Life Updates + Hard Things

It's been a minute...

Hi y’all, remember me? The girl who was going to start writing again on a new substack and then wrote two posts and *poof* disappeared?

We call it the PNW winter hibernation. A time where the days are so short and it never stops raining. On top of just burnout in general, I was doing good just making it through the days, you know?

But here we are, June 17th and one would think it would be sunny, and summer would be just around the corner. But nope. It’s raining. Again.

And I don’t know if it’s the rainy, gloomy weather or the fact I’ve watched You’ve Got Mail 3 times already on Netflix, but I’m in the mood to write so 🙃

First up, life updates.

If you don’t follow along on the ‘gram, then you may have missed another reason why I was a little MIA and busy these last several months - I have a boyfriend 🥰

Which also kinda threw my substack plans off because I was going to share all the dating things here and well, that changed when I met Cam.

There’s a whole story about how we met, how we became “official" but I think I’ll share those for {another} rainy day.

But I posted on my stories last week about doing hard things and it seems a few of you were having to do some hard things too of as late, and I hope you got the encouragement you needed and the courage to do those hard things.

My hard thing I did I have been putting off for over a year (years, honestly). But I did it, and I got information I’ve been wondering about for the last year or so.

I called the Bennett Fertility Institute to see if they still had Kenny’s sperm stored there.

Not many knew, but before one of the many starts of Kenny’s treatments in fall 2011, we decided to freeze some in case we wanted to try and start a family one day and wanted to make sure we had that opportunity to have a little one of us running around.

At this point in our marriage (just 1 year in), Kenny wanted kids like yesterday, and I was always the one who wanted to wait and give it a few years and have some time for the two of us before we went down that path. So we felt like this was a good option and a good plan for us for one day in the future when we would decide to start a family.

Well, that round of treatment came and went, and it was that winter we discovered the cancer had spread to Kenny’s lungs, and he’d need lung surgery if he wanted to try and prolong his life.

We were also in the middle of house hunting and actually just got under contract for the house on 47th when Kenny went in for his surgery in February 2012.

So needless to say, starting a family got put on the back burner and didn’t come back up until a couple years, a few more rounds of treatment, and half of a left lung later.

Now, this next part I haven’t shared too much about and if I’m being completely honest, this time of our life was a little fuzzy. Stress, anxiety, no rest will do that to ya. But to make a long story short (and one I’ll share on another rainy day), we didn’t not TTC for over a year with no luck.

And at the time, we weren’t sure if it was him or if it was me or a combo of both, so when we went in for my yearly appointment in February 2015, we were referred to two clinics in OKC and my midwife wrote them on a green post-in, in which I put down on our kitchen counter when we got home that day and never picked it up again.

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Kenny passed away just a few months later, and that fertility chapter as I knew it came to an end. And with it came a lot of unanswered questions.

Was it me? Was it him? Am I fertile? Do I have PCOS as suspected? Will I be able to have kids in the future? Will I have to deal with infertility?

So many things that I didn’t get to explore and also had no reason to or even desire to want to explore these questions months after my husband passed away.

So for years, I struggled with these. Like I won’t know any of this until I get to that point in my life when I want to start trying. But then will it be too late? After all, I’m a woman in my 30s, if there’s one thing I don’t have on my side, it’s time.

Oh, the luxury of time.

The time to find a partner who I’d even potentially possibly want to start a family with. The time to just be with them, grow with them, build our life together, and not rush into starting a family. The time to figure out my own body and her capabilities. The time to try naturally. The time to try IVF. The time to have failures and missteps. The time to decide is this really what I want or what I thought I’d want.

But here I am, 36, and I feel like I’m slowly (read: very quickly) running out of that time.

Right before my 35th birthday last year, I felt a nudge to call Bennett Fertility Institute just to see if they even still had the vials anymore. I wasn’t looking to have a baby, but if this whole dating thing that I was about to start doing went south, I at the very least had a backup plan (I’m an enneagram 6 and I like to have plans and backup plans for everything). Well, time came and went and I never called them. Even with the best efforts of my therapist sending me their info and pretty much doing everything except call them for me, I still couldn’t bring myself to call them.

I was scared they had maybe tossed them. I was also scared that they maybe still had them and then what??

But I got that nudge again last week. So I texted one of my dearest friends last Wednesday and told her it was my goal to call them by the end of the week, and just get information. That was the one and only goal of the phone call. Not to make any decisions, not to worry about if I was going to use them or not use them, not to over futurecast anything.

Well, I called on Thursday and no one answered, so I left the most awkward voicemail you can imagine asking about my dead husband’s sperm and for them to call me back.

Friday comes and goes, no call. Monday, no call. So I decide to try them again on Tuesday, fully expecting to have to leave a voicemail again. But a nurse answers. *shocked*

I explain my weird situation, to which she has to go ask someone, and tells me the lab would have to check for me and call me back in the morning. Okay, great.

I get the call Wednesday morning.

A lady with the sweetest southern accent lets me know that they do indeed still have it and I have options.

First feeling, relieved. A part of me was preparing for yet another loss, another piece of him that I didn’t have here on earth. So a sense of relief washed over me.

But then my need to figure it all out right then and there started to creep in.

“But Danielle, didn’t you say you had a boyfriend?”

Yup. That.

The other source of my anxiety and struggle with this journey of being a woman in modern times is not having the answers to anything in the future. A new relationship that’s going well, but too soon to tell anything else. And as much as that frustrates me and I just want to have all the answers right now, I have had nothing but full support from Cam and that means everything to me.

So. For now, I have more information than I did last week, and I can now take the next steps to ensure it stays stored for as long as I want to store it. And when/if I ever need to revisit it, I can cross that bridge when it gets here 🙂

But I did a hard thing last week and still here to tell about it. If you have a hard thing you need to tackle this week, I hope you find the tiny bit of courage you need to take the first step, just one step. One step is still a step - it’s still progress.

Well, signing off for now. And maybe I’ll be back sooner than 9 months this time 😉

Have an awesome + safe weekend, friends 😘

Much love,

D