Still Passing Open Windows ....

"'What happens if your choice is misguided?' I ask, softly.

Miss Moore takes a pear from the bowl and offers us the grapes to devour. 'You must try to correct it.' 

'But what if it's too late? What if you can't?'

There's a sad sympathy in Miss Moore's catlike eyes as she regards my painting again. She paints the thinnest sliver of shadow along the bottom of the apple, bringing it fully to life.

'Then you must find a way to live with it.'"

A Great and Terrible Beauty - Libba Bray

Twelve years ago a boyfriend broke up with me and for a year I lived wildly and recklessly. I threw out everything I had been with him and I got to know myself again, the wild, crazy parts I had lost with him. It was a good year in retrospect, very painful and intense at times but full of memories of my strength and a me that I liked and wanted to be. A while later I had an abnormal pap smear followed by panic and the conization that has had doctors tut tutting at the length of my cervix ever since.

I wonder at times if that's the cost of that year. The experiences of friends who have also had abnormal pap smears reassure me that it's not; it's just something that happens to some people, and at least it wasn't HIV or full-blown cancer. There are other choices I wonder about, that I play with, over and over again. I wonder about the train trip we took during my second pregnancy; if it had a role to play in the loss. I wonder about rejecting a doctor's advice which my current doctor is now suggesting and which I would probably do if I ever fell pregnant again. I wonder if I had followed it if I would have avoided these disastrous years. 

"What's the point of this sort of question?" H asks me angrily. I don't know, it's just a bad habit. In the end, they are just the choices I have made and I have to find a way to live with them. Reading about regrets in Libba Bray's A Great and Terrible Beauty, they seem romantically tragic and I am able to view them with a comfortable sense of distance. Art helping us to deal with pain, I guess. That and cycling home. Must cycle more.

Identities

 I'm doing an e-course with Susannah Conway on how you see yourself and your world by looking at different aspects of it - you, how the world sees you, the people around you etc. I've done a few e-courses on different themes and they've been fun, but I haven't done one for ages. I haven't felt like it, I haven't felt like having the commitment of an assignment to complete, however arty or insignificant it might have been. 

This one quietly appealed to me. Susannah Conway lost her partner and began to move in new direction professionally and personally and found a source of comfort and acceptance in what she was doing. People who have suffered interest me these days; I want to know how they deal with it, how they overcome it without denying it, what sort of lives they lead, how it has changed them and how they cope with that.

It feels like I am so defined by my infertility and loss. A friend talks about a party he organised for H and me and I sit there silently, wanting him to stop, because it was the first weekend I was pregnant with my son and I don't want to remember the hope and happiness of that time and how it is all gone now. We go out to dinner and a friend is pregnant and I almost stare rudely at her stomach, remembering scans and visits and wondering why the hell I couldn't make it to full term. I see photos and I place them according to what pregnancy followed or preceeded the photo. 

I have to create a new identity. I have to learn how to see myself without immediately seeing the situation in terms of infertility and lost children. I need to learn how to accept my life and somehow mold it into a life I can be proud of, in which I am doing things I have dreamt of. It's easy to say, easy to plan, harder to put into action but this course is part of the plan. At least it will occupy my mind and keep me off the Oh-I-have-suffered-so-much tracks I slip onto so effortlessly. 

2009

A new year. The last year we will have the farm. A year to try again. Walking through the airport on my way back to work and real life, I think decisively "In February we try a double cycle with my eggs and the donor eggs, whatever it costs." It reassures me to have a strong, firm decision. It helps me to think that I can make a difference, actually achieve this dream but mostly I am just treading water, wanting to get through as much time as possible and wanting this last year of my family home to last forever while wanting the pain of saying goodbye to be over now, today, packed up and behind me, painlessly in the past.  

Comparing

On this day last year H and a friend went to a local wine show. I stayed home. I can't remember what I did but I remember going downstairs afterwards to see all the boxes of wine they had bought piled up in the car. I remember walking with H as he carried the boxes from the car into our cellar. For once I didn't mind staying behind. I was pregnant with our daughter.

This year I went to the wine show. I wandered around, feeling woozy after only 4 tastings, looking for food. The wine show takes place in one of the local halls and it is just trestle tables manned (on the whole) by men in faintly grubby jeans and faded t-shirts. It is funny to think that some really good wine is being sold in this church bazaar manner. On my food hunt I bought cassoulet, moutarde au cognac, vinaigre au framboises and a little tin of foie gras. Then H and friend joined me and added 3 little tins of terrine to the bags. I decided I was going to try and learn to cook in a more French style. I have no idea what to do with moutarde au cognac but apparently it's very good with white meat and useful for deglazing a pan after cooking a side of beef (not that I have ever cooked a side of beef). Vinaigre au framboises is supposed to be good in a vinaigrette for a salad with hot chèvre chaud and that I do make. I have a very stinky goats cheese in the fridge which smells like a fart every time you open the fridge door.

The point of this all is that last year I was home pregnant, this year I went to the wine show. Neither situation is better than the other. It is just my life.

Going to the market this morning to buy a roast chicken, however, was a whole different story. Everywhere I looked there were kids and babies in prams. Everywhere I looked I saw the father's sharp nose and pinched face repeated in his son or a mother's wild black hair reproduced in each one of her three children or a beautiful little girl with her mother's colour eyes. And each child I saw was like a knife as I thought that I might very easily never share that link with my kids, if I even get there. It was good to go to the wine show where it just felt normal and I could think of last year without a twinge.

What are the chances?

We went to a barbeque yesterday. Nice barbeque, a crowd of people I like and haven't seen for a while, mostly unmarried and therefore pretty much childfree. Yes, you can see what's coming? Why couldn't I? So there I am sitting chatting to friends, having a pleasant time, when in walks a girl with her 2 month old baby. The whole barbeque comes to a grinding halt and everyone who is not around the baby is staring at it. Things calm down a little as she sits down and people start to hand the baby around but the conversation is very much about babies. I headed over to H who was chatting to a gay guy and thought, 'The conversation cannot be about babies here'," but as I stand there I read the guy's t-shirt and it says, "Newborn.mtn & Fitch". 'Come on, Carlynn,' I told myself, 'Now you are hallucinating, girl, it's just an Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirt, read it again.' "Newborn & Fitch" still stared me in the face. Fortunately the conversation was about restaurants.

Back

We're back home after being away for five weeks. When we landed, for the first time in years I felt glad to be back. Glad to see the dense green of the trees with their summer growth and even glad to see colleagues and be back at work. Europe seems to have regained some of its magic for me, I see why I love it again and don't think, "What on earth am I doing here?"

I had a dentist's appointment this morning before work and my path to work led through a market. It is a beautiful market. I must try and take a photo one day so you can see it. There are different types of lettuce laid out in boxes and rows and rows of raspberries and strawberries and gnarled bread and the people serving you have thick fingers with dark soil under their finger nails as if they had picked the vegetables that morning. They were selling edible flowers for salads, little purple blossoms and nasturtium-looking flowers, and if I had had more money I would bought some just because they were pretty.

"When do you go back?" asked a friend, referring to the next IVF cycle.

"Sometime in July or August," I said.

"Have you contacted your RE?" asked H.

"No," I said and just leaned back against the pillar behind me, waiting for the conversation to move along. 

I think the cancellation of the last IVF hit me harder than I realise. I don't want to talk about any of this any more. I don't want to think about it even. I don't even know if I want to do it. "What will bring you joy?" is the question I should be asking to decide the right direction for me, I read today. "So, what will bring me joy?" I thought, "A baby," I replied. "Even a baby with donor eggs?" I just don't know. Part of me thinks that I need to keep my eye on what I want and accept what it takes to get there while part of me is a little girl who stamps her foot and says, "I want it to be mine, all mine!" I feel as if I am becoming more and more superfluous. I won't carry this baby and now it looks as if this baby won't carry a part of me and that is hard. What makes me hesitate is that I don't even feel excited about the idea of a donor egg surrogate pregnancy. I just feel all 'yeah, whatever,' as if I am being given the last prize in the box and being told, "But look how much fun this egg cup is, look how much you can do with it! Look, you can fill it with water and empty it out, and you can ... erm, well, there will be so many fun things to do with it." And it's just not fair to feel this unexcited about a child who is going to be born.

Trying to enjoy life

Thank you to everyone who has commented. I am very touched as always and every time I read a comment I feel more guilty for my absence. I am lying on the couch and slouching around the streets bemoaning my lot and muttering, "Why me?" as I walk past yet another pregnant woman or twin stroller.

My uncle has this theory that you see what you are looking out for. I decided to test this theory and look for fairies. Probability of failure guaranteed I decided. During the day I saw 756 pregnant women or little babies and then all of a sudden, what do you know, I saw a little fairy doll dropped near a railing. I'm still looking out for fairies but the pregnant women keep blocking my view (if you read this, Becky, you're excluded, you can block my view any time!)

So, today I am trying to find 5 things that are going well in my life because honestly things are not that bad, I just keep seeing the pregnant woman in the corner and dammit, this cannot go on. Surely at some point it will end?

1. I am down a pants size at Banana Republic. Yes!!!!
2. It is not raining (listen, I'm trying to be positive)
3. H and I are not fighting (scraping the barrel here but 5 good things? Today that seems like a lot)\
4. I have 2 new cute tops to wear
5. There is nothing I am dreading this week (so far)

I mean, come on, I can enjoy life even though I have been trying for five years to have a child, even though I have lost two babies, even though the doctors are so un-positive about my chances of having a baby at all. I mean there are still things to enjoy. Aren't there? I just have to figure out how. My capacity for enjoyment seems to have shrivelled up completely.

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? 

On certain days I have some form of peace about the whole reproduction thing. On certain days I am relieved not to be monitoring my cycle, not to be planning acupuncturist's appointments, not to be trying to avoid coffee or eat raw food or take spirulina or whatever that month's magic pill was supposed to be. There is even a part of me that feels lighter and that skips from time to time with joy at the thought of being able to release everything that trying to fall pregnant and trying to stay pregnant involves in my life, of just being able to let go and live without worrying or thinking 700 times about everything I do.

Then this month my period was a little late. A very little late. My cycles are usually 24 days, this month it stretched to 27 days. Despite myself, despite everything that has happened and the probable end of another pregnancy, I felt that happiness that being newly pregnant after wanting it for so long brings. The world looked like a beautiful place. I felt special, happy with my secret. I even entertained thoughts of how I would have to cancel next week's trip, not go away for Easter either and how I wouldn't tell anyone, not even my doctor until 3 months. I felt that if this pregnancy had arrived miraculously without any intervention on my part that it would run a smooth course, even though Meg has walked that road and found it not to be the case. So not the case.

And now I think AF has arrived. It's good, I tell myself. I can carry out my fitness programme (ha ha ha) and continue trying to lose weight instead of spending 5 months wondering will it/won't it work this time. I can go to Paris and drink like a fish with an old university friend without worrying if the trip has damaged some fragile blood vessel which will bring the whole bang shoot to an end. I can go away for Easter and enjoy it with H and not sit at home trying to will the pregnancy to a successful end. Yes, this is much better.

But a part of me would still like to be pregnant. I was reading my journal from December when I wrote that sometimes it felt my grip on life was so tenuous, I felt it would almost be easier to drift away and that feeling of being on the edge of the void terrified me. I think surviving another loss would be horrendous, would possibly dip me into the void which I teeter on at times. And yet still some part of me would be so happy to be pregnant. It has to be something in my genes because all logic goes against it. It is possibly a bloody good thing that I don't fall pregnant naturally.

Missing

I miss being pregnant. I cannot help thinking that I should be around 7 months now. I know it doesn't help, I know I should avoid these thoughts but it keeps on coming back: I should still be pregnant. I miss the feeling of being special that I had when I was pregnant. I miss knowing that there was a child growing inside. I miss that feeling of hope. I miss thinking that I could just be a normal person with a child. I miss that.

Of course there was all the anxiety and fear that something could go wrong, but there was also so much hope.

We are working on other plans to have children but unless I am actively speaking to an agency, I feel that this is the end, that I will never have children, that I will always endure women's conversation as they discuss schools and childfriendly holidays, that I will always be the outsider. I feel that this is my life and one of the scary effects of this is that I pull away from H. This just feels like my pain and my issue. He could have children. He could move on and recover while I seem to be stuck. He seems to be doing ok. His job is going well and he is involved in exciting stuff. I am just in the swamps of self pity and despair and negativity. This just seems to be pulling us apart and I feel our connection growing weaker and weaker and weaker.

I am hoping this is just Valentine's Day fall out. All those happy, brightly coloured couples gazing into each other's eyes, reinforcing my view of stereotyped relationships where you get married and buy a house and have 2.3 children as the only way to live happily ever after.

How do you draw closer in bad times? How do you live happily ever after when your story is not the traditional one you grew up believing in?