When I look back on the past eight years, eight incredible years that that have seen infertility, conception, miscarriage, childbirth and the parenting of two – soon to be three – small boys, you know what will be inextricably linked with this period in my life? I mean aside from the joy and the tears and the hope and the anxiety and the bliss and the misery and the diapers and the sippy cups and the rest of it? You know what will be the wallpaper on the background of these years?<\/p>\n
Survivor, the reality show on CBS.<\/p>\n
True confession time: I have never missed an episode of Survivor. Nota bene<\/em>: not that I’ve never missed a season<\/em>; no, I’ve never missed a single episode<\/em>.<\/p>\n Survivor <\/a>debuted on May 31, 2000. Beloved was teaching evenings at the time, and I watched the first episode out of sheer boredom. There was some other reality show about a ship or something; this one seemed like a better choice, but only marginally. Three weeks later, I found out I was pregnant for the first time after more than a year of trying and despite the fact that we had just been told by a team of reproductive endocrinologists that we might as well turn directly to in vitro fertilization <\/em>to start our family, so meagre was our fertility.<\/p>\n For the entire summer, I floated in a state of dreamy, early-pregnancy bliss – and became seriously addicted to Survivor. Then, on August 21 of that year, I started to bleed and the next day, I miscarried the baby at 13 weeks. It seemed somehow brutally cruel to me that the pregnancy hadn’t even lasted as long as the summer fill-in show that had its finale on August 23.<\/p>\n Survivor soldiered on, and so did we. I remember walking the dog in the frozen crispness of a dark February night, getting her business out of the way before the start of an episode from the second Survivor season (“Australia – The Outback<\/a>!”) and my how ovaries ached from the stimulating hormones I was taking for our second IUI. That IUI, like the one before it in December, failed.<\/p>\n A little over a year later, and we had Tristan in our lives. He was born two weeks into Survivor Marquesas<\/a>, featuring the first appearance of the soon-to-be ubiquitous Rob Mariano. I remember feeling cut completely adrift from my own life in those early weeks of Tristan’s life, where sleep deprivation, hormones and abject terror turned our lives absolutely inside out, and I truly thought my life would never be the same. I also remember going to bed at 6 pm (ha! what a newbie I was in dealing with sleep deprivatin back then!) but setting the alarm for two hours later, not to feed the baby but to watch Survivor. Everything else in our lives had gone sideways with Tristan’s arrival in our midst, but I clung to the established ritual of watching Survivor like a life-preserver.<\/p>\n Two years later, Simon was born 11 days late and more than 24 hours after they began to induce labour, on the morning of the debut of Survivor All-Stars<\/a>. That was the one that debuted not in the usual attainable 8 pm time slot, but late on a Sunday night after the SuperBowl, of all things. I had been up for nearly 40 hours, since 6 am the morning before, and I clearly remember dozing in my hospital bed with 16 hour old Simon in my arms, exhausted beyond reason but still determined to stay awake long enough to watch the first episode.<\/p>\n That, my friends, is dedication. Or ridiculous. Take your pick.<\/p>\n While Survivor shows no signs of relenting any time soon, I think it’s safe to say we’re done with this whole childbearing thing. And when in the future I look back to this period in our lives, I’ll remember our Thursday-night ritual as it evolved through the years, first just Beloved and I full of unchecked optimism, then through a darker period, and out the other side. I’ll remember a succession of baby boys propped on a nursing pillow while my eyes were glued to the screen, and then little voices calling from upstairs for another glass of water, a final snuggle, one last book, just as that familiar caterwauling theme kicked in. <\/p>\n Some people find certain smells evocative of years past, like the scent of a favourite Christmas candle. Or maybe it’s the sight, year after year, of a sea of red and yellow leaves that connects you to your past. Or maybe it’s the taste of a favourite family recipe, a comfort food ritual. For me, though, silly as it may seem, when I think back to these years there will always be Jeff Probst, unchanging in his slicked-back hair and khaki shirt, that will evoke these wonderful – and occasionally tumultous – earliest years of parenting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I look back on the past eight years, eight incredible years that that have seen infertility, conception, miscarriage, childbirth and the parenting of two – soon to be three – small boys, you know what will be inextricably linked with this period in my life? I mean aside from the joy and the tears … Continue reading “Why I will always think of Jeff Probst when I think of my childbearing years”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-it-is-all-about-me"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1057\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}