Mom (not me) update

After a really hard day on Tuesday (but thanks for all the really great, understanding and comforting comments) and an evening of briefly taking out my anger and frustration on my husband (we patched it up), yesterday (Wed.) started out hard again but ended better.

The thing that actually broke it open with my mom was an email she sent me in the morning (while I was still on a work-related conference call). It was an email forwarding baby registry information for my cousin's wife who is due in a few weeks. Now, I've known she was pregnant. And I'm really happy for them. She's my cousin's second wife. His first wife struggled with breast cancer for many years (first diagnosed at 28, I think) and died at the age of ~35. They never had children. His second wife is really nice and great and, although only 36 or 37 herself, they apparently had some trouble getting pregnant so I'm really happy for them. She's actually on bedrest because she has some serious kidney stones but she'll be 36 weeks tomorrow so hopefully all will be ok.

So, that's not the real problem. The real problem was that my mom chose yesterday to forward her baby registry information on to me. I know she just wasn't thinking. But I reacted badly. I sent a nasty email back, basically saying "I can't believe they named the baby already. They must be confident he'll actually be born. Must be nice."

After that, complete meltdown. I cried at my desk, I cried in the shower. I wrote my sister an email whining about my mother's insensitivity.

And then I deleted it.

I figured, 'I'm a big girl. I'm 40-freaking-years old.' I can call my mother up myself and tell her I'm hurting. I don't need to passively aggressively use my little sister to convey that message to my mother. So, I did. The conversation basically started with my saying I wasn't ok. And it was a great conversation, although draining. My mom was there to comfort me, saying a lot of the right things (although not always: ok, I'm just like her in this way too, not listening enough sometimes, always trying to fix things, but I understand that, at least.) We talked for about an hour. And she let me be all negative with her and tried to get me to see some of the positive things (which, I've already thought about but sometimes just feel the need to just be negative.) We talked about donor eggs (although not about the possibility of my sister donating, since I don't know if my sister has told my mother about this yet) and how she and my dad would love their grandchild no matter what - no matter if it didn't have any genetic link to their families. And about how I really did have time; that it is frustrating that we won't see a child for at least 12 months (and that's if we even get extremely lucky the first one or two rounds out of this) but that my husband and I are healthy and there will be lots of older parents along with us.

So, it was good. I'm really glad I talked to her. She offered to come down to our house, but they'd just gotten home from being in Maine and Canada and have friends coming to their lake cottage this weekend and we're going away on Friday and Saturday so I told her no. Plus, I need to get some of my consulting work done today. But it was good to know that she was there and wanted to listen to me cry and rant and rave and be pessimistic about our chances and talk through all the permutations of our upcoming decisions. She apologized for forwarding that email, saying she just hadn't thought it through.

The rest of the day was ok. Even thought it was a good conversation, it was draining and I snapped at our real estate agent who called not too much later to say that our buyers had walked through our house the night before and were asking us to fix lights that were clearly out just because of blown lightbulbs. I mean, really??? You can't replace a freaking lightbulb once you move into the house? You low-balled us on your offer (to which we countered almost totally in your favor and then accepted) and you can't buy yourself a freaking lightbulb? We were closing at 4 p.m. yesterday afternoon so our agent replaced one of the lightbulbs and brought two lightbulbs to the closing for the other ceiling fixture for the seller to install himself (touche!!)

The guy turned out to be a total dweeb that bought our house. We laughed (ok, helped by a bottle of Veuve popped when we got home) about his total dorkdom for the rest of the evening. But, whatever. We now only own one house! And 3 real estate transactions in 12 months (I sold my house last October, we bought our new house in June and sold my husband's house yesterday), I am completely done with real estate industry and all their hangers-on (especially the smarmy settlement companies) for the next 20-25 years. Phew!

So, there we have it. Things are feeling better. Pretty much have stopped spotting, I think. Still grieving the loss of thinking we'd have a baby by January. And grieving our incredibly bad luck (and seemingly unending back luck.) I'm seeing my counselor this afternoon. I'm not sure how that will go. Probably will be pretty tear-filled, but a releasing a few more tears probably is going to be ok.