I finally got a “just relax”

I’ve always felt pretty lucky that I haven’t really been on the receiving end of too many of the Big List of Platitudes that no infertile wants to hear.  These include “it will happen when it’s supposed to happen” and “my coworker’s wife’s friend’s babysitter went through XYZ and then did ABC and now they have 2 kids” and “you can always adopt”.  The main one I’d been able to dodge was anyone telling me that I needed to relax.  In general, I don’t really let my more hysterical (as in crazy, not funny) side show to people who aren’t my husband.  When I talk about our infertility in person, I almost always use pretty general terms and keep emotion out of it.  So perhaps that’s helped keep the advice the minimum until now.

What’s funny though is that my mother in law is the one who finally told us both, though more specifically my husband, to just relax.  We have only told families a few things here and there, we don’t give them day by day recaps on each cycle, and we don’t let them know when we’re starting a new cycle, or that the last one has failed.  They all knew about our short lived pregnancy, so they already all knew we were trying.  I think that helped keep everyone’s opinions to themselves, since they knew we’d share when we had news.  I did let our families know when we started seeing an RE.  Mostly because it had been well over a year since our miscarriage, and I know they were all dying to get any news of what was going on.  Especially my mother in law, since my husband isn’t so great about sharing details with her.

After our 4th failed IUI, I was pretty discouraged, and I jotted off a quick note to our families that our 4th cycle had failed and that we were taking June “off from treatment” and would try another IUI in July.  My mother in law read this as “we are taking a month off from trying”, which is not the case.  Since then, every conversation she’s had with my husband has included her telling him how glad she is we’re taking a month off, and to just relax, and have fun, and not worry about it.  Um, lady, we are still PRETTY WORRIED ABOUT IT.  Ahem.  I didn’t really have it in me to tell her that the reason we weren’t doing IUI was because we’d be on vacation, with my side of the family, during the week it’d be scheduled.  She’s already insanely jealous of any time we spend with my family, so telling her that we had to skip a month of treatment because of our time with them would have given her more insane things to blame on them.

Oops, that got off topic for a minute.  My crazy in laws really deserve their own post…

While she, uhhh, can drive me kind of insane, I know she really cares and wants this for us badly, so I can’t really be annoyed with her.  I actually laughed when I heard her on the phone telling giving my husband all this advice about relaxing, just because it was such a cliche to me already.  I hope she tells him that I need some presents to help me relax, because who doesn’t like presents?!  Maybe a relaxation necklace?  Does that exist and is it pretty?  If so, sign me up.