Bored

Bore (v.)

Weary by tedious talk, dullness or monotony.

-The Oxford Shorter English Dictionary

My primary emotion, as we turn down the home stretch of this cycle's two week wait, is not hope, fear or anticipation. No. What I feel at the moment is mostly... boredom.

I hate confessing that I am bored, because immediately that inner voice starts up. The voice that routinely and on cue, chimes out all the things your mother ever told you, taking up the chant,

"Bored people are boring to be with! Bored people are booooooring".

The implication of that saying is that: if I had enough inner resources to make the experience of waiting unsuccessfully to get pregnant into something interesting and positive, well, then I wouldn't be bored. So in other words, I feel dull, because I am dull. Well, OK, whatever. I am too bored to worry about how boring I might be. Really. I am too bored to care about the fact that I can't turn the soul-destroying siege of yet another cycle into something illuminating and entertaining for myself.

I recognise that infertility is not the sole cause of my boredom. If I subject the state of my life to a cool, clinical analysis, I can readily admit that many aspects of my life, even before we started trying, are/were boring. When I was younger, I traveled a lot and tried out several different career avenues, and those journeys took me some rather strange and unexpected places. Eventually though, I got sick of having no money, no stability and no security. So I opted for what was ultimately a rather safer & more conventional path. I got a job, I got a mortgage, I got responsibilities. And sometimes those bore me in a general sense, the way we all sometimes get tired of the usual drill.

One of the reasons we decided it was time to have a family is that we looked around at what we had. Though we agreed our situation was nice in many ways, we felt unfulfilled. We thought that having a child would be an enhancement on so many levels. We welcomed the challenge of parenthood. We felt that we would be better people for being parents, and we looked forward to having the opportunity to love and nuture a child. To think about something beyond ourselves, and what we had already created. It wasn't so much as we were bored with what we had- it was just that we wanted to move on to something that we both saw as a deeply enriching and fundamentally important experience.

Sometimes when we talk about the options, we discuss living child-free. I know for some people, child-free is really is not an option. In this house, however, we feel like we must keep all avenues open. Because the bottom line is that for us, it may turn out not to be so much an "option" as the default position. The status quo.

So while we start out agreeing that we like our lives just fine, we always come back, full circle. We've looked at where we are now, and decided it's not enough. That our careers, our hobbies, our properties, hot sex*, our holidays together- not enough. And not because it isn't good- it is. But because we've already looked past that and realised that we don't want to retain the status quo. We've become more and more sure of that over time, because unlike people who simply get pregnant as soon as they decide they want a family, we have to keep re-visiting what motivates us in that direction.

But I think it does become harder to keep re-evaluating a major life decision, one which we may, ultimately, never have the opportunity to make real. It just that it gets exhausting, every month, having to come back to that starting block. To work up the nerve, to conquer our fear of falling and throw ourselves off that high cliff, into the great unknown again and again. To keep asking the same questions that must, on some level, be asked yet again. Do we still want this? How much do we want this? Are we right to want this? How long can we carry on wanting if it never happens?

This is where we are right now. All we can do is hang on and wait for the point where we can add the extra questions. And I am extremely bored with being in that state. I am bored of waiting, bored of disappointment, bored of sex on schedule, bored of listening to other fertile types talk about their kids, bored of my life without baby. That doesn't mean I don't have all the other emotions mixed in there too- it's that today, like so many other days, the boredom is overwhelming. It cancels out everything else. It turns me into somebody I don't like- someone who is bored. Someone who is boring.


*just checking to see if you were paying attention, or if you were too bored by my boringness to notice.