Oh boy...

...have I just set myself up for disaster?

I just signed up for IComLeavWe. And it starts on a Saturday... So with us trying to keep computer-time to a minimum over the weekends so we can spend the precious time we have together as a family doing the things we love most, that means triple the comments on Monday...

Sometimes, I need a big kick in the butt though, and participating is a great way to make myself think about some new blog entries for this new blog that is not even a week old yet. And to maybe meet more of those wonderful women. Women like Julie or Alexa, who write about their struggles with infertility and their fears and feelings surrounding the premature birth of their children. Stories that have helped me cope with my own infertility. Helped me to keep going cycle after cycle, treatment after treatment. Helped me keep my hopes up in dark times and let me know I was not alone.

And when finally all my hopes and dreams came together in our last IVF-cycle and resulted in a healthy (twin)pregnancy, having read Julie's blog might just have prepared me a little bit for the premature birth of our twins. Nothing can really prepare you for an event like that, but I probably wasn't as freaked out as I might have been without her. After our twins came home from the hospital, Alexa's entries about her son Ames and daughter Simone made me go back to our own NICU experience, which had only just ended. Reading them made me more aware of feelings I'd already hidden deep inside myself, and helped me come to terms with maybe not all, but certainly some of the events surrounding the birth of our son and daughter.

My own story is already somewhere on the Internet, in Dutch, for friends, family and other interested people to go to if they want to know how we are doing. When they have had questions about our struggles with infertility, about our fears surrounding the pregnancy and birth, about how the kids were doing, it was sometimes just easier to refer them to that website than to try and explain it right then and there. Most of them have known about our struggles from very early on, but they could not always understand our pain. Not because they didn't want to, but because they hadn't been there themselves. So more often than not it was those wonderful women, those complete strangers on the Internet, that made me feel understood. Just by reading their stories, by listening to what they had to say, I felt more whole. More like a person instead of just a tiny bundle of raging hormones and streaming tears.

Those women kept me sane! And although I am not one to comment a lot, espescially when a lot of other people have already said what I would want to say, I am still listening to their story. I am there, where they can't always see me, rooting them on with every little step they take!

It is time for me to step out of the shadows and let them know I care...