A unicorn told me to write this post

Cynicism is a badge of honor here in the ranks of infertility. Not being able to get pregnant seems to knock the positive right out of you. The exception, of course, are the newbies who obsess about progesterone-induced symptoms during the two week wait. They are full of optimism, baby dust, and candy-colored dreams for their "embies." They don't vacuum during the two week wait, and they probably did a week of bedrest after transfer. They're the ones who exhort you to "Stay positive!"

These people always, always get pregnant after their first IVF. They also misuse ellipses. I'm not sure what the correlation is there, but I'm convinced that one exists.

In the meantime, the rest of us soldier on. We go back to work after transfer. We stop telling friends and families about treatments, because their disappointment at the inevitable bad news starts to feel harder to bear than our own. We drink wine during stims. We keep looking for the next protocol, the next treatment. Our armor of bitterness and negativity protects us from the chemical pregnancies and the negative betas and our friends who have surprise pregnancies. We don't allow ourselves to hope, because hoping hurts too much.

But secretly? I want the candy-colored dreams. I want to clutch a positive HPT in my sweaty little hand and wave it victoriously in front of my husband's face. I want to calculate due dates and think about moving around work commitments and consider baby names. I want hope.

So when three different home pregnancy tests gave me faint positives today on 7dp3dt, I felt a splinter of that hope--sharp and painful like something foreign lodged in my heel. It's there, I can feel it, but I can't get at the damn thing with my tweezers. It's in there good. And throughout the day it becomes more deeply embedded under my skin until I'm afraid to look at it because taking that fucker out is going to HURT. So I let it be.

I let it be.