Dead Cat Bounce March 27, 2010

Item – Oh, crikey, blogging. I knew I’d forgotten something.

Item – The anniversary weekend away was lovely, thank you. Really lovely.

• The landlady of the B&B, who had already brought us tea and home-made cakes, rushed away to fetch a bottle of pink bubbly and a congratulatory card the second H let slip that, well, yes, actually, our 5th wedding anniversary was that very day.
• H and I both like cathedrals. Going to see a cathedral is really truly our idea of a good time. So, H took me to visit a cathedral I’d never seen but had been going on and on (and on and on and on) about for pretty much as long as he’s known me.
• Ely Cathedral is… extraordinary. I have yet to see a single photo that does it any kind of justice at all. And it really does float on the vast flat horizon like a ship.
• We also scored two Marsh Harriers, a Heron, a Grasshopper Warbler and a possible Bearded Tit (no jokes, please). It seems I like Twitching, too. God, but I’m a sad, nerdy sort of person. I must order a cagoule and sew badges to it at once.

Item – It is with considerable annoyance that I must report that Satsuma has not been cooperating in the least. In fact, my basal body temperature chart has been pretty much describing the Sawtooth Range, my *cough* fertile signs have been coming and going and contradicting each other, I felt sick, I felt dizzy, I felt tetchy. I was so very hormonal and weird-feeling, in fact, that I even took a pregnancy test the other day (resoundingly, eye-achingly negative, (because you haven’t even ovulated yet, you moron)). It’s day 29 of this cycle. I had hoped we had put the days of hormonal dead cat bounce behind us. Apparantly not. Feck. Arse. And so on.

Item – H and I managed to blow all the cuddly weekend-in-luxury vibe by having a monumental row. About sex, of all things. We have great (or at least, acceptable) sex for weeks on end, and then suddenly neither of us can do a thing right and we tip into a disagreeable vortex of FAIL. I don’t think Satsuma’s shenanigans helped either. It’s hard to be rational and good-tempered about The Sex, It Fall Down when being persistently flustered about whether one has, or has not, or will, or will not, or will have been going to, miss ovulation entirely this cycle, what with The Sex, It Has Fallen Down And Can’t Get Up.

Item – It really, really doesn’t help that we both still seem to be scared half-witted by the very idea of getting pregnant again.

Item – So we’ve booked another appointment with the counsellor we found last year. During which, no doubt, we’ll both be far, far too embarrassed to talk about sex, and I will have to bring up miscarriages two-through-four and cry myself puce.

Item – Work is stupid and boring and very bloody there, gurning at me and demanding that I get up at 7am and actually, you know, care about how clean my hair is. Yes, yes, I know, I have no right to bitch about my job at all, as it is quiet (mostly) and low-stress (mostly) and my employers have been angelic about my endless sick days. On the other hand, I am underemployed and frustrated and my brain is turning to lettuce and I get paid less than half what H gets paid despite having two (2!) whole degrees more than him. But hey! There’s a recession on and everything! Shutting up about the job now!

H and May, sitting in a tree March 19, 2010

Five years ago today, I said ‘I do.’ And every year that passes makes me more pleased that I did.

H, who is determined to make himself irreplaceable, unmatchable, peerless and amazing on every level, is whisking me away for a surprise Wedding Anniversary long weekend break (well, it would’ve been a surprise, but H’s parents sent us a jolly little ‘happy anniversary!’ card, early, which said ‘I hope you enjoy [destination]!’ Oops. I’m pretending I didn’t really see that).

I’ll be back on Tuesday. Please, dear Universe, be gentle with my readers. There’s been too much of the sad and the horrible and the miserable for them recently.

Underperforming March 16, 2010

I started a migraine this morning, on the way to work. So I turned round and went home again, and took the day (another day) off. To my guilty horror, the migraine had gone by lunch-time. I spent quite a long time telling myself I could have gone into work after all, and, you know, put my head on my desk and drooled into the computer keyboard until it was all over. That wouldn’t have distressed or inconvenienced any of my colleagues, would’ve it? And then I did some more laundry instead.

I take so much time off sick. My work-place must hate me. Surely my work-place hates me.

Left behind March 15, 2010

I am about to be vigorously ungracious at length. And then I will cheer the fuck up and, oh, I don’t know, hang out my laundry or something.

I was pootling about in the blogosphere (for once. Being depressed and hacked off with everything and also (legitimate excuse bit) having my coursework to do of an evening, I have become World’s Worst Bloggy Friend). And some poor innocent woman (no, I shall not link to the blog) was quite rightly and deservedly having a good old moan about how hard it was to still be childless, and how ‘everyone’ had overtaken her and some were even lapping her, and how very long she’d been blogging for.

I nodded. I empathised. I looked at her archives.

She’d been blogging since 2008.

So I took my upper-cut to the jaw like a brave little boxer and hustled myself off before I typed something regrettable. Because, oh, come on, two whole years of this infertility crap? Unacceptable. No one should have to deal with it for two whole years. No one. And certainly no one should be dealing with it to a chorus of Pain Olympians cluttering up the comment box.

But (but but but) I’ve been blogging since 2006. And I was trying to get pregnant for a year before that (she snivelled). I was 30 when H finally took a deep breath and threw away the condoms (I’d already thrown away the pill months before-hand). 30. Does that sound too old? Does that sound like I left it too long while we vapoured about having proper jobs and financial security and a female parent who wasn’t a colossal mess of PTSD and self-loathing after the Almighty Fuck-Up that was her PhD (one third of one, in box in study. Ask me no questions.)?

Anyway, by my 30th birthday, we were freshly married and ready to have kids.

By my 31st, we were worried that since coming off the pill, I hadn’t had a single, not one, period. But hey, we were supposed to try for a year before the NHS took any interest at all (in retrospect, I think I should have drop-kicked the smug doctor’s lap-top out of the surgery window at this point. Seriously, when I approached her I had not had a period for EIGHT MONTHS. Go and away and try for a full year, indeed. Stupid bitch).

By the 32nd, I was waiting for surgery, because my periods had reappeared and decided to make up for their prolonged vacation by going all-bleeding-all-the-time, also, jaysus, the cramps. (I turned out to have polyps and masses of scar-tissue from the surgery that cost me my left ovary, back when I was 18. Arse). No baby, no prospect of a baby for months and months.

I spent my 33rd birthday miscarrying.

By my 34th, we were trying Clomid again, but it was making me anovulatory (oops), also desperate and frantic. I was sure I’d never ever be pregnant again.

It’s my 35th in May. I’ve lost at least two (possibly three. No, I can’t let it go. I will fret about the possible chemical in August for bloody ever, so there) more pregnancies, and I have been diagnosed with adenomyosis, on top of the PCOS and *shudder* Habitual Aborter label. It has been the most colossal fucker of a year.

And I am still childless.

And so many of my darling bloggy friends have kids now. And so few of them have none. And of those few, not many at all have been blogging as long as I have.

I just feel so helplessly, stupidly, far behind. We’re not even doing aggressive, bring-it-on treatment. We’re just flailing along in everyone’s wake, getting bitten repeatedly on the arse by the loss piranha. When I read of people trying for number two, I feel left behind. When I read of people reaching the end of their Family-Building Quest, I feel left behind. Even when I read of IVF consults, and needles and pills and scans and such, I feel left behind. (For us, IVF is on hold until we get some kind of answer to the why miscarriages? question, even if said answer is ‘buggered if we know. Carry on.’ I mean, why spend thousands of poundingtons, and go through all the injections and drugs and exploding-ovary worries and giant-needle-through-vagina, just to lose any poor little fecker of an embro unwise enough to touch down in Cute Ute, Certified Uterus of Death and Destruction?).

It’s making me a shitty-bad commentator, as well. I wish my bloggy friends very well, and I still read, and I care deeply about how their lives are panning out. But I have nothing to say anymore. What the hell can I say to someone who is pregnant with their second, or having breast-feeding woes, or worrying about shutting up the baby-factory for good? What the hell can I say that isn’t insensitive, or stupid, or wailingly self-centred? When all I want to say is you’ve run so very, very far ahead of me now. And even as I think it, I know I am being unfair. And ungracious. Did I mention ungracious? Blech. I don’t care for me so very much right now. Talk about head up own bottom.

Argh.

I did say I was going to be ungracious, didn’t I? Let it never be said I do not live up to expectations.

Anyway. Enough of this. I promised the laundry I would do it. Lucky laundry.

In the bosom of the family March 14, 2010

Item – The Three-Nighter Posh Do Which Required A New Frock went pretty well. My mother was hosting it (my mother Does Events as a job), and H and I were soon, variously, folding 250 napkins in an ornamental manner, babysitting my little niece Minx, hunting down hammers, arranging flowers, reducing the heating system to order by sheer power of masculinity, writing leaflets, selling raffle-tickets, getting toffs drunk so they’ll buy more raffle tickets, being polite to hordes of drunk toffs, dragging my sisters out of the festering pit of their work-room to feed and pyjama Minx, envying the living crap out of my sisters because they both live at home and get a work-room to be art students in into the bargain while I have to do all my own laundry and get up at 7am every morning (you know, the usual), stacking and unstacking chairs, moving tables, and so on and so on until the wee small hours, powered almost entirely on coffee and red wine.

Item – Many aunts were there, and clearly my mother has been TALKING, because I had several versions of the ‘what’s up with May’s lady-parts?’ conversation. But this was fine, as the assvice was polite and respectful (though, clearly, inevitable and lunatic (I mean, have you tried electromagnetic aura therapy? I don’t even know what the hell that is), and I got a great deal of gentle sympathy from them all. I think I am officially the family Victim and Suffering Angel now. Which feels decidedly unsettling.

Item – I also became the unwilling recipient of information about various cousins’ menstrual disorders. No, said cousins were not present, and I bet you sweet green dollars they gave absolutely no permission whatsoever for their reproductive organs to be discussed en famille. As I gave no permission for mine to be discussed. Heigh ho. This is why I am now honest and open about the Woe-Bollocky-Dreariness – so that if the contents of my uterus are to be dinner-party conversation, then at least said conversation should be accurate and not come back to bite me in the arse, as it were, at unexpected moments.

Item – While babysitting, I taught Minx to knit. She, little genius, picked it up right away, and soon presented me with her very first effort, a tiny four-by-one-inch strip, as a bracelet. I wore it all Saturday afternoon, all Sunday, and am still wearing it now. I am a glowingly proud Auntie.

Item – It is day 17 of this cycle, and I have been showing signs of the Awakening of the Gonad, possibly kicked into action by the Adorableness of the Niece.

Item – H needed to leave for another business trip on Sunday afternoon, and he won’t be back until Wednesday night. Given the above item, oops.

Item – Friday night H and I went to bed at 2 am, having spent hours and hours unpicking flower arrangements and transferring the fainting tulips to a bucket of ice-cold water (we’d have to put them all back again the next day), both drunk as Australian philosophers, and action was there none.

Item – Saturday, we decided we needed a plan, or we’d never get any action at all and May would be Impossible To Live With for the rest of the cycle. As soon as all the toffs and family were thoroughly occupied with dessert and there were no more messages to carry or matches to find, H and I made our excuses (separately, minutes apart, like well-trained spies) and scurried back to our room, where we fell upon each other like wolverines. And then we put our clothes back on, and I brushed my seriously disarranged hair, and we reappeared in time for coffee and chair-stacking. So when we went to bed at 2 am drunk as etc. that night, we went smugly.

Item – It’s a very cheering memory, now that I’m home again all on my own, eating cheese on toast and waiting for the washing machine to finish the spin cycle. The glamour.

Item – Standard cynical disclaimer – I bet I don’t ovulate until 2011 now.

Item – It’s Mothers’ Day in Britain. I gave my mother a book, and she told me I was the only one of her children who remembered things like Mother’s Day. I smiled, awkwardly, and did not say ‘that’s because I’m the only one of your children who spends all 24 hours of it burning with sorrow, regret, envy, resentment and misery.’

I have so many things to whine about March 11, 2010

Item – My ovary is a twat-weasel. She actually went and pretended to ovulate last Sunday. And I was so sure it was ovulation, even though it was on day 10 of the cycle (which led to a WTF spiral-of-doom anxiety attack all of its own). Actually, Satsuma had merely filled herself to bursting with gasoline, cackled like Muttley, and lit a match. Or something similar. Once the conflagration had burned itself out, my temperature went back down and we are back to The Waitening.

Item – H is going away on another business trip on Sunday. And won’t be back until Wednesday night. What are the odds Satsuma the twat-weasel will pop on Wedneday at dawn, making sure I am unfertilizable this cycle?

Item – Adenomyosis is a variant of endometriosis. Only, rather than randomly scattered about the pelvis, the excess and mutinous endometrial tissue is growing in the wall of the uterus itself. Every month, in synch with the rest of the uterine lining, it swells up and bleeds. Only, the blood has nowhere to go. So it… goes nowhere. Ohhh, that sounds pleasant.

Item – Current treatments for adenomyosis – chemical castration by Danazol (androgenic steroid, worst possible thing for a PCOS girl), or GnRH agonists (Lupron. You’ll have heard of it). Some clinics report good results from Mirena coils, as the progesterone slows the growth of all that misplaced endometrium. Only cures – surgical castration by hysterectomy. Or, waiting for the menopause. Can anyone spot the problem here?

Item – Yes, exactly. All ‘treatments’ make it absolutely, cast-iron, totally, utterly impossible to get pregnant.

Item – Admittedly, temporary reprieves can be granted by getting (and staying, ah hah hah hah) pregnant, and breastfeeding. Fuckin’ A.

Item – So, from now on, every time I stagger back to bed from the loo, feeling sick and faint and and knowing that my bladder is going to take less than an hour to fill to a point where it presses directly on the fiery haematoma in the front wall of my uterus and make me wish I was dead, I will do so in the knowledge that this is a choice I made. I choose to endure this, in the faint hope I will still have a baby, a living one. I will do this for the sake of that merely possible baby.

Item – This is not a choice any woman should have to make, and God-damn-fuck but it isn’t fair.

Item – Anyway. I got a good look at myself in the mirrored lift at work this morning (brown cords, bottle-green sweater remarkably like the one I used to wear as part of my school uniform, dark grey bags under the eyes), and I thought ‘bloody hell, I dress like a depressed tree.’ I then mentally reviewed the sartorial troops back home and felt very, very frumpy. So I bought a frock on the way home. With sequins on.

Item – This has everything to do with The Big Posh Do at my mother’s tomorrow evening.

Item – I don’t want to have to explain adenomyosis to my mother, even in a spangly frock. I don’t want to have to explain it to anyone. Maybe if I forget to mention it, it’ll take the hint and cease to exist.

Cute Ute the Martyr

About a month ago Miss Consultant sent me off to book an ultrasound so we could, for once and for all, see what the aitch-ee-double-hockey-sticks Cute Ute was up to in the Mystery Growth(s) Which Appear And Multiply And Vanish department.

And today I had that ultrasound.

It’s nearly midnight, far too late to concentrate on editing and continuity. Bullet-points, therefore:

• Ultrasound was held at the Hospital Out In The Country, so I had to leave work nearly an hour-and-a-half beforehand so I could get there on time. Work is being angelic about all this medical shit. Still, I feel beetle-ish.
• Ultrasound was performed by very sensible intelligent woman who treated me like a sensible intelligent woman, even when she had my bare knee comfortably tucked into her armpit so she could get a better angle with the probe.
• I remembered to mention the Absence of Most of Kumquat before she went hunting. Go me.
• I know I normally feel disgruntled after transvaginal ultrasound because the technician du jour has used enough lube to do every brothel in Nevada and I have to go home feeling revoltingly slick, but I shall never do so again. Too little lube is rather worse. And how is one supposed to mention to one’s ultrasound technician that more lube is required anyway? I don’t think Emily Post ever covered the subject.
• I am stalling. Let me get to the point.
• The technician, who is a proper gynaecology ultrasound technician rather than an obstetrics one, is very sure that I do not have fibroids. Fibroids, you see, have clearly demarcated boundaries and are a solid, distinct mass.
• Whereas I have a diffuse area of vascularity in the anterior wall of the uterus, with dark streaks and many small cysts. She also said something about vascular calcification, but I can’t remember if she said I did have it, or did not have it.
• Yes, it’s adenomyosis (Ann, you were absolutely right all along. You are officially Cleverer Than My Doctor, or, It Takes One (adenomyosis sufferer) To Know One). Which explains a hell of a lot with reference to periods that feel like my uterus is being ever-so-slowly torn apart. It feels like that because, whoops, it is being ever-so-slowly torn apart.
• As it is not a submucosal fibroid, it is probably not The Cause of all the miscarriages. Probably.
• It’s a royal fucker that it’s incurable, though.

Excuse me Ms Bullock, but I’ll be needing that Oscar March 9, 2010

I could tell something was up.

H was on the phone, talking to our friend V, and making slightly heavy weather of being pleased about something. And then he said ‘hang on, I’ll just pass you over to May’. I frowned at him extravagantly, but he gave me a significant look and nodded, so I, reluctantly, took the phone.

You see, V has been our friend for, crikey, fifteen? sixteen? years. She and H met at university. She often stayed with me and my family when we were both studying in Italy. We were delighted when, after a few frogs, she met a prince. They came to our wedding. We went to theirs. And then things became a little awkward. She and her husband became obsessed with renovating their cottage, and would talk of little else. H and I were obsessed with getting, then staying, pregnant, and could think of little else, which made us somewhat… underwhelmed… with the DIY saga. She didn’t really know what to say when we lost Pikaia. She was clearly flummoxed when we lost Flash. She did send us a card when we lost Zombryo, but was coming up with, to me, laughably poor excuses for not accepting various invitations we’d sent. I was, I admit it, angry and pissy and totally not in the mood for another long chat about joists.

Oh, you all know very well what she wanted to talk to me about really.

And it explained so much. Barely two weeks before the Zombryo saga started, she had been in a similar position – pain, collapse, terrified she was pregnant and about not to be. After that, as she waited and waited and waited to be sure her baby was OK, there we were. We may as well have been sitting on the roof of her cottage shrieking like banshees and shooting the Dark Mark up into the night sky accompanied by a male wolf choir and Dracula Organ-of-Doom recital. I’m not in the least surprised she couldn’t face us. I’m not in the least surprised she needs to stay at home and rest, or that she couldn’t tell us until she could be sure what, exactly, she was telling us.

Mark this, we are among the first people (barring her parents) that she has told. Now that she’s safe. We won’t be blindsided by Act of FaceBook or Mutual Acquaintance With Big Mouth.

And I instantly split into two people. On the phone, a cheerful, concerned, happy, excited May made jokes about bootie-knitting, and re-iterated that the prince was to be doing all the heavy-lifting and cottage-renovating solo, right? And was so pleased. So relieved.

Meanwhile, my right fist kept clenching and raising itself as if to punch the arm-rest, or the wall. May-on-the-phone kept an eye on it. Shhh, little fist. Shhhhh. Patience.

Then, because I have an iron-hard inner core of Sensible, I carefully put the phone down, and went to have a pee before falling onto the bed like a felled tree and weeping hysterically. You don’t want to weep yourself into hiccoughs on a full bladder, you know.

H lay down beside me and stroked my back, and we talked a little. And I am, I swear to God, happy for V, and very much relieved it didn’t end in disaster for her. And I am relieved V wasn’t Being An Arsehole, but only looking after herself and trying to be tactful, as best she could. I like V, and feeling I was losing her as a friend over all this woe-bollocky-dreariness of infertility and miscarriage was really stabbing me under the nails.

But I can’t help but think, over and over, her baby lived. Mine didn’t. None of mine lived. And her baby is very nearly the same age as Zombryo. And at the end of August, when we visit the new mini-V, how shall I keep from crying? We could have shared pregnancy. We could have shared new Mum. And she will have her baby in her arms, and I will not.

And I said to H, I just want my baby back. Any one of them. I just want one of my babies back. And we both cried.

And then H went out into the night to buy Strong Drink from whichever God-forsaked off-licence was still open at bat-shit-o’clock. The evening ended with a large glass of Grahams’ Late Bottled Vintage Port. Which, in retrospect, is hilarious.

Any port in a storm.

No, really, I am beautiful. So are you. March 6, 2010

Dear God this is embarrassing. Weeks ago, both Secret D and Heather nominated me for the Beautiful Blogger Award. Weeks ago. And I was all, wow, you guys! I am so flattered! And touched! And, about, say, fifteen years old? In gushing terms?

And then I tucked the Award lovingly into my back pocket and sat on it for, like I said, weeks. And every few days I’d take it out and pat it lovingly and think, I’ll do that later. When I’m in a better mood.

At this rate, I’ll be in a better mood approximately seventeen minutes before Hell Freezes Over.

So I shall do it now.

Rules:
* Thank the person who nominated you for this award.
* Copy the award and place it in your blog.
* Link the person who nominated you for this award.
* Tell us 7 interesting things about you.
* Nominate 7 bloggers.
* Post the links to the 7 bloggers you nominate.

I’ve done the first three. Now, 7 interesting things about me. Hmm. I’ve done similar listy-memes before, here, and here, and here, ooh, and here, and I’ve just found another one, and here, and I’m sure this is the last. No, wait, it isn’t. Crikey, but I do love to yap a lot. 7 more interesting things about me? I think I may have to scrape the bottom of the barrel a little. I can do that. Tell you what, I can get H to do that. H? H! Seven interesting things about me, please.

1. My Myers-Briggs personality type is INFJ. We make up about 1% of the population, the rarest of all 16 types. H likes this fact. He always knew I was Not Like Other Girls and this proves it. He also knows, in case of any dispute, it’s Me and Not Him. Even when I’m completely, totally right about whateveritis, it’ll be something most people aren’t usually right about.
2. I am a geek. I actually like cataloguing and classifying. I amuse myself by classifying random books in Oxfam shops, just to see if I can.
3. My taste in music is, apparently, unusually broad, in that I like everything from Handel to Manu Chao, from Cornershop back to Hildegard of Bingen.
4. I have read every single word that J.R.R Tolkien ever published, including all the academic essays and literary criticism (what? He was an Oxford Don, you know) and am working up to being able to say the same for C.S. Lewis.
5. I am an atheist. A diamond-hard, to-the-core, none-of-your-agnostic-shilly-shallying, atheist. I still have my Baptismal candle, and I will cross myself and light candles to the saints when I am in a Catholic church. Richard Dawkins would despair of me.
6. I grew up on a farm in Italy. It seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to do at the time, but H, bless him, finds it interesting.
7. H also finds it interesting that I own, love, and can quote extensively from, a great many books by John Donne, Shakespeare, Austen, Tolkien, Pratchett, Le Guin, Dorothy L. Sayers, Primo Levi, Neil Gaiman, Dickens, Trollopes Anthony and Fanny but NOT Joanna, Stephen Jay Gould, Diana Wynne Jones, C.S. Lewis, Lord Dunsany, Milton, Murasaki Shikibu, Margaret Atwood, Wordsworth, Marlowe, J.K. Rowling (I feel a teeny bit ashamed of that one), Coleridge, Iain M. Banks, Douglas Adams, Stephen Fry (can you tell?), Asimov, Bill Bryson, George Eliot, A.S. Byatt, … OK, H is getting a bit impatient of this now. We’ll stop there. You get the point.

OK. Seven beautiful bloggers to hand this out to. Well. *Thinks*. I know far far too many beautiful bloggers. How do you do this without feeling you’re leaving people out?

Aigh.

OK. Let’s go with this lot.

1. Twangy Pearl, because she is so very sweet and very funny, and her drawings really are really beautiful. And cute. And witty. Check out her cabbage.
2. Hairy Farmer Family‘ fabulous Wifey. Because I adore her.
3. Meganlisbeth, because she has been a staunch supporter of all things May since 2007, and I am so grateful.
4. Valery, who hasn’t been blogging long, but is charmingly whimsical, and (don’t we all?) deserves a hug.
5. Xbox. Who can be a handsome blogger, if he prefers. His posts on the birth of his long-awaited daughter made me cry happy tears (happily! It was lovely!) Because that really was beautiful.
6. MFA Mama. Who makes me laugh myself hysterical, bless her, and who is brave as a lioness.
7. Korechronicles, because I miss her beautiful, beautiful photos.

And I would have nominated Womb for Improvement as well, but someone beat me to it. So I shan’t bother.

There. And as for those of you I haven’t nominated, well, you deserve a nomination anyway. Several nominations. Many, many nominations. Big shiny nominations with stars and flowers and Cupids on.

There, I’ve said it. March 4, 2010

I am so fucking unhappy I can’t stand myself.

I read somewhere, damn me if I can find the link (which suggests I might have read it on paper) that less than 1% of women have three or more consecutive miscarriages. Less than 1%. Given that there are about 30 million women in Great Britain, given that about 15 to 20% of them are under the age of consent, given that most women won’t actually even be pregnant three or more times, this is probably a dumb-ass statistic best thoroughly ignored. But it still suggests that those few hundred-thousand British women (and the incalculable numbers of women world-wide) who fall into the Recurrent Miscarriage Club, are, in fact, by-and-large, women who really, really want to be pregnant. Which is why they get pregnant again. And again.

Whereas my entire family runs on the time-hallowed principle of ‘If at first you can’t succeed, pretend you never wanted to in the first place.’ ‘Try, try again,’ is simply alien to our clan psyche. We’re with Yoda. ‘Do, or do not. There is no try.’

My most predictable reaction to stress and misery is to stop sleeping. And let Bitter McTwisted and the Positive Thinking Fairy duke it out between midnight and three:

You don’t want to have kids anyway. Look what having kids did to [insert relation's name here]‘s marriage. Much better to stay childless and spend your Saturday afternoons having hot monkey sex on the living-room floor. Go back on the pill. You liked being on the pill. You could even go to work on period days and, you know, work (admittedly, it knackered your libido and drastically cut into the hot monkey sex). And anyway, you live in a pit of filth and are obsessed with ‘me-time’, books and knitting. You’d be a rubbish mother. A really rubbish mother. The sort of mother who abandons her baby in a pram at the bottom of the garden for three hours straight so she can read Baudelaire and drink Harvey Wallbangers in the bath.

Just stop now. Just stop.

You’re too chicken to get pregnant again, aren’t you? You can’t take it. You’re scared. You don’t have the guts for this. Think what [insert name of any one of a number of fine infertility bloggers here] went through. You’re pathetic. You just don’t want a kid as much as you think you do. Give up now, before you permanently derail something.

Look at you. Add one teeny weeny extra stressor to your existance (the poetry assignment) and you go to pieces. You haven’t even commented on anyone’s blog for, Scheiße, over a week? a fortnight? Have I used ‘pathetic’ already? How about really crappy friend?

And then for some reason, I’m really tired the next day and late for work and I hate work and I particularly hate the over-an-hour-each-way commute and this morning I sat down and had a little cry instead.

Does this all sound a little… ridiculous to you?

Anyway, I finished the poetry assignment and handed it in late, but I have an email from my tutor offering me extra time if I wanted it (she is being extremely kind to me, alas because she too has had the woe-bollocky-dreariness. Bastard universe). I emailed back saying yes please, so I assume that, even though I haven’t heard anything else about it, I’m safe? At least in terms of timeliness. I can’t answer for the poems. They probably exude a faint but noticeable smell of vapouring adolescent.

I think the creative writing course would be considerably more fun if I wasn’t so fucking unhappy. It’s not really cheering me up, as I had hoped. It’s just being another soul-sucking heap of crap for me to have anxiety attacks about. Which is hateful. Hateful hateful hateful. It was supposed to be my ‘all about me’, ‘let’s rejoice in May and the wonderful things she can do when she tries’ thing. Gah. GAH.

List of things to have anxiety attacks about also include:

• dispute with the Inland Revenue over mislaid paperwork, which is going to cost me money and involve me redoing the paperwork, I just know it;
• missing so much goddamn time at work for health reasons (not that anyone’s said anything about it, so I think this may just be me sweating one part 50% proof Catholic Guilt, one part adulterated Jewish Guilt and one part ersatz Protestant Work Ethic);
• while we’re on work, some of my colleagues are behaving in a way I find lazy, unprofessional, and unfair on the rest of us, and I am having kittens about it because, given own massive absences and somewhat ‘phoning it in from the pool-bar’ performance lately, I am so not owning the moral high-ground, but I am being driven completely bacofoil by having to redo their work on top of my own every damn week;
• I have a scan on Wednesday to see if the Mysterious Triune Fibroid(s) actually exist (this is going to involve more major work rearrangement shittity shittity shit). I want to be able to demand, hugely and with extreme entitlement, an exact explanation of what is in there, how many of them there are, and where, exactly, they are, because the next medico who tells me ‘fibroids are not a problem’ is going to make me cry. Submucosal fibroids are, ACTUALLY I THINK YOU’LL FIND, associated with recurrent miscarriage. No doubt because they fuck up the uterine lining they are lurking just under. So some clarity on this issue would go down charmingly;
• I even managed to have a panic attack because this period was rather lighter than usual. You’d've thought this was a good thing, given my usual tendency to haemorrhage for England. But why waste an opportunity to indulge in a complete and wobbly ‘what the hell is happening‘ duvet-chewing moment;
• Other people’s pregnancies and small babies. Am split neatly into delighted and relieved, terrified on behalf of (projecting, much?), and racked with guilt (ooh! More guilt!) because my first, fleeting instinct is to shout ‘Stop rubbing it in!’ and run away;
• I even managed a teeny-tiny stampy-feety moment because three (anonymous, obviously) people had unsubscribed from this blog’s RSS feed on Google Reader.

I suck. The end.