Still Passing Open Windows ....

Moving along

I am feeling much better. So much so that I feel embarassed about last week's breakdown but I want to thank my commentors for being so nice about it. It's funny, I regularly wear sackcloth and ashes about what a bad wife I am in not being able to give H gorgeous little H-lets to run up and down the corridor. Then I get told that H can still have children but me? possibly not, and I go to pieces. Obviously my desires are more present in all of this than I realise. It is all about me after all.

And there are still options. We are lucky enough to be able to consider other options. I definitely need to work on the glass-half-full-view.

It's been interesting, I can say that much.

Comments

I have to say to all of you that I am posting from an apple, which is a lot of fun, but unfortunately I can't get the hang of comments and after writing one long comment and being unable to post it, I have given up.

Before I go though, I wanted to suggest you drop by Becky's blog:
http://mommywantsvodka.psys.org/
(and I know, that probably doesn't even appear as a link, I am seriously challenged by this new operating system).
Becky writes about worrying throughout her second pregnancy but now having a one year old celebrating his birthday and she pays hommage to all the babies who did not make it through a scary pregnancy. It is a subject close to my heart. Thank you, Becky, for remembering the children who are not with us. Happy birthday to Alex. I am glad there are some happy endings.

Maybe not

Well, as the ambitious young businessman, H is now travelling with his laptop and so this has been the most connected holiday that I have had. It's nice actually. We can look up addresses of places we want to go. I can check my email. I can even post to my blog. It's a brave new world for me.

So far so good, but you haven't heard about our trip to the surrogacy agency and Super Duper Fertility Specialist. That was not so good.

It started off well. We flew in and as we flew over the city, I looked down and thought, "My child could be born here." It was a weird thought. We drove to the hotel and I wondered if good things could happen in this place but I felt nothing but apprehension. I burst into tears at breakfast out of sheer nerves and H calmed me down as he always does. I calmed down and we went to the agency first. Everyone there was very nice and extremely chatty and the meetings went well. Then we went to the Super Duper Doctor. We chatted in his office and he asked a few questions. Then there was the standard stirrup examination and he could only count 3 baseline follicules. "How many do you expect to see usually?" I asked him. "At least six," he said. To summarise, he wants me to do an FSH test and then we go on according to the results but the dreaded words "donor eggs" were mentioned, as well as "reduced success rate".

It seems so innocuous as I write it here but I was devastated. I am devastated. It's not a surprise. I expect the bad news now but I still hate having it confirmed. I took to my bed for the afternoon and it was not pretty, I was a horrible, nasty mess. I don't even understand it myself but having a baby has become the thng I want to achieve most in my life and I seem totally and completely unable to do it. I have never subscribed to the view that a woman's total fulfilment is to be found in being a wife and mother but not being to achieve motherhood devastates me more than any other failure yet. Maybe it is the repetition. Every year there seems to be another confirmation that I cannot do this and every year the confirmation seems to hint that my body is pretty much screwed.

I spoke to a relative who funnily enough had her children with donor eggs last night. She even said that in the end it hardly matters; your children are your children, you don't ask how they were conceived. It helps. It will just take a while to accept.

H is positive. He says it worked last year, can so much have changed? He says to wait for the FSH test results. I am just worrying.

Away, away for a year and a day

A farm manager who worked for my dad when I was at a very impressionable age used to reply that whenever we would ask him,

"Where are you going, Paul?"

"Away, away! For a year and a day!" he would always answer.

Another of his favourite statements was, "Man alive!" He used it for everything.

We loved him. He gave everyone in the family a card for Christmas. Mine was a chimp with a big toothy grin. Inside was written "Because you like men with a little hair on their chest". I was 12 and convinced that Paul could see my deepest, darkest secrets but not completely sure of what the card meant.

He left to work for a friend's family and walked in on her sitting on the loo. She was also around 12 when this happened and of course mortally embarrassed. (Actually I don't know what being 12 has to do with that, I think you would be mortally embarrassed at any age. Probably more so now.) Paul just turned around and walked out, saying, "Man alive, Lindy, can't you close the door!" What can I say? We were farm girls, no-one closed the loo door. It wasn't like the neighbours were going to see you and loos were usually at the end of the verandah anyway and miles away from the rest of the house.

So, yes, we are going away, away, for a week and a day. Thank bloody goodness. I need it. I had another meltdown last night about how long this bloody plan B is taking to get put into place and of course it was all H's fault. He had a phone call with the agency and I expected him to cover all the contract and cost details. He summarised the call in one sentence, answering ONE question of the many I thought he had on his list.

"How long were you on the phone for?" I asked.

"A couple of minutes," he replied.

"A couple of minutes! A couple of minutes?!!" I just exploded, probably in part because I had a stomach ache and had just seen my therapist who suggested that stomach aches are usually related to relationship issues, and not to anxiety as I thought, and man, was I venting on any relationship issue I could get hold of.

As I said, we need a holiday. We are looking forward to it. We will be nice to each other, I am sure. I am always a nicer person on holiday. Well, usually. Most days.

And I wish you all a good Easter. I hope there is lots of chocolate and somebody has a hot cross bun for me. I lurve hot cross buns.

Bored, bored and probably boring to know

I am bored. Bored stiff. Nothing to read. Nothing to watch on TV. Nothing to do and now I have reached that advanced stage of boredom where there is nothing I even want to do. I am starting to think of taking a sleeping pill and going to bed and it is only 5.13 p.m. Maybe two sleeping pills?

No news from our plan C people. At my 6 week post-partum check up the gynaecologist said that he had two patients with a similar history to mine who had gone on to have a third pregnancy with no problems. At my post-partum visit with my RE he said the likelihood of pre-term birth happening again was high. So ... We have 3 options; try again, adopt or try surrogacy. No, actually we have 4 options; try again, adopt, surrogacy or give up the idea of having children. For now we are thinking seriously of surrogacy but it is slow, as all infertility plans seem to be. 99.5% of the time is spent waiting. And waiting. And waiting. And to go by past experience, more waiting followed by crashing defeat. So often it feels like option 4 is what will eventually happen.

I just feel old. I feel like I have no more energy to have children, that I am too old to play with children or do stuff with them, that I would just be a crap mom now.

What do you do when you get so bored you can barely crawl off the couch?