Groundhog Day

Buckle up, we’re about to get started again – my period started on Saturday, a.k.a. February 2, a.k.a. Groundhog Day.

Because I’m a huge nerd and clearly everything has to have meaning, I tried to find the significance in the fact that my period started on Groundhog Day.  I mean, Groundhog Day typically means six more weeks of winter, and an IVF cycle tends to last about six weeks… maybe there’s only six more weeks in this bleak, dark season of my life?  And then I found out that the groundhog didn’t even see his shadow this year, which made me wonder if the universe is trying to tell me that this will be over sooner than I think?

And then I remembered the MOVIE Groundhog Day and it all made sense.

I’ve been trying to articulate to myself lately how infertility feels (not that anyone has asked; I just want to be ready), and it’s really hard.  It’s unlike any other feeling, and I don’t know if I could have understood how tortuous it is before this happened.  But in a weird way, Bill Murray in Groundhog Day comes as close as anything I’ve seen to showing what it feels like to be infertile.

That feeling that you’re repeating the same thing over and over and over and over? Yup.

That feeling that no matter what you do, it won’t make a damn bit of difference?  Yup.

That feeling that whatever you did, surely you don't deserve this hell?  Yup.

That feeling that you’re slowly going crazy, and no one around you seems to notice? Yup.

That feeling that there must be something you can do to change your fate, but you just don’t know what it is?  Yup.

If I have one quibble with the comparison, it’s that of course in the movie everyone else is repeating the same day, too, they just don’t know it.  In the infertility version of Groundhog Day, everyone else would get to move on; it would only be you that is stuck.

In the movie, Bill Murray’s character gets depressed.  I’m there right now.  He gets jaded and cynical.  Uh-huh, been there, too.  He takes up hobbies to kill time.  Totally done that.  He tries to kill himself.  Ok, maybe not that one.  But, of course, after being stuck in the same day for what IMDB tells me was about ten years, he finally gets it right and wakes up on February 3.  Hopefully it won't take ten years before I get to move on, too.