The light at the end of the tunnel

I'm definitely falling behind in my blog posts, but like I said in my last one, this is the end of the academic year for me (yeah!), so I have lots to do. And I feel like I need a good chunk of time to write everything that I want to say. But I'm going to try to get caught up a little.

So, as I mentioned previously, J. and I were having some major problems. He was hugely disappointed with the negative results of our FET (that's frozen embryo transfer for any laymen out there...) last month. And he projected that disappointment onto me and our relationship. In his pain, he was saying things that seriously made me think that our relationship was over. I was already packing in my head. I was devastated and felt very sad and alone. But I think that was his way of grieving and dealing with the situation. Ultimately he had to decide if his life was better with me or without me, and fortunately he decided on the former rather than the latter. He basically just came home one night after having drinks and a good talk with a friend, and hugged and kissed me and said he thought we were going to be ok.

He even sent me a sweet email last week, in which he pasted the lyrics of a song by the Z0mbies, saying that we should make it our theme song for 2010. I'm pasting a link here because I don't want to put the title or lyrics in my blog, just so they won't be Google-able once again: http://www.lyricsbox.com/the-zombies-lyrics-this-will-be-our-year-rntpbtf.html
Needless to say, I teared up when I read the lyrics. I hadn't actually heard the song though, and on Friday night we met in Manhattan for dinner and then took the bus back to NJ. We weren't able to sit right next to each other on the bus, but had seats across the aisle from each other. Shortly after we left Port Authority, he took out his iPod and handed me the earphones. I put them in and he just played the song for me without saying a word. It was very sweet.

Among the other things that are better...we decided to take a really nice vacation, sort of a second honeymoon. We are going to go to Tulum, Mexico for 8 days for our 4th anniversary in June. (We will go the week after we get back from cycling at CCRM. Yes, we are going to cycle again. One last try with my own eggs, and then it's on to donor eggs...). So we spent Saturday planning and booking our trip. We are staying on the beach in a little cabana, and are so excited. Just planning the trip has made us so happy.

But I should say that there is a catch to all of this. Well, not really a catch, but a concession that I have to make in order to help our relationship. Three years ago we left Manhattan to rent a place that is bigger than what we could afford in the city. And though we are right across the river from Manhattan, J. just hasn't been happy here. He really, really misses the city. So we had been looking to buy a place over here somewhere but now we are going to move back to Manhattan and continue to rent. I had just mentioned it in passing during one of our heart-to-heart talks as we tried to work through our problems, and though he didn't say anything about it at the time, it stuck with him and he realized that it would solve a lot of problems. Admittedly we moved out to NJ when were thinking about starting a family but so far that hasn't worked out and while we fully expect that we will be successful in one way or another eventually, we don't want to put our lives even more on hold in the meantime. So it is back to the city for us, where we will hopefully find a place that is not too small, where we could even squeeze a baby for a year or two if we had to.

I am very excited about everything that this summer is going to bring: a cycle at CCRM, a totally lazy beach vacation in Mexico, house-hunting in Manhattan, a massive purging of too much crap that is piling up around this apartment so that I can pack and move. We hope to be settled in a new place by the middle of August at the latest, just in time to get started with the new semester for me.

Whew! So that's where we are right now. Just one more day of dealing with my students and then just grading and computing and submitting grades. A few days of meetings with other faculty members, and graduation. I feel like I am graduating too and am moving forward with the next phase of my life. I am feeling much more positive about everything, and that no matter what happens, we will deal with. What a turn around in just a few weeks, right?