This thirty-second timeout sponsored by the good people at Yahoo! Real Estate

Because I should be concentrating on the dozens of pages of validated test scripts I must run today. Because my milk supply is dwindling. Because I must find, and subsidize, a new apartment for my lunatic mother. Becuase I must find, and wholly pay for, a Silicon Valley daycare provider for my infant girl. Because I must find, pay for and manage an interior painter to fix our peeling plaster and the water damage in our laundry closet, an exterior painter to pressure-spray our house, a gardening service to pretty up our overgrown yard. Because I have servers to upgrade, yoga to do, an hour to drive and dinner to make. Because I have a fantastic daughter to rush home to.

Because of these things--these useful and important things that I should be doing instead--I am fruitlessly engrossed in Yahoo! Real Estate, imagining our furniture in houses that are entirely out of our price range.

Why do I do this? Why? Why?

When

When Olivia was fifty-four hours old, I cried because I wanted another one. Not that I didn't want her--no, no, no--I wanted her and more. I wanted another one because I knew I wouldn't remember those days and hours and minutes and seconds in enough detail; I knew the cocktail of hormones and sleep deprivation and pain would gray it out. I was missing it even while it was happnening. I figured, if I were able to have another, I'd be better prepared for those early days, better able to enjoy them, better able to retain them.

I assumed this urge would quiet down once the hormonal pendulum had swung back toward normal. I figured I'd be too busy being fulfilled and exhausted and stretched to the edge of snapping. And I am. I am stretched, I am exhausted, and I even feel, for the most part, fulfilled--or at least mostly filled, if you know what I mean. But the urge is still pecking at me, pulling at my mind.

I'll be thirty-seven in a few weeks. My eggs, having aged poorly, will be older than that. Time is short. Of course, I have this occasional fantasy that, Menita-like, I'll find myself magically pregnant one of these days. (Granted, the fantasy would be more realistic if I'd had a period and we'd had sex, but somehow it persists.)

Most of the time, though, I find myself daydreaming about Repronex and the diameter of follicles, picturing the exposed-nerve moment after retrieval when the embryologist is on his way with the number. I picture the ultrasounds, the E2 blood draws, even the interminable eleven days between transfer and beta. I long for them.

I'm not sure when I'll get a fix, but I've come to think of it just that way: "when", not "if". It feels a little indecent to admit to it, a little greedy--like winning the lottery and putting half the profits into another batch of tickets. Will I spend too much of my newfound Olivia happiness capital in another failed attempt? Will trying and failing return me to a state of deep discontent? Or would failing to try leave me paddling in a lifelong pool of regret? I don't know. And, at this point, I will plug my ears and whistle loudly, thinking blindly of a morning (next spring, perhaps?) when "when" has become "today".