I'm waiting for Stanley and Lucy

Who are Stanley and Lucy anyway?

Stanley and Lucy are my future children.  Am I pregnant with twins? No, not even close.  My husband and I have fertility problems and have so far been unsuccessful in trying to become parents to Stanley and Lucy. You may think that this is the very start of our journey to become parents with this being my first post.   In reality we're already 18 months into our journey with no sign of the finish line just yet. 

We started trying for a baby a few months before our wedding, naively hoping that by our wedding I'd be secretly carrying our first child.  Stanley and Lucy did not exist then, though.  It was just any baby we were wanting.  Now, though, after all the trying, it's Stanley and Lucy we want.  It may seem strange to you but to us it's more like we already know our children and we are just waiting for them.  Or, they are waiting for us.  When we refer to our future as parents, we do not simply say "we'll have to come here with our baby", we say "We'll have to bring Stanley and Lucy here one day".  For us, it keeps the dream alive that one day we will be a mummy and a daddy.  That, one day, Stanley and Lucy will be here.  They will know how wanted they were from the very beginning, or from even before their very beginning.  They might come together or one at a time.  But they will come. 

At present, we are waiting for our referral for IVF with ICSI.  We expect to hear from our hospital around June time.  In fact, the waiting list is quite short (only six months) in comparison to a lot of other NHS waiting lists.  At our hospital they also allow you to have three attempts at the procedure. After that, you must pay for treatment.  We hope we will not need to get to this point; that one of our 'free' turns is successful, hopefully the first one.  We were told we have a 36% chance of the treatment being successful.  Apparently this is good. However, being a "glass half empty" person, I see this as a 64% failure rate.  There is a 64% chance that we will not have Stanley and Lucy each time.  

I have looked into treatment and what it entails.  It is quite a lengthy and scary process.  I decided, therefore, to keep a diary from January to enable me to voice my worries and thoughts.  I made the decision to publish my thoughts in this blog too.  

My journey to get to this point has been horrific quite frankly.  In the space of us being at our happiest, starting to try for a baby and being hopeful and positive, we have been through so much: getting married, losing my mum suddenly, having what's called a 'chemical pregnancy' (early miscarriage), depression, anxiety, the fear of redundancy, stressful teaching jobs and then finding out we have fertility problems that merit IVF treatment.  Throughout this time I could not have got through it without the support of my amazing husband.  He is truly the best thing that has ever happened to me.  Still, what would make both our lives complete is having Stanley and Lucy.  Our babies. 

I cannot pretend that I am ever in a good place.  That we are ever happy.  We are always just waiting for that happiness to arrive.  In the mean time, we see friends and relatives have babies with seemingly relative ease.  Of course, we feel happiness for them, we feel love for their babies, but it does not cancel out or help us.  It is painful to us. The thing that keeps us going is that one day it will be us.  The thing that knocks us down is the thought that it might never be us.  That is a real possibility and it's one that I think about and get scared about every single day. 

I have to hope.  I know people who've been where I am now.  They've come out or are coming out the other side of this nightmare. I have to believe that one day that might be me.  I might have Stanley and Lucy one day. Keeping that faith is so difficult.  I feel tortured every day by our inability to have what people were put on this earth to do.  I feel guilty that I think as such because my husband blames himself.  Is it so bad to want something so badly that sometimes it seems that nothing else matters to you as much any more?  Am I a bad person for feeling resentment towards lovely people for whom getting pregnant has been a breeze, a one-month journey rather than eighteen months and counting? And they are lovely people who certainly do not deserve any resentment. It's a weird mix of emotions - I feel delighted yet envious, happy but angry.  

This is shaping me into being someone I'm not. I can't pretend I like it.  I hate it all.  The only good thing is that  I know that I will not take Stanley and Lucy for granted.  That they will be the most loved, cherished and adored children that exist. I know already that I would give my life up for them.  Well, I feel like I am giving up a part of my life already, just to get them in this world.  It will be so very worth it when I have my babies.