Catching Up: Miracle Pregnancy for an Infertile

Sometime during the spring of 2014 amid better eating habits, plenty of Indian food and exercising on a daily basis, I was late. Not late like the other hundreds  of times I had been late before, no, this was late with symptoms. 

I had began taking my BBT again just to see if exercising was helping with my cycle. After 20 high temperatures I decided it was time to take a test.  Of course, I took the test as soon as I woke up, which was 3:45 in the morning on a Sunday.  And suddenly, a miracle, those two pink lines showed up, and changed our life forever.

Catching Up

So much has happened since I stopped blogging on a regular basis.  We won and lost a fortune…in dreams that is. But, it is better to have loved and lost than have never loved at all.

More on all of this to follow…so many stories, so many lessons learned.

How I See Infertility

I wouldn’t say I am infertile, because ever since I was a little girl, I always assumed I was so motherly, it had to mean I was super fertile.  However, 3 and a half years off the pill (and not necessarily avoiding children, but not trying for them either), there has been no children, no pregnancy, sometimes no ovulation.  Of course, the first few missed periods, were disappointing, I even cried once. I would talk obsessively about babies, and pregnancy, but then again, I had always been obsessed with those topics even before I hit puberty.  In order to stop driving the people around me crazy with babies, I started writing it all down in a diary.

I admit, I went through the five stages of grief, and came out the other side, all recorded in my diary.   I finally got to the acceptance stage because I realized I was happy with my life the way it was.   I actually wrote: “I was 23 years old, and had already accepted the fact that it would always be us two.  I had accepted that NO children would come along, thus I would never expect one to.  I would say I was avoiding children just to shut people up, but the reality was that I no longer really cared.  I was enjoying my life, was busy working, and trying to bring balance to my life.”  Why was I going to despise the good life I had by wishing so much for it to change?  How do you miss or suffer for someone you have never met?

Therefore,  I don’t consider the infertility, I have experienced so far, a tragedy.  It is not a tragedy for life to stay the same as it has always been, if children don’t show up, that would not be a tragedy.  Tragedy is losing someone you’ve grown to love.  Tragedy is what my mother-in-law had to suffer when she lost a seemingly perfectly healthy 27 year-old son for no apparent reason, he just didn’t wake up one morning.  Nine years, and an inconclusive autopsy later, his death remains a mystery, and a horrible tragedy.  Tragedy is getting pregnant, raising a boy, living with him, loving him with all your heart, and then losing him like that.  So no, for me,  it is not a tragedy that I have not gotten pregnant.   Any sadness this “infertility” may have caused, can never compare to something like that.  Waiting for something to arrive that never does, hurts way less, than losing something that was there.

My View of Teaching

I realized that my method of teaching consists of the following: Encourage, and guide the student to grasp their true potential, never control.  I hate when people try to control me, so why would I try to control them?  Also, never under pressure, while some may work well under pressure, in my opinion, few learn well under pressure.  While I am not yet a certified or a licensed teacher, I was practically born with a passion for teaching.

Most likely, it started with the birth of my younger brother when I was 20 months old.  I guess I always felt that I was the one who should help instruct him.   Of course, most the education in my home came from my mother.   My mother was an excellent teacher, she homeschooled all of us during our first years, and she taught me how to read before I was five.  However, I always assumed that I could relate to my brother, and be on his level, mostly because of our age proximity.  I remember when I would always try to instruct him to color inside the lines.  In my home, this was very common with all of the members of the family.  My father would speak to us about complex theories from a very young age, and my sisters were always helping me learn new things.  Learning, in my house was not limited to school or during homeschooling hours, my parents treated learning as something very natural.  Therefore, I always loved putting together the pieces of information I would capture in different places: school, movies, books, etc. I would, then, love sharing what I learned with those around me. Then, throughout most of my life, I have always loved being able to help people realize something, or learn.

I would say I began realizing my love for educating when I was in high school.  My boyfriend’s father, who was a former NYU math professor, was having a difficult time giving math tutoring to his 10-year-old granddaughter.   The reason for not succeeding in this attempt was not the lack of knowledge, but the lack of being able to meet her at a level she would understand or that would spark her interest.  Frustrated, they asked if I would give it a shot.  I did, I sat down with her, and told her to explain what was being taught in the class, and then helped her realize that she already had everything necessary to understand the lessons.  I also focused on the weak areas, mostly the times table, and the results were excellent.  My now father-in-law, always jokes about how everything happened.

I later moved on to be a freelance tutor in the university, mostly for accounting, but I ended up tutoring my classmates in any of the various courses I was taking.  I started working for the university as a Math tutor, however the one hour I had with the students was never enough to be able to help those who were very lost.  The next semester I was hired as an English tutor, which I was hesitant about at first, but  I succeeded with the help of another English tutor who became my mentor and good friend.  I would say that my teaching style started to be set in place while working as a tutor. Even though my major in the university was in accounting, I realized more, and more everyday that I wanted to be a teacher.  Of course, I believe in finishing what I start, so I finished my bachelor’s in accounting, and then took the courses needed to be an accounting teacher (business education teacher).  Mixing the two subjects I loved most.

I love teaching those who are willing to learn, but the challenge is getting them to that point.  While there will always be students who absolutely refuse to learn, most students are willing to learn when something interests them.  I was able to find what sparked the interest of most of them, and used this to teach them.  To get to know them enough to know what interests them, and to go to their level, they needed to feel comfortable being around me.  To accomplish this, I had to be pleasant.  A pleasant personality is usually underestimated.  However, when educating, some students may tune you out completely if they feel you are unpleasant.   Those are the subjective aspects of it, feelings have to do a lot in this process.

Finally, I always think that students learn things that they consider important for everyday life, so I always try, and help them find real life, and daily life applications for their learning. I like showing them that learning is a natural process, in reality they learn everyday without realizing it.

Food Brings People Together

My childhood was spent mostly in restaurants.   The owners of the restaurants most likely regretted having announced: “2 Kids eat free with every Adult entrée”, when my family composed of exactly 2 adults and 4 kids would show up.  My father loved taking our family out to eat, but he wasn’t one to spend a dollar over what he absolutely had to, so he conveniently found all the restaurants where these offers existed.  Thus, at one point in my childhood I clearly remember the following weekly restaurant schedule: Mondays- Rex’s Chicken (similar to KFC), Wednesdays- Shoney’s (all you can eat salad bar), and Fridays- Pizette’s (Pizza Buffet).  Of course by that time I was probably already 8 years old, but my memories of eating out went even farther back.

Ever since I can remember, maybe since I was a tiny 3-year-old living in Tulsa, I remember going to the grand Harvest Buffet where the delights seemed endless, barely being able to look at the food on display, and getting help from total strangers to reach the food I wanted. I remember Po Folks, where Southern and Western foods were always being served.  We weren’t real fast food people, except for the occasional Taco Mayo were the tacos were amazingly only 30 cents!! My father preferred going to restaurants, it was the experience that would bring us together often, and I might say, united us as a family.

No, it was not the restaurant that magically would bring the family together, it was because it gave us all a chance to sit together and share before the food came.  My father felt very strongly about the family always eating together, even at home, he wanted us to all sit at the table and eat together.  I didn’t realize it then, but that was a key to our family unity.

Years later, when we moved to Puerto Rico, even though we were pretty bad off financially, my father would at least take us out to get fried chicken and fries for $1.50 a box, in his effort to continue keeping the family close.  Unfortunately, we were all, fast becoming teenagers, which meant our attitudes, and busier lives were drawing us apart, to the point where we would no longer have any meal at home together.  Everyone would eat when they could, on the couch, or preferably at a friend’s home, and the family times became almost exclusively at restaurants.

Dad found a pizza place where pizza was inexpensive and good, and would find any excuse to pile us all into the cramped, beat up, Ford Taurus to get there.  We also developed a fondness for certain fast foods like Burger King, but later our best-loved fast food spot was Wendy’s.  At one point in my teenage years, we would literally go to Wendy’s everyday.  Even when Mom would cook, we would eat early, and magically be hungry a few hours later, so we could head out to Wendy’s.  If we went out to a church activity or service, you could be 100% sure where we would end up after, no matter how late it was.  We ate out 5-7 times per week, mostly fast food, but at least once a week, we would go to a restaurant.

Dad always had an eye for finding good restaurants.  On one of his work outings, he spotted an Italian Trattoria named Cano’s.  We tried it and fell in love, in fact, my sisters’ fifteenth birthday party was celebrated there, and we stayed as loyal customers. Even, when my family left Puerto Rico after 9 years, my husband and I would continue going there every single week.  He shares my love for good food, so it easily became our favorite restaurant, uniting our tiny, new family composed of 2.

Never had the idea that food brought people together hit me so hard as when I saw my family actually come home for dinner, for the first time in a long time.  At that time, I wasn’t married yet, but my parents were living in the States already.  It was just one of my older sisters, my brother, and I at home.  The reality was there was no one appointed as the cook, all of us worked, so we kind of just fended for ourselves.  I would eat at my boyfriend’s house, where his parents would effortlessly cook up wonderful Puerto Rican cuisine.  Meanwhile, my sister and brother would go to Wendy’s for their daily bread.  Cooking at home was out of the question, the only one who knew how to cook was me, and I wasn’t about to assume that responsibility myself if no one else was going to cook either.  Don’t get me wrong, I loved to cook, and now even more, but at that point I wanted the responsibilities to be shared.  If I was going to cook for us, my sister would have to too.  In the midst of this time in our lives, we became good friends with a man who knew a great deal about cooking.  He would cook for all of us, and have the meal ready when we arrived from work.  The first day he cooked for us, I remember calling my brother to tell him to come home after work to eat.  That was the first time in years, my brother came home right after work just for a meal.  Setting the table that first day, knowing we were all going to sit together, and eat, for the first time in maybe years, made me realize the uniting power of food.