The no-good bad sad unreasonable May 26, 2012

It was my birthday on Thursday. I am 37.

Well now.

I wouldn’t mind being 37 in the least if it weren’t for the ‘and barren’ thing. Why else should I mind being 37, if not because I’ve spent my entire 30s so far failing (sometimes bloodily, spectacularly) to have a child? Oh, and getting a job and a promotion and a degree, which I keep mysteriously forgetting about. It’s not like I’ve spent 7 years exclusively either flat on my back on my chaise longue or flat on my back on the ultrasound table. But it somehow feels like it.

Tomorrow, H and I are going away for a week, for a holiday. We always have a holiday this time of year, partly because it is my birthday, you know, and partly because I got a miscarriage for my 33rd birthday and it was such a long, drawn-out mess of a thing, and I’ve not only never got over it, but it has come to stand for All The Other Miscarriages And Continuing Lack Of Baby. So my birthday is partly a pleasant day of being sent cards and given presents and being taken out for dinner and such, and partly the pointiest day in a week or so made up entirely of things to bruise oneself upon. It’s easier to be Somewhere Else, and not trapped in the routine of the everyday which won’t even have the decency to be an everyday that includes small sticky fingers, nappies, push-chairs, very small jelly sandals, and someone asking me ‘why? Why? Why, Mummy? Why?’ seventeen million times a minute.

Because of the timing of The Period, H and I didn’t go away this week as originally planned. So on my birthday, I went to work (still feeling rather fragile, as The Period has hob-nailed boots). Whereapon all the ladies who are on maternity leave came in to show the office their babies. Which, you know, fair enough, but on my birthday? With all its pre-existing pointy-bruisy-ouchy bits? Thanks, Universe. And then there was a spate of ultrasound pictures on FB – you know, cute ones, showing wee spines and skulls and things, rather than the ones I’m used to, which show ovarian cysts and adenomyosis and empty uterine cavities and, occasionally, little empty collapsing gestational sacs surrounded by haemorrhage.

The thing about Not Getting Over It, is that, in my case at least, nothing has happened to get me over it. Time has passed, yes, but in that time I’ve had more losses, and my health has got worse, which have between them increased my distress. My chances of having a living child have, of course, shrunk, because time has passed, which in itself fucking sucks rancid arse and would be plenty to be depressed about. I do not have a living child, which I am given to understand is a joyful event that provides a great deal of distraction and healing, even if he or she can never ‘replace’ or ‘make up for’ the lost ones. So I am sad. I am sad on my birthday, and I am sad the week after my birthday, and I am sad when I should be happy for people, and I am sad when sad things happen to people, and I am sad when doing laundry and sad when watching telly and sad when standing on the bus and sad when walking along the street and sad when I go to bed and sad when I get up in the morning.

This is not a totally joyless soul-crushing sadness. I still laugh at jokes and enjoy books (oh, I got books for my birthday! I love getting books for my birthday!) and put on pretty sun-dresses and wax my legs (OW) and get excited about the holiday H and I are just about to go on. It’s just, I might cry at the drop of a hat. Hell, I cried when some chap I’d never heard of cried when he was given a gold medal on the Chelsea Flower Show. And I Compleeeeeetely Lost My Temper when we discovered the moths had got back in again and eaten a hole in my hand-knit slipper-sock (admittedly the stupid sock had been abandoned under the bed since Christmas because it had felted and I had to fight like a ninja to get it on over my heel, but still. I knitted it. Moth ate it. Now I have to Clean All The Things and spray entire bedroom with Moth Murderer TM). And, of course, everything beautiful makes me sad. The sunshine, the birch-trees tossing their heads in the breeze, the birds on the bird-feeder, roses, H singing, the neighbour’s baby. Everything I love is full of sadness.

This too shall pass, no doubt. And at least I am not feeling the horrible ugly depressed stuck-in-a-trench way I used to, and at least things still are beautiful. It’s just, I’m 37, and I want to have a child, and every where I look, slammed doors, locked windows, hoops to jump through (mostly very high, very small, and on fire), ‘no thoroughfare’ signs, paths being blocked off, bridges being dismantled. Eventually the only path left will be the one sign-posted ‘fuck this shit, I’m childless’. One day I will be OK with that. Today I am sad.

After life’s fitful fever, she sleeps well* May 22, 2012

H’s grandmother died early this morning.

Oh dear, oh dear, this year has been so hard on H’s family so far.

 

*Macbeth III.ii.

All is not well May 21, 2012

The Period began as expected on Sunday morning. By Sunday evening I was throwing up con brio despite the fact I wasn’t in that much pain – I’d taken my painkillers on schedule and before the pain got bad in the first place, like a sensible woman. As H said to me, handing me a glass of water to rinse my mouth with as I staggered forth from the bathroom for the fourth or fifth time, clearly my body knows it’s in a lot of pain even if we’re not letting my brain find out.

I still feel pretty nauseous today. Bah.

It’s not the not-eating I mind. But not being able to drink more than a tiny sip of water at a time, and those sips spaced out by hours, in case I trigger the ‘eject’ button again, that gets unpleasant. My lips are dry, my skin is beginning to itch and flake, I have a headache which persists despite the industrial quantities of diclofenac and tramadol in my system. I am losing a fair amount of fluids anyway, what with Cute Ute Of Doom’s immoderately lavish attitude to menstruation. This sucks.

On the Pollyanna side of the matter, I’ll take being nauseous and vomiting but in mild to moderate pain over being not-nauseous but in severe pain, and I’ll definitely take it over the unutterable hideousness of being in severe pain and puking my guts out, which is the modus operandi of choice if Cute Ute and her infiltrating accomplices aren’t bludgeoned into silence with opiates and NSAIDs.

This week is my birthday week. Normally, H and I book this week off and Go Away, and so we had done, until it occurred to H that given the regularity of my cycles, this was bound to be the week The Period would turn up and ruin everything, so we cancelled and rebooked and are now Going Away next week. We both felt very clever when we realised this cycle was going to follow precedent and our birthday holiday was not going to be spoilt by my innards and their appalling shenanigans.

Therefore, of course, a couple of days ago the In-Laws called us to let us know H’s grandmother (on his mother’s side, not the widow of the recently deceased and much missed Paternal Grandfather) had had a stroke, and wasn’t expected to last the night. This was a bitter-sweet painful relief, in a way, as she has severe dementia, and hasn’t been able to speak, let alone look after herself, for a long time. She doesn’t recognise her own children now. Last time I saw her, well over a year ago, she certainly didn’t recognise me (she’s known me for 20 years), and I’m not sure she recognised her grandsons. Since then, in her bewilderment and growing inability to communicate, the poor lady has been prone to rages, tantrums, wandering about the nursing home screaming in fright at two in the morning, trying to fight off her nurses in terror. It was horrific, and very, very draining and distressing for MIL. So when we heard she was dying, we, well, yes, we were, sort of, sadly, relieved.

However, my Grandmother-in-Law has the heart of an ox, and a particularly young and athletic ox at that. She’s still alive. Unconscious, and barely breathing, and they think the stroke has done a great deal of damage, but she’s alive. MIL and her sisters are spending every day by her bedside, and are slowly going to pieces, and every day she stops breathing, and every day she starts again all by herself (she has a DNR order). It’s so sad.

Of course, if she does die in the next few days, the funeral might well be during our holiday. H is making plans for car hire and such – we are going to holiday in the UK, we usually do – so we should be able to attend. It’s just, and yes, I know I am being colossally head-up-own-bottom by saying this, that I’d've liked a holiday for once where nothing did go wrong, and we weren’t banjaxed by sickness and death and grief and family troubles. Ah, well. C’est la mort.

I make no sense just because, OK? OK. May 13, 2012

So, yes, thoughtful pause has ensued. Sorry about that. Well, I’m sorry about that if you were in any way wanting to read more of my ramblings and fossickings (you strange masochistic person, let me clasp you to my grateful bosom). If you didn’t care, well, then we’re all staring at each other in a confused fashion, because you are, aren’t you, reading this? And yet you don’t care? How odd you are. Hello!

Anyway. I felt rather as if I had painted myself into a corner with the whole ‘Let’s Talk About FEEEEEEELINGS!’ thing, and so I had to do what everyone who paints themselves into a corner has to do – that is, sit on the radiator kicking my heels until the paint dries. Meanwhile H’s post has brought all sorts of fascinating people out of the woodwork to comment. It’s gratifying and astonishing. (Apologies if you never thought of yourself as the sort of person who lurks in woodwork. Do you prefer shadows? Corners? Having been sitting quietly over here all this time?)

So, on to the meanwhiles. Meanwhile!:

Item – I have H’s cold! At least, I think it’s H’s. It could be anyone’s. I live in a big city and people cough and sneeze so very inconsiderately (did I ever tell you about the chap at work who was about to hand me a book, felt a sneeze coming, lifted the book to his face and sneezed right on it, wetly, and then put it in my poor little cringing bare hand? I wish now I’d had the strength and swiftness of mind to put my hands behind my back and GLARE at him). I was clearly feeling out of sorts on Friday, and woke up yesterday morning with my throat on fire. On. Emmineffin’. FIRE. And a fever. And now I have ear-ache. Which is an embuggerance.

Item – It’s six dpo and I don’t feel comfortable stuffing myself to the gunwales with anything more punchy than paracetamol and tea. Which sucks. I rather wish I had the insouciant gumption to just shout ‘the hell with it!’ and snarf 400mg of ibuprofen and a Beecham’s flu powder and a large ginger-wine toddy and possibly a thumbnail of cocaine and all (is cocaine any good for colds?).

Item – To my horror, my astonishment, my despair, and my utter horror, I had a screaming weeping melt-down on Friday. Because it was the 11th, I think. Because while I am no longer in active mourning for that particular pregnancy, or, I think, any of the others, as such, I still feel bitterly cheated out of four years of pregnancy and motherhood. I still feel I should have a three-and-a-bit-year-old, and these past four years have been an intermittent torment-by-denial. And because it’s Mother’s Day (not in Britain, mind you (we have ours in March, before Easter), but for most of the rest of the planet and therefore for The Internets) and because I will be 37 in a couple of weeks and I have not a single living child about me. And because I have been going through The Period Designed By Abyzou, for years now, every month, and the only reason for me to go through this physical torment is in the hope of pregnancy. Which isn’t happening. Fucking fuck fuck fuckitty fuck.

Item – Speaking of which (The Period, not the fucking) H and I cancelled and rebooked our traditional end-of-May holiday this year because we counted on our fingers and saw the dates we’d already booked might be invaded by Said Period, and therefore Would Not Be A Holiday Experience. And then of course panicked that Satsuma would uncooperate and delay The Period by a week and Fuck Up All The Things. She didn’t, bless her, she ovulated when I usually expect to ovulate, and I was quite surprised, because I have trust issues when it comes to Satsuma and I will have them forever. Sorry, Sats.

Item – You know how you have visions of your life, and life goals? H did, bless him. I had life goals too, when I was in my late teens and early twenties, you see. A) I was going to be a professor and writer, B) I was going to have at least one kid, preferably two, to whom I’d be the coolest, adorablest, most thoughtful and loving mother in the whole Goddamn world, and C) I wasn’t going to have the sort of fucked up, emotionally dishonest, unsupportive, unloving, cats-in-a-sack, serially unfaithful marriage that is common in my family, and I’d rather be single than deal with an atom of crap at any point at all in any of my relationships. A has gone down the crapper, B is going down the crapper, I am left with C. I need to re-write C – indeed, to a large extent, I have rewritten C. I’ve kept the bit about not having an emotionally dishonest, unsupportive, serially unfaithful marriage, indeed, I’ve put that bit in 16-point bold. But I’ve had to radically redifine ‘crap’ and exactly how much an atom of it is, though, you know, to leave room for people being tired, or sad, or depressed, or angry, or grieving, or having a bad day, or a blind-spot about other people’s bad days. When I am in a state, I regress, and my ‘atom’ shrinks and becomes oh, so much less forgiving, this is true. It is also true that the pain of the sad slow demise of A and B makes me even more unreasonable than necessary about C. I fear I have lost everything and become completely utterly blind to all the other things I am any good for, or have achieved. On Friday, for example, I was loudly and weepily announcing that I have achieved nothing, nothing at all in my entire life, while H looked at me with compassion, and also with startled incredulity. I had actually completely forgotten that I had three degrees (two post-graduate), a good marriage, a job, a talent for cooking, knitting, and writing poetry, and quite a few good friends. It’s madness. I am quite mad.

Item – Anyway, H has his first appointment with the counselling service next week. Which makes me feel like an elephant has scrambled down from my shoulders. There’s still a clan of them camping out on my chest and all around my living-room, yes, but the one on my shoulders about H’s state of mind was giving me a crick in the neck. Hurrah!

Item – Yes, I know. Get my own counsellor. Stat.

Lesser knowledge May 6, 2012

Item – I’m letting H have the final (well. Final for the moment. Finalish. Non-final. Punctuational) word on the matter of feelings and expressing them and to whom and how and why and whether it’s any help at all to do so or not or what. It seems only fair. He says he’ll post tomorrow. At the moment he is emailing my mother about private IVF and has therefore earnt all the brownie points a man can earn in one evening.

Item – Meanwhile, we’ve both been busy and/or stressed and/or royally pissed off at work. H for good reasons involving tight deadlines and screwy budgets and peculiarly demanding but under-informed clients. Me for stupid reasons involving my giving too much of a crap about whether procedures are followed correctly, having to share an office with people arguing with each other about seniority, and my boss’s absolute, persistant, four-years-and-counting obsession with the fact that every now and then I am ten minutes late for work. I am working up the nerve to tell her I’m not paid enough to be responsible for the train company’s maintenance schedules on top of my own work. As it is, I have a fairly unpleasant panic attack every single morning that the trains fuck me about. My boss claims that my being ten minutes late ‘on such a regular basis’ (I think she means, every few weeks the trains fuck up for a week and I’m late maybe twice that week) makes me look like I ‘don’t care about work’. This is what bothers her. I should be glad it’s not my missing three days of work a month, I know, but I work late several times a week even on days I’m not late. I volunteer for extra training and responsibilities. I take on procedure-writing duties. I give talks on library skills. I am generally acknowledged to be the go-to expert of the team on four different subjects-areas. I can, and have, catalogued a seat-cushion. I ‘don’t care about my work’ indeed. I am so offended.

Item – But she’s right, you know, just a tiny bit. I do my job to the best of my ability because I’d feel scuzzy taking the money if I didn’t, and because I do care about my particular field of expertise, but yes, I’d dump the whole lot tomorrow and skip chortling into SAHM-land, waving my last pay-check like a jolly little flag, if only I could.

Item – Oh, and H has another bad cold. Another! He’s only just got over the one that arsed up our holiday at the end of March. I’m going to complain to the management, so I am.

Item – I, meanwhile, am not having bad colds. I am having desultory hay-fever (the one good thing about the utterly craptastical weather we’re having this Spring), so my eyes, nose, lips, and throat all itch all day long, and, err, that’s it. Oh, and I will now give myself horrible gas and diarrhoea if I eat wheat, it seems. I get a mild stomach-ache if I so much as eat the wrong brand of soy sauce. Oh, Universe, just why don’t you sod off.

Item – Given that my immune system has spent the past five years becoming thoroughly unreasonable, H and I are investigating various private providers of IVF who also do immune testing for RPL.

Item – And I showed H how to access my cycle charts online – you know, my ovulation/menstruation charts, which I keep religiously because I am one of the few people I know for whom charting really works in that I actually need to know when to expect my period so I can barricade the doors etc. and charting gives me at least ten days’ warning which is so freakin’ cool also unpunctuates me utterly – where was I? Yes. I showed H the charts, and he had a good look, and worked out what he was looking at (all the little green squares and cross-hairs), and then he drew my attention to a couple of cycles in the past year that looked worryingly like chemical pregnancies. Yes, I know. I worried myself sick those two months. But I didn’t get a positive pregnancy test for either of them, therefore I have not drunk and seen the spider*, and therefore they don’t count. I refuse, I categorically refuse, to up my count to nine. I won’t. They didn’t happen.

Item – H is getting over his mental block about IVF. He even said, today, that he was coming to terms with the fact we probably weren’t going to get pregnant naturally again. General feeling that we are sidling onto the same page again, though alas, poor H, what a thing to have to come to terms with.

*…How blest am I
In my just censure! in my true opinion!
Alack, for lesser knowledge! how accurs’d
In being so blest! There may be in the cup
A spider steep’d, and one may drink; depart,
And yet partake no venom (for his knowledge
Is not infected), but if one present
Th’ abhorr’d ingredient to his eye, make known
How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides,
With violent hefts. I have drunk, and seen the spider. A Winter’s Tale, II.i.

Another broken biscuit assortment April 21, 2012

Item – Right. I went back to work. There was a lot of it. I did it. The people who picked up the emergency slack for me while I was Indisposed refused all my offers of shift swaps and so on, saying I’d do the same for them. Which is true, but they don’t have Inner Organs of Recurrent Doom, so I don’t get the chance to do the same for them. Not once an emmineffin’ month, anyway. Am verklempt. (As H pointed out, it doesn’t hurt that I always go back to work after an Indisposition, disgustingly pale with fetching navy-blue under-eye pouches. I think they all treat me very gently for a couple of days in case I really do actually shatter into a gadzillion shards and the whole office has to be evacuated for clean-up).

Item – H, whereas, is coming down with another cold, and is skulking in the study in his dressing-gown and a slight fever. Poor bastard. Stress really does hold your immune system’s head down the pan and pull flush, doesn’t it?

Item – I think, finally, I have come to the conclusion that H and I really are not going to get pregnant the fun private way anymore. 12 cycles since I was last pregnant (actually, 13, but we carefully didn’t try for one of them as I was having surgery, so it doesn’t count. Clearly, that was the cycle we would’ve conceived Baby Einstein Prime Minister Nobel Prize for Literature). We’re back to being infertile, as well as recurrent miscarriers.

Item – You will see from the Ticker of Shame down there on the right, the combination of holidays, bereavement, The Chocolate Festival, and anxst, has embiggened my bottom, and we’re back at square one. Excuse me one moment… [AAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH]… So. Anyway. Given that I have Officially Lost All Faith in my body’s ability to produce an egg with any sperm-related social skills at all, IVF it is. And I have to lose a few pounds again (again (again again)). So close, and yet so utterly fucked up.

Item – Next quest (to go along with the Salad, You Shall Eat It one), actually do more of the things that cheer me up, and a lot less of the things that piss me off. To which end, a list -

Things that cheer May up:

1. Knitting – I have raging Knitting Attention Deficit Disorder, caused, or so I like to think, by having to jam projects in and around commuting, work, and being tired and vague (this last being pretty much a full-time job in and of itself for the likes of me). *sigh*
2. Reading – I don’t read as much as I used to. I always think there’s something better I ought to be doing, and that reading would be self-indulgent, and then I fribble my spare time away on nothing very much and just think! I could’ve been improving my mind with a good book!
3. Writing – The more I write, the happier and more balanced I feel. And yet, it suffers from the same sort of fribblage that messes with my reading time. And, also, an ugly feeling of ‘there’s no point writing anything unless it’s brilliant, and it’s not going to be brilliant, so don’t write’. What is this crappy inner monologue in my head for and how do I turn it off?
4. Cooking – This happy habit came completely unglued in the Recurrent Miscarriage Years of Soul Destruction. I used to do most of the cooking, I enjoyed it, and I was pretty good at it. Now H does most of the cooking. It started because I would go through weeks and months of being utterly flattened with apathy and depression after each miscarriage – I’d get home from work every evening so very tired I could barely eat without crying with exhaustion – and then I’d miscarry again just when I was starting to get a grip and perk up. And now, my periods make me really ill and weak, which doesn’t help. My plan is to do more of the cooking at weekends, and do more of the sort of thing that can be put in the fridge/freezer for later in the week, which will still allow me to be completely apathetic on Thursdays but take the pressure off H.
5. Art galleries and museums – I work in a big city. I could really truly go to a museum for a quick brain refill during my lunch-break. Why don’t I?
6. Films – OK, we don’t do too badly on cinema-going.
7. Long walks – This, we fail on miserably. But I like them!
8. Restaurants – A couple of times a month, H and I go out to brunch. It makes me happy. As does meeting H for dinner in town after work but before cinema. As does saving up to treat ourselves to a special meal somewhere fancy on a birthday or anniversary. Again, this sort of thing falls victim to Depressed Apathy. I hate Depressed Apathy.
9. Sex – Specifically, the sort of sex we have because we’re both in the mood for sex, with absolutely no reference whatsoever to the time of the month and whether or not we can just do what is sweetly referred to by our American friends as ‘heavy petting’ instead. That might be one good thing to come out of setting our sights on IVF, ironically. Better sex. (You said ‘come’! Teeheehee!)

Item – Another thing that makes May happy, in a weepy, over-joyed, hopeful, heartful sort of way: Long-time blog-friend and all-around witty, lovely Liz at Womb for Improvement is, well, she’s… you know…

Item – It’s been a bit of a week for pregnancy announcements. I have another good friend, who I know has been trying for well over a year and who was starting the whole sad grind of going to doctor’s appointments and having tests, also struck lucky (yay!). So that was nice.

Item – Booze I can no longer have because I have developed allergic reactions to grapes, wheat, barley, rye, and, clearly, fun: White wine, champagne, rose wine, sherry, brandy, beer, Guinness (I was totally a Guinness drinker, from the age of 16), lager, whisky. This is why I’m obsessed with gin. It’s the only thing I can still drink. (Yes I know gin is sometimes made with wheat mash. It’s triple distilled, and has pretty much no wheat proteins left in it by the time it’s bottled. Also, many British gins are made with corn and sugar, so. Here endeth the lesson). For those of you bouncing with eagerness to mention rum – the first time I got pukathonic drunk it was on rum & coke. Rum is dead to me. Tequila, I could get behind.

Item – Nobody ever gets my clever references to Milton and his ilk in my post titles. I feel such a colossal dork. But your indifference will not stop me! I have a mind not to be chang’d by place or time. And again I say:

For who would lose,
Though full of pain this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity
To perish rather, swallow’d up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night?

Abash’d the Devil stood April 17, 2012

Unlike yesterday, I didn’t forget to take my mid-morning dose of tramadol today, so I am feeling a lot better than I felt yesterday afternoon (to whit, like a wolverine was tearing my lower abdomen to pieces with knife, fork and jack-hammer).

Not that I like taking tramadol. It makes me feel unpleasantly like being drunk (“What’s unpleasant about being drunk?” “You ask a glass of water.” – Douglas Adams). And mefenamic acid makes me feel sick, heartburny, and sleepy. And diclofenac makes me feel like I’m trying to drive my body from inside a box of cotton wool in the next room. I’m amazed I can still spell. Can I still spell? I may be hallucinating correct spelling right now as I type, and not a word of this is making sense.

Anyway, given that the pain is under control (that is to say, I have backache, and an ugly dull bruised feeling extending from belly-button to knee (why in the name of sanity to my thighs get involved? Seriously, what’s it to them if my uterus is pitching a fit?), but I am not nauseous or in tears), I am finding spending the day in bed with the radio, the internets, and my knitting almost pleasant. And alternately, there’s cold heavy rain beating on the windows and bright glassy sunshine pouring through them. Weather very odd. I am rambling. The rainy bit is cozy-making, what with double-glazing, a functioning boiler and a duvet.

Before Cute Ute The Ironically Named kicked off, H and I had gone to his parents’ for the weekend. Last Saturday was his Grandfather’s memorial celebration (not a service, as it was totally secular, what with Grandfather being a humanist and philosophical atheist (another reason why I adored him so – we had similar outlooks on, well, nearly everything)). H and I were reading the eulogy between us, and along with all the other sorting and organising and making of ham rolls and crudites for modern day Funeral Baked Meats (H’s Grandfather loved Shakespeare too) … (I am being entirely too parenthetical. What was I saying?) … Anyway, we and the In-Laws all stuff to do, and everyone was anxsty (In-Laws bickering more than I think I’ve heard them bicker for years, poor people (damn, ‘nother parenthesis. BLOODY TRAMADOL)), and I was rather concerned that my period would turn up a day early and Fuck Things Over. I’d been spotting since Thursday and Cute Ute and Satsuma between them are prone to brinkmanship. However, one of my more unusual and inexplicable gifts is that of calm, straight-backed, unfazed, clear-voiced public speaking, even when four centimetres from the verge of tears and/or falling over. I was fine. H did fine too.

The memorial celebration was, in fact, very beautiful, joyous and moving. We all laughed, we all had at least a little weep, we all agreed H’s Grandfather was a Mensch. And a talented, witty, charming man of great gifts and great achievements, but most wonderfully and above all, a Mensch. We should all be so lucky.

I started to flake out during the restaurant dinner we had afterwards. Couldn’t finish eating, felt increasingly woozy. And then H and I were sleeping on the fold-out couch in the In-Laws living-room. How do you make people sod off out of their own living-room so you can lie down? Especially my Brother-In-Law, who is a) a night-owl and b) chatty and c) the last person I want to discuss my uterus with and d) I was getting too frazzled to think of something nice and vague to say to him about being tired or under-the-weather.

Sunday I was Proper Afflicted. H went off to visit his Grandmother and give her all our love without me, and I, pale as milk, curled miserably up on the refolded couch while MIL made me cup after cup of tea and chatted gently to me. At one point I was visibly shaking, and she was visibly upset to notice this. I felt an odd mixture of one part ‘see? I am not fucking around when I say this hurts,’ one part ‘OK, I do actually feel quite selfconscious that you’ve all noticed I look and therefore obviously feel like hell,’ and about ten parts ‘OW OW OW OW’.

And then H came back from his Grandmother’s and we drove home.

H is still in a bit of a state, emotionally. And why shouldn’t the poor sod be? He’s just said goodbye to his beloved Grandfather again, and seen his family all sad and stressed, and had to do public speaking infront of 100 people, and his job is not being any less tiresome, and his bloody wife is ill again, and still not pregnant, which is coming under the heading of Unreasonable Also Unfair, Damn You Universe. As he said in his post, he’s actively hunting down a counsellor of some sort at the moment (remind me to nag him about it (what? I’m his wife. Nagging is in the wedding vows)). The thing is, usually, when H is in a state, it has been my job/duty/role/honour to help him work out what he’s in a state about, what he can and can’t do to destress the situation, and what is and isn’t helpful behaviour. I usually understand H quite well – better, sometimes, than he understands himself – and can be actively useful in getting him to have some insights. I can be helpful even if my speculations are wrong, because I give H the prodding necessary to think and say ‘no, actually, that’s not what’s bugging me. It must be something different. Something to do with [xyz], perhaps.’ And H has usually found this sort of thing useful, and leading to improvements in his state of mind, even if it was unpleasant or difficult at the time.

Of late, however, I just haven’t had the strength, the energy, the motivation, to do all that. I am finding dealing with my own health issues, anxieties, and depression rather a full-time job, and with H being unsupportive (sidle, sidle), isolating and resentment-causing.

The thing is, H resents me. Well, not me exactly. He resents how ill I get each month, and what an almighty fucking bore it is to deal with, and how it banjaxes plans and ruins holidays, and he feels guilty about resenting it all, and guilty that I am the one actually doing 100% of the physical suffering, and helpless (no fun at all for a fixer), and then of course sad at the Continued And Persistant Lack Of Baby. Dealing with me (difficult to avoid altogether, I’m in his bed, looking like I’ve been made of wet paper) is a constant rubbing-of-nose into the above issues, which make him feel bad, which he can’t deal with, which he sidles away from, which he can’t sidle away from, which he tries to compartmentalise and repress, which is nevertheless lying in his bed moaning faintly and demanding fresh hot-water-bottles, irrepressably. Basically, he needs to go tell someone other than me, someone safe, that it fucking sucks and he’s had ENOUGH and it’s not FAIR and ARGH and GRR and FUCK FUCK FUCK BUGGER AND DAMN.

Of course, he mentioned his family tragedy, the poor aunt who was bi-polar, and whose hallucinatory highs and terrible, crushing lows scared the living crap out of the family over and over again before she couldn’t bear it any more and took her own life. When H was growing up, strong emotions, any strong emotions, delight, or rage and sorrow, were triggers. He was told to calm down. He was sent to his room. He learnt, quite young, not to have strong emotions. Whereas I grew up in a family where just about everyone was loudly, noisily, extrovertly emotional all the time, and shrieks of laughter and of rage were equally likely at the dinner table. Often during the same dinner. I was an introverted, sensitive child, and found this all quite painfully Too Much.

When H and I met, I saw in him a place of calm, of phlegmatic, stoic, good-natured placidity, and it was so peaceful, and restful. Being with H was like a warm bath and a cup of tea. It was like lying down under a shady tree and watching clouds. After the shouty, anxsty chaos of my family, the serenity was enchanting. Meanwhile, H saw in me a joie de vivre, a lively, fierce delight in and passion for, well, all sorts of things, ideas, art, literature, ethics, flowering trees, Star Trek, kittens, mountains, astronomy, yada yada, passions he himself didn’t even share the half of, but to him, after the guarded fear and worry and flattened affect of his childhood, intoxicating. And to this day, I find his unflappability in most crises, his practical kindness, and his mellow acceptance of, well, stuff, truly lovable. And H finds my righteous indignations, tendency to give all the cash in my wallet to teenage beggars, and raptures over cherry trees and falcons and Doctor Who and knitting yarn adorable and refreshing.

But because we’ve been a couple since we were teenagers, I am driven round the fucking twist by the flipside – his refusal to think about or deal with issues, his inability to get really enthused or delighted about anything, his wet-blanketness; while H, bless him, is both annoyed and unnerved by my ridiculous idealism and unrealistic high standards and expectations, my uncanny ability to be both exalted by thing A and really pissed off by thing B at the exact same time, my tendency to cry and shout when angry, by my fascination with emotions and feelings and every goddamn infinite little variant of thought that anyone has had ever in the history of consciousness.

Which is normal. It’s a truism, because it is true, that whatever it was that attracted you to your mate will be exactly what drives you bonkers about them three years in.

Anyway. It has been quite a few months since H and I have been on the same wavelength. We argue and explain and try to get to grips with it and each other and sometimes, for an hour or so, succeed, and then by the end of the week we’re both back in our own anxst-choked caves and again, unable to find each other or lean on each other for support. We’re still loving towards each other. We still say please and thank you and offer each other tea and help with the laundry. H still reads me poetry in bed (yes. He does. ENVY ME). We still cuddle before we go to sleep. We are not teetering on the brink of the Abyss of Marital Embuggerance – at least, I don’t think we are. But we are both lonely, and sad, and rather angry with each other, and unable to find our way back to equilibrium by ourselves.

Which we ought to do before we start IVF, don’t you think? Because if we think we’re stressed now…

OK, fine, let’s talk about feelings April 10, 2012

In Italy they have a saying: ‘Natale con i tuoi, Pasqua con chi vuoi,’ which roughly translated means: ‘Christmas with family, Easter with whoever you like.’ Only it rhymes and therefore sounds snappier in Italian.

As regular readers of my whingeing might remember, H and I spent Christmas with family. Therefore, we spent Easter on our own, here in our scruffy little hovel, eating potatoes Dauphinoise (May’s High Holidays Extravaganza Cooking Of Choice), roast duck, and a frankly immoral amount of black chocolate. And I may have had a couple of glasses of red wine, just because I can.

And writing H’s Grandfather’s eulogy (which wasn’t stressful in the least. Not even when H’s father emailed us five times a day each with additions/corrections/don’t mentions. Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha). The great big memorial service for everyone who wasn’t at the funeral is next weekend, and it has turned into Rather A Deal. And H will be reading said eulogy, to a crowd of, we now discover, over 100. Yay! Apparently I’m reading part of it too. Yay! FIL has just emailed us another correction. Yay!

Meanwhile, H and I have had three very angry shouty fights in a row (well, I shouted, H pouted (sorry, H, but you did)), which, whatever set them off, were chiefly about the increasingly ludicrous amount of non-communication going on between us.

Yeah, I know. May and H, the wonder team. Look! Clay feet!

H has been in a… I don’t know. H doesn’t get into moods, or strops, or huffs, as such. He just… sidles away. So, H has been in a sidle since before I had surgery in November. It’s a stress thing, I think, from past experience, but it doesn’t normally go on so long. On the other hand, a chap doesn’t normally have seven or eight major stressors happen two a month for months on end (lose job, get new job, mother-in-law is seriously ill, massive public performance to do, wife has surgery, Grandfather is declared terminally ill, BLOODY CHRISTMAS, Grandfather dies, another massive public performance… and then he hurls his guts up). I say this because I want to be as fair as it is possible for such a totally unobjective, partial, involved person as myself can be.

As far as I’m concerned, I know I am a mass of neuroses, anxiety, and misery (my Mum in surgery dramas! I hate my job! I’m still not pregnant! I have RPL PTSD! EVERYTHING BETWEEN MY RIBS AND MY KNEES HURTS! My Dad has stopped speaking to me again! I had surgery and it fixed nothing!), and whenever I try to talk about any of it with H, his response is to remain silent, change the subject, or in extreme cases leave the room.

Oh, he doesn’t storm out of the room, or flounce, or stride, or fling. He sidles. I approach him, I say something – something dramatic no doubt – about being unhappy, and I slowly raise my sad neglected-kitten eyes to his, for maximum pathos, and there’s no H any more. He’s suddenly in the study writing an email, or in the bathroom brushing his teeth, or in the kitchen with his head in a cupboard. I change my tactics, hold his hands (quite firmly, to prevent sidling) and look into his face as I speak, and he somehow, miraculously, the sheer power of his reluctance giving him pre-emptive Bat Hearing, detects a message arriving on his iPhone two rooms away which might be really really important. I tried cuddling up to him in bed before I spoke; he fell asleep. I took to losing my temper and shouting that he didn’t listen and I needed him to; every single time it became a discussion about H’s difficulties with expressing emotion. Every. Single. Time. I’d call him on that, and five exchanges in we’d be back to discussing the wonder that is H. It became bleakly hilarious. It’s been going on for months.

We spent the Easter Long Weekend tantrumical.

It’s all very well saying I can vent on the internet and get all those lovely supportive comments to make me feel better. You, Gentle Readers, do make me feel better. But you’re not very cuddly, and your neck doesn’t smell faintly of sandalwood and citrus, and you don’t make me tea.

And anyway, I like the feeling that the inside of my head is of some interest to my spouse. It’s not a feeling I’ve had for a good while. And I like the feeling that care and consideration of the spouse’s state of mind is reciprocal, not a one-way street.

H insists he does care, he just doesn’t know how to deal with showing it, and doesn’t know how to deal with me being unhappy and wanting to talk. I’d be sympathetic, if we’d only been married a year. I’d be sympathetic if I hadn’t given him explicit instructions (do not leave the room! Ask questions! Recap from time to time to prove you’ve been listening! You know, like I do for you when you want to talk!) over and over again whenever he’s complained he doesn’t know what to do. I’m sick of only being able to say whatever’s on my mind as part of a dirty great row, in fragments, in between multiple (exhausting, pointless) visits to the planet of H Doesn’t Do Feelings So Please Stop Asking Him To.

We reached a consensus the other day that H is being awkward about sex at the moment because he’s actually scared I might even get pregnant, and given our track record so far have another miscarriage, and go to pieces.

Which is heartbreakingly understandable. And also makes complete nonsense of the H Doesn’t Do Feelings thing. Of course he does. He does them lots and lots. And then he ignores them. Which means he has to ignore mine as well, in case they remind him he has some too. And therefore whenever I insist on having feelings at him, his own recrudesce with astonishing force and derail the whole conversation on the instant into a river cruise in Egypt. At the end of which, we are no nearer finding the source of it all, and I am left with a raging case of Feeling Abandoned And Unloved, while H, lacquered three inches deep with obliviousness, nails the lids back down on his emotional packing cases.

I have to say, that what with H’s severe fluey cold followed by attack of norovirus while we were on goddamn bloody holiday, followed swiftly by the amount of almighty anxst we’ve managed to generate over the long Easter weekend, I think I deserve a refund and do-over on this relaxing lark. I feel as relaxed as a steel girder in the Forth Bridge.

The date is overly meaningful April 1, 2012

Item – H is feeling a lot better. Friday night was the worst, in terms of Horrible Minutes Trapped In Bathroom. Saturday, he draped his person across various beds and arm-chairs, sulking and occasionally, when he had the energy, complaining, feverish and stomach-achey. And today, he declared himself well enough to go out for lunch and dragged me to the nearby pub so he could eat roast beef. I pointed out he was pushing his luck, rather, but he merely smiled beatifically at me before grinding to a halt half-way through the yorkshire puddings. Ha. But, yes, indeed, he is feeling a lot better. Even his burnt hand is a lot better (though, you know, blisters, ick).

Item – Early this morning I dreamt I finally had a baby daughter, and she was lying in my arms, breastfeeding (even in the dream this gave me a strange, visceral thrill of bewildered happiness – my own daughter at my breast, my body finally doing something right and doing it well), and H and I were looking lovingly at this darling child and rejoicing in her existance, that after all we’d gone through she was finally here, in our arms. And then, with a sudden lurch of anxiety, I realised I couldn’t remember her name. We’d given her such a pretty one. What was it? Minx? No, that was my niece’s name. Willow? Rose? What was her name? Worried, I bent my head to look at her again, to see if that would jog my memory, and realised I was holding a plastic doll. There was no baby. I sat bolt upright in a sweat of fear and shame, that I’d mistaken a doll for a living child, and realised I was awake. April Fool. Damn it.

Item – Meanwhile H (banished to the spare bed in the study for snoring violations) had also had a bad dream. He was at a big family dinner-party, and then when he got up from the table to clear up, he saw one of the guests had hung herself, and all the while he’d been drinking and playing cards and having a good time, she’d been dangling there behind them all, ignored. And she had the face of H’s aunt, who really did kill herself a few years ago. Of course, today would have been her birthday. Oh, my poor beloved H.

Item – So, there we both are, after our week’s holiday, strung out, exhausted from lack of sleep, recovering from a trifecta of health attacks and/or from looking after a chap with a trifecta of health attacks, and now both nervous wrecks as well because our respective subconsciouses decided today was a good day to get a thorough kicking in. Pfft. Holidays. Who needs them.

Mother****ing Sunday March 18, 2012

It’s not the best day of the year for the childless infertile woman, Mother’s Day. In Britain, we hold it on the fourth Sunday of Lent (i.e. today), and its roots are all entangled with Mothering Sunday, which was originally the day in Christian Europe when people who had moved away returned to their ‘mother’ church – the church where they were baptised – for a thanksgiving service in honour of the Virgin Mary. Of course, most people didn’t leave their village or town for generations, so not many people needed to do this. Later, in Britain at least, it became the Sunday servants were allowed to go home to their families for a little holiday, and that’s when it got inextricably linked to the idea of going to see one’s mother and celebrate her. When the celebration was revived during the First World War, it became explicitely about celebrating motherhood, and the original celebration of one’s first church and congregation got completely swamped.

Other countries hold the whole schemozzle in May. As the USA does this, and wherever America goes, Britain follows bleating like a lamb, we now seem to have two Mother’s Days. This one, where British mothers get their glitter-and-pasta-shape cards, breakfast in bed, and if they have sufficiently guilted prepared their partners, flowers and gifts, and the ‘internet’ one, where every fertile woman in Blighty joins in the FuckBonk memery and ‘copy and post this if you’ve ever…’ nauseating shite, for the sole purpose, as far as I can tell, of making all their childless and/or motherless acquaintances feel like a bucket of fermenting shit for the day.

So hello! Welcome to Bitter McTwisted’s Angry Festival!

(I’ve sent my mother a card. I am getting her a gift. I am grateful I have a mother I can send cards to. Look at me not letting Bitter McTwisted piss on anyone else’s day. I’m so good).

Every few weeks, H and I go out for brunch on a Sunday morning. We’re lucky – we live in walking distance of five good places to get splendid brunches, and given that I have totally, unconditionally, utterly banned H from getting his iPhone out at these meals, we actually get to chat and argue about Art and Politics and make each other laugh. This morning, H suggested we go out, as is out want, and just as I was scrambling out of bed it occurred to me: we live in Young Families Central. The last time we went out for a meal on Mothering Sunday it was like being dragged naked and screaming over a red hot microplane grater made of other people’s families (also, we got the shitty table in the corner with no flowers. Hell, yes, I’m bitter). So… we stayed in. You could say, in fact, that we skulked.

H spent the morning setting up his (technically, our, but All Shiny Thing Belong H, because though we eschew gender stereotypes chez nous with every fibre of our left-wing woolly-liberal hippy granola beings, well, I knit, and H likes fiddling with electronics) brand new can-talk-to-the-internet (it’s magic!) stereo. This caused a cascade of Things That Need To Be Updated And/Or Reset. This caused quite a lot of internet outages and non-workingness. This caused a bit of a row about the iTunes thingy H updated the permissions for on my lap-top weeks ago after I complained that it didn’t work for months, which of course still didn’t work because, remember, I switched lap-tops a few weeks ago, and the new lap-top also needed the permissions updated. Umm. Anyway, I lost my bloody mind and burst into tears, because it’s Mothering Sunday (bear with me (no, of course it’s not ‘bare with me’. Do I want us all naked together? Emphatically I do not. It’s bear, as in endure, put up with, have patience with. This is your grammarian public service announcement from blogland)).

I have an, eh, issue, shall we say, with people who allegedly know their shit telling me that whateveritis I am vapouring about isn’t a problem, or is already fixed already!, or dealt with in whatever way, while I stand there whimpering ‘but it doesn’t actually work! It really doesn’t!’. H, bless his Fix All The Things! little mind, has a bit of a record in this department when it comes to things electronic, because he really does know his shit and I really don’t. However, I do know when something’s not working, on account of not being an eejit who can’t tell the off-switch from the contrast button.

I also have an issue, of the huge, never-to-be-resolved, variety, with many doctors who, since I was fourteen, have told me my problems with very irregular periods, severe menstrual pain, and that awful lump I was sure I could feel in my lower abdomen, were variously, normal, all in my head, caused by constipation, and nothing to pester a doctor with. And so I lost my left ovary to a dermoid cyst or teratoma the size of a motherfucking grapefruit, that twisted, ripped my ovary in half, and gave me septicemia. Since then, I have had doctors who dismissed my increasingly-painful-even-on-the-pill periods as ‘not possible’, doctors who dismissed my weight-gain, acne and hairy upper lip as caused by my being lazy and over-eating, doctors who dismissed the fact I didn’t menstruate for nearly a year after coming off the pill as ‘one of those things’, doctors who kept telling me the reason I couldn’t get pregnant was because I was fat (and nothing to do with, say, anovulation and a collection of polyps all bleeding away like Iguazu), the reason I couldn’t stay pregnant was because I was fat (and nothing to do with, say, a blood-clotting disorder), and who when Clomid made me anovulatory said ‘huh’ and made me try Clomid again, even though it made me anovulatory, and doctors who didn’t bother to check my FSH/oestrogen balance on the right day of my cycle until I’d been in treatment for six motherfucking years (which proved my ‘fatness’ wasn’t, actually, fucking up my ovulation at all), doctors who insisted visit after visit that IVF would not help me get or stay pregnant, and all the while, time ran on, time ran out, I am 37 in May, and if, oh, if only someone had paid me, actual me who lives in this body and who has always been saying ‘this isn’t right’, some respectful attention, do you think I’d be nearly 37 with no children and seven dead ones and one ovary and a pelvis full of scar tissue and a womb agonisedly bloated with cysts and scars and misplaced endometrium? Not one of which issues had a motherfucking thing to do with the size of my arse?

So, yes, I lost my mind, I screamed at H, I cried. Mothering Sunday is a triggery bitch.