discourse was this weird fairytale cutsey-poo sentimentality verging on infantilism. They were the intellectual equivalent of an all-pink bedroom filled to the brim with stuffed animals and unicorn posters - great when you're 12, but not so much for the whole raising a child thing.

One thing that kept coming up was the idea of "baby dust" - shorthand for good wishes, crossed fingers, etc., but with this whole magic fairy powder vibe. To a Mister Crankytrousers like me, this seemed unrealistic and not useful. Ground your support in something sincere and based in experience, not closing your eyes tight and leaving it up to chance, higher power, whatever. Now, out of all times, don't cede control over your own life. I won't even go into all of the little animated images in signature files, signature files that were longer than the posts to which they were appended, clusters and blocks and images of children which practically screamed I HAVE NO IDENTITY OF MY OWN ANYMORE. I AM DEFINED ENTIRELY BY MY CHILDREN. And in this spun-sugar world, the husbands and fathers were referred to as DH. Dear Husband, Darling Husband. DH. Designated Heterosexual. Dick Haver. Donor Here.

Yeah, I took it a little personally. How could you tell?

Fathers don't get a huge voice in this conversation. I'm frustrated by this, but I can see how and why this is case, especially over time as S and I have grieved in our own ways. It's complicated, it's all over the place, and I am as complicit as anyone or anything else in this relative silence, as my posting history vividly indicates. But when somebody pays attention to the fathers, I take notice. Any attention, please God, thank you for noticing.

S pointed out an article in the NY Times - A father's view of infertility is how it's labeled, published in the parenting blog. So I read it, hoping that somebody gets it - the frustration, the loss, the silence, shouldering pain without complaint, keeping busy, staying strong, wondering if not being able to father children makes you less of a man, mourning the father-son moments that will never happen, seeing my own eyes in the face of another. Giving voice to the rage and sadness that's so hard to express otherwise.

Instead, I get some sentimental crap about a dad who takes his daughter to a baseball game, talks some shit about The Natural, seems vaguely sad that he and his wife can't have another child as easily as they had their first, and goes on and on and one about his daughter talking about "fairy dust."

I have no fucking idea what any of this has to do with infertility. It's like reading a Thomas Kinkade painting.

Is this seriously how the culture at large thinks of men and infertility? That we're kinda sad when we aren't thinking about lazy summer days and the Great American Pastime? Because seriously, fuck that. That's just as poisonous as the idea of the DH and "baby dust" - instead of taking fertility out of our hands and giving it over to the great unknown, (which robs use of control and self-determination) it elides the possibility that men might not have children of their own at all by making our putative voice someone who already had a daughter and then articulates any negative emotion as vague sadness couched in sentimentality. Just one wrong note in a fondly remembered summer evening, complete with the innocence of childhood, fireworks, baseball - all the things you need to be an all-American man. I don't hear anything in that about tears, about helplessness, about shots and pills and operations and tests and doctor's appointments. About forms of impotence for which Viagra is not a solution. About holding your wife while she cries in frustration, wondering when it gets to be your turn to fall apart. Never mind loss. Never mind the life and death decisions you get to make in hospital rooms, the voice that says you will never have this. No, apparently it's just down to intentionally vague answers for the child you already have when she asks about getting a sister, and fairy dust. That's the father's experience of infertility.

Fuck baby dust, and fuck fairy dust. All I have are ashes. Who speaks for me?

How is today different from all other days?

Father's Day, and it's quiet and still here. S left me pretty much alone today, which was exactly what I wanted, or needed. Just some time to sit here and hurt.

There have been a lot of tough conversations lately. S is doing much, much better than she was, which makes life a little bit easier. There's smiling and laughing again, and that's nice. Like healing always does, it happens slowly, when you aren't looking. Suddenly, all of the things that you never thought you'd ever be able to do (or do again) are easier to contemplate or even do. I can be around kids without feeling the loss acutely, maybe just a wry smile. And when it comes to the children of people I like, I can play with them, make them laugh, hug them, and it's okay. The wanting to pick them up and make them laugh comes so naturally you'd think it was wired in from birth. It's okay, the feeling says. You could be a dad after all. That's the feeling, that all of the worry and insecurity and unpreparedness for fatherhood I felt before we started trying wasn't necessary. I'm wired for it.

And then I have to give the child back.  And that hurts a little. It's a small, dull ache in the pit of my stomach, like all of those small moments after someone dies, all of the specific "I'll never ______ again" moments that reveal the truth of your loss. But considering there was a time I couldn't imagine being around kids at all, it's progress.

And then there's days like Father's Day. I wonder if this is how veterans feel on Memorial Day, if this is the one day they can't escape all of the stuff they'd like to forget. This is the one day when I can't duck around it, this is the one day I can't drown out the words I'm not a father, I don't have any sons. It rings in my head. Of all the things I am or do or have, that's the one that got away. And on Father's Day, no matter how much I avoid TV or even going outside, there it is. The little hands I'm not holding.

And like I said, we've been having some tough conversations lately. We came into a bit of a windfall after S's grandmother passed away, and all of a sudden, some things we thought were closed to us are open again. The thought of trying to conceive again weighs on me. Our odds aren't good, and at our age, they're getting rapidly worse. We could afford maybe one round of IVF, maybe. Or one shot with donated embryos. Or put money away for adoption. Pay off some debt, maybe sock some away for the down payment on a house or a condo. I can't imagine getting on that merry-go-round again: Tests, pills, shots, procedures, catheters, speculums, endless doctor's offices. I think about it and I start to feel sick inside. I think about people who did the work for twice as long as we did, and I honestly don't know how they did it. I don't think I can do it again.

S and I were both late bloomers in different ways. I made some bad decisions during college and ended up dropping out for about 5 or 6 years. I didn't graduate until I was 29. We got to where we wanted to be sort of late in life. I learned to stop kicking myself about it a few years ago.  But this brings it back. We're backed into a few corners - I've just turned 40 (Yay?), and S will next month. S still has work to do on her doctorate and I'm planning to go on the job market this year, though I'm not optimistic about my chances at a decent job. And we're still climbing out of the hole, one day at a time, learning to live our lives again. In some ways, we've just exchanged one set of pills and appointments for another. We don't have a lot of time left to start a biological family, and there are other life things that have to happen first. If we were in our late 20s, this wouldn't be an issue. Woulda, coulda, shoulda.

It's hard to face. For S especially. This desire to have and love a child is embodied for her in ways that it can't be for me. The world has told me no, it told me no when our only successful attempt at conception ended in death and blood and grief and pain. I felt like a door was closed in my face that day, and all I could see to do was put one foot in front of the other, make sure S was safe, and get back to the business of living. The world won't wait for you, I heard in my head. The world does not care about what has happened to you, and you have obligations. So come spring, I went back to school and wrote my dissertation. What else was I going to do? Shake my fist at the sky? The sky wasn't listening. The sky didn't care.

Maybe we'll try again. Maybe we won't. Maybe it's selfish, but I feel like we've got to put our own well-being first for awhile after sacrificing so much of it for so long. I'm writing a little more, keeping a blog on a totally unrelated subject. Still fighting depression, still wondering why and how I'm going to get things done sometimes. But most days I have music and light and a couple of sweet cats and an adorable dog and a loving wife and good friends.

Which makes Father's Day easier, when all of that goes out the window, and all I can do is sit here and feel empty.

Persistence

"If at first you don't succeed/try try again
Step up to the mic/and die again
This is the next lifetime and you want to battle
You must like reincarnation/or the smell of carnations"
- "Raspberry Fields", Cannibal Ox

So we've tried three cycles since we lost the boys. Each one hasn't worked. Not even close. And oddly enough, I don't feel worse for it. Maybe I'm just numb, inured to disappointment after tragedy. Or maybe losing the boys was some sort of large NO, and ever since, I've just assumed this was never meant to be, and keep trying because I don't want to say we didn't try. Is it masochism if it doesn't hurt anymore?

There's a part of me that's given up. That has to assume that we aren't going to have biological children and needs to start getting used to the idea. Inoculation. Introduce the pain a little bit at a time until it builds up a resistance. Let it hurt a little bit all the time until the pain is manageable. Get used to it. Get accustomed to it. And the last year has been rough for me, but never so rough at once that it felt like a real struggle.

I've grieved the boys. S got worse and I had to take care of her while trying to finally transition into a career. I put the boys and my own pain aside because S couldn't get out of bed. There were days I honestly thought I'd come home and find her body on the bed. That today was the day. Not because she was going to kill herself but because the medication and the depression would eventually reach critical mass. Maybe the line between deliberately killing yourself to end the pain and accidentally killing yourself in the process of managing the pain is so thin as to be academic. But that was a hard year. Always alert, always vigilant.

Then things started to get better - counseling, better medication strategies, talks with doctors that helped absolve S of some of the guilt she felt. Started putting our life back together, engaging it what we called "Operation Grow The Fuck Up" - get back to living, being social, managing the daily business of living and climb up out of the grief, the long dark hole. And part of that meant trying again.

The first couple of cycles didn't work, and apparently part of it was because S's endometriosis had come back. One laparotomy later, we try the next cycle. Lots of drugs, lots of pills, and two IUI's this time. And it didn't work. Why? Well, why not?

I teach a class on child development. The first semester it was just a horrible irony. Those who can't, teach. The second semester it felt more integrative, critical examinations of parenthood, childhood, fertility, the social constructions that shape us from conception onward. This third semester I've taught it, it's fine. I know what to do with it now, and I know what role my own experience can play. Part of what I teach is the probability of conception. Only 10-15% of conceptions successfully implant. And all we're doing with the pills and the shots and the vitamins and the hormones and the centrifuging and the catheters is getting us to that 10-15% place. We're marshalling huge amounts of technology to do what two people do anyway. So at a certain point, it's a numbers game. Try, try again.

We've got one last cycle in us, I think. It's taken a long time for S and I to get to the point where we both feel this way. I was there some time ago, she wasn't. But the cost of beating our head against the wall, of coming up on the wrong side of the numbers again and again is getting too high. It might work, it might not. I think if it works, it'll be a surprise. If not, we'll need to start saving up for a shot at IVF. Our only shot, most likely. But nobody can say we didn't try, try, and try again. And again, and again.

In transit

There's an old prison maxim - "Drink a lot of water, and walk slow." Drink a lot of water because it keeps your system flushed out, and walk slow because you're going nowhere fast.

Being stuck at an airport always reminds me of this.

Long story short - RE appointment scheduled earlier than we thought it would be, try to fly standby out of Seattle only to be told that all other flights are overbooked already. Wouldn't be too much of a hassle, except my scheduled flight is a redeye that leaves at 11:30pm. So here I am at the airport for the next 9 hours or so. As much as I'm impatient and in a hurry when I travel by air (as my inhumanly patient wife would tell you), being stuck here for a ridiculously long time tends to put me in a contemplative state. I walk slow and look around.

Airports are weird. They have aspirations to permanence - shops, restaurants - but they're essentially places of impermanence. They aren't destinations, they're ways of getting you to your destination. We are only here to be elsewhere. We're in transit, suspended between here and there.

Cycling is like that. We know entirely too much about what it takes to have a child, we have our attention called to every detail in ways that you wouldn't if you were just doing what comes naturally and hoping for the stork to unload his storky payload over the house. We are doing what comes unnaturally. There is no "baby dust" here. Well, there are ashes. I'd like to ask some of those "baby dust" people if those count. We know what the costs are, in dollars and tears and moments lost. With every cycle we hold our breath, caught between "it's over" and "it's just beginning." In transit, suspended between here and there.

This one isn't looking good. S stimmed hard, but only one out of four follicles showed any significant growth by the ultrasound. I'm going to be going right from the airport to the appointment, which might make for the least hallowed/sacred/whatever attempt at conception in my life. S is starting to wonder if we shouldn't just quit IUIs and start saving up for IVF. I'm starting to wonder the same thing. And so we hang between "do we" or "don't we", with everything in the middle up for grabs.

And the first person to ask me why we don't "just adopt" is getting punched in the throat.

It's beginning to and back again.

It's all about circles right now.

I'm giving a lecture on issues around treating mental illness -

(pacing around the auditorium - I can't stand still when I teach)

"Let's say you have paranoid schizophrenia, and as long as you take your meds, you're fine. But when you feel fine, you think 'I'm doing fine, I don't need to be on the meds.' So you go off your meds, at which point the delusions and hallucinations return. And what's the first thing that happens? You become suspicious of anyone trying to give you your meds, because they're trying to control your mind. And you get hospitalized, and they medicate you, and you get back on your meds. After awhile, you think 'I'm doing fine, I don't need to be on the meds', and so on."

"It's a vicious cycle."

We lose our sons - our last shot on the long, hard road to accepting infertility as a state of life - and spend almost two years coming to grips with that. Lots of meds, therapy (pharmacological, psychological, singly and as a couple), some vindication along the way. We can see daylight. We're getting our act together ("Operation Grow The Fuck Up", we call it. And in this process of act-getting-together, we think "hey, we're doing well, we've got energy, we're being social, things are looking up - we're finally in a position to do another cycle." And so we do. And nothing. Zilch.

And another. And again, nothing.

It's like a punch to the gut. And it all comes back. The wondering, the "will this ever work?" Ironically, it's more expensive now than it was when we had crap insurance. We're struggling to make it to the end of the month. And I'm back on the couch, staring at my computer. And S. is back up in the bedroom, wondering what the point of anything is. Resentful, rejecting the idea of hope. "I don't care. What's the point? Why do I bother?" It's three years ago all over again, the rawness of futility in trying to conceive. If I never see the acronym "TTC" ever again, it'll be too soon. Fatigued. Worn out.

It's vicious, this cycling.

And S. sits sobbing, depressed. And I have to remember that this is not her forever. This is her now. Even as I'm telling her that this is not forever, this is just now. She feels this way now, but this is not how it is. I tell her that I know it's hard for her to see this when she's in such a sad, bleak place, but there is more for her - for us - out there. And yes, there's a shift in her medication, and the new stuff may not have kicked in yet. So I'm having to tell someone who struggles with depression and their meds that although they're convinced of one world, it is not the world as it is. And when the meds kick in, it'll be "wow, that was bad." And right now, it is bad.

And so on, and so on, and so on.