The Princess and the Follicle, and Other Tales

So, why is it that we can feel our ovaries so well on fertility meds, when follicles are so small? I mean, I understand that if you've got 15 follicles forming thanks to FSH, those suckers are definitely going to make themselves felt. But I know I'm not alone when I write that even on C, if you lie on your side or arch your back, you feel your ovaries, though all they're doing is making three or so 20 mm blobs. Very much like the princess and the pea, with all those soft layers unable to mask the tiny irritant below. I guess we should take this as a sign of our great refinement and nobility as women, no?

Now, in addition to revealing my silly quirks, I'm also about to prove myself a hopeless nerd. A few days ago, I checked out the Fellowship of the Ring on DVD from our local library--yes, my international intrigue days are long behind me. I'd seen the film before, but it was fun to watch it with my guy, who hasn't read the books, or at least hasn't read them in a long time. I've read them several times, though I'm not obsessed like, say, the professor in my department who reportedly writes scholarly articles in Elvish. But yesterday, after a long afternoon slaving away over my conference paper and a bit of yoga, I decided to unwind a bit and watch the DVD extras, or what the producers snootily called "the appendices" for the film.

Though, as you'd expect, the whole production process was long, involved, and expensive, the part that I found the most interesting was a little introductory bit about Tolkien and his life. I've got to brag that I'm two degrees away from Tolkien (my mom studied Anglo-Saxon in grad school with his student), but I'd never known much about his life. His life was very sad: orphaned, fought in WWI, and so on. Yet the most interesting part came when several Tolkien experts began to discuss the book and his philosophy. One theme that came up was despair and hope. As one of the specialists put it, Tolkien believed in "hope without guarantees," a guarded state of pragmatic optimism. But he thought despair was an error, a mistake. Not because hope is so overwhelmingly powerful, or because good will prevail. It doesn't always. But despair implies that you know what will happen. And you don't. You don't know how things will unfold.

For those of you who know the book, despair is one of the potent emotions that drives evil. If you think it's pointless to resist, then you're far more likely to do someone else's bidding (Sauroman) or do something desperate and rash (Boromir). But no one, not even the wisest and most powerful, know the future and if the ring will destroy the world, or be destroyed.

Taking this down a notch from the mythical, we all face the same choice. We do not know what will happen, nor do we know how we will feel when we get there. My IF experience seems like a constant, frenzied weighing of scenarios, with usually the most dramatic (and silly) predominating: I'll never have a child, my husband will leave me because of it, I'll join some Buddhist nunnery in Nepal, as just one example. But the reality will be very different, perhaps more heart wrenching, perhaps just plain banal (i.e. I get knocked up with twins somehow and we buy a minivan and start watching television).

So I want to think about this "hope without guarantees" and see how it works. This hope may be a cruel mistress, but the note of grimness makes her easier to bear than that bitch Pollyanna with her bag of stupid baby dust.