Final Countdown

It’s cycle day one after a thirty day cycle and we’ve decided not to try again this month because we are already almost 1,000 dollars over budget, and we’ve decided to maybe not even try again until January when the HSA replenishes and even then, maybe not until we leave this state, which could be next summer. It could be that we don’t try again until I’m 34.

Then, again, I have every day until I’m old and gray to get out of this state, but only about 910 days to get pregnant.

So, maybe, I need to get my priorities straight.

Place Love

This morning I go in for the sonogram to see how big my follicles are. I wonder if I’ll get any feedback about the number of eggs in general? If the follicle is a good size, I’ll get a shot to make it drop and come back tomorrow for an IUI. And the next day for another one, even though Dr. Hugs already said that he doesnt like to do two IUIs in one cycle because, “it only increases your chances by about blah blah percent.” Dr. Hugs is on an island right now. He doesnt get a say.

Also, I added a cycle day ticker at the bottom of the homepage. This cycle day ticker’s for you, LPC.

I’ve been in a twitchy mood lately. Quiet, furtive, otherly. I really want to leave this place and I really want 3,000 dollars to fall out of the sky in order to make it happen. Awhile ago, when Wifebian and I were hashing out the meaning of love and life as it was between us, she observed that maybe I like to fall in love so much because I’m depressed and isnt love is a fan-fucking-tastic anti-depressant? I mean, dont get me wrong. I didnt spend my twenties falling in out of love every two weeks, I wasnt recklessness, but I definitely bent over backwards for love. I’ve had the honor of falling head over heels four times and all of them involved crossing many, many state lines. Specifically, the ones between Maryland, New York, Washington, D.C., California, Utah, and Florida. Just my lousy luck, I guess, but I never shirked from my responsibility to go boldly forth in the name of love, to get on that Greyhound or rent that Ryder.

Now that I am married, I hopefully wont be falling in love again (because, well, wouldnt that be a disaster) but what is it that I can fall in love with, I ask myself? I mean, I agree. Falling in love seems to really do it for me, surely getting married isnt the end of the falling in love.

I know motherhood will do it. But I think finding a place will do it, too. Finding the final apartment, in that one city, in that one state, where I will really just stay. I want to fall in love with the place I live. But somehow, in spite of being married, and therefore, ostensibly settled down, I still find myself in the moving business. In the four years I’ve been with Wifebian, I have moved six times, gracing four states with my presence. I have lived in D.C., the homebase I love, and Virginia  (which I swore up and down I would never do), and I have lived, well, here. And there are two unmentionable, unfathomable heres, states I never even took the time to swear about not living in because who ever thought I would have to?

I want to go some place and I want to stay there. For fucking ever. I want to love it and I want to take care of it. I want to attend city council meetings and block parties. I want to sweep my front step and pick up other people’s dog poop. I want to have an opinion about stoplights and I want to adopt a highway. “Yes, I will donate an extra $25.00 to have my name engraved on that brick,” I will say. I want the address on my checks to match the address on my license. I want to infest the nooks and crannies of my house with layer upon layer of my creepy, crawly memories. I want to douse the sidewalks with stories. I want every building to have a story and most of the faces to register recognition when they see me coming. I want to start something, or at least become a part of something, and I want all the people I’m in it with to come to my funeral. I want one city, one neighborhood, one house, to be mine from now on. I want my kid to say, “I was born here,” and have an accent while they say it.

And in my youthful exuberance I thought D.C. might be that place. I had most of my good stories there, and my mother’s and father’s, too. That was one of the great things about that DC, my history and my parents’ histories were everywhere I was. He got arrested in an the alley behind the Manhattan laundry building. They met in Georgetown.  And there’s where their stories start to make mine. She stood in the parking lot of a GW building with a young me and decided not to apply for a doctorate program. Me and him driving past the Pepsi bottling company on the way back to Maryland.

I was a tour guide in DC one summer. Being a tour guide in DC was awesome. To have the history of our nation in all of its blackness and whiteness and wars mingling with my own family’s history, as well as the registry of public places in which I had sex during my early twenties was like an ice cream sundae! So many sprinkles and cherries! SO MUCH FUDGE. But the place for me, the adult place, isnt DC. What self-respecting middle class white liberal can afford to raise a family there? (Cue zombie voice, raise arms parallel to the floor.) Middle-class white liberal must buy house. Must buy house. Buy house. Hauwsssss.

So. I need to find a place to love and take care of and a place that will love and take care of me . . . and I wonder if that place isnt Baltimore. Being a native Marylander, it is, after all, my birthright. And there is some family history. My mom says that my grandparents had a dry cleaning store on St. Paul Street and my mom got a certificate at JHU (instead of that PhD from GW). I have a very dear friend there, who I believe in my heart is never going to leave. And my company has offices there, plus there are lots of positions there with the National Health Service Corps. Baltimore has a dab of history and a spot of friendship and a job prospect or two, which is enough to get started. In fact, one of my fondest memories of my dad is picking up my first interstate love from the bus station in Baltimore. (I was 16 and I had met him on the internet.) My dad took me to pick him up and suggested that we cross the street so we could be warmer on the sunny side. Having grown up in the suburbs, I didnt know that about city streets and I just thought to myself, “That is so smart!” and thought my dad was so savvy.

I mean, I can make it work. Baltimore has place personality for miles. I could play place games like letterboxing and foursquare for days in that little city. And while I have always thought of it as D.C.’s annoying little sister and I never imaged I would deign to set up shop there, I am considering it. I started a Baltimorean category on the blogroll. I troll Craigslist. I daydream.

Baltimore, however, is Wifebian’s last choice ever. Although she is nonetheless mostly willing, the other night, when she came home from visiting her sister’s new baby, she put a moratorium on all Baltimore-talk. She couldnt bear the thought of ever leaving this place, this place I do not love, this clean, conservative, southern place that is the shining birthplace of her first-ever most precious niece, for some place as dirty and busted as Baltimore. Yesterday morning we had to cry about it all a little. Today, we are getting together the infinite paperwork for the licenses.