Goal Girl’s Blog

The Life Cycle of One of GoalGirl’s Personal Goals

About six years ago, I came to a not-so-sudden realization. Well actually a couple of realizations. First, I wanted to be a mom; I mean, really wanted to be a mom. Second, I wasn’t really set up for that. I’d been divorced for several years and wasn’t dating anyone seriously. Also, at 35-ish years old, I wasn’t getting any younger either. Not that you get younger at any age, but you know what i mean.

Ok, so that was three realizations, shoot me.

The more I thought about it, the more motherhood became a burning, driving need. I guess this is why humans haven’t become extinct; this procreation instinct is really powerful. and in case it’s not enough, we also have just plain old sex drive so there are enough ‘accidental’ pregnancies to make up for an lag… lags probably due to women like me who chose to finish graduate school, find a better job, travel a bit first, etcetera, and then made silly choices of marrying a man who didn’t want kids and expecting him to change his mind eventually.

ok, so a goal exploded forth and took me by the throat. I had a goal. This goal even had an automatic built-in time limit, and as they say, a goal with no time-limit is no goal at all. The time limit, in case you are wondering is the near certaintly of eventual menopause.

What are steps required to reach this goal? Well… normally on would say, find a mate, fall in love, get married, ya-yada… but hey, my clock was ticking fast. I’d done the first three, but the latter bits didn’t follow. So check them off anyway.

What are my other options? I could have started doing a series of one-night stands. I could have approached my male friends in the hope that one or more would be willing to donate to the cause, so to speak. Maybe I could have found someone in need of a green card and married them in exchange for their, um, services… I could have advertised for a donor who would be willing to sign away their rights to any offspring… or, i could do what I did do, that is, shop around for a sperm bank.

What are the potential barriers between me and my goal? Well, I couldn’t afford doctor-assisted artificial insemination (AI), so I found a sperm bank that would ship directly to my home, along with the necessary supplies to do the job myself. Are you grossed out yet? The nice thing is that this site also had a very good forum and the community there had a good spirit of mutual support. I went four cycles with that company at about $200 a pop. I knew I had some issues, but I was hoping they were as intermittant as the symptoms. I have polycystic ovarian syndrome. I figured I would go get a fertility workup. While researching my insurance coverage, I discovered that some fertility services were in fact covered, hurray!

I did two rounds of doctor assisted AI with no success. The ultrasounds showed that my ovaries looked like a bumpy ball from all of the unreleased follicles. Time to go for bigger guns. My doc had me “rest my ovaries” for a while by lupron injection, which kept them quiescent. Then I started the hormone shots to get the ovaries producing a lot of mature follicles for egg harvesting (i.e. to be used in in-vitro fertilization). I figured out once that in the course of trying to get pregnant, I gave myself something like 80 injections. Some of these were on an airplane returning from visiting friends in New Zealand.

Then I got a letter from my insurance company. They were implimenting a new policy that all covered reproductive services had to be performed at a “reproductive center of excellence”. I went ot the URL they provided and found two such centers in Texas. One was in Dallas, but was at the Methodist hospital, which would not provide said services for an unmarried woman. The other was in Austin, an over 4 hour drive away… considering the frequency of doctor visits required by an assisted reproduction cycle, this was really not an option.

After several letters and phone calls, the insurance agreed to “Grandfather” me with this course of treatment, since I was already 2/3rds of the way through this cycle, but future cycles would have to be administered at a center of excellence. Well, thank God my first invitro cycle worked!
After a Hypnobirthing class, gestational diabetes, insulin shots, swollen ankles, and aching hips (the little darling decided at around six months to jam her head into my pelvis and leave it there for three months or so), a double nuchal chord, and an emergency cesarean (didn’t get to use the Hypnobirthing stuff, darn it!), I reached my goal. I was finally a mommy!

Worth it? You bet. My daughter is the joy of my life. It’s often harder raising a kid on my own that it would be with a partner, but I still feel that this was the best goal I’ve ever set and met. My little bug is the joy of my life and my raison d’etre …

The point of this article (besides just want to relive the past), is that if I had not actually made a goal and broken it down into the necessary steps, if I had just left it as some nebulous longing, a “someday” thing, I would not now be getting good morning kisses from a little Princess.

If anyone is interested in discussing fertility issues, single-parenthood by choice or other related topics, please leave me a comment to that affect. If there is enough interest, I’ll set up a forum.

-GG