Dirty Harry's List of How to Feel Better after the First Failed IVF

There are things one can do that can ease the disappointment and dejection after a failed IVF. Don't let anyone tell you booze won't help. It does.

Here's my list of how to feel better, quicker.

1. Go to your parents' house and cry in your mother's arms. It will help if you are sandwiched between your partner and your mother. Usually this might make you feel smothered, but on the day you get your bad news, this will actually help.

2. Stop crying fairly quickly as you realize a manhattan is near proximity. Drink 1/2 of manhattan in single gulp, prompting disapproving looks from mother previously engaged in comforting you.

3. Continue to drink your manhattan while checking your email. Realize the blog-world is amazing and you love all your blog-pals. Look at drink and realize it's empty and then wonder if there is such a thing as beer-goggling your blog-friends. (Later revisit this topic, and realize that you were not doing this-- your blog-friends are more than blog friends and are indeed friends and even when not tipsy, you still love them.)

4. Pour another drink while trying to ignore your future SIL, who is not being malicious or mean, but is just not thinking when she repeats several times that it is her nightmare that you will have your baby during her wedding. Remind yourself of how you felt at your wedding and remember how wonderful it was. Do this in aid of sympathizing with her fear, but still, work at ignoring her ill-timed comments.

5. Gorge yourself on the "Southern Comfort Food Feast" your brother and previously annoying future SIL have made for you. Your future SIL is southern, so this is good authentic eats. Feel guilty about being annoyed now. White beans and rice, macaroni and cheese, potato salad, cole slaw, pulled bbq chicken sandwiches-- all of them homemade-- will fill your belly and you even though you realize you are stuffing yourself because of emotional needs more than hunger, you feel good at this end of this meal.

6. Go home after this, and sleep like shit. Realize that drinking many manhattans, even after being off them for only one week, can have a very deleterious effect on your morning.

7. Drink real coffee the next day. Fuck the decaf stuff you were drinking. Skip the healthy breakfast you were previously eating when you thought you were pregnant, and instead eat the some of the leftovers from southern comfort food feast. Potato salad: not just for picnics!

8. Finally, after working the next day and having to tell other people you know and love about your news, meet up with your crazy smart Native American friend who has been promising to teach you how to hold and shoot a gun for a year. Decide that it is absolutely the right time. You might be very scared when meeting him at the shooting range since you are the only woman there and you have never even held a gun before. You will feel silly in the "ears" and "eyes" you need to wear. You will cringe when not only you friend, but the ranger gives you lecture about safety. The gun will feel big and scary when you hold it for the first time. But ultimately decide that this was the best therapy ever and he might need to take you to the range again the very next day. Decide every one of your friends who is going through this same shit should find someone to take them to a shooting range at least once during their ART treatment. Finally be dumbfounded that you are liberal lesbian espousing such a thing.

My Target!