It’s always a day of mixed feelings on Mother’s Day. I get spoiled by Mr K and the Small Child and the effort they put into making me feel special for the day is really sweet. There’s nothing quite like a homemade card and a lovingly made breakfast from someone who can’t cook. 🙂

But somehow, in spite of my excessive good fortune in having a beautiful son, motherhood for me is still tinged with a lonely and bitter kind of sadness. So many miscarriages. So many years of IVF. So many operations and procedures. So many months on horrible drugs. So many embryos that could have been brothers or sisters for the Small Child…

Whenever I think of family, children, babies and being a mother, it always dredges up the heavy baggage that I work so hard to stuff down deep to the sludgy bottom of my memories. One of the worst emotional scars left behind by dealing with extended infertility is the inability to be truly happy for others. It’s sooo hard to be happy for friends who fall pregnant as soon as they decide they are ready to start their families. It’s so hard to hold the new born infants of your closest friends without thinking ‘why is it so easy for everyone else?’ And it’s extremely difficult to wrap your brain around the idea that pregnancy can actually happen to someone by accident.

I mean, how is this even possible? Don’t they have any idea how hard it is to get the little sperms to go to the right spot and find the microscopic egg and to have them join together correctly, and then move along the path to find a hospitable spot to take hold. And even once you get past all that… don’t they know how hard it is for that little zygote to have all that those chromosomes lined up right, and don’t forget it needs to make those progesterone levels skyrocket and then it has to hang in there for that magic first trimester… and… and… and… The conditions required for a successful pregnancy seem insurmountable in the minds of the infertile – and yet for some it happens by ‘accident’. By accident!

For some reason that whole bitterness thing just never seems to leave, even though it’s been several years since I resigned myself to having an only child. I’m so lucky to have such a wonderful little person in my life – and I made him! But my God, what I went through to get him here. 🙁