PTSD October 12, 2009

OK. Let’s talk about this.

Since the miscarriage, I have had about nine? ten? periods/provera-induced bleeds/whateverthehells. (The ones on provera were not nearly as vile as the ovulatory ‘proper’ periods, but yes, they were vile too. Vile is not binary). Anyway, as they have come, stamped up and down on my belly in spiked rugby boots, and gone, I began to notice H was being a little… off. Not quite H-ish.

You see, H’s normal reaction to an unwell May is to tuck her up in bed and bring her tea and stroke her hair, while May bats him crossly away and demands to be left in peace for God’s sake. But during a period (I hate the word ‘period’. I really do. Not as much as I hate ‘Aunt Flo’ or ‘The Painters’ or ‘That Time of the Month’, admittedly, but still), H would, in fact, leave May alone. He would bring tea and refill hot-water-bottles, but having delivered them he would scarper. Admittedly, I’m not a good conversationalist at these times and about as easy to cuddle as a brass elbow. It was quite a big deal for both of us when, on one particularly shitty night in a hotel in Zurich, H sat up at about 2 am and massaged my feet in a kindly attempt to distract me from the cramps in my thighs, back, belly, buttocks and jaw (from teeth-clenching). It was such a big deal, in fact, that it made me think about the fact that the normally very huggy cuddlefest that is H on a compassion bender, doesn’t touch me when I have my (ugh) period.

Oh, hey, part of me is saying. I don’t blame him. I wouldn’t touch me either. Also, usually, when I am not well, I don’t actually like being touched or asked how I am in a worrity little voice. Just keep the tea coming and pass me the TV remote.

The miscarriage has changed everything, though. The whole I’m-all-disappointed-and-hejeebuz-but-this-hurts-too-much thing? Now I want to be stroked and cuddled. It doesn’t have to be all cuddle all the time, you know. Tea is good, too. And I am aware that while sleep becomes that Vanished Good of Golden Yore for me, at least until the Cute Ute shuts the fuck up, other humans will be and deserve to be blissfully unconscious between 11 pm and 7 am. But, some cuddle? A little cuddle? Mini-cuddle? Cuddle if you ever want a blow-job ever again?

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, in my best wifely, concerned, caring way, I got H in a headlock and threatened to tear his ears off if he didn’t talk right now this minute as to WTF was up with the distant no-touchy thing during the Visitation of the Red Menace. Eventually I had to let go of him as his replies were rather muffled, but when he repeated it all, I gathered that, basically, my periods are so fucking awful that they remind him of my post-miscarriage collapse. And that scares and upsets him, as it was a (yes, really!) scary and upsetting experience, and he deals with it in the way he usually deals with horrible shit, i.e. he puts it a box, tapes the lid on with gaffer tape, puts the box in a locked filing cabinet, and then buries the lot under a deserted cross-roads at midnight. In other words, avoidance tactics. In practice, this means he pretends I don’t really exist until about day 4 of said period, when I am clearly feeling a lot better and have become a cushiony armful of yumminess again.

H did not realise this would be in any way a problem because I am usually so keen on being left alone (only, bring the tea) when not well.

I agree it might have helped if I had said, look, yes, normally, but when I am menstruating, I need cuddles, OK? Only, and this is a stinger, this is pretty much exactly what I did say several months ago. Hence, you see, the need for head-locks. What? I’m not normally violent.

H admits I did say that. It’s just, when faced with me rocking back and forth in foetal position, communicating in grunts through clenched teeth, with the sweaty complexion of a good stilton, he panics. Any intelligent memories of a (pink, comfortable, upright and voluble) wife saying, ‘remember, a back rub would be nice at this point,’ are swamped by fear and grief, and therefore, you know, the whole ‘box, gaffer-tape, spade, if anyone asks, I’ll be down at the old cross-roads’ routine kicks in.

Self-defence. And for exactly the same reason I want the cuddle. It’s all too like the miscarriage, and the aftermath of the miscarriage, and we are both upset and disappointed and dealing with crappy memories, and it really, really is a bit fucking much that I have to do a live-action re-enactment of the whole sodding thing just to prove that I’m still not pregnant, and I want to deal with it by hugging and being treated like a super-special snowflake, and H wants to deal with it by, well, not dealing with it.

We both promised to do better at the communication lark. Well, no, I actually promised I would be promising to do better if I hadn’t already done better, thank you. H promised to, well, get over himself and rub feet.

The thing that really annoys me, however, is that from the very day I lost Pikaia, yea even while lying in my hospital bed feeling like road-kill, I was worried about how H would deal with it all. And H spent quite a few months denying that it had any kind of permanent or traumatic effect on him at all, why should it have, I mean, he was sad, obviously, but, it’s all over now, onwards and upwards. Hah, I say. Hah.

You remember we went to a counsellor about my (our! It was supposed to be our!) inability to get over it and cheer the fuck up. We did do lots of useful work on communication and acknowledgement of each other’s feelings and more communication and that it’s normal to feel crushed to pulp by years of embarrassing medical shit topped off with infertility and a dollop of miscarriage. But I am actually quite annoyed, then and now, that the one thing we never discussed at length was H’s feelings, because H was always denying he even had any. Yeah. He does have a remarkably elaborate burial ritual going for these feelings he doesn’t actually have, doesn’t he? And denial is in Egypt.

PS I am well aware you are all staring at me in disgust because H is obviously an angel in chinos. Tea, hot-water-bottles, and now I want foot-rubs? Just how special is this super-snowflake?

I loved long and long September 15, 2009

Xbox (hi, Xbox!) posted this back at the end of July. In particular he says, of the child he and his wife are at last expecting :

We’ll know it as the kid that has kept us going for two years….

So no, I’m not nervous, I’m excited at the thought of finally getting to meet in the flesh, someone who has already done so much for us. Someone we’re already familiar with after years of ups and downs.

Someone we’ve already known for a long, long time.

A brand new old friend.

I think I cried when I first read it (sorry, Xbox!). Mostly because it’s exactly true. I was teetering on the verge of writing about it too. And then a couple of weeks later Mel of Stirrup Queens posted some thoughts along the same lines, and I got a little overwrought in my whole-hearted, nay, whole-bodied agreement and shelved the whole subject until it felt safe. Because, for me, it’s not a beautiful, heart-filling, piercingly sweet thought any more.

When I lost Pikaia (and I always think of her as female, even though we never knew if she was), I didn’t just lose a few weeks-worth of pointless pregnancy. I didn’t lose a mere blob of genetic material, a non-person. I lost that child who had already been in my heart for the whole two-and-a-half years we’d been trying. We’d been trying for her, after all. Through the polyps and anovulation and bleeding and surgery and drugs, the hope of her, the reality of her, was the one Pole-Star that kept us going. It was for her we did it. It was for her we clung on.

When I lost Pikaia, it was all that that died.

It took a year, at least a year, for me to get to a place where my heart wasn’t crying to have her back again. Oh, yes, I wanted to get pregnant again, of course I did. But in the night, when I wept, I wept oh come back to me, come back to me.

Finally, my heart managed to bury her.

Today I am able to hope and wish for a baby without instantly being hijacked by yearning for her.

Some people talk an awful lot of bumfluff about the influence psychology has on physiology. I have been told that, for example, painful periods are a result of my disappointment at not being pregnant (what, when I was fourteen?). That you must ‘make room in your heart’ for a pregnancy. That you have to be ready. And that, dear friends, is exactly why I have not talked about this before. Certainly not while I was still yearning for my first pregnancy to somehow miraculously come back. Some platitudinous twerp, I felt sure, would bounce out of the woodwork and tell me to free my soul or what-have-you, and I’d have to go round to their house and spit in their eye, which comes expensive if they live across the oceans. Every blog, message board, personal account I ever read or heard confirmed that getting pregnant again is a great healer and helps a person move on. I have yet to hear that wallowing in grief is a natural sterilizer. God, and if it were, all war-torn countries would have a birth-rate of precisely fuck-all (and they notoriously don’t). (And it kinda rankles that we had to get over Pikaia’s loss all by ourselves).

But still, it’s a, well, not a relief at all, really, but it’s something to be able to long for a baby, and not that baby anymore.

Not that either of us can forget her. H (to my (possibly unworthy) surprise) began to talk about Pikaia last night, and then he lit her candle for a while, and we spent the rest of the evening in its glow. See?

And so we go on, knowing only that it will go on for ever, and, perversely, the only life Pikaia has is in our desire, as she was made of our longing before she existed, and is made of our longing now she has ceased to exist.

Not that I over-think these things August 23, 2009

Since I lost Pikaia, 15 months ago, I’ve had only five ovulatory cycles. Of which only two seemed to have anything to do with Clomid, and one of those was definitely more of an ‘I’m not budging until this damned chemical shit is totally out of my system’ point-proving exercise than a drug-induced ovulation.

I have two strong and recurrent feelings about this, depending on whether you catch me having had, or not had, my mid-morning coffee-break:

1. Well, you know, in a normal woman, who ovulates maybe twelve or thirteen times a year, no one would bat an eyelid if she still wasn’t up the duff after five cycles. Not one single eyelid. It’s within statistical ordinariness. It’s not something anyone would panic about. Keep trying. It’s fine. Deep breaths now. Remember, you shouldn’t expect yourself to be pregnant already, you’ve only had five goes since you were last pregnant. Now breathe, finish your coffee, and stop staring at the carrot-cake, you can’t have any.

Or,

2. In fifteen months, fifteen, I only get five cycles? Is this fair? Is this cricket? How the hell am I supposed to get pregnant if I only get a go once every three fecking months? Huh? On average? Huh? Do you have any idea how crushing it is to get a period when you get so very few chances and you haven’t a fecking clue when or if you’ll get another chance? Crushing, I tell you! This is me, being crushed! Also, you’re between me and the coffee stand and I am taking no prisoners. Mmmm. Cake.

It’s exhausting. (Also, what’s with all the pre-coffee fecking? My inner Irish half (yes, both grandmothers were Irish) seems to suppressed by caffeine. How odd).

So, what exactly, do you suppose, are the chances of Satsuma stepping up to the crease a third time in a row? (Americans’d say ‘plate’. But we play cricket here in Blighty, so we step up to the crease, and anyway we’re just won the Ashes, so crease! Crease! Crease!). She definitely seems to be hinting that she’s over the Clomid and on with her life, doesn’t she? Do we trust Madame Satsuma The Lying Ovary of Lies’ hints? Do we look stupid?

However, H is optimistic. After all, I ovulated on day 20 last time, flying solo – I hadn’t even been acupunctuated yet. H cannot shake off his hippy conditioning, and has rather more faith in the Snazzy Clinic than I do, and is assuming they’ll make things even better. Me, I am cynical and now possibly even sneery. It’s a consequence of being punctured in special lady-organs improvement points for improving the condition of the uterus, and then going on to have a period the sheer suckitude of which actually sent me off to snivel in the GP’s waiting-room, surrounded by Things in Pushchairs Pushed by Great Big Bellies (my God, it was like farrowing season in there. All of you who know farms, know what I mean).

My next visit to the Snazzy Clinic is Wednesday. Words will be said. Pray God I say them in a calm and reasonable voice and don’t drag in Ben Goldacre, Richard Dawkins, or anything sweary.

Anyway, in any case, must crack on with the weight-loss thing, which has stalled again, and I am thanking my lucky stars it didn’t go backwards, considering my appalling laziness recently. And I ate an extraordinarily large portion of extraordinarily good lasagne tonight, which I doubt helped. In fact, I know it didn’t help. I made it. I saw exactly how much butter and olive-oil and cheese went into it. I’d be a nine-stone twiglet if only I was a shit cook.

Slough of despond, now with improved wallow August 10, 2009

I want to apologise to my fellow infertility bloggers who are currently pregnant, and on whose blogs I haven’t left a single measly comment for ages.

I’m sorry.

It’s not that I’m not happy for you. I am, I really am, so very, very happy. And I still check up on you regularly, and come away smiling from cute, hopeful, joyful posts. I smile all day. I tell H, So-and-So had ultrasound pictures! Such-and-such had a funny story about morning sickness! Isn’t it great?

I just can’t talk to you. Well, yes, obviously a part of it is being sea-green with jealousy and wishing I could happily join in with my own anecdotes and blurred, shadowy, unintelligible and perfectly beautiful pictures. The jealousy is something I can get past, however. I have been known to. I am quite grown-up sometimes.

It’s that there’s nothing for me to relate to in your posts any more. I mean, I was sick too, I even have a cute story about nearly hurling on a friend, and therefore having to tell him I was pregnant to stop him flinging me into a taxi and rushing me home while scrubbing himself down with disinfectant hand-gel. And the cute anecdote ends with an ultrasound image too, but of a dead, deflating gestational sac surrounding no heart-beat. I know this story has no place in your comments. It’s a horrible cross between a piece doom-mongering bitchery and emotional blackmail. But I have no other story to tell yet.

I could just limit myself to saying ‘lovely! Excellent! Good luck!’ and running away again. That would be the mature, kind, thing to do. Do you want to see that week after week? Would that work? It’d stop me feeling like a wart, at least.

Oh, the self-pity I am wallowing in tonight. Revolting, isn’t it? *Pulls self together, and goes off to brush teeth*

A little sweetness June 30, 2009

Did you know about Organic Meltdown? I’m not supposed to be going anywhere near chocolate at the moment (damn you, diet! You had better work!), but once apon a time *ahem* I ate some *ahem ahem ahem* (what? One bar, I swear) of their chocolate. And so did H. H quite likes chocolate too, you see. And it is totally guilt-free middle-class hippy suitable-for-eco-worriers chocolate. And extremely tasty. (Which helps). Every bar sold allows the charity to save one tree in the Amazonian rain-forest – how cool is that? It was, in fact, my duty to eat that chocolate. I am utterly slacking by avoiding it. (Oh, my, this is an ethically complicated situation).

This evening I got a little email from them. H had kept the wrapper from said chocolate bar (Organic Dark Chocolate with Indian Spice, I recall). There’s an extra little thing you can do, you see. Register the wrapper online, and they’ll pick a tree from their tropical cloud forest in Ecuador for you and show you where it is on google maps (on a ridge above the confluence of two rivers). That chocolate? Meant they could afford to protect that tree. It won’t be felled for agriculture, or to make way for cocoa plantations (which are, you see, one of the main reasons the cloud forests in South America are being cut down. Like I said, this is eco-worrier chocolate).

H had dedicated that tree to Pikaia.

Several cuts of the whip June 19, 2009

It has been a less than fabulous week.

It ought to have been a fabulous week. There were theatre visits, and a weekend, and my husband bought star-gazer lilies, and I saw friends, and a last birthday present turned up in the post, hurray!

But I was in a foul mood anyway, about the Clomid Doesn’t Love Me Anymore thing, so I was attracting anxst. As you do when your mood is foul.

On Wednesday, the evening of the day in which I had learnt this cycle was another Epic Fail (I am so good at those now), H and I joined my good friend E, and some friends of his, to go to the theatre (that bit was great, we saw Waiting for Godot, and it was AMAZING. A. MA. ZING). Anyway, E’s friend hasn’t seen me for a couple of years, but we always ask after each other, so, as we were walking along, she asked, ’so, how’s the kid?’

Awful pause.

‘The… the what?’ I stammered.

‘Your kid? You’ve got a baby, haven’t you?’

‘No,’ I said, evenly (yes, evenly! I was impressed too!).

‘Oh, I thought you had,’ she said, looking confusedly at E, who having missed the exchange, smiled back.

Arse. E was one of the first people I told when I was pregnant, mostly because I nearly puked on him. Oh, don’t be angry with E, both his friend and I know he tells the other all about each, and I know eye-watering stuff about her, so it’s only fair. Only, he seems to have missed out the vital point that I did not, in fact, have the baby.

I didn’t elaborate. I couldn’t face it. No doubt she interrogated him at length later.

Then, at work, a few days later, a colleague, let’s call them P for Parent, having told me all about the lovely things they’d done with their small children over the weekend, asked me what I’d been up to. I mentioned the theatre trips (I’ve been on several). ‘Oh,’ said P, ‘That’s the problem with having kids. You don’t get to have so many evenings out. You’re so lucky. I wish I could go to the theatre as often as you.’

‘To be honest, I’d rather have the kids,’ I said, stung, and not very evenly at all.

There was a horribly awkward pause. A LONG, horribly awkward pause.

‘No, you wouldn’t. They’re such hard work, they take over your life,’ P began, and then, thank GOD, the meeting started, and P had to shut up. This being the same P, remember, whose children are the light of their life, and whose weekend was one great ocean of family cuteness, three minutes previously. As P is quite a nice person, I can only assume this was a cack-handed attempt at comfort.

Because, really, I’ll totally take the cute kids over the theatre visits and lie-ins. And I’m willing to bet P wouldn’t take the years of fertility treatment, surgery, failure, and the silent bitter weeping of their beloved partner over the loss of their child, even with all the Godot versus the Space Wizards theatrical triumphs in the world thrown in.

Yesterday I was hauling my pathetic arse out of the incommunicado funk everything had hurled me into, when I got a migraine. It was a two-stage migraine. I ran home with one eye completely blood-shot, half-blind, nauseous, dizzy, collapsed, and the actual agonizing headache failed to materialise. I had a headache, but not as bad as that headache, and despite infuriating photophobia, was quite chirpy by evening. Aha, it was merely biding its time, and I woke up at dawn feeling like a rugby prop forward was standing on my head. Most of day spent in bed with head under duvet, as blinds utterly unable to keep a sufficient quantity of that bastard light out of the room.

A fine end to a pisser of a week. I think I shall have a drinkie.

P. S. The oven just broke, blowing every fuse in the house. When I have got over my joy that the modem survived, I shall swear a great deal and have ANOTHER drinkie.

We’re not here May 22, 2009

We are, in fact, there *points northwards*

Well, we will be.

H has just this minute told me we may well not have any internet access when we get there.

I have screamed like banshee stepping barefoot on a lego brick at three in the morning.

Very well then. We will be back in civilized parts on Sunday the 30th of May. If you don’t hear from me before then, dinna fash yersel’*. If you don’t hear from me after then either, fash away like anything.

In my possible (and enforced) absence from internetland, a) I shall turn 34 – same birthday as Queen Victoria and Bob Dylan, dontcher know – and b) it will be the anniversary of the miscarriage. The fatal scan that proved Pikaia was utterly dead was on the 27th, three days after my 33rd birthday. It will be an interesting holiday. Which is why we’re going on it.

*Proper Northern for ‘don’t worry yourself’.

The best I can do right now May 11, 2009

Item – And this is where I was this time last year.

Damn, eh?

Which is pretty much what I said to C the counsellor this evening.

Item – It’s been a strange day. H had a job interview for the job he’s been doing pro tem while they interviewed for a new member of staff to do the job that H is, like I said, doing already thank you. They told him later they couldn’t give any feedback on his interview, because it was absolutely perfect. Oh, and would he like the job? So hurrah! We are happy! Go H! And so on!

Item – And then we went for our counselling session and it was all ‘ohh, we’re happy – ohh, we’re destroyificated with anxst and gloom – hurrah, we’re going on holiday – gah, I want to bang my head on the wall for a bit – sob sob, dead baby dreams – wahey, progress from H on sharing feelings – bah, my boss is driving me nuts – arse, but everything is driving me nuts – sob giggle yay!’

Item – I’m knackered. You try being anxst-ridden and grief-stricken and delighted and ever-so-proud of your husband not only on the same day but in the same sentence.

Item – I think a lot of the anxst and bad dreams are to do with sheer, naked, self-widdling terror that I will never get pregnant again (don’t try to talk me out of it. I won’t be talked). It’s reached the point where I flinch when people mention adoption, fostering, surrogacy, donor eggs, and leaving all one’s money to one’s nieces. (By ‘flinch’, keep in mind I am normally ‘flinching’ out of the office, down the stairs, across the street and into the coffee shop. I’m going to get caffeine poisoning).

Item – On Saturday, we met up with some friends for a Nice Day Out. Which it was, I hasten to add, before The Bitching, Oy Vey It Commenceth. I had a fabulous day. My friends are a very special bunch of very kind, sweet, funny, loving people, and I would (and did) pay good money just to sit in the sun with them and talk drivel for hours. And I’m not just saying that because a couple of them read this (hi!). And now I can bitch. Well, whine self-pityingly, really. One of the group’s second child was born only a couple of weeks before Pikaia’s unfulfilled due date. My God, I could have had a baby strapped to my front too. I really could have. I should have. That size. Well, maybe not that size, as she seems to be breeding prop forwards, but still. And I have (privately, silently) had issues about her tendency to go on about how she doesn’t feel like a ‘Real Woman’ ™ because she had a caesarian for the first and some minor issues breastfeeding. Constant refrain in own head: ‘What does that make me then? A fucking replicant? Also, I’ve been cut open twice already, like I’d give a fuck if they did it again in exchange for a healthy baby.’ Why I have such issues (privately, silently) with someone I actually like, and in any case don’t meet face-to-face very often at all, is beyond me. I think it’s probably unfortunate that her pregnancies coincided with a) me realising I was as sterile as a bleached petri-dish and also bleeding to death (or at least, to very, very, very, very pale indeed) and b) Pikaia, or, what should have been Pikaia. I think I am projecting, or possibly doing transference, or both. Can you do both?

Item – Anyway. I have started on the Provera. Clomid cycle 5, the One With The Added Ovary And Still No Dice, is over. Thank fuck.

Into the dark April 10, 2009

Tomorrow is the 11th of April. On the 11th of April, 2008, I extremely grouchily began the stressed-the-fuck-out, I’m-doing-too-many-essays, like-hell-this’ll-work cycle that ended with the conception of poor little Pikaia.

And I haven’t ovulated yet this cycle. And I haven’t had a positive OPK. This is not a good time for Satsuma to go on strike; this is not a good time for my body to mess with my head.

Tomorrow we also pack up our favourite socks and go stay with the In-Laws for four days. I do not know if I’ll be blogging from the In-Laws, I mean, they have the innernets and all (and running water and gin, working gravity and an indoor toilet). Technology is not the issue. Manners are, as in, it’s not good manners to sit brooding darkly over the lap-top in the dining-room when everyone else is sitting in the sitting-room (natch) having delightful conversations and wondering why the fu-hey I don’t want to talk to them. So I may have to get through the whole ‘it’s been a FUCKING YEAR since I was pregnant and I am so angry and sad about that and about my body’s total inability to give me a break since then’ all on my own.

I’m so glad they have gin.

This being what May thought of counselling. March 4, 2009

[H's version is here.]

The first visit to the counsellor, we talked about, well, the Story So Far (see ‘About‘ page, for those of you singing along), and when I got to Pikaia I bawled for about 30 minutes non-stop, frantic with embarrassment the entire time. All the Counsellor had to do, being a counsellor, and Wise in the Ways of the Wayward Psyche, was point out to me that I had been through a lot (gulp) and naturally I would still be grieving (gulp, sniff), and nobody could expect me to be over it already (wahhhhhhhhhhh!).

We soldiered on anyway, me blowing my nose on increasingly teeny dry patches of the increasingly soggy tissue. And we discussed the following:

H compartmentalises. Apparently, most men do this. Well, frankly, if I had wanted to marry most men I would have. And it irks me very much to realises that this is a good way of coping, in that H is not the one bawling his freaking eyes out in a complete stranger’s front room. Which is something I don’t really want to be doing. Except I am paying to do it. Where were we? I was talking about H. Who compartmentalises, whatever the fuck that means – well, what it does mean is that H can sit in a complete stranger’s front room and talk about miscarriage without bawling his eyes out.

We’ve discussed my somewhat unimpressed reaction to the ‘being strong for you’ theory briefly on this blog. We have not discussed it with the Counsellor (let’s call her C. H is calling her C and I am all about the consistency here) but I think we should. For either I am egregiously wrong, and men are Supposed to Be Strong by ignoring every single person in the Universe’s feelings including their own, and most people really do find it helpful to share a home with an automaton, or I am egregiously right, and H is being a moral coward and dressing it up as ’staying strong’ as that sounds so much nicer than ‘wimping out’.  Christ, I sound like a bitch. Heigh ho.

Anyway, H can too bawl. He cried when he saw I had written Pikaia’s name out in full with his surname on her little boat.

While we’re on the subject, I was an idiot to think that the Thing With The Paper Boats, no matter how beautiful it was, would somehow be, or ought to be, the end of the grieving process, but I did. C suggested we get something permanent we could both remember Pikaia by, and H leapt at the idea – and has since been talking enthusiastically about finding an ornament that would be just right (for example, not a rock, no matter how pretty the semi-precious stones in the Natural History Museum shop are. And something small enough to hold). So when I say leapt, I also mean took a firm grip on, and Means It.

And I sat there with my mouth hanging open. I had felt, I had, in fact, put myself, under pressure to Get The Fuck Over It Already, especially after the due date. None of it was coming from H, after all, despite his Strong Silence and ability to say ‘miscarriage’ without tearing up. He wanted, badly wanted, to keep hold of Pikaia, and remember her too, and I had not known this. I simply had not known this. (Oh, bugger, I’m starting to cry again. Excuse me one moment).

I did not cry the second time we visited the Counsellor. Go me! I thought, as I gulped water frantically and thought about daffodils. So brave! Doing my damndest not to cry again, and trying to, be, like, all cool and humorous about it, and like, totally not fazed, dude.

I am an Idiot.

This time, we discussed my issues with telling work, and not wanting work persons to know a damn thing about it, which will be unavoidable if I’m forever sloping off to be prodded and stuck, and also being a leeeetle skeeved at the idea of cheerfully lying my head off at work under the banner of None Of Their Fucking Business. I did not say ‘fuck’ in C’s office. I am well-brought-up. C suggested ways in which H could help me come up with pre-planned excuses for the nosy bastids, and a calm professional way to keep my line managers informed, as I am freaking just a tad out about both. H seemed to like this idea. I was bewildered by H liking this idea. H wants to help? Really? But, but, he’s been Being Strong, which as we know involves Not Saying Anything.

And then we naturally had to discuss why I hated the very idea of telling work that I needed the time off, which lead to a discussion of my feelings of guilt and shame over being ill or needy (yeah yeah yeah, I’m warped by careless parenting, I know), which lead to a (mercifully brief) discussion of my slightly fucked up relationship with my mother, she who spent my childhood telling me off for being a hypochondriac and faking illness to get out of things and making her life difficult and so on, during which I badly wanted to curl up into a pretzel and roll unobtrusively out of the room and into the dark deserted street. Yes, I know that sounds fucked up. It is fucked up. I am fucked up.

By this time I was getting slightly twitchy that we were spending the entire hour talking about me mememememe ME. H had disclaimed all responsibility for the evening as he’d had a shite day at work and couldn’t think of a single thing to say, but I still felt I was hogging the limelight rather.

And then we discussed anger, in that I don’t seem to be expressing any. I am quite sure H would have had quite a lot to say on that score if he hadn’t been being so polite and H-ish, so I did hasten to mention I snapped at him. So we had to discuss why I feel such a strong need to be scrupulously fair and consider all sides to all stories. At this point H butted in and proved he has absolutely been listening all these years and volunteered that it was to do with my father. So I had to explain that I had been my Daddy’s favourite for years, and how utterly shitty this had been for my sister Trouble, and how it had screwed our relationship up, and there I went, empathising with Trouble and explaining it all from her point of view, which rather made H’s point.

The anger thing is going to be a Big Issue. In that I am so angry about the infertility and loss thing that I think I could chew through a concrete wall, but cannot express it. In that H is extremely uncomfortable with anger, even when it’s not being expressed at him. In that there are rages within me I daren’t tell him about, in case he despises me for them. I think I shall force H to talk about that next time.