The Things We Do To Torture Ourselves

I went to a new hairdresser today.  The first new one in almost 12 years.  Well, for the most part, I did some dating around with a few others, but kept coming back to my old stand-by when I wasn’t satisfied that the replacements truly ‘understood’ my hair issues.   But, her prices kept going up, and my paycheck kept going DOWN, so it ‘just wasn’t working out’, mathematically speaking anyway.

I’m not sure this new hairdresser is going to get a second date, I had to rewash my hair after I got home because she had so much product in it I almost passed out from the fumes on the car-ride home.   That would make this the THIRD time my hair was washed today.  Number one time:  before the appointment, because you want your hairdresser to know what you’re aiming for.  Number two time:  at the appointment, which I always find gloriously relaxing.  And this was a good massaging wash by the way.  When I was in college, I had this hair dresser who scrubbed my head so vigorously I had to brace myself.  I think she had some deep vested anger at college students who all wanted to have ‘the Rachel’ cut.  Number three time:  after the haircut and styling, which we already covered.  I almost always do the after wash, because for some reason, hairstylists (despite their name) don’t usually style my hair very well. 

Anyway, the point I was trying to make by telling you the humdrums of my hair day is that women do all kinds of crazy things to ourselves for the sake of, I don’t know, a combination of things I guess:  vanity, anxiety, superstition, and just sheer self-deprecation.  I could site pages and pages full of examples of how all women do this to ourselves.  But I’ll just name a few quickies that come to mind. 

1. Trying on bathing suits in front of 3-way mirrors.
2. Self-diagnosing a brain tumor after an afternoon Google search and one little headache.
3. Tweezing.

So, as I said, there’s many, many more examples of self-torture.  But I want to narrow our discussion down now to women who are TTC or find themselves facing IF, and the things we do in spite of ourselves. 

I think it depends on where you are in your TTC journey as to what forms of torture you subscribe to.  When I my hubby and I first bought our house, the project I looked most forward to tackling was painting the ‘nursery/guest room’.  I picked out PILES of those little sample color cards and fretted over the ‘perfect’ choice.  I wanted to go neutral, since of course we didn’t know what we were having (ha!  like I was even pregnant).  I wanted it to be able to fit nicely as a guest room color while we waited for the stork, and I wanted it to match the crib set that I impulsively bought on sale a few years before and had just been collecting dust in storage.  So I chose a fun ‘apple pucker’ green color and had a friend over to help me paint.

You know, little one by one inch squares of color don’t really accurately represent what that color will do when it’s ALL over.  Apple pucker green miraculously transformed into PLUTONIUM CITRON once we covered the walls.  It was sort of disturbing, especially the way it made the entire hallway glow when the door cracked open, like a scene from X-files or something.  My hubby didn’t grumble too much when he helped me repaint it with a kinder, gentler green.  Lesson learned, buy a sample quart  first.   Always.

But I guess I really haven’t gotten to the point of this story, which is my diligent planning of a nursery for a baby that wasn’t even baking might have been a bit premature.  Because, in the years after so carefully preparing that room for a baby that still wasn’t, I could hardly get myself to open the door and go in.  And we didn’t have a crib or anything obvious in there,  just the twin guest bed and a white-washed dresser.  But in that dresser was my ’secret’ drawer, where a small collection lived:  a matching set of pastel pink and blue blankets, two stuffed bunnies, one little puppy rattle, and one miniature rocking horse.   Self-induced torture.

As the years past in my TTC endeavor, my baby-preparation veered in a different direction.  Gone were the premature ‘what names do you like?’ conversations with my hubby, or impulsive meanderings around the baby section at Target when I was supposed to be getting toilet paper.  Nesting isn’t fun when you don’t have any little blue-speckled eggs to hatch.  I turned my energy toward information gathering on the TTC process and all the dumb things wrong wtih me.

That meant reading all kinds of facinating books like, “Endometriosis:  the complete reference to taking charge of your health”  or “The Seven Secrets to Getting Pregnant” and the like.  It also meant stalking any website I could find on dealing with Endo and PCOS and infertility.   The time I was supposed to be spending on researching birthing facilities or the difference between disposable or cloth diapers was instead spent on trying to get some understanding of what was wrong so I could fix it.    Is that torture?  Well, I guess the painful part is learning that, despite knowing everything you can about all this stuff, it still doesn’t mean you’re going to get pregnant.  And it’s definitely torture when you sneak yourself a peek of ‘What to Expect When You’re Expecting’ at the bookstore when you’re supposed to be picking out a book on “The Infertility Diet” and start daydreaming about your own baby bump.

The last and probably most masochistic form of torture is what we do in the 2 WW (that’s the time between the big O and when you’re supposed to get AF).  The 14 day (more or less) time span is torturous enough.  Those two weeks hold equal parts hope and excitement for a long-awaited BFP and also the dread of an impending BFN, and the interplay of both of those possibilities simultaneously playing out in your brain cause a truly schizophrenic state.  So what are some examples of torture during this time?  Here’s a few that come to mind:

1. Obsessively reviewing your BBT chart mutliple times a day from mutiple angles to detect some sort of hidden pattern, maybe like those 3D image puzzles from the late 90’s where you could see pictures of Jesus or something if you got your nose close enough and sort of crossed your eyes all janky-like.
2. Looking up ‘early pregnancy symptoms’ on the web to review what to look for.  Assess yourself compulsively.
3. Looking up ‘very early pregnancy symptoms’ on the web.  Assess yourself compulsively.
4. Calculate your due date and think of baby names that might be seasonal to that date.
5. POAS each day, several times a day.
6. Take a little peek at the ‘due date’ clubs online where pregnant women all due in the same month come together to compare each and every stinking body change, gas bubble, and stretch mark.
7. Pop into the maternity section at Old Navy ‘just to see’.
8. Look up ‘creative pregnancy announcements’ online to get ideas of how to reveal the big surprise.
9. Obsess over if your nipples (or areolas, should we say) do indeed seem darker.
10. Take a peek at your secret stash of baby things.

Admittedly, I have done each and every one of these things at one time another in my two TTC journeys.  And when AF arrived after all this 2 WW obsession, it just left me feeling,  I guess ‘cheated’ after I put so much hope into it all.  So, after two course of IF, I’ve abandoned a lot of these 2 WW compusivities.  What happens will happen, I figure.  Maybe I’m just a dumb old pessimist.

But I’ll tell you a secret, even with all that I know about how the 2 WW obsession makes me feel in the end, I still found myself looking up ‘very early pregnancy symptoms’ and performing a comprehesive body scan this past December (the last month I actually had a TTC cycle).  

Plain and simple:  self-induced torture.