Nuts in May

Too much information will certainly be shared

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.

 

The times when blogging is too much of an arse February 18, 2013

Item – I had noro.

Item – I was angry and unhappy and sulky at the way things were going in the comments in the last two posts, and I didn’t (I still don’t) know how to respond.

Item – H has had a nasty, constant cough for four whole weeks now. We’re both sleep deprived.

Item – My period was late. Not, late as in a longer-than-28-day-cycle (my cycle is ALWAYS longer than 28 days), but proper real ‘your luteal phase is longer than usual’ late. Mine has been 11 days long for four cycles in a row. Before that, it was always 12 or 13 days long unless, and sometimes even if, I was pregnant. This month? It went 16 days. I had a nervous breakdown. Three negative pregnancy tests and brutal arrival of said period later, Occam’s razor dictates, given the near-total lack of marital congress round these parts (see Item 3, above), that, actually, I probably had the day of ovulation wrong, and my calculations were thrown by the fact I had noro and therefore a fever. Anyway, even so, my luteal phase was longer. This is good, I think. I think.

Item – I really did have a bit of a nervous break down. I spent three days begging and pleading with the indifferent universe not to be pregnant, because if I were, I’d absolutely certainly lose the baby, and I couldn’t take it, not again, ‘chemical pregnancy’ be fucked. The cognitive dissonance has torn all my protective scabs and callouses off.

 

Whoa Nellie February 3, 2013

Item – Excuse long absence from blog. Had migraine. It sucked.

Item – This weekend, just to shake things up a little, I have Norovirus. Hello. Every single muscle, layer of skin, bone, joint, nail and inch of gut aches, I am freezing cold despite the fact H is wandering about the house shirtless, I have consumed exactly three cups of cold tea since yesterday evening, and this morning saw me taking a plastic washing-up basin to the privy for a half-hour I’d give my eye-tooth not to have to endure ever again.

Item – So, last post’s comment-related kerfuffle. 1) I want to make it perfectly clear Sheila is a dear and valued Gentle Reader of some duration, and who has dealt with some of the same doctors I have, and therefore I take her comment as coming from a place of friendly interest, affectionate concern, and natural curiosity. And I’ll get to answering it all when I feel less like the entire French Rugby team ran me down and sat on me. 2) That said, I also see where The Comment That Broke The Camel’s Back is coming from, I think. I myself have found it amazingly fucking irritating when people have popped up on my blog for seemingly the sole purpose of telling me I’m Doing It Wrong, and that my doctors are Doing It Wrong, especially if it devolves into people playing the ‘The NHS sucks and socialised medicine sucks and no wonder you Europeans are dying in ditches in droves’ card (especially because of the awkward fact that, actually, Europeans aren’t dying in ditches in droves and for MOST purposes the NHS is one of the best health services in the entire world and May is also a socialist herself so BACK THE FUCK OFF*). 4) So, my rule of thumb is, a long-term reader and commentator who has so far been a total darling, and very supportive, and who has had similar history, can be allowed questions and phrasings that could possibly come across as aggressive and self-righteous from a relative newcomer to the blog who has an axe to grind/bone to pick/kerfuffle to get off on. So, Sheila, please carry on. Comment That Broke The Camel’s Back, I appreciate you going to bat for me very much, but I think you batted the wrong person this time. 5) I am a little unclear who is calling whom a concern troll. But let’s just go with, no one is a concern troll today. Just, people are concerned, bless them. And leave it at that.

*P.S. – Being a socialist in Europe is normal, healthy, intelligent, and reasonable, and there are lots of us. We think the (I, of course, generalise) American hysterical reaction to the word ‘socialist’ is fucking hilarious.

P.P.S. – Socialists! Socialists! Socialists! “Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, We’ll keep the red flag flying here!” Tee hee hee. Sorry. I am light-headed through fever and lack of nourishment.

 

Pissiness January 8, 2013

I don’t know why, but I’m feeling angry and sad at the moment.

Maybe it’s because we’re going to get a fourth opinion, things are moving forward, we might be about to do something big and, err, doey, about the infertility/RPL Suck Permanence that is my life. It’s frightening. Suck Permanence may be deeply unpleasant and soul-destroying, but it tends not to put your soul on the line and then jump up and down on it in hobnailed boots.

Maybe it’s because I’m feeling a tad lonely these days. Hello, Gentle Readers. How many of you are five, six, seven, more, years into trying to have a child, and yet still childless? Do you also, just sometimes, feel a bit left-in-a-ditch? Not that anyone wants to leave us in a ditch, of course not. But here is the ditch of years-and-years-and-nothing, and we are in it, and quite a lot of our best and most beloved cheerleaders aren’t, and there are moments when we just feel… slightly… a tad… well, left-in-a-ditch. I must give myself a hearty slap and shake before I start wailing ‘nobody understands meeeeeeeeeeee’. So jejune.

And I’ve not done myself any favours by falling out of the blogging-and-commenting loop the past few months (aha! Favourite punctuation of the day, the hyphen!). Woe is me, self-inflicted woe is me too. Woe!

And then there’s my uterus. My period is due next Monday, possibly Tuesday. I would like a pint of strong coffee and a very large bottle of wine now please. Remind me to tell you about the actual state of said uterus at some point when we’re all either slightly drunk or feeling very strong-stomached. *shudder*

Anyway! And another thing that made me angry today! -

I was in a coffee shop this lunch-time, buying soup, when I overheard two women at the table behind me. One was saying: ‘No, I don’t have kids.’ The other replied, in tones of excitable jollity: ‘Oh, but you should! Kids are great!’

Oh, for the sake of fuck.

I took my soup and my tea and slunk sloshily away. I don’t even know how the first woman reacted. But on behalf of all childless people everywhere, I’d like to say:

Never say ‘You should have kids!’ to a childless person.

Two reasons:

One: They really don’t want kids. They know they don’t want kids, can’t afford kids financially or psychologically or physically, don’t like kids perhaps, and did I mention? Do not want kids. Telling them they should have kids regardless? Anyone who has the intelligence and insight to know they can’t do parenting and then take steps to prevent themselves becoming a parent should be celebrated. I can think of few acts more morally awkward than bringing an unwanted, unloved child into this world. I know many oops! pregnancies have turned out for the best, and the parent has found new reserves of love and strength and dealt with it with grace and courage, even if that includes the courage to let the child go to another family. But then, so many more (in my own family, even, and by the dozen) have turned out, if not actually horrifically, then into low-grade, dreary, resentful misery which sets up a whole new generation of neurotic and damaged people to be unwilling and shitty parents. It’s just not fair to do that. It’s not fair to wish parenting on people who bloody well know it’s not something they can handle. Think of the children! A person who does not want kids, and therefore does not have them, should have their hand shaken, and that is the end of that.

Two: They really do want kids. Best case scenario, they have only recently started trying for a baby, and will have one very soon, and your thoughtless squeaky remark is merely utterly pointless and bossy. They’re already on that! FFS! More likely, they want kids, but can’t have them. They are still single, perhaps, so just rub that the fuck in why don’t you? Or they’ve been trying for a while. You know you’ve just basically slapped them in the face? Or maybe they’ve been trying for years, or had a miscarriage? Well, now, would you go up to a car-crash victim in a wheelchair and burble: ‘Legs! They’re great! You should try having some!’? Would you skip past a homeless man shrieking: ‘Houses are fabulous, dude! I love my house!’? Would you prance up to a widow or widower and chortle: ‘Isn’t marriage great? Why aren’t you married? Try being married!’? No? But you just did the moral equivalent, you turnip-head.

Excuse me; I am going to fume picturesquely in the middle distance.

 

And then December 30, 2012

After the In-Law Mellow Interval With Roast Dinner, H and I came home again (did I say that already? I did say that already). We spent a day washing things and going to the cinema (The Hobbit – not bad, fight scenes amazing, interspersed with episodes of Mystic Cheese, would try the patience of anyone not a die-hard Tolkien/Jackson/LOTR fan, Richard Armitage can come and sulk at me anyday, as can Adrian Turner. Oh, and Martin Freeman. He can come too. *Fans self*). We had friends over for dinner and stayed up until 3:30 am, talking crap and getting very drunk. Well, they did. I didn’t, because Metformin, but I don’t need Strong Drink Taken in order to talk crap for hours.

And May saw every thing that she had made, and, behold, it was very good.

Now, we gird loins and go to my Mother’s for New Year, so H can have a go at putting up with his In-Laws. It’s just as well he can drink, because his require a great deal more putting-up-with than mine.

Meanwhile, in matters reproductive, just before Christmas Week of Chaos, H wrote an email to yet another Grand High PoohBah of Reproductive Medicine, requesting a, what is this, fourth? Yes, fourth opinion. Because Dr Expensive is making us both feel uneasy. And because I stamped my feet and shrieked that we needed to DO SOMETHING in 2013, and H needed to actually take a great big stakehold in DOING SOMETHING, because I had the bleeding and vomiting and suffering and weird medications that don’t seem to do much bit to do and that was quite enough, thank you. We’ll see what January brings.

If being at Mama’s precludes blogging, I shall be content in the knowledge that I took this opportunity right here to wish all my Gentle Readers, Pocket People, Dear Friends and Loyal Lurkers a very, very happy 2013, full of joy and wonder and laughter and hugs and heart-warming moments and shit like that.

 

Just give me a minute, wrapped up in tinsel December 23, 2012

It’s not that I don’t care about this ‘ere blog, Gentle Readers. It’s just that I have been Quite Busy. (Hi! I’m Quite Busy! Call me Quite!)

Item – Christmahanukwanzaa. We go to the In-Laws tomorrow. The area of the country where the In-Laws dwell is prone to floods. It has been raining in a Noah’s Ark sort of way here in Blighty. I… I have a bad feeling about this…

Item – Therefore, Festive Gift-Shopping. We have done rather well this year, though H keeps saying we bought too much chocolate (H, no we did not. Shut up). Nevertheless, it needed doing, and in evenings and so forth, which interferes with blogging.

Item – Number of surprise pregnancy announcements at my cousin’s wedding last weekend? Four.

Item – I am less bothered about this than I would’ve been last year. I am getting a good coating of shellack, I think.

Item – I was out last night having a social life. I am out tonight having a social life. Isn’t this wonderful? I’m having fun!

Item – I am in six minds as to whether to take the lap-top with me to the In-Laws and do some blogging there, under the guise of ‘writing my novel’. What do you guys think?

Item – Hugs to my delightful pocket-people, who I treasure with every fibre of my heart.

 

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.

 

What would Cthulhu do? October 26, 2012

We’ve achieved a little distance now, from October 15th, and the international candle-lighting in memory of lost pregnancies and babies. Let’s breathe out.

You know, it’s an awareness campaign I thoroughly approve of (there are so freaking many of us, and we may as well live in a biscuit tin at the back of the cupboard), and I, too, light my candles and think Dead Baby thoughts, as close to 7pm as I can make it. But I’m not sure its an awareness campaign that, in the end, is for or about me.

What? I hear you cry. But, May, dear girl, you’ve had seven miscarriages! Maybe more! OK, they were all ridiculously early, but they were miscarriages and this really is about you!

And all I can do is look uncomfortable and say, yes, you are quite right, it does include me, insofar as I have lost pregnancies. But there’s the problem right there. ‘Lost’. As if they’d gone down the back of the sofa or fallen out unnoticed in a taxi. As far as I’m concerned, my embryos died, and then I bled and bled and bled and wept and raged and went a bit weird and survived on Ben&Jerry’s and black humour for weeks.

And another problem – the sugar-pink and pastel-blue colour-schemes of these campaigns. I get why these colours – they are chosen to represent little baby girls, and little baby boys, and remind the world that what was ‘lost’ was just that – a child, with a gender, an identity, personhood.

However (and this is what I find… awkward) pastels, culturally, are used as a short-hand for ‘feminine’ – razors marketed for shaving legs, armpits and bikini-lines rather than chins are usually pastel-coloured; as are pens (*snort*), tampon boxes, bra-and-knicker sets, diet-food cartons, hair-clips, purses, vitamins for pregnant/menstruating/menopausal women, mobile phone cases ‘for the ladies’, and so forth. Note, things especially that relate to the more carnal, earthy, and bodily aspects of femaleness – armpit hair, periods, deodorants, being unacceptably zaftig despite the fact many women are supposed to have arses that shape oh my God – are marketed as pastel, as sweeter and daintier and cleaner and less fleshy than the actual reality. It’s unfeminine to have armpit hair and menstruate. And yet I cannot think of anything more female.

And so to the pastel colour-scheme of baby-loss. It is being presented as a feminine, dainty, bodiless thing. The babies are, euphemistically, ‘lost’, which is tragic, and remembered in soft sweet colours, which are non-threateningly not-ookie. And yet, every single woman who has miscarried or given birth to a dead child or had her baby die in her arms knows, really actually knows, that this was a bloody, bloody, painful, messy, ugly, process. It hurt physically as well as psychologically. There was blood and torn flesh and fluids and clots and snot and tears and vomit and no fucking dignity left whatsoever. It was not dainty. It was not ‘feminine’. It was intensely female, yes, and the female body is just that, a body. Made of meat. And this is terrifying.

Very well, so the non-threatening, babyish and feminine colours are ‘necessary’, to make the whole sorry mess publicly presentable – a ribbon you can wear on your coat without scaring small children, a subject you can raise without making your listeners rush away, fingers in ears. I do see that. But also, alas, it has the unfortunate side-effect of minimising miscarriage and infant death. They’re pastel. How can they possibly be a big deal? And anyway, they’re a lady thing, like periods.

So that’s another point – this pastel, feminine view of it all excludes not only the actual horrible truth of the experience, but it also excludes men.

You know, those human beings whose child it also would have been? Who were there when the woman they loved was bleeding and weeping and screaming? Who saw and held the tiny fragile body of their dead child? Who called the ambulance? Who paced the hospital corridors while the love of their life was having the remains of his DNA scraped out of her, away from him, away from anyone who would hold her with tenderness as it happened? The men who are also grieving? The men who already have no words, no place, no socially acceptable way of grieving? Who end up retreating into silence, anger, frustration, pretending it never happened? Because the only context in which the subject is dealt with is public is one of unrelenting, sanitised, saccharine, pastel femininity.

H and I were discussing my Halloween miscarriage of 2009, what with the anniversary approaching and me acting therefore like a harpy with PMS and a nettle in her knickers. H said he hadn’t really remembered it was that time of the year. And then he said he didn’t really ever think about it. And then he cried, because it had been so horrible, and he had been so scared. And it has taken him three years to say that out loud, even to me.

And a final point. The angels. There is a lot of talk, on miscarriage support sites that I have visited, of angels. The baby is now an angel. People say this even when they don’t seem to have any particular religious beliefs. And I do get it. How horrible to think your longed-for child has just… stopped. Ceased. Finished. Over. Gone. How necessary, how important, to be able to visualise them existing somewhere still, perfect in their innocence and freshness, waiting to be reunited with you.

But I am an atheist. And I don’t believe in an afterlife. So, actually, my longed-for children are passed on. These embryos are no more. They have ceased to be. They’ve expired and [not] gone to meet their maker! These are late embryos! They’re stiffs! Bereft of life, they rest in peace! If I hadn’t flushed them down the bog they would be pushing up the daisies! Their metabolical processes are of interest only to historians! They’ve hopped the twig! They’ve shuffled off this mortal coil! They’ve run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible! These…. are EX-EMBRYOS!

And you know how much comfort all the ‘angels in heaven’ talk gives me? Absolutely bloody none. And not only that, it excludes me. I can’t talk about my totally tragically utterly dead embryos because that would be offensive to people who do believe in baby angels. And I very much do not want to offend and upset people who do believe in an afterlife, and who know their own babies actually really are angels in heaven. But that’s the point. I am never going to see mine again. They are not looking out for me in heaven, in the company of all the bloody-minded grouchy atheistical old bastards who they’re related to and who pre-deceased them.

I have a sadness that is full of rage and loneliness and black, black humour, and the organisations and support groups allegedly there to support women like me, well, simply don’t. And they have nothing to say to my husband either.

I am not feminine. I rarely shave my legs in winter. I don’t wear make-up unless someone’s getting married. I watch the rugby, I wear DMs, I drink Guinness. I wear sugar-pink and pastel-blue about as often as I pole-vault naked into crocodile enclosures. There is nothing demure or discreet about the way I menstruate. The only person I called an angel lately was H, when he cleaned the bath-tub and then ran a bath for me because my back was sore. At this candle-lighting virtual support meeting for pregnancy and infant loss, I am lurking at the back, clutching a glass of gin, lips firmly pressed together in case I start humming the Dead March from Saul. My husband hasn’t even been allowed in the room, and is, I think, sitting on the stairs in the cold, completely alone. And in a hydrangea sea of butterflies and cherubs, I am wearing a blood-red ‘What would Cthulhu do?’ teeshirt in Gothic black lettering, complete with tentacles.

 

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.

 

I must be the world’s biggest pain-wimp October 6, 2012

Filed under: The innards,We are not alone — May @ 5:02 pm

I cannot be the only woman whose periods are this mind-blowingly painful. So how do so many women who describe their periods as being The Worst Ever still manage to go to work/drive/care for kids/do housework?

Yours in bafflement also stoned (yay tramadol!),

May

 

 
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