Odds and Ends

Just a rambling post today as I have thoughts in my head and this is a great dumping ground.

The first thing I want to talk a bit about is my mother.  My mother and I have a good, but maybe not great relationship.  If we lived in the same city, I'd suggest we go to couples therapy or something to try and address some of the ingrained issues.  I know that I don't always deal with her fairly.  I also know that she has the ability to throw me into 'furious' by doing things that shouldn't elicit such strong results.  So with that in mind, case in point.  Yesterday she sent me an email about child development and how parents can help their kids develop better blah blah blah.  This irritated me a lot.  It irritated me because it feels like she vaguely is suggesting I wouldn't know how to be a good mother (this is not the case).  It also irritates me because I'm not pregnant.  I may not get pregnant. Even if I do get pregnant, I may not carry to term.   A whole lot of things need to happen before I'm worrying about child development.  The fact is, I may never need to worry about child development, despite best intentions.  So it just irritated me, a lot.  I have to keep a close watch on how involved my mom gets with things because she has a tendency to make it all about her (no matter what it is). I've already had to field conversations with her about her 'not wanting to be a long distance grandmother' which was couched in 'I could come to the UK and help you out because you're going to need help'.  But when it came down to it, it was about her and what she wanted, not about helping me at all.  And there are precedents for this, like when I had my surgery to remove my one ovary and she came to 'help' which involved telling my friends who were coming to visit me that I was a complainer and asked her to do stuff I could do myself (for example, get me some water from the kitchen when she was going there for herself anyway), as well as showing my friends her scars from surgery and telling them how she'd had much worse surgeries herself in the past.  I feel that I am reasonably cautious about handling my mother and her emotions.  It just also makes me sensitive to every little thing.  Anyway.

More positive rambling, I've been chatting to the embryologist at my clinic because I had to fill in 'a consent to warm frozen eggs' form.  I noted on the form that there was a clause that you are signing up to which basically says they will continue to thaw eggs until the desired number is reached.  I'm glad I read that because it's not really my intention at all.  When I said I wanted them to defrost 6-7 (or half of my 13 frozen eggs), my thinking was 1 or 2 may not defrost, so I was accounting for that in my plan.  In addition, I don't know how many eggs may be collected from the fresh IVF cycle.  So I don't want them to just keep defrosting to hit 6 or 7 if I don't need that!  Positively, the embryologist was completely on board and agreed with me that because what I'm doing is different to standard (using fresh and frozen at the same time) that I would be scheduled for the first collection in the morning (good to know) which would give them time to fully assess how many fresh eggs were retrieved which would also give them enough time to thaw more if we decided to after the first amount were thawed (and they would ask my permission).  So that was good. I like feeling involved in the process, and, like I said, I'm glad I read that properly because I would have been pissed to find out they defrosted 8 or 9 to get me 6, especially if I get a good fresh collection as well.

I'm looking forward to just getting on with this next cycle!!  It's a whole month plus a bit away still. But I'm glad my outlook is positive (despite my first paragraph which could suggest I'm not).