It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Infertility does have a positive side.

Most of the time you have to look really really hard to see it, but it's there...waiting, disguised, for you to uncover it. Often, it's obscured by the multitudes of unhappy outcomes and disappointments, but it's always there, waiting to be discovered.

When I really sat down and thought about it, I was surprised at what came up.

Infertility is the reason I went to Paris. It was one of those weird moments where you're slogging along in temp charting and you have made yourself damn near crazy over the why's and wherefore's of what isn't happening, and why isn't it?

And suddenly, someone kind of laughs and says, "You should plan a vacation....we could go to Paris! The way fate works, you'll be too far along to fly when the trip rolls around.
Well, and if not...."

"We'll always have Paris?" I interjected, helpfully.

"Well, exactly."

"Hell, when you out it that way....let's go!"

I had never been off the North American continent before. My high school French was really rusty, and it took awhile to kick in, but it was so worth it. And then I came home and had like, a 53 day anovulatory cycle. But still worth it! If you'd like, you can read about some of our adventures here and here.

I quit my horrible job because of infertility.

I was stuck in the worst way imaginable, at a company that simply did not want me to be able to move up through the ranks, and I was refusing to give up. I was such a mess at the end of every single day, but The Man's pleas with me to quit and just find something else fell on deaf ears. I was going to make it work, if it killed me.

My boss was someone who socially, must have been a kick in the pants. In an office, she was a nightmare. She was never at her desk. If she was, she would invite the men in our office into her office, and they would shut the door and laugh and joke and flirt while the women I worked with looked at each other and seethed. I would go in for meetings, and she would tell me horrible, confidential things about my co-workers. I had to come up with fictions about my IF appointments, or the whole office would have known about them by the end of the day.

She would come by on my lunch hour with random objects, and place them on my desk with a post-it saying "Fix this!" and no other directives. In one case, it was a plaque that she needed for an awards ceremony in an hour. It had the wrong name on it. No directive on what she expected me to do, and no name mentioned to replace the name on the plaque. Did she want me to pull an engraving machine and brass plates out of a convenient orifice? Creative use of White-out and Sharpie? I still don't know. I ended up getting the art department to mock something up at the 11th hour. Thank God for Photoshop!

My office buddies had a little joke about her management style-
If you have seen Overboard, you'll get this:

"Jennnnnnnaaaaaa, I seem to have lost my earrings between...emmmmmm....43rd and 48th Street. Fiiiiiiiiiiind them!" Then we would waft our hands helplessly through the air.

She never answered phone calls, and it got so bad that I had regional v.p.'s calling and asking for me, because they knew she wouldn't take care of it, but I would usually McGyver some way of getting it handled. Dangerous practice, when you consider that you're working for someone who gives you zero recognition for saving the day, but if you made a mistake, she would sell you out in a heartbeat. I had to make sure that everything was documented via e-mail, so I could cover my ass. Looking back on it, I was as safe as houses, because essentially, I was doing 90 % of her job for her, while getting an eighth of her paycheck or less. D'oh!

My calls to HR were never returned. I appealed to my former boss, and he basically said, "She's been here for 17 years. Get used to it, or get out." I attempted to transfer to another department, and while they let me interview, I know that I got retained by my department because I was "necessary to the well-being of the department." (It pays to have friends in IT.)

As time went on, I would awaken in the mornings feeling sick. Not morning sickness, (ha!) more like existential despair. The Man finally cornered me one night and said, "I want my wife back. The stress is hurting our marriage, and if you want to have a baby, I think this is the last place you should be. It's making you crazy. Take a few months off and think about what you want to do." I put in my notice the next day, and she was demoted within six months.

I found a wonderful job because I quit that job.

When I saw the ad in the paper, I thought it was going to be a scam, like selling perfume door-to-door or CutCo or something. But I had worked with kids before, in volunteer positions in high school. I had always been great at science, and I have, as we say, a flair for the dramatic.
It was part-time, and you could make your own hours, so I could schedule dr. appointments with abandon. It was perfect. And they hired me.

And now I make slime dressed in a lab coat and talk about polymers and molecules and volcanoes with kids all day long. Writing down "M.ad Sci.ent.ist " under my occupation on forms has ceased to be embarrassing, and has actually sparked several hilarious conversations among my new co-workers, and medical office staff, as well as the guy who filled out our mortgage paperwork at the bank.

Because of this job, I know that I want to be a teacher when I "grow up." I am going back to get my credential as soon as The Man is done with his college. We may postpone it a bit, because of the move to SF~ we'll see.