By the time you read this, I will have hopefully survived the first day of preschool. I say "hopefully" because I truly don't know what's going to happen when I get to that classroom door. Will I have a meltdown in the hallway, throwing myself at my childrens' feet, having them drag me over the tiled classroom floor as they fight my grip, struggling towards that goddamn sand table that is going to create so much laundry for me at the end of each day? Or will I merely slink off to the stalls filled with mini potties and silently weep into the toilet paper?

All I am certain of tonight is that there will be tears.

The twins have been home with me for four years and it hit me tonight during bathtime that today was the last day; the last day when they were entirely mine, where our day was our own. They've been apart from me, though not with a non-family member--they go over to my mother's house when I write. The reality is that it was always in my control to say, "I don't feel like being apart from them today. I think we'll all stay home."

Intellectually, I knew this was our final day, but I don't think it really hit me until I was watching them splash about in the bathtub. We will have afternoons and we will have weekends. But we won't have the ability to wake up in the morning and say to each other, "let's visit every car dealership and pretend to drive their floor models" or "let's go to the farm and pick apples and turn them into pies." We have had such a lazy life for four years.

This is not the mother I ever thought I would be. I have this friend Patti who let me babysit when her firstborn was only a few weeks old. She would hand him off to me in shul and I'd walk around, pretending he was my own, balancing him on my hip while I scarfed down mini brownies from the oneg table. I was going to be a Clintonite--a takes-a-village-to-raise-a-child sort of mother. And instead, while I am perfectly happy to have my friends drag my children into their laps for a quick cuddle (it's not that I never learned how to share), I just need to be there. I need my piece of the pie too.

I don't know if it was infertility that created this or the NICU experience (which, of course, was related to the infertility). If I would have been this way even if I had conceived on the first try or if this grew out of those experiences--if longing to become a mother chips away at any fortitude you may have had to leave them. If leaving them with a stranger in the NICU removes any future possibility of being comfortable with a babysitter.

Every fall, we return to the hospital for a NICU reunion. We never miss it; it is as important to me as Rosh Hashanah. It is about facing down fears and reconciling myself to the fact that for the first several weeks of the twins' lives, they went several hours a day without love. They had fantastic care and they had a lot of empathy and attention. They had someone to cuddle and rock them when they were fussy as well as rethread their ng tube when they pulled it out. But the nurses and doctors didn't have love.

And I say this as a former teacher who once would have said that I love my students and now have realized that it wasn't that at all. It was a duty, a fierce protection, a worry. But it wasn't love. Love is something reserved for children who will be in my life indefinitely--my niece and my children. But people who are transient, that we know with certainty will leave us due to the nature of our relationship and that relationship is entirely conditional? That never truly settles into love.

You may read this and not really understand what I mean by this, but it is a common refrain in the parenting after infertility community. There is something about the hours you do not spend with your child, even when it is a necessity or a fact of the situation. Parents need to work or want to work, but those hours are still noticed. There is that time prior to the adoption--hours or days or months of your child's life where you didn't know them. You will always be able to find the exception to the rule, the parent who is counting down the minutes until she can leave the house, but, there is a common post that floats through the infertility community: the heartbreak of time apart.

Monogrammed Mom wrote about this as her child prepared for her day of kindergarten: "I can't believe she is five and going to school for a whole day. I won't see her until 3pm. She seems to little to go be going to school. I must remember to pack my box of tissues. Didn't she just get here?" Ukraine Adoption wondered aloud: "Our little Tara Vika is ready for her first day of kindergarten on Tuesday. But am I?"

Serenity Now, one of the first bloggers I ever read, had a post this week about returning to work. She wrote: "But it struck me yesterday as I was doing dishes. It means that this is the last week Baby O and I are home together...And overall I AM looking forward to this new job. But I’d be lying if I told you that I wasn’t dreading it, a little, too. Why? Because Baby O is the most important person in my life right now."

There are plenty of non-IF women and men who feel the exact same thing that I am describing right now, but that worry about time, that reluctance to part, the mourning of milestones, it is so deeply ingrained in the fiber of the infertility community. I always knew I would feel this way when this day came. I just didn't think it was going to come so soon.

Melissa is the author of the infertility and pregnancy loss blog, Stirrup Queens and Sperm Palace Jesters. She keeps a categorized blogroll of over 1450 infertility blogs and writes the daily Lost and Found and Connections Abound, a news source for the infertility blogosphere. Her infertility book, The Land of If, is forthcoming from Seal Press in Spring 2009. She is also an editor at Bridges, the awareness consortium and the keeper of the list for IComLeavWe (International Comment Leaving Week). The list for September is currently open and all are invited to join the conversation.