Still Passing Open Windows ....

Moving

I have started to cycle to work more and more. It is a 35-50 minute drive, depending on the traffic, and a 50-60 minute cycle and I'm a lot happier on the bike so I'm trying to do it as often as I can motivate myself. "Just get on the bike," said a friend, and it's good advice. I lie in bed thinking how un-energetic I feel or I look out my office window and think how cold it looks out there, but once I am on my bike, it is usually just fine. When I'm not that sure about it, I tell myself it's gathering experience so I know what it's like to ride when I'm tired or feeling bleah or it's dark. When it rains or is windy, I phone H and get a ride.



The best thing about cycling is that I usually arrive in a better mood than when I left. When I drive home, I seem to get lost in the swamps of despair quite regularly. There is even a road where I regularly seem

to think about lost pregnancies and physical failures. It's something about being caught up in the snarl of traffic and sitting there, stuck. The bike short circuits that.



In the mornings, I see the world before too many people are up and it is breathtaking at times. I see the dog walkers and the lights on behind the lace curtains in a little Mom and Pop house between the MacMansions. This morning the mist hung below the mountain peaks and the sun shone on the buildings giving them that beautiful golden winter colour. Last night I saw the lights practically twinkling on the hillside and I smelt the pine as I cycled past the Christmas tree lot. I felt the wind in the dark and that thrilling potential nighttime seemed to hold when I was 20 and walking into town with a girlfriend in party boots. Cycling also adds some adventure into my day. There's mud and puddles and that glorious freedom of going fast that I remember from being little and going

as fast as my legs could move.



It makes me a better person, a nicer person to live with. Last night, cycling home, I thought it will be ok. Having a child is more important than not having a child. My child or children will be my children. I don't have to explain to everyone about the donor eggs. If someone knows, they know but people who don't , I am not going to explain. I have spilled too much of my story already and I don't think it helps the people in my immediate circle understand that much more. It just makes me look dark and negative (which is possibly true but it seems to shock people who then spend the next half hour telling me to "just adopt" or "count my blessings" and then I want to kill them which just confirms that dark and negative image I have). If this all works and someone one day says to me, "Who does your daughter look like?", I will simply say, "Oh, depends on the light, sometimes me, sometimes my husband." And if someone

says, "He laughs just like you," I will just smile and accept the comment, not go into the profiles and contracts that brought him here. I will just be happy he is here.



Great resolutions, n'est-ce pas? Must get on that bike as often as humanly possible.

Got to update, got to blog ....

(To get the full effect of the title, it needs to be sung to the tune of "Got to sing, got to dance ...). It has been ages, I know. I have been home, to my parents which was wonderful. I saw lots of friends. There was not too much baby talk. The worst questions came from my grandfather and my sister, and pissed me off mightily but on the whole were manageable and for the most part, I was able to just have a week at home.

Now I am back, in the thick of a northern winter and gearing up for another cycle. Well, gearing up in a manner of speaking. I will not be physically involved at all, which, I suppose, is a good thing. Sort of. You see, I would like to be involved. I would like to be the one providing the eggs. That I am not affects me in a lot of little ways.

For example, "Let's go to Scotland and look up your family," says H. "No," I just say simply, not wanting to go into it, not wanting to explain that my family ends here and now, that any children who might possibly (miraculously) be born will not have my grandmother's hands which I see in my own, will not carry our particular blue eyes, will not have the deformed-looking little toe my father and I have which gives us hell when we wear narrow shoes, and who knows if they will have that quirky sense of humour which will have me and my cousins in hysterics while other people stare at us perplexed. 

How does family history work with donor egg children? These miracle children might possibly be interested out of sense of curiousity but they will lack the odd feeling of being at home in a country they have never visited, like I feel when I go to Germany and unexpectedly feel my 2 German genes going "Toll! Fantastich!" They cannot say "I come from a long line of people who have fought to remain here," when they visit South Africa. Actually, I cannot say that either, seeing as I live overseas. So, maybe I am overworrying all this. Maybe, like most worries, it won't matter one jolt in the years to come.

In the meantime, I have taken up knitting again and I am cruising @m@zon and looking at books like this: 

because I just know that if I buy this book, I will fill my house with funky little watercolour angels and awesome homemade Christmas decorations and my life will be dense with colour and interest, which would make a nice break for H from the little dark cloud I currently walk around under. And that's given me an idea: I can NOT buy the book but copy the angel idea and hang little watercoloured black clouds from the ceiling to decorate the flat this festive season. (I will of course line them with glitter to add a suitably festive look.) That way, I can remain true to myself, being both creative and yet frugal enough to satisfy my Scottish genes.

Love and Leicas

I am in love. I have just discovered Leica cameras. The pictures they take are incredible. So much atmosphere is captured. It blows me away.

"How much is it, if I can ask?" I say.

"$19,000," says the proud owner, looking a picture of his four month old daughter.

"It's the price of a small car," says H the next day as we drive to work.

"It's the price of a small car and a half," I say. "It's the price of ...," I think aloud, "Almost 2 egg donors ... plus the price of ... mmm, yes, almost 2 egg donors ..."

which would equal, given our rate of sucess, zero babies. Yes, we are moving on to our third egg donor and still have no pregnancy, no baby in site. Incredible, n'est-ce pas? 

To give the full background, the first donation was cancelled en route due to poor response. The second donation, with a different, previously successful, donor, yielded 2 embryos and zero pregnancies. We are pressing forward, more out of a sort of disbelieving stubbornness than anything else. This has to work at some point, doesn't it? It just seems incredible that there are so many babies out there and I seem totally incapable of having even one, even when I have other, fertile women's help. Unbelievable. Fascinating too, in a way. I wonder which will run out first: the money or my stubborn refusal to give up. Unfortunately it feels chillingly like it could be the money. Man, am I going to be a twisted old lady if that's the case. 

Reading

Reading books set in Eastern Europe. "Bleak," said a friend. She is reading Shopaholic. Need I say more? 

Coping

I grew up in a small farming community. My best friend and I were born a few weeks apart. We shared the same friends and had matching dolls. Her mother used to pick us up from school and we would draw in the office while her mother finished work, always the same picture, full of similar details and one of us would have the beautiful world with flowers and swing in the garden and one of us would have the broken down house with a garden of weeds and holes in the roof. 

We seemed to go through the same things together, experiencing growing up milestones at similar times. Inevitably I guess, there was competition between us. It was never down and dirty but it was always there under the surface. Who would come first in class? Who would impress the guy we all liked? Who would be picked for school committees? A certain equilibrium was maintained. She won more of the leadership things, I won a lead in a schoolplay here and an editorial position there.

We went to different universities and then our lives met up again when we were both living in London. The wild days. Drunken afternoons watching rugby in a pub and staggering home from the tube station to wake up with monster hangovers and drag ourselves off to jobs that paid pittance. We always seemed to be scraping for money but every weekend there was another party somewhere and friends in the house.

We met our husbands around the same time. She got engaged fast and married a year before I did. I told her we were trying for a baby as soon as possible. She said they were enjoying married life and weren't ready yet. Six months later she phoned me to tell me she was pregnant. Two years later she texted to say she was pregnant again. I texted back to say I was pregnant too. Seven months later her son was born and mine was five months dead. She now has three children.

Some people's children are harder to bear than others. I think the more similar the parental style is to what I think mine would be, the harder it is. My best friend does things I think I would have liked to do with my kids. She taught her daughter baby sign language. She's into organic food. She stopped working to be a full time mother. She has a garden. She has managed to write a book. I see her being the sort of mother I thought I would be and I feel inadequate and pathetic, struggling along in the muck and grief of infertility.

It's not even like she rubs it in my face. She tries to be as sensitive as possible. It's just that when I speak to her and hear the sounds of her life in the background and hear how we talk about everything except her family, I am reminded of everything I have failed to achieve. That old competitive element is still there and I feel like I have failed and she is winning effortlessly at everything I struggle so futilely to achieve.

"No one's life is perfect," H tells me. "It's not a competition," he reminds me. I know. I know everyone has dark clouds, I do. I just struggle to enjoy the sunny day.

I caught a bit of an interview with an old Russian woman on TV as I was tidying up the lounge. She must have been about 80 and she was talking about a winter in the 1940's when many people starved to death. "My sister died after giving birth," she said. "My brother came to visit us and one day he just didn't get up," and she wiped away the tears gathering around her nose. She is crying about events that happened 60 years ago and they still make her cry.

You never get over losses, I think. You move on. You get used to it, but your losses can still make you cry. I never realised this. I thought that everything could be healed. I thought that people walked around whole. Now I think that with time we just don't think about our losses as much. We think about other things and we are ok, but scratch the surface of our memories and the grief is still there.

I spoke to my best friend this week to wish her happy birthday and today I have been thinking about my losses a lot, too much. I left work early and came home, avoiding driving into a wall by promising myself LOTS of toast with nutella. And by lots, I seriously mean a hell of a lot.

Dish towels and colour schemes

Well this cycle did not work. Surprise! And so on to more important things: decorating my flat. 

I have a love-hate relationship with our flat. The flat itself is fine. The location is ... well, it's ok, it could be a lot worse. It could also be a lot better, and as I am a glass-half-empty type of girl, I tend to harp on the "it could be so much better" side of things. 

In an attempt to love where I live, I have this big plan to redecorate, which unfortunately gets pushed down the priority list by the other big plan i.e. Have a Baby who Outlives Us. Anyway, we are not talking about that. We are talking about decorating.

My decision this week is the oh so important colour scheme for the kitchen. My current vote is for turquoise and green, and my object of lust for this week is Anthropologie's dish towels. Gorgeous, I just love them. The only thing is, how does one justify $17 for a dish towel? 

The question I want to ask you, darling readers, is what are your favourite house inspiration sites?

Reading the tea leaves

Not being an experienced tea leaf reader, I tried to remember what I read and simply turned my cup upside down on my saucer once I had drunk all my tea. There are clumps of tea leaves and then there are the floating tea leaves in the remains of the tea. My interpretation is: clumps of happiness / good things with potential for more in the floating tea leaves but overall very changeable or unstable; things could go in many different directions.

Background info: the cups were a wedding gift to my mother. She only uses them once a year, for special occasions. Now that my parents are seriously faced with moving, I was able to export 2 cups from the set (of 6). I use them every weekend and love them. I prepare tea in my little metal tea pot, which is standard issue in more rural supermarkets, and drink it on the balcony. It's a link to home, to drinking tea on the verandah and looking out over the hills, often misty. I look out over the road with its scooters and impatient commuters and remember happier days (say in a quavery voice for full effect) and feel about 73. I must look for a nice shirtwaister this week.

Do you have any tea leaf reading tips? I feel coffee ground reading is similar enough and will accept coffee grind reading tips too.  

PTD

"What do you feel like doing tonight?" H asks me as we drive home from the airport.

"I don't know. Let's see later. I'm waiting to see how long it takes before Post Trip Depression hits so I don't want to commit to anything yet," I reply.

Clever girl. PTD has hit. It probably wasn't helped by the phonecall from our RE to say that only one of the three embryos produced in this cycle is growing and that he recommends thawing our 2 frozen ones. So much for that trip then.

I look out our balcony at the building site opposite us and the slightly menacing house up the hill, as a scooter buzzes annoyingly up the road. The US is looking very attractive at this point. Europe is just looking bleak. Post Trip Depression. It always hits and it always takes me 2-4 weeks to find my equilibrium again, to get back into a rhythm. In the meantime I will just watch TV and eat Reeses, because I bought back a good stock. And if Reeses can't help the blues, what can? I wonder if that would work as a mantra ...

Moral Support

I am not a big driver. It's not my thing. I would rather walk or take my bike. So driving a lot and taking freeways tends to freak me out. In this context, add using the cheapest car rental available and you can imagine my stress level.

We're driving up the freeway, on the way to a historical site 63 miles away. There's a little dinging noise. "What's that?" asks H.

"I have no idea," I say, concentrating on the road and the GPS which is nestled between the steering wheel and the speedometer. ("I'll give it to you for free," says the car rental guy, pulling it out a drawer. "It has no stand.")

H whisks away the GPS to reveal both the petrol light and the battery light illuminated.

"I think we should go back," he says.

"Really?" I ask, concentrating on the road but now throwing worried glances at the lights on my dashboard.

"Yes," he says firmly, "And we should probably fill up with gas first."

"Where do I fill up?" I ask, looking around and seeing hotels, exit ramps and offices. "There are no filling stations! Where's a filling station?" My voice is rising and I'm getting panicky as cars whizz by me on either side.

"I don't know," says H with a shrug, quite calmly. "How would I know?"

"There's nothing!" I say shrilly. "In South Africa there are petrol stations on the side of the highway, here there's nothing! This is a foreign country for me!" 

"Take the next exit," says H. 

I fly by it. I'm thinking. What to do? What to do? Both lights are still on.

"Look," says H, "There's a gas station. Take the next exit. And it's right next to the highway, what do you know? Just to make you feel at home."

"Ha ha ha, very funny," I say.

We fill up with gas and turn around, heading back into the city to the car rental place. 

After we've driven a few miles, H comments, "Look, another gas station, next to the highway," says H, "It's just like South Africa."

And now, every time we pass a gas station on the highway, H shakes his head in mock wonder and goes, "A gas station right next to the highway, just like South Africa." If I wasn't concentrating so hard on the road, I would hit him.

 

Musical memory

Becky has written a great post on music she loves. It got me thinking about songs that can change my mood in an instant, put a smile on my face or take me back to another time. 

One of those singers is, funnily enough because there are very few French artists I love, Raphaël. I love his songs, his voice and the words. One of my favourites is Ne partons pas fâchés (Let's not separate angry). It's a typical guy statement - let's not part angry, it's not worth it - but his voice and the melody are so beautiful and upbeat that I forgive him, like I forgave my unrealiable boyfriends in my youth. He sings of of how beautiful he finds the girl, of how he wants to take her to the sea, of how there's nothing else to do but drink, of how he's sold his motor bike. It's his voice and his elfin face that gets me I think, and the song reminds me of being at university, of being young and that mad love you feel for guys at 20 when you stay up all night and decide to drive to the beach at 5 a.m. and you're high on nothing more than youth and alcohol and finally being with the person you have been obsessing over during all those lectures. Before infertility and losing babies and diabetes and making sure there is an apple juice in my handbag and that I have my insulin. Before all of that, when a day can suddenly turn into something magical just because a guy speaks to you. Or is that just early love?

My latest love is Paolo Nutini's song Candy. There's something in that song that could make me leave everything and take off in Paolo Nutini's car, driving into the distance, anywhere, as long as it takes us days to get there. Even if he does have the odd clunky line like "I'm just a stain on your bedsheet and you're my diamond in the rough". His voice just melts me.

Maybe I love these two guys' songs because they somehow encapsulate something of the guys I have lusted after. They have a bad boy quality mixed with a boyishness which gets me every time. It's probably why I love Macy Gray. She sings about loving the bad boys, about how she knows she shouldn't yet she does. And she has that great voice.

My mother loves music. We would dance to Buddy Holly and she would tell me how only the bad boys liked the Rolling Stones, and she would look like a different person, jiving away and singing all the words. Maybe that's why we love certain songs; because they evoke a younger emotion or time in us, they remind us of happy, carefree times. Ok, I am stopping now because I just sound old and care worn. Time to go to bed, and maybe listen to Raphaël on my iPod.