On it not being Mothers’ Day May 12, 2013

Five years ago, pretty exactly, we were here. And it was such a beautiful place to be.

Whereas we spent this afternoon going through all the paperwork from all our medical tests and procedures, making sure we had a full set of all the relevant results for H to sneak into work and photocopy tomorrow, for the benefit of the Riverside Clinic. And this is not a beautiful place to be. Not at all. Five years, and all we have to show for it is an inch-thick stack of doctors’ letters.

I have friends who can talk of nothing else but whether or not their four-year-olds did or did not get into their primary school of choice, and how silly and expensive the uniforms are. And I am not able to join in. And I should, I really really should, be joining in.

And then, of course, there’s the Trial-By-Drive-By-Mother’s-Day. It is not Mother’s Day in the UK. We did that in March. I’m not sure I need all my favourite social media to be plastered with variations of ‘honk if you love motherhood!’. Nevertheless, I am clearly wrong and making a private gesture of affection to, well, your own mother, is inadequate and the only way to prove you love her and love being a mother (hurrah for you) is to post passive-aggressive self-aggrandising horse-wallops about it on all the internets. Because if you just send the poor woman flowers, who’s gonna know. And if you accidentally grind broken glass into the hearts of everyone who has lost their mother, or never had a mother, or was abused by their mother, or who can’t be a mother, so what, eh? Serves them right for not being normative.

(No, really, there are people on the internet who think that if you’re not a mother, you’re not even a woman, and nothing you are doing could possibly be as worth-while as raising children, and you know nothing about love and self-sacrifice, you selfish selfish party-hopping waster. I think they might have a hard time selling that one to Mother Theresa or Susan B. Anthony or Emily Dickinson or Queen Elizabeth I or Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell or Amelia Earhart or… you get my point, I hope. *Flail-hands*)

Anyway. This post is brought to you by Bitter McTwisted The Angry Infertile and Not Enough Tequila.

So, H and I sorted through the letters, and I had a panic attack (whyever not?) and H had a moment of ‘not listening! Am made of teflon!’ which neatly derailed the panic attack because I had to stop and shout at him, and then we had a prolonged and weepy conversation about how fucked up my family was for a change, and then my mother rang to offer me moral support and millions of pounds to do this possible IVF also three nights in a health spa if I liked or possibly craniosacral therapy because that is the new acupuncture, and I felt like an idiot. And then we went through the letters properly and with tears in our eyes because, actually, this recurrent miscarriage business is really, really, really fucking horrible.

And, possibly in self-defence, I find I keep losing track of how many miscarriages I’ve actually had, and when. Things I was so sure I’d never do. Surely each and every one was burnt into my brain forever. Surely. And now I must go back through my blog and my diary and my inch-thick stack of letters, and count them all.

Christmas makes everything twice as sad* December 13, 2012

I am spending a second day at home in front of the telly, because I feel very sick and Cute Ute the Despoiler is making a horrible fuss (Stupid uterus. I dislike her intensely. The feeling is clearly mutual). Shark Week began today, so I hope (but by no means expect, damn it) that therefore I’ll be feeling less-than-dead by Saturday and will be able to sit upright on my pew at this blazin’ wedding.

I’ve done two loads of laundry and cleaned a lavatory. It’s not all been Criminal Minds marathons and hot-water-bottles. Alas.

H and I are trying to be festive. We bought a very (very very) small Christmas tree. We put up some decorations – snow-flakes, a wreath, a couple of reindeer. My dear friend korechronicles sent me a Christmas ornament a couple of years ago, which we hung on the bookshelf. I have some handpainted wooden stars as well I need to find a place for – we can’t hang anything on the tree, because you see, my tree is tiny, and so wee, that I sometimes think the pixies gave it to me**, and it would topple over. I received my first Christmas present – you know who you are, you and your classy classy gift-giving – so I opened it for Hanukkah, and am thrilled to absolute bits.

This year, we are going to H’s family for Christmas, because we feel they need us the most (My family is going skiing. Again. They keep asking us to come, but neither H nor I can ski, and the idea of being stuck with my sisters for a week in a country where I don’t speak the language and can’t just run screaming into the mountains in my nightie for fear of Death-By-Snowdrift, does not appeal). At least I won’t have my period (see last year. That was fun).

However to make up for my NOT having my period over Christmas at the ‘rents or in-laws, the In-Laws are coming to us. Tomorrow. So I can still have my period at them. HAH.

And I keep bursting into tears. I wanted to be pregnant. I haven’t been pregnant for so, so long, I am absolutely terrified that All Is Wrong in there and I can’t ever get pregnant again. I’ve had my lot, and they were all duds, and that is that.

Oh, and there’s the tiny question of Christmas, Season of Doom, in that I’ve had two miscarriages over the festive season, and it sucks. The media are doing wall-to-wall baby stories and family stories and babies and families stories and mothers and more babies and every radio is blaring out songs about the wonderful birth of a special baby and people send you cards with pictures of tiny shiny babies on them and Christmas is all about the kiddies, innit? And you don’t know the meaning of love or family until you’ve given birth, allegedly. Why not flay me and roll me in rimming salt while you’re at it?

Pikaia, my first poor little doomed embryo, would be nearly four this Christmas, if she’d actually grown a spine as her nickname suggested she should and lived. Have you seen a nearly-four-year-old in the run-up to Christmas? She’d be so excited you could power a small cathedral city off her for a week. And now she is nearly four, I have so many, many ideas for beloved books and adorable toys for her. I do, I really do, find myself looking at toys shop windows and thinking ‘Would Pikaia have liked that? I hope she would’ve liked that. It’s very cool.’ Or I look at books and think about reading it to Pikaia. And then I have to stop that right now and go and look at a book on astrophysics or baking, because grown women weeping over Dr Seuss are frankly unnerving.

Poor Pikaia. Of all our losses, she’s the one who really haunts me. She’s the only one I ever imagined (however briefly) as a living child, you see (too scarred/scared to do anything of the sort after her). She follows me about like a little ghost, slowly growing up as I grow older. I can see me in my late 50s being haunted by a red-haired university student who keeps forgetting to call home. But for the moment, she’s nearly four. She has fiery copper hair. She loves books and making things and drawing and music. She has a doll or teddy she adores beyond words. She has unusually small hands and feet, because her parents do, and is tall for her age, because her parents were. She is precocious and worryingly articulate, like me, and a little song-bird, like H. I don’t know if she’d be prone to brief but terrifying ferocious outbreaks of temper followed by tears like me, or pouting and sulking like H. I wish I did know. I miss her so much.

And I know I’m not the only one to have a ghost-child. Melissa wrote movingly about hers here (and it touched me particularly because I know that city so well, and can picture it). And then everyone chimed in in the comments, and I thought, see? I’m not mad. We’re not mad. Not mad at all.

* Douglas Copeland.
** Waitrose, actually.

Hence migraine October 16, 2012

I am at home, again, today. I woke up feeling bizarrely cranky and unfocused, and monosyllabic, which anyone who has met me (or, hey, has read this blog) will tell you is uncharacteristic. Clumsily, I staggered off to the station, thinking ‘bloody hell, the sunlight is bright this morning. Really bright. This can’t be normal for October’.

Yes, well, you’re all sharper than me, so you won’t be surprised to hear that the next thing to happen was a scintillating scotoma eating the woman next to me’s head.

So I went home again, got H to ring work for me (bless the man) and put my head under the pillows for a few hours.

Bugger migraines. Bugger them to hell.

H, being ‘wise after the fact’, pointed out it’s 1) that time of the month for me, 2) I’ve been sleeping badly and 3) I’ve been stressed which = migraine. To which all I could groan was ‘you could’ve said’, to which he hinted I could’ve said, as I was the one behaving like an aphasic cassowary this morning, to which I implied that being an aphasic cassowary, I wasn’t in the best condition to judge my own state of neurological activity, at which point H wisely kissed my eyebrow and crept off to work.

Yesterday was International Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Day. H was, well, I shall say out at his club, because it amuses me to do so, though no doubt he will give me the stink-eye when he reads this (he was at rehearsal. He’s proper talented, you know). So I said I’d be home by 7pm to light a candle, or several, to commemorate our poor little sods of embryos and your losses too, Gentle Readers. And H said he’d text me at 7 to let me know he was thinking appropriate thoughts. So that was the plan.

I admit I was feeling sulky about it. Not because H wouldn’t be there, but because I have been lighting candles for years now and I am very very sick of this twilight, bruised existance as neither mother nor not-mother. I currently am in a Denial Place about it all. I don’t want to think about it very often and I certainly don’t want to dwell on how much it hurts. I don’t want to be Infertile anymore and I don’t want to be bound on this wheel of torment anymore. So, no, I was not being pleased about the idea of lighting candles and focusing on loss and grief. I was going to do it anyway, out of solidarity, and because being in The Denial Place is just one of those places you wander in and out of for the rest of your life when a Bad Sad Thing happens, along with the Acceptance Place, the Raging Place, the Shan’t Get Out of Bed Place, the Reasonably Happy Place, and the Place of Lamentations (I doubt I’ll be here for very long, and I’m spending longer and longer in Acceptance and Reasonably Happy, fash not yerselves), and I didn’t want to face me in a few weeks time when I am visiting Rage or Lamentations, shrieking ‘and you didn’t even light a candle on the 15th and throwing plates. So I noted the location of the matches before I left for work.

Work, however, had a sneaky bastard trick to play. A couple of colleagues didn’t turn up, so I cheerfully (oh, hey, I wasn’t in a hurry) volunteered to hang on for another ten minutes so as not to leave my other colleagues in the total screaming chaos lurch. The manager who was supposed to be finding out what had happened to the next shift, didn’t. The other manager simply sodded off home without waiting to see if their staff had turned up. I ended up staying on an extra 40 minutes, hot and flustered. When H texted me something sweet and moving about Pikaia and our other benighted embryos, I was still on a (very packed, slow-moving) train. I felt angst. Much angst, with added pissed off.

So in the end I lit our candles at about 7:30. Then I ate cheese and rice-cakes. Then I blew the candles back out, went to the cinema on my own, and watched Looper (which wasn’t half bad, or, at least, Jeff Bridges wasn’t half bad, and the plot was fascinating, and Bruce Willis, as ever, was about as interesting to watch as a lump of silly putty, but, like silly putty, can be squashed into the correct shape for purpose and isn’t actually offensive or irritating).

And I had bad dreams.

Diamonds and rust September 19, 2012

Hello, and welcome to all you interesting and lovely people who did me the honour of reading the last post, the ranty one, showering me with compliments, and are now hanging about to see what I’m going to do next. I have no idea what I’m going to do next. I now feel a tad fraudulent – you do know this blog is mostly me whining about doctor’s appointments and just how horribly bad I am at menstruating, right? Sorry. *gnaws nails*

Or freaking out. There’s always me freaking out.

H and I took a few days off work. I won’t use the phrase ‘staycation’, because ‘staycation’ sounds like Day Camp for vampire slayers. But that. The problem with being at home with nothing to do except relax and enjoy yourselves leads to such behaviour as Visiting Ikea And Buying Storage Bins, which leads to Sorting Out The Knitting Stash, which leads to H laughing at me as I shriek: ‘How do I have this much yarn? I don’t even remember buying this? What is this? I have 45 litres of SOCK YARN! How am I ever going to knit all this? What was I thinking?’

And then you find the half-finished and abandoned knitting projects. I knew it would be in there somewhere, along with the scarf that came out too small, and the sock-I-can’t-be-arsed-to-knit-a-friend-for, and the half-a-pullover I’ve been havering about the neckline for.

It is most of a Shetland lace baby shawl, in very fine white wool, knitted on tiny needles. The sort of lace cloud a new-born is wrapped in for the home-from-hospital pictures, or for a Christening. It’s patterned with diamonds and trees-of-life and rose-buds, all chosen for their charming symbolism. I remember casting it on way back when H and I were still merely infertile, and, indeed, when I was still under the impression that as soon as we’d removed my uterine polyps and convinced Satsuma to just let an egg go once in a bloody while, I’d get pregnant. And, of course, carry the baby to term. Why shouldn’t I? I come from a Revoltingly Fertile Family. Carrying babies to term, through Hell or high water, is what we do. Or, what they do. I didn’t yet know I wasn’t one of them.

Of course, just about when I had nearly finished the body of the shawl and was trying to work out the maths (I am proper discalculic. Ask H. So this part was taking weeks) for the edging, I did get pregnant. And miscarried. And I didn’t have the heart to keep knitting. I told myself I’d get it out and finish it for the next baby. OK, for the one after that. Maybe for the third one. Damn it, not the third one. And since then I haven’t been able to face even looking at it. I think I have since once angrily announced I’d finish it if I ever got past the 12th week. And then I could use it as a fucking shroud, if necessary, because then there’d be something to bury.

Because you, oh Gentle Readers, are wise, and because all the above might have given you a clue that Not All Is Well chez the Psyche of May, you will be considerably less surprised than I was to discover that when I did unearth the shawl as I entirely expected to do this afternoon, still on the needles, still unfinished, I burst into tears. I flung myself into H’s arms and sobbed and sobbed.

‘What is it, darling?’ he asked, concerned, ‘A lace shawl? Oh, sweetheart, have the moths got it? No? What is it?’

‘It’s so beautiful,’ I choked out, ‘and it was for our first baby…’ and then I got snot on his shoulder (‘Dignity’ is my middle name. My first is ‘Lack of’).

Gentle Readers, this thing is beautiful. And so nearly finished. It breaks my heart.

H thinks I should just finish it. Partly because he’s feeling vaguely hopeful again these days, bless the dear eejit, and partly, well, because, did I mention it’s beautiful?

I could always auction it for a suitable charity, I suppose. If I can convince anyone to pay hundreds of pounds for it. I couldn’t let it go for less than hundreds of pounds, not even for the most excellent of causes. It has, after all, already cost me an infinity of grief.

Grief Bacon July 31, 2012

Gentle Readers, my period appears to be turning up a day early (I say ‘appears’. It hasn’t appeared. I have had cramps for 24 hours, I feel sick, my bowel has done its trademark premenstrual panic-and-empty routine, I feel so very grim I’ve called in sick, and yet? Not even spotting. But anyway), so I am in a sort of heap in the living-room with the Olympics on in the background (there appear to be… horses? What happened to the swimming?).

I haven’t been posting very much recently out of a giant, swamping feeling of anxst. And I am very, very bored of telling you all about my anxst. The whole infertility/RPL/borked innards saga has been pretty much nothing but anxst for six years (seven, really, but six blogged), and as well as being bloody unpleasant to live through, it is so fucking boring now. And this is not one of those excellent-reading heart-warming IF/RPL/Borkage stories that canters through high drama diagnoses and treatments and losses and! Finally! The Take-Home Baby! in two or three years, giving everyone a lovely story-arc with weeping-happy-tears resolution, crucially, before everyone gets royally sick of the whole thing and wanders off to find a blog less wall-to-wall tedium and frustration.

*Musical interlude in which we play May a concerto on the world’s tiniest violin*

However, my trousers are getting tight and I daren’t weigh myself, because I have been dealing with the Unspeakable Anxst Du Jour by eating rather more than I think is wise. The Germans, who have a splendid way with a compound noun, call this kind of ensquidgerey Kummerspeck, or grief-bacon, the weight you put on because you are comfort-eating your way through a crisis. (This, and ‘shark week’ for the days taken over by menstruating, are my new favourite terms. Oh, the infinite ways in which the raw, sarcastic, redolent-of-pain-and-blood ‘shark week’ is preferable to the twee, coy, tea-cosiness of ‘Aunt Flo’).

For the sake of my favourite jeans and my dignity in attempting to sit down therein, I shall now vent anxst all over this blog-post. You have been warned.

Your mileage may vary, but for me personally, the best way to be told of a friend/relation’s pregnancy is emphatically not by ultrasound photo on FuckBucket. If the announcer is not particularly close to me and has no clue as to my woes, or, perhaps, not much of a clue and is a clueless clot from the clue-free shopping channel anyway, I’ll let it pass. I might even say ‘congratulations’ (note lack of exclamation mark).

If, however, said person knows me, loves and is loved by me, knows my woes, and still thinks I can learn this alongside every twerp dick and hairball she went to primary school with, well, I get a twitch in my eyelid, is what I get. No, I don’t want a phone-call, either, though I appreciate the personal touch there, and will tough it out. Email me. Or write me a letter. I don’t need eighteen paragraphs of ‘I’m so sorry, I know this is so hard for you, I feel so guilty,’ either, because I don’t like being Bitter McTwisted the Kill-Joy Queen. A simple ‘Dear May, I am pregnant! Just thought I’d let you know before I start babbling about it on FuckBucket. Baby is due on [whenever]. Thinking of you, Much love, Friend-With-A-Clue’. Then I can have my ‘happy for you, sad for me’ moment in dignified privacy before emailing back ‘WHEEEEEEE! CONGRATULATIONS! SO MANY HUGS!’.

The real knife-in-ribs twist is, this friend answered the long, loving, concerned-all-for-her-and-her-toddler letter (with re-cap of our own medical disasters as shortest paragraph in said letter, and done in a ‘just to let you know our news’ way and NOT a ‘where were you, you unsupportive bitch?’ way) I wrote to her to restart our friendship with a brief ‘that was a lovely letter and I was really moved. In touch soon’. And then ignore me for months. While I, you know, had surgery and shit. And then, 24 hours before the Grand FuckBucket Announcement, email me a link to a completely unrelated funny and add ‘we should catch up soon’ at the bottom of that. Oh, hell, no, we should not catch up. She gets three kids (yes, twins. Ultrasound of naturally conceived twins) in the same time I get, what, three? Four? miscarriages. She can’t face me. She offers no support or love or even so much as a ‘how did the surgery go’? I think, right now, we will ‘catch up’ approximately as and when I become the Chief Rabbi of the British Isles.

Meanwhile, because we can’t do naturally conceived twins in a Surprise! ‘oh, goodness, I don’t know how we’ll cope!’ way *hiss*, we have to decide whether we want to blow an entire fucking house-deposit’s worth on, not a baby, but the mere chance of being allowed to buy a metaphorical lottery ticket for a baby.

H is still deeply pissed off with his job, by the way, and therefore is rather distant and preoccupied and also rather given to comfort-eating, which is getting a bit mutual-enabling. As have my gluten-free baking experiments – oh dear, if cake is good, we’ll eat it. Who knew?

And then there’s Olympics. You can’t have missed them. The last time they were on was the summer just after my first miscarriage, and I was grieving and angry and wondering if I’d be able to get on with the trying-to-get-pregnant any time soon. As I said then, on the subject of waiting to TTC:

No, the main reason they don’t want you TTC-ing at once is, apparantly, a) so you can take a month to ‘finish grieving’ and therefore not have a full-blown nervous break-down during the first trimester, and b) so they can accurately date your pregnancy from the date of your last period. To which I say a) finish? I was supposed to finish this already? But I’ve got enough left here to keep me going until the London Olympics, and b) how amazingly thick does a doctor or midwife have to be to assume the date of the last menstrual period means jack for a good 20% of the women they are going to see? No, wait, flash-backs to the Early Pregnancy Unit From Hell, don’t answer that.

And here we are at the London Olympics and, oh, God, nobody tell poor May-in-2008 what happened next or she really will have a full-blown nervous break-down.

I don’t think I mentioned it on the blog ever, but I found it in my old-fashioned paper diary (I’ve kept a sporadic diary since I was 8) – When I was first pregnant I had a lovely little fantasy of sitting watching the Beijing Olympics and feeling my baby move for the first time, and being able to tell her in 2012 that we watched (well, were in the room for) the 2008 Olympics together and she did somersaults along with the Olympians. And then I lost her. And all her tiny embryonic siblings since. And it’s finally 2012 and the Olympics are on again and I’m still not pregnant and another dream has died and I keep weeping whenever an athlete wins or loses or just, you know, turns up and represents. We’re all here again and all those embryos aren’t.

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.

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.

A kind of desolate blank January 15, 2012

Item – It has been a week since I last blogged on this here blog because nothing is happening. Nothing. It’s January, it’s gloomy, my job is irritating the living shit out of me, Satsuma seems to have gone into hibernation, H’s job is irritating the living shit out of him, etc. It’s boring boring boring. Dreary dreary dreary. Meh.

Item – Also, there is still no sign of the letter offering me the appointment for the follow-up-to-the-surgery consultation with Miss Consultant. You know, the surgery that happened in November. So tomorrow I shall have to spend my tea-break trying to get through to anyone at Miss Consultant’s office who a) isn’t the cleaner or a passing patient who fancied answering the phone, b) isn’t the answer-machine (I swear to God they take the tapes out of that thing just to burn them unheard on the roof, giggling all the while), and c) has a clue who I am, how to find my record in the system, and is prepared to tell me the date of my next appointment at once without trying any ‘we’ll send you a letter’ shenannigans.

Item – Re: Satsuma having gone on strike – well, right up until Thursday, which was day 17 of this cycle, I was clearly producing No Oestrogen Whatsoever. Which is weird. For me, at least. Normally the Signs of Oestrogen are apparant by day 11. Everything that happens that isn’t like what usually happens is of absorbing interest to me, because I have now not eaten wheat for a month and a half, and I want to know if there’s a point. Is there? Do I feel better? Will it take longer before noticeable changes are noticeable? How about now? Anything? And now? Anyway, Satsuma seems to have remembered her duties (note use of word ‘seems’) and we now wait to see if I ovulated last night, or will do so at some point in the next week, or whether she really is hibernating and this is merely a yawn-and-roll-over.

Item – As for the weight-loss thing, well. Bitter McTwisted seems to have taken the veto on wheat to mean that chocolate, being wheat-free, is perfectly acceptable, as are potatoes and rice, and I have not lost a single pound. No, wait, that’s not accurate. Over the past two weeks I have lost and regained the same two pounds every four days four times over. The end result is the same, but the anxst is doubled.

Item – When I was three and old enough to have friends to tea for the event, my mother made me a double-decker bus birthday cake. I think, basically, she made three rectangular chocolate sponge-cakes, stacked them on top of one another with a ‘cement’ of butter-cream, and covered the whole thing in pink icing. It should’ve been red icing, of course, but turning the whole batch scarlet took rather more colouring than she’d bargained for, so my particular bus was resolutely, camply, sugar-pink. And the wee faces of the passengers lining every window were smarties. And I loved it. I am no better a baker now than I must have been at three (unlike my dearest Hairy Farmer Family Wifey, who is a Cake Goddess), but used to amuse me to think that when my own sproglet turned three, I’d make him or her an ineptly pink double-decker-bus cake with smarties on. After all, if I’ve remembered the cake all these years as the height of cake genius, it’d be a tradition worth insisting on. This weekend, the weekend when I should have been making this stupid bloody cake, I made vegetable soup, two portions, one for me and one for H. And later I will cook trout, two portions, one for me, and one for H. And that’s it. No third. No three-year-old third whose birthday cake should be the Great Big Stressy Thing for this weekend. Instead, I stressed out about laundry, specifically, my tee-shirts, and H’s socks. And no-one else’s anything.

Item – And then H wonders why I am so AMAZINGLY FUCKING BAD-TEMPERED this week.

That thing my sister said January 3, 2012

On Christmas Day, during Christmas dinner, we all toasted absent friends. This of course included Diva, my youngest sister, who was spending Christmas with her father, my ex-step-father. And I remembered that ex-step-father and his partner had announced they were expecting a baby back in July. Or, they had announced it to Diva, who’d told my mother, who then phoned me up at work in a state of cheerful gossipy excitement to tell me all about it, and I had been typically infertile-step-child disgruntled about it, because, frankly, I was instantly consumed with envy, and because, very frankly, I dislike my ex-step-father and though Diva assures me he has mellowed a great deal since, he made my adolescence so almighty fucking miserable I don’t know if I could warm to him if he became the Dalai Lama.

Anyway, because, nevertheless, I am well-bought-up, and because it concerns my beloved Diva finally getting to be a big sister after being the family baby all her life, and because (and I have this in writing, despite disgruntle and envy, see above link-to-post) I wished my ex-step-father’s partner well, and I wanted the baby to be fine, I asked how they all were. Surely the baby was due any minute, if they made the announcement in July?

‘Oh,’ said my mother, ‘that’s not happening any more.’

What? Seriously? Seriously?

I think I said I was so very sorry to hear that, and that my heart went out to ex-step-father and his partner, and then I looked at my plate and tried very hard not to sob right into it, and felt miserably furious with myself for ever having been scathing about and envious of their luck, and, oh, poor Diva, no baby brother or sister for her after all.

Minx, uncertain but curious, being eight, then asked ‘did the baby die?’

And Trouble (my sister her mother), answered ‘well, it wasn’t ever really alive, so it couldn’t've died.’

I have a voice, I have been told, of steel and flint, when I am very angry but resolutely trying not to shout. So in my voice of steel and flint, I answered ‘that’s absolutely not for you to say. It’s up to the parents to say if they felt their baby was alive.’

Trouble said, ‘well, that’s debatable.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ I replied, steel and flint now with extra rail-road and don’t-fuck-with-me. ‘At least, not by you. You have no right to decide how people think or feel about their babies.’

And then I ate the rest of my dinner without looking anywhere at all except either at the plate or straight ahead. In case I felt the shoulder-seams of my cardigan tear as my skin flushed bright emerald green.

Trouble deals with being chastised in two ways. Either she bears a grudge and sulks for days before finally breaking out in an impassioned rendition of ‘Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, I think I’ll eat some worms (and die in agony and it’s all your fault)’. Or, she becomes unusually affectionate and good-humoured. I got the affectionate, good-humoured Trouble for the rest of the visit. I can only assume she remembered who exactly she was talking to and decided to let it go as I was clearly a tad unhinged by my own experiences. I can only hope she thought about it and realised I was, actually, right.

Diva’s tiny sibling was alive, because its parents told everyone it was there, and everyone was expecting it to join us. My even tinier, heart-and-nervous-system-free embryos that all tanked before seven weeks, were also alive (if pretty damn watery, bless them) because I knew they were there, and oh, so wanted them to stay. And that’s what matters. And it’s not debatable.

Iron in the soul September 4, 2011

Now that I’ve – for the moment – parked my mother and her health issues back on the shelf marked ‘pending’, I can have a little think about the rest of my week.

It has been rather a wayward week, this. I think I owe about one third of the English-speaking world emails, the floor in the bathroom has developed an alarmingly bendy place under the lino (I think a floor-board needs replacing with some urgency), work is Entering The Thunderdome (New students enter, temp staff leave), H keeps getting nosebleeds and I think he has a low-grade chronic sinus infection, I broke the heel of my nice cute boots AGAIN (I think the cheap wee sods need resoling altogether), the boiler keeps going on the blink when one is in the shower (wakes you up sharpish, that), and so on.

On Wednesday, however, I spent the morning with HFF, Solnushka (surprise bonus, I hadn’t known she’d be there), and extra-surprise bonus our friend Z, who lives hundreds of miles away, which lead to me yelling ‘what the hell are you doing here!’ at the top of my voice across Trafalgar Square, totally ignoring the others, in one of my genius moments of Social Awkward, I Haz It. Anyone’d think I wasn’t pleased to see him. Oy.

So, as we had several small children about us, we spent the morning chatting while they romped, then having coffee and ice-cream, then watching the Changing of the Guard, then letting the smalls romp in Green Park for a while. Well, I say chatting. We did that in relays, as Small Persons Require Supervision, but they are very cute Small Persons, and I worship them. Especially as, not being their Adult-in-Chief, my main tasks were holding tea and minding push-chairs, which don’t answer back or gallop off towards unsuitable bodies of water (ie, I had the really easy job).

Kids are fascinating. And as soon as you get used to them, they change, and fascinate you all over again. And Sol had a brand-new one – babies are extra-fascinating. Beautiful, strange, wonderful, and fascinating.

When I had to say goodbye and go to work (late shift, hence morning free for frolicking), I felt, well, cheated. I’d've so much rathered spent hours more chatting and watching the kids.

Being a grown-up sucks, eh?

Our kids, even. I wanted to spend the day watching our kids. I stomped off towards the bus in a total ‘I hate my life’ rage.

It’s ugly, and bitter, that seeing my friends and having a perfectly nice morning with them should have left me feeling so angry. I’m in such a shitty mental place right now.

Eurydice would have been due in the last week of August, you see. I wish I didn’t remember their due-dates, sometimes. It makes me feel disloyal, thinking that. And stupid, for feeling disloyal. As if it matters at all whether I remember their due dates. I don’t know the dates of the chemical pregnancies, for example, and yet, I still count them as losses, I still wish one of them had lived. Dates are irrelevant. And yet, and yet, I should be sitting at home with stitches and a milk-stained nightie and unwashed hair and arms aching with strain because I daren’t put the newborn down, not for one second, not ever.

And Pikaia would be two-and-a-half. And if I’d had her, would I have ever got pregnant since, would I have even tried to? If she’d lived, I wouldn’t have ever felt so lost. I wouldn’t have known it was possible to feel this lost.

Most days, I don’t think I’ll ever have a child. I think that I’ve had my chances, and they were all duds, poor little sods, and that’s it, I’ll never get pregnant again, or, at least, not with an embryo that knows how to grow a spine. When I have sex with H on ‘fertile’ days of the month, I struggle to suppress a terrible rage, that wants to cry and scream and throw things, because this is pointless, bloody pointless. And yet I also get antsy if we’re not having sex, because, obviously, I am indelibly stained with hope and longing.

This is not a pretty state of mind. Hope isn’t a beautiful, poetic emotion, not for me. It’s like the manacle keeping me chained to the side of the juggernaut of infertility and loss, forcing me to run with it, dragging me when I fall. In fact, I almost hope, when I have the laparoscopy in a couple of months’ time, that they find my fallopian tube blocked solid and my ovary sealed off. So I can say, that’s it. I’m done. We’re stopping. I want my body back before it gets any more damaged. I want my life back, before it’s all spilt and wasted. I want my marriage back, my social life back, my poetry back, my writing back. I want that week every month back. I want me back.

And I know, if they look, and find the least chance I could conceive, then I will go on trying. Because Hope, for me, is not the thing with feathers. It’s the padlock and chain with no key, the steel-jawed man-trap, the bite of the crocodile, obdurate, heartless, intransigent.