The four year anniversary gift is jizz in a catheter, right?

Four years ago was my wedding day. I married Mr. Bunny because he was the first man to love me despite the fact that I have a big black oval for a face. (He sees my inner beauty.) As it turns out, he's also the perfect match for me. I can never quite get over my astonishment that he's willing to put up with my crankiness and nagging and fits of despair. 

That blurry figure is Mr. BFB, who performed the ceremony. You can only see Mr. Bunny's hand. Just in case you think I'm married to a guy with a blurry face. Wouldn't THAT make a pretty baby?

I considered trying to get pregnant that same year. Once I'd recovered from finishing my dissertation and moving and buying a house and adjusting to life as a faculty member, I felt like there was a lot of extra time in my schedule. But I wanted to spend a few years being married first. I wonder what would have happened if we had tried then. Would we have gotten to skip this IF bullshit? Would I even want that? As long as there's still hope for a baby someday, I can be grateful for the ways this experience has brought us closer and made us stronger. Or would we have spent those first fairly happy years being miserable instead, going through exactly what we've gone through, but without the deeper understanding of each others' characters we developed in years one and two?

It would be pretty awesome if we conceived a child on our anniversary, if via a very unromantic method. (Everything went fine this morning. I told Nurse Idiot that the bend in my cervix goes anterior, then posterior, and she was in with only a few sighs of frustration. I HATE having some person between my legs sighing with frustration!) Missing out on the fabulousness of that coincidence will be an added source of disappointment if this goes the way it's always gone before.

It's a bit weird to post poems read at your wedding, because taste in nuptial readings is so subjective and personal. But one of the poems read at ours has come to have extra meaning for me in the wake of IF. I think many of us who are the broken ones in the relationship wonder whether our partners would like to trade us in for someone with working parts. And I know my husband fears that if we never have our own child, he won't be enough. And he won't be--something will always be missing, there will always be a hole in my heart. But he's what I would choose if I could have only one thing in life. And I do not think that this will change, no matter how rocky our path.

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.