Last week I dragged my husband to a Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner. Half of the city is singing hymns to this guy on various chats and forums for his ability to diagnose conditions that western medicine isn't able to put a finger on, so I decided to give him a try.

He sees his patients behind a bookshelf in his dusty herbal shop on the second floor of a little Chinese mall that smells like food I would never eat. His English is really bad so we communicated via sign language and him pointing various words out in a worn-out Chinese-English medical translator booklet. From everything that I have been able to decipher he was right on! He looked at my nails, tongue and eyeballs, then, as he held his finger on my pulse, he listed all symptoms that he saw in me and explained as best as he could the origin of the symptoms. It was incredible.

He saw my night sweats, sensitivity to cold, moist palms, fatigue... then he wrote on the piece of paper TSH up-arrow, FSH down-arrow and said: "Lo FSH, lo ovulasha, one ovulasha ok, one no ovulasha, cyst" pointing to the vicinity of my right ovary. Ok then, that explains why my ovulation test is positive only every other month! He said: "no problem, no worry, no worry, you ok, I give you pill" then he asked me why I came to him. I said I want a baby trying to talk in his language: "3 months, no baby". He said: "I fix, no worry, 4 months, you have baby".

Then he switched over to my husband and told him in a similar matter that he is very healthy but low on Zinc, and sperm needs Zinc because "Zinc make sperm no *wave-motion with hand*, but *straight-forward motion with hand*, ok, no worry, no worry, I give you pill, 4 months, you have baby".

We paid $40 per person for the consultation and another couple of hundreds for the 4 months worth of Chinese herbal medicine and walked out of his little herbal shop full of faith. My naturopath okayed all ingredients that she recognized and now we are downing 8 tiny-bunny-poop shaped pills 3 times a day after each meal. 

​We'll see what happens. 

"Don't start a family and have children until you become somebody", "If it wasn't for you kids, I would have achieved more in life and become somebody by now" are some of the things I remember hearing when I was little from one or both of my parents. Every time someone I know happily announced their pregnancy the critical voice inside automatically pulled out my "Somebody" measuring stick and decided if they have reached the Somebody status.  If not, it meant that they were stupid for having this child, because "how could you do that if you aren't Somebody yet?" That was the rule. Oh well, I thought to myself proudly, I am working on becoming Somebody.

Sadly, I didn't realize then that I was constantly using this measuring stick on myself. And that it was my not-so-friendly inner critic that held the stick out and loudly announced my growth or shrinkage along the Somebody scale. I didn't know what the scale was, what the requirements were, and what this Somebody looks or feels like. There were no success measurement criteria. Sounds insane. That's what insanity is, I get it now. Unfortunately, we all do it to ourselves to some degree. We make decisions about ourselves based on our distorted perception against some abstract measuring stick that was given to us without the owner's manual. My inner critic ran wild with this against me, deciding whether I am Somebody, granting or withholding the permission to procreation.

Half-a-year into our marriage, my husband and I were chilling on the couch casually wondering if it's time to have those kids yet. I never divulged my Somebody measuring mechanism to him, as I was not aware of it yet. But it didn't stop my critic from using it on him: "He is successfully self-employed, able to provide for a family of 3, he likes his work and is comfortable with himself and his future career". Done. My critic announced that this man seems to be Somebody and is thus approved for procreation. I, on the other hand, was in the middle of a career change, was working full-time and studying part-time, hoping to leave my dull-time (pun intended) job and move into a flexible, not-so-profitable, but my dream line of work in the field of mental health. That's when my inner critic decided that I am not approved for procreation. My ego, of course, didn't want to admit it, so it teamed up with the my inner manipulator to create a diversion. This wry team told my husband: "Why don't we do something fun, dangerous and exciting one last time! Something we would never do when when we have kids". My husband, bless his explorer-Sagittarius-soul, quickly and cheerfully agreed, and we started looking for ideas for exciting and dangerous trips to take. 

After sifting through the internet, travel agencies and friends who didn't understand our obsession, we stopped at "Climb Mount Kilimanjaro" article in a travel guide to Africa. It took us another half a year to plan, book and train for the climb. We spent evenings at the gym and weekends hiking all the "mountains" we could find in vertically challenged Eastern North America. The plan was to climb the mountain, check out the wildlife of the Tanzanian safari and make the baby on the Zanzibar beach resort, which carefully lined up with my mid-cycle. Perfect! I even foregone the yellow fever vaccine with the approval of my doctor after I told him that we're planning on getting pregnant on the trip.

We didn't get pregnant. And I was so confusingly relieved. If I really felt anything, it was a concern that I wasn't concerned. But it makes sense now. I didn't all of a sudden become Somebody once I climbed that mountain. Nor did I become Somebody when I got back down. My Inner Critic said "I told you!" as I wiped the anxious sweat off my forehead and went on with my life, quitting the dull-time (again, not a typo) job, switching to full-time studies and finally starting my private practice.

Fast forward another half a year. I'm walking into my doctor's office to complain about my computer use inspired yoga-wrist, tennis-elbow and ganglion cyst when he looks me up and down and says: "Why aren't you pregnant yet?". "Am I supposed to be?", I ask. He reminds me of foregoing the yellow fever shot because of planning a pregnancy. "Oh yeah... baby... right..". I forgot. Guilty. I finally muttered: "I don't know why I'm not pregnant". I walked out of his office holding in my yoga-wrist a referral to the lab for hormonal blood work.
  
Two days later he calls me into his office. That can't be good. I bring my husband to the appointment, who quietly sits in the corner for the duration of it. Doctor tells me that my estrogen level that of a post-menopausal woman. Off-the-chart low. All other hormones are in perfectly normal range. Basically, I am not ovulating. His recommendation is to fatten-up, because fat is somehow related to estrogen levels and to check-in in a few months to a follow up test.

That was my first reality-check and a powerful blow to my sacral chakra that produced the first set of tears. Tears of grief, over losing something that I didn't know I could lose. A choice. Can I get it back, please?

We took off for a Cuban getaway in the next few days and I drowned my sorrows in Cuba Libres. I guess I wasn't a Somebody yet.