Let's Start at the Beginning...

So, this is the deal: I had a plan. After getting married I did, anyway. I wanted kids, soon and many. Oh, I don't know why, but it was my plan. And so, after a respectable honeymoon period of 2 or 3 years, we pitched the birth control and started plugging away, so to speak...

My better half was on board, and we cheerfully looked forward to our days of parenting. And time marched on. Our noble plan was... not the noble plan that the powers that be were choosing to endorse...

So, what, another infertility blog? Well, not entirely. Yes we were infertile, no we didn't become partents. Other things happened, life happened, continues to happen... And we've decided to jump on board. So our noble plan is being replaced by a nobler plan- getting on with life.

So maybe you're thinking: "Oh, she's just bitter. Burnt out from all the failure..." Actually, no. This is about the other side, the side of the story about things not happening according to plan. But going quite well all the same. I'm a girl on the cusp of 2 blog lands, not quite an infertile, (not in the active way anyway) and not quite 'childfree'. I'm in the middle ground. Or at least I feel like I am. I totally get the TTC bloggers, I read them compulsively. I remember it all, when they blog about waiting for beta's, when they post about heartbreaking ultrasounds, when they tell the world that they spent half their salary on pregnancy tests and the other half on OPK's, I can relate.

On the other hand, I am now decidedly childfree. I'm happy about it. I would have, I feel certain, been happy if our plans for having children had worked out like we intended, but I'm happy anyway. Certainly happier than I was when we were wanting what we weren't getting. I like my life without kids, even though I love kids, and contrary to popular belief, this isn't my second choice. Except in the way that I tried to choose something else once. OK, so in that way it is a second choice. But actually, we didn't run out of options, as far as I can see, for us, at this point, there are always options. We could have kept trying, we could have pursued adoption. We decided to pursue something else. We didn't want it anymore. We, ok, I, decided CF was what I was looking for.

I still relate to the TTCer's. And I'm not entirely sure I get the majority of CFer's. I LOVE kids, they do not annoy me in restaurants (very often), I do not think of parents as anything other than parents. I might think they good parents, or great parents, or crappy parents. I think kids are neat, and sometimes annoying, sometimes gross, sometimes too cute for words, sometimes so honest that I could cry.

So I'm off the TTC/infertility 'rollercoaster', as they say. I have occassionally read in blogs, once an infertile, always an infertile and thought HA! Because I don't think of myself as infertile. But, truth be told, I feel like another alumnus. I didn't graduate in the same way a lot of former infertiles did, through parenthood. But I'm a former infertile all the same.