Still Passing Open Windows ....

Floating in the pool and looking up at the palm trees and wondering how life can be so easy and so difficult at the same time. Am I just making it difficult? Is it a glass half full type of thing? Then a friend says, "I don't know how you handle that," and I feel better.

Really?

My RE phoned to say we have great embryos. Great. Can you believe it? And lots. Lots and lots. Ok, maybe not lots and lots because we are probably capable of zooming through many but we have lots. It's a wonderful feeling, it feels like a little lift from a balloon that keeps me from hitting the bottom with a thud, someone's arm holding me up and keeping me from getting too low.

The fact that they were not my eggs feels less important too. I'm excited. It's just odd comments that get to me and get me thinking of yak breeding on the Russian steppes. 

"His younger daughter, his real daughter, she's very warm with us always," says my mother-in-law, "But you know his older daughter has different genes, she's adopted, so it's understandable." 

I can practically see H tear off his shirt to reveal SuperHusband underneath, "Look at Carlynn and her sisters," he says, swooping in and grabbing the falling concrete block before it crushes me.

I play with the salt and wonder about buying a book on yak cheese making.

"The same parents and 3 very different personalities," continues H and the conversation moves on to one of my sisters, who can provide enough stuff to talk about for hours, and I am suitably distracted.

I suspect this is not the last comment like that from either my mother-in-law or my mother. Fortunately, and ironically, the men in our families are a little more tactful. Or maybe they just talk less and the opportunities for gaffs are fewer. 

Links

We are staying with my in-laws and I am going through my regular identity crisis. It happens every time I come here. 



Everything is different: the language, the dress code, time. I miss having children when I'm here, a lot. Everyone wants a piece of H; his mum, his nephews, his friends and as always, his work, and so inevitably I get less of him. 



I am sure I am the same when I go home. There is so much I want to see and do that I get involved in something in the kitchen or my mum wants to show me a corner of her garden or I need to sign something for my dad and before I know it, the whole morning has passed and I wonder what H has been doing. It's just what happens when one only spends 3 or 4 weeks a year at home, I know that but here I miss the babies I have never taken care of.



I

miss having a structure of my own, something that means something to me to do in my day; getting a baby up and dressed, doing breakfast, entertaining him or her or even them. This is the perfect place to have a baby; there is so much time and no rush and everyone has children and being a Latin culture, children are a major part of life. I feel like the pale weirdo; chubby with too casual clothes and slow Spanish and lack of confidence in big groups and Anglo-Saxon sense of time and ways of doing things.



It doesn't make any sense either. People are very warm, everyone speaks English and a form of Spanglish is totally acceptable. Pretty much everyone knows our story and we don't get many awkward questions about children. It's just that a child would need me and provide me with something in common with other women. In my everyday life I handle it fine, I think, but in a strange country where I don't have close friends, I feel

odd, a bit out of place, like I am missing something essential, as if I forgot to pack my bra and people are kindly not looking at my chest but it's obvious I look different.

Home

 

This is probably the place I love the most, where I feel comfortable and fully me. It is also the place where I feel the weight of the family and where my role feels like it was defined when I was a little girl and there is no possibility for me to redefine it and be less nice and less of who I am right now. There is less room for me to make mistakes and try something different. I am the oldest, responsible with a well-behaved life.

Now the door is open and I have a marvellous opportunity to explore, to try something new but I don't know what. I don't know if I have the energy or the commitment to give to something new. Today that sounds pathetic but I know there are times when a date or a conversation can make me run back home and shut the door and all I want to to do is knit and watch Two and a Half Men (which has taken a while but it's grown on me. At least there's some growth somewhere!)

This weekend was the second anniversary of the death of my daughter. Unlike the birth of my son, I don't know the date and I don't want to. There is a race that is run on the anniversary, however, and so I am reminded. "Are you going to watch?" asked my hairdresser. "No," I said simply. And Christmas also reminds me of that Christmas and vestiges of the black cloud return. Aah, my poor little girl, and you were such a fighter. She was a strong little character with lots of energy. If she had lived, I would probably be exhausted and arguing with her right now. Bugger. Bugger, bugger, bugger. (It's a good word. I never use it but it seems apt here).

So, this door is open and I can attempt to reshape my professional life. Should I? What should I do? What can I do? Aah, that last one is the tricky one.

  

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?