His name is Tristan Patrick...
...also known as Tricky.
Saturday, July 29, 2006
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Moonrising (The Birth)
Two days earlier it had been a full moon.
As we drive home along the ocean I watch it hanging, hugely round and golden, above the waves.
Maybe the moon will bring the baby I say to C and we laugh because we had been told that the full moon does bring the baby and so, lacking any better idea, we had planned around it – our pre-baby holiday away, the baby book reading, the writing down of the birth plan, my sister AJ booking her ticket from NZ for the full moon - two days before the due date, the last minute intensive antenatal class…all scheduled before the full moon.
The next full moon.
You’re one lunar month away, says my sister in law N later that night and I think about the time we have left and the time that has passed and how much has moved and changed within the ocean of our lives and still the moon rises, and still the waves crash and suddenly, shockingly there is no more time.
On Thursday, C goes back to Northern NSW, and I potter on at home. On Friday morning I wake, back cramps, waves of period like pain, bearable but uncomfortable.
And… confusing. This is… early.
It’s the gnocchi, I think.
Earlier I babysat the Naughty Nephews and we had dinner together. The pasta was a month past its use by date.
I, on the other hand, am a month early.
The pain continues, regular, unsettling, and in the morning I ring the Birth Centre to see what I should do. Take Panadeine, they tell me, and rest and ring again if they continue.
I do, and they do, and I ring again.
Come in, the midwife says, but if you are in labour we can’t take you because you need to be 37 weeks at least. You’ll have to go to Delivery.
I am horribly disappointed and when later N and I arrive at the Birth Centre, a midwife steers me back down the hall to the other doors.
No, I want to say, I can wait, please! I can do better. I can hang on. Give me another chance. But she’s gone.
And all through Friday the pain continues to wash over me, stops while I am in the bath where I sway and sing the world’s a big blue marble through my contractions and the warm water slops over my belly rising like an island from the deep.
And we wait and we wait and we wait…should I stay, should I go, should C fly home now, or next flight, or last flight, or drive, or wait, N is waiting with me, calmly updating C, giving me arnica but no, stay don’t rush, don’t panic, not happening, don’t go….
Fifteen minutes after C’s last flight leaves the midwife examines me again. I am 1cm and fully effaced. I’m not going anywhere.
C swears loudly and exclaims delightedly within the same breath. He will pack up, drive back, be here in about seven hours – about 1 in the morning.
My youngest sister K arrives from Newcastle, her fiancé has driven her the two hours and will drive back again immediately. You look after your sister, he tells her. Don’t leave her alone at the hospital. K is nervous, excited, didn’t read Active Birth - she did order it from the bookshop but it didn’t come in time…
No time, no time…
That night I am given strong doses of Panadeine and a couple of mild sleeping tablets and I have three blessed hours of pain free sleep. I’m still 1 cm on Saturday morning so we’re sent home again.
It’s the day of the baby shower which is now postponed although a couple of girlfriends turn up and we have tea and cake and lavender oil back massages and the day passes in a beautiful blur of love and sugar.
And the waves keep coming and I am starting to turn into myself, getting into the zone.
By Saturday night the waves are much harsher, I hang off the walls and breathe, N is telling me to float above the waves and indeed at the height of the pain I do see myself floating above… something dark and far away, a canyon, impenetrable, mysterious…and then the wave recedes and I find my feet on the other side.
Minute after minute, breath after breath, hour after hour.
Walking down the hallway to go back to the hospital, I have to stop and breathe and float on the walls directly outside the Naughty Nephew’s bedroom. Vaguely I am aware of their bright eyes, their curious voices.
Earlier Naughty Nephew the 2nd had asked his father about why it was hurting so much and he began to explain…well the baby has to come out through her vagina… NN2’s eyes goggle. His mouth dropped open. Struck temporarily speechless he covered his cheeks with his hands.
After the birth he will draw a card for me showing a picture of me “dilating” and “being dilated by K”.
After a gruesome but mercifully short drive on my hands and knees in the back of the car, we reach the hospital where they discover my bladder has hugely distended. I haven’t been to the toilet all day. I’ve been in the zone and also I’m a bit iffy using any toilet other than my own. I resolve to get over this bit of fastidiousness but in the meantime the midwife uses an in out catheter to draw off a litre of urine.
K, N and C carry dish after dish to the sink and drain it away.
Sometime during the night will come the first of many discussions concerning my multiple sclerosis. Could this have caused the bladder retention? No, I say, in between breathing and floating, nothing to do with it. The MS comes up again and again and underlying the questions is the Potential for Problem and hence the need for intervention.
I breathe and float and argue.
They examine me and disappointingly I am only 3cm dilated. The contractions on top of a full bladder have made me seem far further progressed than I actually am. This time I get a shot of Pethedine to let me sleep.
Again, a few hours of respite, a few hours to catch my breath, clean the slate, start again. Until now Pethedine was on my list of No Thankyous, but I have changed my tune. This early in the labour it is Pethedine that is giving me strength.
By Sunday nothing has changed and I am sent home again. This time we will have no visitors, nothing but quiet and nourishment and breathing and rest. I am given the Panadeine forte and the sleeping tablets again but this time they do little, perhaps allowing me to doze between contractions, little more.
And once again my bladder starts to shut down, although my sister K is by me all through the night with a little bowl to help me relieve the pressure.
And so on Monday afternoon , I am back at the hospital. The pain is not so great but I don’t want to make the same journey I made on Saturday night. This time they tell me my bladder is retaining again but not like the night before, 600 mls instead of a litre. (Are you sure this isn’t the MS?) So now I’m going to have a catheter throughout the labour.
I ask if I can have more Pethedine which means another examination. This time a midwife suspects I could have a bladder infection (Could it be the MS?) so I will have to go onto IV antibiotics during the labour. They put a canula in the back of my hand in readiness and throughout the labour I will snap at people who clutch or press at it.
Stop it! My hand, you’re pressing my hand!
I am aware of voices and murmurings around me but by now I am pretty much into the zone and time which seemed to be so short before has now become slippery and elastic and I slip and slide in and out of now and another state, a more liquid state of consciousness, full of strange imagery and half dreams.
A midwife breaks my waters and they gush hotly down my legs.
Somewhere in there the obstetrician has reappeared, more MS discussion, concern that this labour is taking so long, I am now, after all this time, only five centimeters and he is concerned because…..because…because…
… the voice weaves around me, he is talking Syntocin to hurry the labour along and I think of how this will throw me straight into the deep end of these crashing wave contractions and I know I am not ready.
I ask for Pethedine, let me sleep, let my body try and finish the job.
My support team are around me, rock solid, N has come home early from work and I have asked her to stay for the birth, K is holding my hand, C is with me and around me whispering to me you are so beautiful, you are doing so well, you are so strong…
They work tirelessly, massaging me, applying heat pack and whisking it away when I screech too hot too hot on the eve of each contraction. I am silently congratulating myself for not swearing, for staying calm even though it is patently obvious that the massage is all wrong that the hot packs are too hot and then in the wrong place, that K’s hands are too small and in the wrong place…
C tells me later that I would snap out instructions and the three would roll eyes and smile at each other and patiently work on around me.
You said that K’s hands were too small and that they were like monkey paws, he tells me and I gasp at the meanness and cry with laughter at my cranky shitty labouring self, forgiven over and over again.
And eventually I am given an ultimatum.
Pethedine, yes, but then in two hours, I’ll be reassessed, to see if Intervention Is Required to Speed Things Up.
two hours only…
time, time, so little of it, so much of it, not yet, not yet, not yet
C and N withdraw to restrategise.
They are aware that I am rapidly being seen as A Problem, there are tight little knots of staff discussing me, they hush up as K walks past. C and N create their own tight little knot while K stays with me.
The pethedine only lets me sleep between contractions, and these are getting bigger, the waves are rushing down my body from head to toe, my back arches up in between. In these moments I moan and sigh and think yes, I understand why women choose epidurals, I understand fearing and hating this pain, I understand elective caesarians and my little sister despairs as I whisper all my fear to her.
I’m scared, I’m scared, I can’t, I don’t want, it’s not fair…I’m scared
But in between these moments I am drifting at the entrance of that dark world, that strange half life, illuminated by pain. Flickers of face and image and strains of music and words. I have never seen that image before I say to myself, I have never heard those words before…
And later we say that may well have been transition, the doorway into Stage 2 because when I am finally examined, exactly two hours later, I am fully dilated.
Fuck your syntocin I think.
In stage 2, fully dilated, the door to our world as fully open as it can ever be to the baby squeezed deep within my body, a light in the darkness, a path to follow through the incessant squeeze and writhe and push…
Push, I hear people saying, it’s time to push…
…and I do, for nearly two hours, with nothing to show for it. I hang from my husband’s arms, my sister rubs at my legs and squeezes my toes, my sister in law rubs at my back and stops and starts and talks me through, her voice is a clear bell in the storm brewing about my body.
Here now is the dark place, the black place, the canyon I floated over during earlier contractions. The world has split wide open, full of stars and the bright lights of faces I can’t place or properly glimpse.
All love and all hell rests here and I see, suddenly how thin the veil is that lies between us. Only women glimpse this place, I think. Only women see this power.
The shock of this.
The sprawl of this.
The intense terror and beauty that winds me through this landscape, winds this place to me, marked by the painful waves crashing against me.
Push, I hear the voices saying, and I push and I push but I know it’s not enough.
We’re running out of time, the obstetrician says…that word again…
With each wave I push with my first breath, push hard at something but when I break to gulp air and push again it’s as if whatever I’m pushing against has slipped further from my reach.
…the time…the obstetrician says. His eyes are like green orbs, they seem sorrowful and fanatical all at once and I hear him saying ventouse but then also forceps and maybe even emergency caesarian and I think no, that’s not fair, after all this, that’s fucked…
So, push again, he says…your baby’s head is flexed, I ‘ll try and turn it now, but if this doesn’t work we need to look at the options, it’s been two and a half hours now… do you understand?
Do I understand?
I do, but I don’t. I understand the logic but I don’t understand the enormity, the power of what I’m experiencing.
He reaches into me and twists and I scream and I hang and clutch and berate and groan from the arms and hands of people who love and support me, until my body, my vessel, slides further into the heaving waters of this new ocean, this new storm…
We’re running out of time…
Time
Time
Time
And the time it takes is one breath, perhaps, or the combined heartbeat of me and the child trapped within me, or one hour, or one year, but when the next wave hits me, deep inside I suddenly scream.
Mum.
Get the baby out. Mum!
Breath
Breath
Push!
Muuuuuuum! Get the baby Mum. Please.
Breath.
Breath.
But there’s nothing. And then time stops.
The obstetrician asks: the ventouse?
And I open my eyes and see N’s face. I know she had the ventouse with her second child, Naughty Nephew the 2nd has told me about how we was “hoovered” out of his mother because he wanted to stay inside and play football “with the bones”…
She nods. Yes. The bell in the storm.
And I say yes.
And bang! the room fills with staff who seem to have been hovering in the hallway waiting for the word.
C tells me later how it became suddenly a room full of people, busy, swift, efficient. He knew and N knew but my sister K didn’t and she was scared.
I’m told to get up on the bed, the doctors are waiting and I mutter the doctors can fucking well wait as I heave myself up onto the bed. I am tired beyond tired and sore beyond sore.
And now, a new kind of scream, a new kind of sensation.
But it’s all part of the same water, the same journey, the same road that led me past that huge golden moon so many years ago.
The ventouse is slipping and the baby’s heart rate is dropping but here now perhaps is where my mother is able to do her own intervention, or perhaps it’s luck, or love, or skill or all these things, or nothing but suddenly I hear people say:
Here comes your baby’s head!
And I feel that burn, that stretch, that I have read about, heard about…and now the head is out…and now, impossibly quick after all that has gone before, the rest of my baby comes slithering out and suddenly there is a new person in the room, a new soul… and people are laughing and gasping and my sister is sobbing.
It’s a he.
And he’s on my belly, large and wet. And his bright eyes look at me in amazement.
And I stare back, in amazement, this is you. This is you.
We saw you being put into my body, in the end of a pipette.
We saw you sparkle in the night sky of my uterus, a star beside your sibling’s smaller weaker beat.
We saw you alone, a tiny dancing baby, shimmying beneath the ultrasound.
We saw you at 20 weeks, still moving and dancing and bigger and bigger…
We saw you pushing and batting at my flesh…
We saw you coming from far far away.
And we thought we loved you then.
But we were wrong.
Because now you’re here, and so the world has changed.
And the stars have wheeled and turned.
And the moon has come and gone.
And time has stood still for you.
And the oceans have run dry and refilled for you.
And my love. And your father’s love.
Immeasurable.
For you. Our son.
And things will never be the same again.
As we drive home along the ocean I watch it hanging, hugely round and golden, above the waves.
Maybe the moon will bring the baby I say to C and we laugh because we had been told that the full moon does bring the baby and so, lacking any better idea, we had planned around it – our pre-baby holiday away, the baby book reading, the writing down of the birth plan, my sister AJ booking her ticket from NZ for the full moon - two days before the due date, the last minute intensive antenatal class…all scheduled before the full moon.
The next full moon.
You’re one lunar month away, says my sister in law N later that night and I think about the time we have left and the time that has passed and how much has moved and changed within the ocean of our lives and still the moon rises, and still the waves crash and suddenly, shockingly there is no more time.
On Thursday, C goes back to Northern NSW, and I potter on at home. On Friday morning I wake, back cramps, waves of period like pain, bearable but uncomfortable.
And… confusing. This is… early.
It’s the gnocchi, I think.
Earlier I babysat the Naughty Nephews and we had dinner together. The pasta was a month past its use by date.
I, on the other hand, am a month early.
The pain continues, regular, unsettling, and in the morning I ring the Birth Centre to see what I should do. Take Panadeine, they tell me, and rest and ring again if they continue.
I do, and they do, and I ring again.
Come in, the midwife says, but if you are in labour we can’t take you because you need to be 37 weeks at least. You’ll have to go to Delivery.
I am horribly disappointed and when later N and I arrive at the Birth Centre, a midwife steers me back down the hall to the other doors.
No, I want to say, I can wait, please! I can do better. I can hang on. Give me another chance. But she’s gone.
And all through Friday the pain continues to wash over me, stops while I am in the bath where I sway and sing the world’s a big blue marble through my contractions and the warm water slops over my belly rising like an island from the deep.
And we wait and we wait and we wait…should I stay, should I go, should C fly home now, or next flight, or last flight, or drive, or wait, N is waiting with me, calmly updating C, giving me arnica but no, stay don’t rush, don’t panic, not happening, don’t go….
Fifteen minutes after C’s last flight leaves the midwife examines me again. I am 1cm and fully effaced. I’m not going anywhere.
C swears loudly and exclaims delightedly within the same breath. He will pack up, drive back, be here in about seven hours – about 1 in the morning.
My youngest sister K arrives from Newcastle, her fiancé has driven her the two hours and will drive back again immediately. You look after your sister, he tells her. Don’t leave her alone at the hospital. K is nervous, excited, didn’t read Active Birth - she did order it from the bookshop but it didn’t come in time…
No time, no time…
That night I am given strong doses of Panadeine and a couple of mild sleeping tablets and I have three blessed hours of pain free sleep. I’m still 1 cm on Saturday morning so we’re sent home again.
It’s the day of the baby shower which is now postponed although a couple of girlfriends turn up and we have tea and cake and lavender oil back massages and the day passes in a beautiful blur of love and sugar.
And the waves keep coming and I am starting to turn into myself, getting into the zone.
By Saturday night the waves are much harsher, I hang off the walls and breathe, N is telling me to float above the waves and indeed at the height of the pain I do see myself floating above… something dark and far away, a canyon, impenetrable, mysterious…and then the wave recedes and I find my feet on the other side.
Minute after minute, breath after breath, hour after hour.
Walking down the hallway to go back to the hospital, I have to stop and breathe and float on the walls directly outside the Naughty Nephew’s bedroom. Vaguely I am aware of their bright eyes, their curious voices.
Earlier Naughty Nephew the 2nd had asked his father about why it was hurting so much and he began to explain…well the baby has to come out through her vagina… NN2’s eyes goggle. His mouth dropped open. Struck temporarily speechless he covered his cheeks with his hands.
After the birth he will draw a card for me showing a picture of me “dilating” and “being dilated by K”.
After a gruesome but mercifully short drive on my hands and knees in the back of the car, we reach the hospital where they discover my bladder has hugely distended. I haven’t been to the toilet all day. I’ve been in the zone and also I’m a bit iffy using any toilet other than my own. I resolve to get over this bit of fastidiousness but in the meantime the midwife uses an in out catheter to draw off a litre of urine.
K, N and C carry dish after dish to the sink and drain it away.
Sometime during the night will come the first of many discussions concerning my multiple sclerosis. Could this have caused the bladder retention? No, I say, in between breathing and floating, nothing to do with it. The MS comes up again and again and underlying the questions is the Potential for Problem and hence the need for intervention.
I breathe and float and argue.
They examine me and disappointingly I am only 3cm dilated. The contractions on top of a full bladder have made me seem far further progressed than I actually am. This time I get a shot of Pethedine to let me sleep.
Again, a few hours of respite, a few hours to catch my breath, clean the slate, start again. Until now Pethedine was on my list of No Thankyous, but I have changed my tune. This early in the labour it is Pethedine that is giving me strength.
By Sunday nothing has changed and I am sent home again. This time we will have no visitors, nothing but quiet and nourishment and breathing and rest. I am given the Panadeine forte and the sleeping tablets again but this time they do little, perhaps allowing me to doze between contractions, little more.
And once again my bladder starts to shut down, although my sister K is by me all through the night with a little bowl to help me relieve the pressure.
And so on Monday afternoon , I am back at the hospital. The pain is not so great but I don’t want to make the same journey I made on Saturday night. This time they tell me my bladder is retaining again but not like the night before, 600 mls instead of a litre. (Are you sure this isn’t the MS?) So now I’m going to have a catheter throughout the labour.
I ask if I can have more Pethedine which means another examination. This time a midwife suspects I could have a bladder infection (Could it be the MS?) so I will have to go onto IV antibiotics during the labour. They put a canula in the back of my hand in readiness and throughout the labour I will snap at people who clutch or press at it.
Stop it! My hand, you’re pressing my hand!
I am aware of voices and murmurings around me but by now I am pretty much into the zone and time which seemed to be so short before has now become slippery and elastic and I slip and slide in and out of now and another state, a more liquid state of consciousness, full of strange imagery and half dreams.
A midwife breaks my waters and they gush hotly down my legs.
Somewhere in there the obstetrician has reappeared, more MS discussion, concern that this labour is taking so long, I am now, after all this time, only five centimeters and he is concerned because…..because…because…
… the voice weaves around me, he is talking Syntocin to hurry the labour along and I think of how this will throw me straight into the deep end of these crashing wave contractions and I know I am not ready.
I ask for Pethedine, let me sleep, let my body try and finish the job.
My support team are around me, rock solid, N has come home early from work and I have asked her to stay for the birth, K is holding my hand, C is with me and around me whispering to me you are so beautiful, you are doing so well, you are so strong…
They work tirelessly, massaging me, applying heat pack and whisking it away when I screech too hot too hot on the eve of each contraction. I am silently congratulating myself for not swearing, for staying calm even though it is patently obvious that the massage is all wrong that the hot packs are too hot and then in the wrong place, that K’s hands are too small and in the wrong place…
C tells me later that I would snap out instructions and the three would roll eyes and smile at each other and patiently work on around me.
You said that K’s hands were too small and that they were like monkey paws, he tells me and I gasp at the meanness and cry with laughter at my cranky shitty labouring self, forgiven over and over again.
And eventually I am given an ultimatum.
Pethedine, yes, but then in two hours, I’ll be reassessed, to see if Intervention Is Required to Speed Things Up.
two hours only…
time, time, so little of it, so much of it, not yet, not yet, not yet
C and N withdraw to restrategise.
They are aware that I am rapidly being seen as A Problem, there are tight little knots of staff discussing me, they hush up as K walks past. C and N create their own tight little knot while K stays with me.
The pethedine only lets me sleep between contractions, and these are getting bigger, the waves are rushing down my body from head to toe, my back arches up in between. In these moments I moan and sigh and think yes, I understand why women choose epidurals, I understand fearing and hating this pain, I understand elective caesarians and my little sister despairs as I whisper all my fear to her.
I’m scared, I’m scared, I can’t, I don’t want, it’s not fair…I’m scared
But in between these moments I am drifting at the entrance of that dark world, that strange half life, illuminated by pain. Flickers of face and image and strains of music and words. I have never seen that image before I say to myself, I have never heard those words before…
And later we say that may well have been transition, the doorway into Stage 2 because when I am finally examined, exactly two hours later, I am fully dilated.
Fuck your syntocin I think.
In stage 2, fully dilated, the door to our world as fully open as it can ever be to the baby squeezed deep within my body, a light in the darkness, a path to follow through the incessant squeeze and writhe and push…
Push, I hear people saying, it’s time to push…
…and I do, for nearly two hours, with nothing to show for it. I hang from my husband’s arms, my sister rubs at my legs and squeezes my toes, my sister in law rubs at my back and stops and starts and talks me through, her voice is a clear bell in the storm brewing about my body.
Here now is the dark place, the black place, the canyon I floated over during earlier contractions. The world has split wide open, full of stars and the bright lights of faces I can’t place or properly glimpse.
All love and all hell rests here and I see, suddenly how thin the veil is that lies between us. Only women glimpse this place, I think. Only women see this power.
The shock of this.
The sprawl of this.
The intense terror and beauty that winds me through this landscape, winds this place to me, marked by the painful waves crashing against me.
Push, I hear the voices saying, and I push and I push but I know it’s not enough.
We’re running out of time, the obstetrician says…that word again…
With each wave I push with my first breath, push hard at something but when I break to gulp air and push again it’s as if whatever I’m pushing against has slipped further from my reach.
…the time…the obstetrician says. His eyes are like green orbs, they seem sorrowful and fanatical all at once and I hear him saying ventouse but then also forceps and maybe even emergency caesarian and I think no, that’s not fair, after all this, that’s fucked…
So, push again, he says…your baby’s head is flexed, I ‘ll try and turn it now, but if this doesn’t work we need to look at the options, it’s been two and a half hours now… do you understand?
Do I understand?
I do, but I don’t. I understand the logic but I don’t understand the enormity, the power of what I’m experiencing.
He reaches into me and twists and I scream and I hang and clutch and berate and groan from the arms and hands of people who love and support me, until my body, my vessel, slides further into the heaving waters of this new ocean, this new storm…
We’re running out of time…
Time
Time
Time
And the time it takes is one breath, perhaps, or the combined heartbeat of me and the child trapped within me, or one hour, or one year, but when the next wave hits me, deep inside I suddenly scream.
Mum.
Get the baby out. Mum!
Breath
Breath
Push!
Muuuuuuum! Get the baby Mum. Please.
Breath.
Breath.
But there’s nothing. And then time stops.
The obstetrician asks: the ventouse?
And I open my eyes and see N’s face. I know she had the ventouse with her second child, Naughty Nephew the 2nd has told me about how we was “hoovered” out of his mother because he wanted to stay inside and play football “with the bones”…
She nods. Yes. The bell in the storm.
And I say yes.
And bang! the room fills with staff who seem to have been hovering in the hallway waiting for the word.
C tells me later how it became suddenly a room full of people, busy, swift, efficient. He knew and N knew but my sister K didn’t and she was scared.
I’m told to get up on the bed, the doctors are waiting and I mutter the doctors can fucking well wait as I heave myself up onto the bed. I am tired beyond tired and sore beyond sore.
And now, a new kind of scream, a new kind of sensation.
But it’s all part of the same water, the same journey, the same road that led me past that huge golden moon so many years ago.
The ventouse is slipping and the baby’s heart rate is dropping but here now perhaps is where my mother is able to do her own intervention, or perhaps it’s luck, or love, or skill or all these things, or nothing but suddenly I hear people say:
Here comes your baby’s head!
And I feel that burn, that stretch, that I have read about, heard about…and now the head is out…and now, impossibly quick after all that has gone before, the rest of my baby comes slithering out and suddenly there is a new person in the room, a new soul… and people are laughing and gasping and my sister is sobbing.
It’s a he.
And he’s on my belly, large and wet. And his bright eyes look at me in amazement.
And I stare back, in amazement, this is you. This is you.
We saw you being put into my body, in the end of a pipette.
We saw you sparkle in the night sky of my uterus, a star beside your sibling’s smaller weaker beat.
We saw you alone, a tiny dancing baby, shimmying beneath the ultrasound.
We saw you at 20 weeks, still moving and dancing and bigger and bigger…
We saw you pushing and batting at my flesh…
We saw you coming from far far away.
And we thought we loved you then.
But we were wrong.
Because now you’re here, and so the world has changed.
And the stars have wheeled and turned.
And the moon has come and gone.
And time has stood still for you.
And the oceans have run dry and refilled for you.
And my love. And your father’s love.
Immeasurable.
For you. Our son.
And things will never be the same again.
Friday, July 21, 2006
Hot Dog! We Have A Wiener!
I am BACK!
from the HOSPITAL!
with a BABY!
sweet mother of God that has got to be the most amazing and extraordinary thing i have ever done in my entire life. it was amazing but so loooooooong and hard but la so so so incredible
he is a BOY born finally on tuesday 18th july at apout 2pm
i am so tired and sore
and so happy
and c and i are completely smitten...
also obviously completely unprepared and shocked, but I'll get a pic up here as soon as...as...oh you know...
something...
i have a lot to say about this: the birth, the St Hellacious hospital experience, the great escape but you know what...he just fell asleep which is my cue to drop on the bed beside him.
thankyou lovely people
*smiles and falls into unconsciousness*
from the HOSPITAL!
with a BABY!
sweet mother of God that has got to be the most amazing and extraordinary thing i have ever done in my entire life. it was amazing but so loooooooong and hard but la so so so incredible
he is a BOY born finally on tuesday 18th july at apout 2pm
i am so tired and sore
and so happy
and c and i are completely smitten...
also obviously completely unprepared and shocked, but I'll get a pic up here as soon as...as...oh you know...
something...
i have a lot to say about this: the birth, the St Hellacious hospital experience, the great escape but you know what...he just fell asleep which is my cue to drop on the bed beside him.
thankyou lovely people
*smiles and falls into unconsciousness*
Sunday, July 16, 2006
Important Community Message
When you start to do the whole labour/contraction thing, DRINK LOTS OF FLUIDS.
Then, when you have drunk lots of fluids, DO LOTS OF WEEING.
If you don't you will end up with a bladder the size of a bowling ball. Amusingly you will assume this large swelling is baby's head and tell your husband to feel it and maybe give it a little kiss.
Won't you feel a dill later on!
The contractions will intensify. They will come at 2 to 3 minutes apart and you will be feeling very ordinary indeed. You will go back to the hospital that night, absolutely certain that THIS IS IT and you will find to your great displeasure that you are STILL ONLY ONE CENTIMETRE.
Plus your enormous bladder will need to be catheterised to remove the one litre of fluid so diligently drunk by you during the day.
After another night in at the hospital you will be again discharged and sent home, except this time you will be tested for a urinary tract infection.
On the good side, if this goes on for say... five more days you will be out of the premmie zone. The birth centre midwives will welcome you back.
On the bad side, you will be knackered.
Also, if baby who has been lying perfectly for ages, decides to go all posterior on your ass...those back achey contractions hurt like hell.
That is all.
Then, when you have drunk lots of fluids, DO LOTS OF WEEING.
If you don't you will end up with a bladder the size of a bowling ball. Amusingly you will assume this large swelling is baby's head and tell your husband to feel it and maybe give it a little kiss.
Won't you feel a dill later on!
The contractions will intensify. They will come at 2 to 3 minutes apart and you will be feeling very ordinary indeed. You will go back to the hospital that night, absolutely certain that THIS IS IT and you will find to your great displeasure that you are STILL ONLY ONE CENTIMETRE.
Plus your enormous bladder will need to be catheterised to remove the one litre of fluid so diligently drunk by you during the day.
After another night in at the hospital you will be again discharged and sent home, except this time you will be tested for a urinary tract infection.
On the good side, if this goes on for say... five more days you will be out of the premmie zone. The birth centre midwives will welcome you back.
On the bad side, you will be knackered.
Also, if baby who has been lying perfectly for ages, decides to go all posterior on your ass...those back achey contractions hurt like hell.
That is all.
Saturday, July 15, 2006
Home pass
When I was a kid living in Malaysia there was a tv show called The Big Blue Marble. It was about environmental stuff and the theme song started with a chorus of childish voices singing...the world's a big blue marble when you see it from up there...the sun and moon declare...our beauty's very rare...
It's a catchy little number and one that is deeply ingrained in my childhood psyche (much like the cheer song for the University of Minnesota, see post previously) so perhaps that's why I was singing it through contractions. In the bath. At the hospital.
Yes, I was told by the birth centre to come on in after the contractions that had started the night before...and just excuse me a moment as i get another one and have to call c to come and squeeze my thighs and rub my back...
phew, back again...so, in I went with sister in law N because C was still in northern NSW, a 6 hour drive away, only to be told that because I was just on 36 weeks I was considered premature and so I WAS NO LONGER ABLE TO USE THE BIRTH CENTRE.
Imagine my delight as they pointed me to the delivery ward. I was left alone to have a few more happy contractions and then, it seemed, I was about to be released. I talked as hard as I could about prelabour and my sister AJ being in it for a week before proper labour beginning, I argued that as an IVF baby, a FET baby no less, that it must be older than 36 weeks anyway, it was a 10 day blastocyst that was transferred... not only that I made a point to chat merrily throughout the contractions just to show I could though fuck knows what I was actually saying.
I was a hair's breadth from going home, C was on the phone asking if he should catch the last plane... god here's another one...breathing breathing making little moany noises but trying to keep my face loose...
we were saying no, no, plenty of time...and then the midwife decided to do a quick internal exam.
Cervix effaced, 1 cm dilated and midwife was touching the baby's head through the membranes.
And that's how, a few hours later, I ended up in the antenatal ward and then in the bath and the singing through contractions began.
Having missed the plane, C was now driving home and expected at half past 12 that night.
ooh ooh ouchy ow ow but relaxing face and breathe gasp breathe...
I decided I didn't want to progress any further without him. By the time he arrived...I hadn't.
And finally this morning, the new shift of doctors and midwives decided yes I could go home.
As a little goodbye present, my mucus plug emerged during a urine sample. It was beautiful, ruby red and gold. The midwife was pleased and encouraged us to leave quickly. It's just that if you stay, she said delicately, they'll put a clock on you and... we took the hint.
So here I am.
Back at home. N, C and my sister K are feeding me, rubbing my legs and organising all the baby stuff I failed to do. oooooh oooh another one, another one.....
Sadly the baby shower was cancelled but...then, it's currently raining and a baby is coming and as I look out my window and breathe through the last of the previous contraction I think: well there is a baby shower. Of sorts.
I've gone past the point of merry chatting through contractions, past even the point of singing old tv tunes. It's just breathing and vocalising through each contraction, calling for back massage or leg rubbing...and trying to remember each one brings me closer to this thing we have worked so hard to achieve.
and inside my baby stretches and moves closer and closer. Head is engaged, but then all our heads are engaged, all focused on this amazing journey.
oh baby oh baby ooh ooh
soon baby soon.
we're here and we're so looking forward to meeting you.
It's a catchy little number and one that is deeply ingrained in my childhood psyche (much like the cheer song for the University of Minnesota, see post previously) so perhaps that's why I was singing it through contractions. In the bath. At the hospital.
Yes, I was told by the birth centre to come on in after the contractions that had started the night before...and just excuse me a moment as i get another one and have to call c to come and squeeze my thighs and rub my back...
phew, back again...so, in I went with sister in law N because C was still in northern NSW, a 6 hour drive away, only to be told that because I was just on 36 weeks I was considered premature and so I WAS NO LONGER ABLE TO USE THE BIRTH CENTRE.
Imagine my delight as they pointed me to the delivery ward. I was left alone to have a few more happy contractions and then, it seemed, I was about to be released. I talked as hard as I could about prelabour and my sister AJ being in it for a week before proper labour beginning, I argued that as an IVF baby, a FET baby no less, that it must be older than 36 weeks anyway, it was a 10 day blastocyst that was transferred... not only that I made a point to chat merrily throughout the contractions just to show I could though fuck knows what I was actually saying.
I was a hair's breadth from going home, C was on the phone asking if he should catch the last plane... god here's another one...breathing breathing making little moany noises but trying to keep my face loose...
we were saying no, no, plenty of time...and then the midwife decided to do a quick internal exam.
Cervix effaced, 1 cm dilated and midwife was touching the baby's head through the membranes.
And that's how, a few hours later, I ended up in the antenatal ward and then in the bath and the singing through contractions began.
Having missed the plane, C was now driving home and expected at half past 12 that night.
ooh ooh ouchy ow ow but relaxing face and breathe gasp breathe...
I decided I didn't want to progress any further without him. By the time he arrived...I hadn't.
And finally this morning, the new shift of doctors and midwives decided yes I could go home.
As a little goodbye present, my mucus plug emerged during a urine sample. It was beautiful, ruby red and gold. The midwife was pleased and encouraged us to leave quickly. It's just that if you stay, she said delicately, they'll put a clock on you and... we took the hint.
So here I am.
Back at home. N, C and my sister K are feeding me, rubbing my legs and organising all the baby stuff I failed to do. oooooh oooh another one, another one.....
Sadly the baby shower was cancelled but...then, it's currently raining and a baby is coming and as I look out my window and breathe through the last of the previous contraction I think: well there is a baby shower. Of sorts.
I've gone past the point of merry chatting through contractions, past even the point of singing old tv tunes. It's just breathing and vocalising through each contraction, calling for back massage or leg rubbing...and trying to remember each one brings me closer to this thing we have worked so hard to achieve.
and inside my baby stretches and moves closer and closer. Head is engaged, but then all our heads are engaged, all focused on this amazing journey.
oh baby oh baby ooh ooh
soon baby soon.
we're here and we're so looking forward to meeting you.
Friday, July 14, 2006
But I'm NEVER early.
It's no secret that I was lagging at the back of the line when they dealt out 'organisation'. I pack at the last minute. I arrive at the last minute. I understand not the list or the timetable. These are strange and foreign beasts.
In a pivotal moment in my early schooling career, my third grade teacher Miss Morrison (from Minnesota, USA but slumming it for the year in Werribee, Australia) discovered that I had somehow failed to get my looseleaf binder into any form of useful system.
Instead of neat cardboard dividers separating my subjects, each nicely decorated with a hand drawn picture depicting SOCIETY or MATHS I had a haphazard sheaf of paper and cardboard all flung in together. They probably weren't even sitting on their rings properly and I distinctly remember that on the GEOGRAPHY divider I had drawn a duck.
But why? she asked me, distinct crossness in her voice. Why would you throw all your papers into your folder like this when I asked you all to organise your work and I even showed you how to do it.
Had she?
I was speechless. I felt my face grow red even as I racked my brains to remember when we had studied FOLDER ORGANISATION.
Luckily, one of my desk neighbours was able to recall that I had not been at school that day, that I had been off sick and so had missed all the crucial tips for keeping my folder nice.
I burst into tears with sheer relief.
Miss Morrison was instantly all smiles. There's no need to be upset, she said. I wasn't angry. Did you think I was a bear?
I laughed, as required, through my tears but inside I thought, a bear no, a fascist bullying cow, yes.
Having been in Sydney for the last week C has gone back to the country town where he is setting up a new arts project. The launch is on Wednesday and the plan is for him to come back on the Thursday or Friday. During that time I will finish a couple of writing deadlines. Then, the week after next I will be free to pack hospital bag, place rubber sheet over mattress, wash barrels of baby clothes I have been given and find the time for C and I to get away, on our own, just the two of us. And, tommorrow, I'm meant to be having a baby shower.
Cue outrageous laughter at Plan and pathetic postponement of organisation.
Last night I was woken with nasty period like pains. Every fifteen minutes. They were so unpleasant I had to get out of bed. Each time they hit I would do a little belly dancing which seemed to help.
I also spent a lot of time on the loo. It was as I hadn't been constipated for the past month. Surely that's just last night's gnochi I kept telling myself. After all it was a month over the useby date.
But the pains kept coming.
This morning I rang the birth centre. I'm having these pains, I told the midwife. Every ten to fifteen minutes. And...I'm just on 36 weeks.
That's fantastic, she said cheerfully. Although, if you are in labour you have to go to the labour ward, you can't come to the birth centre until you're 37 weeks.
Bugger, I said.
I rang C to let him know that we might have to go to Plan B. Not there was ever a proper Plan A.
It's alright, he said. It might not be It. Some people keep having contractions for weeks before they go into labour.
Oh goody, I said.
So here I am, perched over my computer, standing, because sitting hurts a bit too much. N went out this morning and got me some Panadeine (midwife wants me to take 2 and call in a couple of hours after resting) some new born nappies (because the only ones I have are the freebies I was given at a baby expo) wipes, jelly beans and barley sugars.
I started packing my bag. I started writing my blog.
Good lord, is this really how it's going to go?
The thing is, C said, we can't control this. It doesn't matter about the washing, or the packing or the deadlines. If this is going to happen there's nothing we can do about it.
And of course he's right.
Miss Morrison ended up being one of my favourite teachers. She was bright and cheery and she helped me organise my folder. I delighted in seeing my subjects set out neatly, my precisely placed dividers with appropriate pictures (the duck deemed more suited for NATURE). I enjoyed clicking the metal rings shut and doctoring the little holes in my work sheets with stick on plastic reinforcement rings.
It was a short lived pleasure. But I think back to those organised days with sweet nostalgia. And If I haven't retained her planning skills I did retain Miss Morrison's university theme song, some thirty years later...rah for the U of M!
While I've been writing this the pains have been coming quite regularly. The baby's moving about which is quite reassuring. Nothing like a kick in the guts to say: it's ok, we can do it!
Keep me posted, said the midwife when I spoke to her this morning.
I've put it on my list. It's right before...hold on for a week.
In a pivotal moment in my early schooling career, my third grade teacher Miss Morrison (from Minnesota, USA but slumming it for the year in Werribee, Australia) discovered that I had somehow failed to get my looseleaf binder into any form of useful system.
Instead of neat cardboard dividers separating my subjects, each nicely decorated with a hand drawn picture depicting SOCIETY or MATHS I had a haphazard sheaf of paper and cardboard all flung in together. They probably weren't even sitting on their rings properly and I distinctly remember that on the GEOGRAPHY divider I had drawn a duck.
But why? she asked me, distinct crossness in her voice. Why would you throw all your papers into your folder like this when I asked you all to organise your work and I even showed you how to do it.
Had she?
I was speechless. I felt my face grow red even as I racked my brains to remember when we had studied FOLDER ORGANISATION.
Luckily, one of my desk neighbours was able to recall that I had not been at school that day, that I had been off sick and so had missed all the crucial tips for keeping my folder nice.
I burst into tears with sheer relief.
Miss Morrison was instantly all smiles. There's no need to be upset, she said. I wasn't angry. Did you think I was a bear?
I laughed, as required, through my tears but inside I thought, a bear no, a fascist bullying cow, yes.
Having been in Sydney for the last week C has gone back to the country town where he is setting up a new arts project. The launch is on Wednesday and the plan is for him to come back on the Thursday or Friday. During that time I will finish a couple of writing deadlines. Then, the week after next I will be free to pack hospital bag, place rubber sheet over mattress, wash barrels of baby clothes I have been given and find the time for C and I to get away, on our own, just the two of us. And, tommorrow, I'm meant to be having a baby shower.
Cue outrageous laughter at Plan and pathetic postponement of organisation.
Last night I was woken with nasty period like pains. Every fifteen minutes. They were so unpleasant I had to get out of bed. Each time they hit I would do a little belly dancing which seemed to help.
I also spent a lot of time on the loo. It was as I hadn't been constipated for the past month. Surely that's just last night's gnochi I kept telling myself. After all it was a month over the useby date.
But the pains kept coming.
This morning I rang the birth centre. I'm having these pains, I told the midwife. Every ten to fifteen minutes. And...I'm just on 36 weeks.
That's fantastic, she said cheerfully. Although, if you are in labour you have to go to the labour ward, you can't come to the birth centre until you're 37 weeks.
Bugger, I said.
I rang C to let him know that we might have to go to Plan B. Not there was ever a proper Plan A.
It's alright, he said. It might not be It. Some people keep having contractions for weeks before they go into labour.
Oh goody, I said.
So here I am, perched over my computer, standing, because sitting hurts a bit too much. N went out this morning and got me some Panadeine (midwife wants me to take 2 and call in a couple of hours after resting) some new born nappies (because the only ones I have are the freebies I was given at a baby expo) wipes, jelly beans and barley sugars.
I started packing my bag. I started writing my blog.
Good lord, is this really how it's going to go?
The thing is, C said, we can't control this. It doesn't matter about the washing, or the packing or the deadlines. If this is going to happen there's nothing we can do about it.
And of course he's right.
Miss Morrison ended up being one of my favourite teachers. She was bright and cheery and she helped me organise my folder. I delighted in seeing my subjects set out neatly, my precisely placed dividers with appropriate pictures (the duck deemed more suited for NATURE). I enjoyed clicking the metal rings shut and doctoring the little holes in my work sheets with stick on plastic reinforcement rings.
It was a short lived pleasure. But I think back to those organised days with sweet nostalgia. And If I haven't retained her planning skills I did retain Miss Morrison's university theme song, some thirty years later...rah for the U of M!
While I've been writing this the pains have been coming quite regularly. The baby's moving about which is quite reassuring. Nothing like a kick in the guts to say: it's ok, we can do it!
Keep me posted, said the midwife when I spoke to her this morning.
I've put it on my list. It's right before...hold on for a week.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Brain To Bishop
I rang C in a state of great excitement.For a long time I have been fearful of Mush Brain, that evil pregnancy induced state of vagueness and general sorry what was that? syndrome.
But now I had proof positive that I could beat it!
Being school holidays my sister in law N had arranged a chess tournament. Slightly reluctantly I agreed to take part.
Chess, you see, is not my game. As a kid I played draughts and Chinese Checkers and a sort of dropping beans in a little wooden pot game. But not chess.
But then, the tournament started and an amazing thing happened and lo…I won ALL my games!
Every single one!
Even the grand final!
At Chess! Chess, I say! Which I only learned to play as a grown up. And is much harder than that game where you drop the little beans in a wooden pot.
Did you hear me C, I shouted down the phone.
Every single game! I was the champion!
And that means I AM NOT IN THE GRIP OF MUSH BRAIN!!!.
How can I be when my focus, concentration and strategy skills are obviously razor sharp?
There was a delicate pause.
But... C said, you were playing against a six year old.
AND a nine year old, AND their mother, I retaliated.
...who was playing in tandem with the four year old, C pointed out.
But it was chess, I whined. Chess is Hard. Some pieces go one way, some pieces go another. And the six year old kept making up rules which sounded like they might be true so I had to keep checking with his mother.
Mmmm said C.
It's not like dropping beans in a little wooden pot, I said crossly. In fact I don't even know if that was a real game, it might just have been me liking the plunkety plunk sounds.
What are you talking about, asked C.
I’d really like to end this post neatly with some sort of witty observation about chess and playing against one’s nephews and so forth but... it all seems suddenly too much for me and my it’s a nice day today and where did I leave my cup of tea?
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
The Pain Event (34 Weeks)
I left home at the age of 19. My parents were not particularly impressed. For starters, my timing was seen as rather poor. A couple of weeks earlier my paternal grandmother had died of thyroid cancer.
My mother, being a trained nurse, had taken on the role of carer in that last stage of the cancer, my grandfather being hopelessly out of his depth both emotionally and physically. As a result of my mother’s efforts, my grandmother was able to die with dignity in her own bed.
It wasn’t just my mother who waited out those final weeks. Our entire family, Mum, Dad, my three younger sisters and I, had decamped from Newcastle and were now living in the fold up bunkbeds and strange faux-holiday ambience of my grandparents’ caravan. Once the getaway vehicle for countless family adventures it was now permanently parked on the pebblemix drive, a few feet away from my grandmother’s bedroom window.
She eventually died after a few weeks of this strange sad caravan limbo and then Mum and Dad took us down the coast to spend some time in a friend’s beach house. The idea was to have some family time, some grieving time, some quiet reflective time.
The problem for me was that I had left a boyfriend in Newcastle and an active sex life, both of which I was missing. I understood the need to support my grandfather and look after my grandmother, I respected my parents' wish to spend precious post funeral days in a poorly furnished two bedroom fibro minus television and telephone, but when we got back to Newcastle I packed a bag and announced my intention to stay with my boyfriend in Sydney over the weekend so we could go sailing.
And my parents hit the roof.
Looking back I imagine they felt it was too soon to be enjoying myself so soon after such a sad event. My father, who had said little to me about his grief at losing his mother, was probably disgusted at my blatant desire to hang off the edge of a speeding catamaran not to mention my unspoken desire to hang off my boyfriend.
I argued that I needed a break, that I wanted a holiday…
But you just had a holiday, my father snapped back. We just spent a week in a beach house.
And I hated every minute, I wanted to say.
Because the thing is, the holiday I want is from you.
I didn’t say those things, some vestigal sensitivity must have held me back. Instead I began to whine to get my way, always a useful tactic when dealing with disapproving parents. In this instance, my piercing tones finally burst the emotional dam in my father, he was able to shout that I was an ungrateful bitch, which obviously went down very well with me, and finally he offered this ultimatum: if you walk out that door you’re never coming back.
It was a no brainer.
Fine, I shouted back. I’ll move out when I get back from Sydney.
My face was grim, my eyes hard and stony but as I walked down the stairs I suddenly heard my mother break down and cry. It was this more than any of my father’s threats that nearly propelled me back up the stairs but instead I kept going, knowing that a line had been crossed.
I would go to Sydney and have plenty of sailing and sex, I would come back and move into a friend’s place, close to the university. After a few months my parents would visit my new house bringing housewarming presents and hugging me close. I would return to the family home, we would move beyond the incident and never speak of it again, but on that day standing on the stairs that led to the front door, hovering between anger and regret I realised that for the first time I had knowingly broken my mother’s heart. I could have taken a knife out of the kitchen drawer and stabbed her and I knew it could not have hurt her more than the sound of my feet marching out the front door.
I had caused this pain.
I had done it willingly.
And I cried bitterly at the thought.
A few years earlier I had kept a diary and one particularly ugly day I had written about how much I hated my fucking parents, each of them, my fucking mother and my fucking father and how I wished they would both just fuck off.
I have no idea why I had written this, I only remember the words scrawled in pencil, jagged furious scribblings inarticulate with 15 year old rage.
And I remember coming home from school to find my diary open to that page on my desk, a pointed message that my parents had found the page and read it.
For several years whenever I thought about this discovery I became furious all over again at the invasion of my privacy. But then, not long ago, I thought about this incident and instead of feeling the familiar white hot incandescence of my teenage indignation I wondered how I would feel, reading those words, about me, in my child’s handwriting.
It was a strange sensation and oddly painful.
These and other memories came back to me this week following a phonecall from a friend I hadn’t seen in a long time.
I hear you’re pregnant, he said, congratulations, I think you'll be a great mother.
The friend asked where we were having the baby and we discussed the hospital, the same place his wife had her baby recently, except, I said, we're hoping to use the Birth Centre and be under midwife care.
My friend made a small derisive sound. His wife had had an elective caesarian.
Oh, he said, you’re having one of those ‘natural’ births.
Well, I said, we’re going to try. It’s very possible I’ll be wheeled screaming straight into the labour ward and the warm comforting arms of Mr Epidural but I’m going to try my best to have a ‘natural’ birth, yes.
I didn’t mention the stretches and the birth plans and the support team, it seemed pointless.
I just don’t understand why you’d put yourself through all that… and then with a Herculean effort at civility he changed his tone. Oh well, he said cheerfully, to each their own.
The word he had omitted was pain.
I understood that he saw pain as a needless exercise, as an unnecessary element of the child-bearing procedure. Nobody likes pain. God knows I don’t, I am after all the woman who, years ago, when my then GP had greeted my announcement that I wanted to have a baby with the news that I should start with a blood test, blanched with horror and shrieked a bloodtest!?
Pain is unpleasant.
Pain makes you cry.
Pain makes other people cry for you because there’s not much they can do to help and also because in an effort to alleviate one’s pain one might reach for one’s husband’s gonads and scream Breathe Through This, Cunt.
Oh yes, it’s all ahead of me.
I didn’t say to my friend that I’m afraid of pain too, but I am looking forward to the birth of my child. That I have struggled so long and so hard to bring this soul into the world and one of those struggles was giving up things like coffee and wine and painkillers and anything else I thought might possibly harm or hurt my baby. That to avoid pain in the way he preferred I would need to agree to the use of drugs that might possibly harm or hurt my baby. That I would perhaps undergo invasive major surgery.
I’m not inflexible about this. I know I might become exhausted, the baby may become distressed, there are a myriad of crisis situations that may necessitate intervention and I’m prepared to do what it takes. Including the drugs and the surgery and whatever else I have to do to ensure a healthy baby.
But just here, just now, with six weeks left to go, yes, I do want to have a ‘natural’ birth.
And the thing is, I should have said to my friend, that pain you can’t even bring yourself to mention? That’s just the start buddy. You’ve got a daughter whom you adore more than life itself. I saw the photographs you sent via email, the radiance on you and your wife’s face as you held up your precious bundle.
But amongst the many golden moments of joy, there will still be pain, blackly stitched in fear, in illness, in injury or accident, in anger, in rage, in death. How does a father feel when his daughter says she hates her family or she leaves home under a dark cloud with her mother crying beside him? And for some parents, the pain is overwhelming. Last week an 8 year old girl was found murdered in a shopping centre toilet. The week before that a father accidentally ran his toddler over as he reversed down the driveway.
There is no anaesthetic for parenthood.
In the last days of my mother’s life, we, her daughters and husband, were gathered around her bed day and night like moths drawn to the intoxicating glow of her dying.
Now it was my turn to have my heart broken, and not fast or cleanly, but slowly, in splintering fragments of grief. I was losing the person I loved most in the world and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
In one of my last precious moments with my mother, curled up beside her on the bed, while my sisters and father were getting dinner, or sleep, or simply walking their own patterns of distress around the hospice, she asked me to forgive her. I was immediately resentful at the thought that, now, with death twiddling his thumbs nearby, she felt the need for forgiveness.
Why, I said, my blind stupid tears welling up immediately, why do you need to be forgiven?
For all the times I made you cry.
Our faces were very close together, our voices little more than whispers.
Oh yes, I said, of course yes.
And, she continued… I forgive you. For all the times you made me cry.
We lay like this for moments or perhaps it was hours, this woman and her first born child, mentally snipping together at the black stitches of our past.
We had 26 years together, my mother and I.
When you forgive the pain caused by each other that’s a heck of a lot of gold.
My mother, being a trained nurse, had taken on the role of carer in that last stage of the cancer, my grandfather being hopelessly out of his depth both emotionally and physically. As a result of my mother’s efforts, my grandmother was able to die with dignity in her own bed.
It wasn’t just my mother who waited out those final weeks. Our entire family, Mum, Dad, my three younger sisters and I, had decamped from Newcastle and were now living in the fold up bunkbeds and strange faux-holiday ambience of my grandparents’ caravan. Once the getaway vehicle for countless family adventures it was now permanently parked on the pebblemix drive, a few feet away from my grandmother’s bedroom window.
She eventually died after a few weeks of this strange sad caravan limbo and then Mum and Dad took us down the coast to spend some time in a friend’s beach house. The idea was to have some family time, some grieving time, some quiet reflective time.
The problem for me was that I had left a boyfriend in Newcastle and an active sex life, both of which I was missing. I understood the need to support my grandfather and look after my grandmother, I respected my parents' wish to spend precious post funeral days in a poorly furnished two bedroom fibro minus television and telephone, but when we got back to Newcastle I packed a bag and announced my intention to stay with my boyfriend in Sydney over the weekend so we could go sailing.
And my parents hit the roof.
Looking back I imagine they felt it was too soon to be enjoying myself so soon after such a sad event. My father, who had said little to me about his grief at losing his mother, was probably disgusted at my blatant desire to hang off the edge of a speeding catamaran not to mention my unspoken desire to hang off my boyfriend.
I argued that I needed a break, that I wanted a holiday…
But you just had a holiday, my father snapped back. We just spent a week in a beach house.
And I hated every minute, I wanted to say.
Because the thing is, the holiday I want is from you.
I didn’t say those things, some vestigal sensitivity must have held me back. Instead I began to whine to get my way, always a useful tactic when dealing with disapproving parents. In this instance, my piercing tones finally burst the emotional dam in my father, he was able to shout that I was an ungrateful bitch, which obviously went down very well with me, and finally he offered this ultimatum: if you walk out that door you’re never coming back.
It was a no brainer.
Fine, I shouted back. I’ll move out when I get back from Sydney.
My face was grim, my eyes hard and stony but as I walked down the stairs I suddenly heard my mother break down and cry. It was this more than any of my father’s threats that nearly propelled me back up the stairs but instead I kept going, knowing that a line had been crossed.
I would go to Sydney and have plenty of sailing and sex, I would come back and move into a friend’s place, close to the university. After a few months my parents would visit my new house bringing housewarming presents and hugging me close. I would return to the family home, we would move beyond the incident and never speak of it again, but on that day standing on the stairs that led to the front door, hovering between anger and regret I realised that for the first time I had knowingly broken my mother’s heart. I could have taken a knife out of the kitchen drawer and stabbed her and I knew it could not have hurt her more than the sound of my feet marching out the front door.
I had caused this pain.
I had done it willingly.
And I cried bitterly at the thought.
A few years earlier I had kept a diary and one particularly ugly day I had written about how much I hated my fucking parents, each of them, my fucking mother and my fucking father and how I wished they would both just fuck off.
I have no idea why I had written this, I only remember the words scrawled in pencil, jagged furious scribblings inarticulate with 15 year old rage.
And I remember coming home from school to find my diary open to that page on my desk, a pointed message that my parents had found the page and read it.
For several years whenever I thought about this discovery I became furious all over again at the invasion of my privacy. But then, not long ago, I thought about this incident and instead of feeling the familiar white hot incandescence of my teenage indignation I wondered how I would feel, reading those words, about me, in my child’s handwriting.
It was a strange sensation and oddly painful.
These and other memories came back to me this week following a phonecall from a friend I hadn’t seen in a long time.
I hear you’re pregnant, he said, congratulations, I think you'll be a great mother.
The friend asked where we were having the baby and we discussed the hospital, the same place his wife had her baby recently, except, I said, we're hoping to use the Birth Centre and be under midwife care.
My friend made a small derisive sound. His wife had had an elective caesarian.
Oh, he said, you’re having one of those ‘natural’ births.
Well, I said, we’re going to try. It’s very possible I’ll be wheeled screaming straight into the labour ward and the warm comforting arms of Mr Epidural but I’m going to try my best to have a ‘natural’ birth, yes.
I didn’t mention the stretches and the birth plans and the support team, it seemed pointless.
I just don’t understand why you’d put yourself through all that… and then with a Herculean effort at civility he changed his tone. Oh well, he said cheerfully, to each their own.
The word he had omitted was pain.
I understood that he saw pain as a needless exercise, as an unnecessary element of the child-bearing procedure. Nobody likes pain. God knows I don’t, I am after all the woman who, years ago, when my then GP had greeted my announcement that I wanted to have a baby with the news that I should start with a blood test, blanched with horror and shrieked a bloodtest!?
Pain is unpleasant.
Pain makes you cry.
Pain makes other people cry for you because there’s not much they can do to help and also because in an effort to alleviate one’s pain one might reach for one’s husband’s gonads and scream Breathe Through This, Cunt.
Oh yes, it’s all ahead of me.
I didn’t say to my friend that I’m afraid of pain too, but I am looking forward to the birth of my child. That I have struggled so long and so hard to bring this soul into the world and one of those struggles was giving up things like coffee and wine and painkillers and anything else I thought might possibly harm or hurt my baby. That to avoid pain in the way he preferred I would need to agree to the use of drugs that might possibly harm or hurt my baby. That I would perhaps undergo invasive major surgery.
I’m not inflexible about this. I know I might become exhausted, the baby may become distressed, there are a myriad of crisis situations that may necessitate intervention and I’m prepared to do what it takes. Including the drugs and the surgery and whatever else I have to do to ensure a healthy baby.
But just here, just now, with six weeks left to go, yes, I do want to have a ‘natural’ birth.
And the thing is, I should have said to my friend, that pain you can’t even bring yourself to mention? That’s just the start buddy. You’ve got a daughter whom you adore more than life itself. I saw the photographs you sent via email, the radiance on you and your wife’s face as you held up your precious bundle.
But amongst the many golden moments of joy, there will still be pain, blackly stitched in fear, in illness, in injury or accident, in anger, in rage, in death. How does a father feel when his daughter says she hates her family or she leaves home under a dark cloud with her mother crying beside him? And for some parents, the pain is overwhelming. Last week an 8 year old girl was found murdered in a shopping centre toilet. The week before that a father accidentally ran his toddler over as he reversed down the driveway.
There is no anaesthetic for parenthood.
In the last days of my mother’s life, we, her daughters and husband, were gathered around her bed day and night like moths drawn to the intoxicating glow of her dying.
Now it was my turn to have my heart broken, and not fast or cleanly, but slowly, in splintering fragments of grief. I was losing the person I loved most in the world and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
In one of my last precious moments with my mother, curled up beside her on the bed, while my sisters and father were getting dinner, or sleep, or simply walking their own patterns of distress around the hospice, she asked me to forgive her. I was immediately resentful at the thought that, now, with death twiddling his thumbs nearby, she felt the need for forgiveness.
Why, I said, my blind stupid tears welling up immediately, why do you need to be forgiven?
For all the times I made you cry.
Our faces were very close together, our voices little more than whispers.
Oh yes, I said, of course yes.
And, she continued… I forgive you. For all the times you made me cry.
We lay like this for moments or perhaps it was hours, this woman and her first born child, mentally snipping together at the black stitches of our past.
We had 26 years together, my mother and I.
When you forgive the pain caused by each other that’s a heck of a lot of gold.
Thursday, May 18, 2006
Letter To A 28 Week Old Mathematical Genius
Dear Tiny But Feisty Person Currently Occupying My Uterus
It’s been a while but I’m finally putting fingers to keyboard. How’s it all going in the Pink Palace?
A little snug is what I’m guessing, what with all the feet I keep finding in my bellybutton.
The other morning your father was feeling you kick about and he decided he’d do a little gentle prodding back and then suddenly the two of you were engaged in some sort of bizarre poke-off where he would poke at you and you would poke back.
I was banned from laughing because the movement was preventing C from feeling the full force of your amazing new power and anyway who am I right, I’m just the large warm fleshy barrier lying between you both.
When you both finally collapsed with exhaustion, C said he was teaching you how to count.
This week C is away setting up a new project. I told him that you started doing that belly button poking thing again and he got sad because he was missing you. So then I said that I didn’t poke you back because that was a special game you have, just between the two of you, and that made him feel better.
Of course I was lying through my teeth and when he gets back on the weekend you can show off your Long Division skills.
A couple of weeks ago your aunty N did the Scientifically Proved Ring Test over my belly which said that you must be a Boy. And then, while I was at a Playwrights’ Conference on the weekend a woman told me that according to every Italian woman she had ever known, my bump was boy shaped. But one of my friends had a psychic episode and declared you were a Girl and then last night I dreamed that I had already given birth to you and you were indeed a Girl.
So who knows?
The dream actually went on to reveal you were also incredibly slippery and I dropped you a couple of times and then decided you really would be better off back inside me and I'd only given birth so prematurely because I was impatient to meet you and then I was working out the best way to swallow you whole and then thankfully I woke up.
Your cousins the Naughty Nephews have been very helpful with suggesting names and because we’re not sure of your gender (although that woman with all the Italian women friends was very persuasive) they have given me both sorts.
Naughty Nephew the 1st has provided a selection of lovely names all based on girls in his class he fancies or boys who are among his best friends. Among the girls he rates Chloe and Phoebe very highly and I was pleased to note that the other day he included Bronte as a suggestion. I am yet to meet Phoebe or Chloe but I have met Bronte several times and she is a lovely thoughtful polite little girl.
Naughty Nephew the 2nd, with his finger firmly on the Literary Pulse, has suggested Klaus, Violet or Sunny (being the names of the Baudelaire Children in Lemony Snicket’s delightful “A Series Of Unfortunate Events”). Violet gets extra points because she is also the daughter in “The Incredibles”.
And finally Naughty Nephew the 3rd, he of the blue saucer eyes, has suggested…his own name. But with a 2 on the end. You know, like with Shrek 2.
Today, I went to visit Grumpy Grandad (That’s Grumpy Great Grandad to you) and he suggested that I could use my deceased mother’s name.
Just on the off chance that it hadn’t occurred to me.
All suggestions are gratefully received of course. But at the moment I treat names the same way I treat gifts of baby clothes and baby items. I just don’t know what to do with them so I shove them in a cupboard or a corner to deal with later.
Even now, at just on 28 weeks, it still seems a long time till you’ll be safely in my arms.
Even with the dreams and the Ring Test and Poking Belly Button games, it still seems surreal.
Yes, you might be a baby, but you also might be my liver wearing boots and equipped with tiny fists.
Which of course would explain why you keep trying to beat up my bladder.
But despite the regular thrashings of various internal organs, despite the necessity to sleep sitting up, despite the sore back and shoulders...things are good.
Sometimes I look at my belly in the mirror and am shocked at how quickly my body has changed. But shocked in a good way. I can be hypnotized watching the ripples in my skin caused by you turning over, or stretching, or sculling a little amniotic fluid (like I know you do). I feel you when I'm driving or watching Very Boring Plays or when I'm meant to be having important business type conversations and it makes me smile.
I don’t mind too much when old ladies and friends of my parents touch my belly because I think it’s amazing too. In fact I think it's a complete miracle and maybe it's my civic duty to provide a Belly Touching service to anyone who needs it because that's how incredible and wonderful it all is.
And above all, I'm happy.
That's you who’s done that.
So thankyou.
And give the bladder a break some times, ok?
OvaGirlxxx
It’s been a while but I’m finally putting fingers to keyboard. How’s it all going in the Pink Palace?
A little snug is what I’m guessing, what with all the feet I keep finding in my bellybutton.
The other morning your father was feeling you kick about and he decided he’d do a little gentle prodding back and then suddenly the two of you were engaged in some sort of bizarre poke-off where he would poke at you and you would poke back.
I was banned from laughing because the movement was preventing C from feeling the full force of your amazing new power and anyway who am I right, I’m just the large warm fleshy barrier lying between you both.
When you both finally collapsed with exhaustion, C said he was teaching you how to count.
This week C is away setting up a new project. I told him that you started doing that belly button poking thing again and he got sad because he was missing you. So then I said that I didn’t poke you back because that was a special game you have, just between the two of you, and that made him feel better.
Of course I was lying through my teeth and when he gets back on the weekend you can show off your Long Division skills.
A couple of weeks ago your aunty N did the Scientifically Proved Ring Test over my belly which said that you must be a Boy. And then, while I was at a Playwrights’ Conference on the weekend a woman told me that according to every Italian woman she had ever known, my bump was boy shaped. But one of my friends had a psychic episode and declared you were a Girl and then last night I dreamed that I had already given birth to you and you were indeed a Girl.
So who knows?
The dream actually went on to reveal you were also incredibly slippery and I dropped you a couple of times and then decided you really would be better off back inside me and I'd only given birth so prematurely because I was impatient to meet you and then I was working out the best way to swallow you whole and then thankfully I woke up.
Your cousins the Naughty Nephews have been very helpful with suggesting names and because we’re not sure of your gender (although that woman with all the Italian women friends was very persuasive) they have given me both sorts.
Naughty Nephew the 1st has provided a selection of lovely names all based on girls in his class he fancies or boys who are among his best friends. Among the girls he rates Chloe and Phoebe very highly and I was pleased to note that the other day he included Bronte as a suggestion. I am yet to meet Phoebe or Chloe but I have met Bronte several times and she is a lovely thoughtful polite little girl.
Naughty Nephew the 2nd, with his finger firmly on the Literary Pulse, has suggested Klaus, Violet or Sunny (being the names of the Baudelaire Children in Lemony Snicket’s delightful “A Series Of Unfortunate Events”). Violet gets extra points because she is also the daughter in “The Incredibles”.
And finally Naughty Nephew the 3rd, he of the blue saucer eyes, has suggested…his own name. But with a 2 on the end. You know, like with Shrek 2.
Today, I went to visit Grumpy Grandad (That’s Grumpy Great Grandad to you) and he suggested that I could use my deceased mother’s name.
Just on the off chance that it hadn’t occurred to me.
All suggestions are gratefully received of course. But at the moment I treat names the same way I treat gifts of baby clothes and baby items. I just don’t know what to do with them so I shove them in a cupboard or a corner to deal with later.
Even now, at just on 28 weeks, it still seems a long time till you’ll be safely in my arms.
Even with the dreams and the Ring Test and Poking Belly Button games, it still seems surreal.
Yes, you might be a baby, but you also might be my liver wearing boots and equipped with tiny fists.
Which of course would explain why you keep trying to beat up my bladder.
But despite the regular thrashings of various internal organs, despite the necessity to sleep sitting up, despite the sore back and shoulders...things are good.
Sometimes I look at my belly in the mirror and am shocked at how quickly my body has changed. But shocked in a good way. I can be hypnotized watching the ripples in my skin caused by you turning over, or stretching, or sculling a little amniotic fluid (like I know you do). I feel you when I'm driving or watching Very Boring Plays or when I'm meant to be having important business type conversations and it makes me smile.
I don’t mind too much when old ladies and friends of my parents touch my belly because I think it’s amazing too. In fact I think it's a complete miracle and maybe it's my civic duty to provide a Belly Touching service to anyone who needs it because that's how incredible and wonderful it all is.
And above all, I'm happy.
That's you who’s done that.
So thankyou.
And give the bladder a break some times, ok?
OvaGirlxxx
Friday, April 28, 2006
Breast Intentions
So the other day C and I went on our first babycentric shopping venture.
Or at least, preggerscentric.
I’m willing to now admit I’m pregnant but it’s a far larger leap of faith to say there will be a baby when my feet hit the ground. Other pregnant friends are filling their baby rooms with monitors and cots and dingly dangly things. C and I have bought nothing (yet) but we have received a load of hand me downs which have all been hastily stuck in the cupboard where we can’t see them.
Anyhoo, the time seemed right to shop for maternity bras.
I had actually attempted to do this a couple of months back when my bra size changed dramatically but I chickened out at the last minute and settled for a couple of non maternity bras that were a bit bigger than my normal size. These were now right at the end of their row of little hooks and uncomfortably tight.
I am not a well endowed woman, bras have generally only ever really been things to stop my nipples poking out of my teeshirt on cold days. Bra-shopping in the past was a quick and haphazard event based on Colour, Pattern and Is This One On Sale?
It was clear we needed the help of an expert. I had heard the rumour of the necessity for proper fittings and the dire warnings of back strain, wrenched shoulders and milk pudding boobs that would ensue if said Proper Fittings were not had.
C and I wandered into the ‘intimates’ section of a Large Department Store and lingered awkwardly around the maternity section. Row after row of wireless, double clipped, enormous cupped, wide strapped bras dangled from their racks, taunting us.
We looked at them, we took them off the rack, we fingered their odd little fastenings and marveled at their extra hooks and eyes. Then we put them back because those whopping big cups were scaring the bejesus out of us.
Diddly diddly dee went the musack.
A chill wind began to blow and a lone tumbleweed scuttled across the floor.
C and I clutched at each other’s clammy hands. One of us may even have whimpered.
Someone will come, we muttered to ourselves. Someone Who Knows About Pregnant Bosoms.
At one stage a sales assistant did flit past, replacing frilly delicate non-pregnancy things as she went.
Why look! Here is Someone Who Can Help, announced C in his best Actorly Projected Voice.
Yes, I smiled, relieved.
We took our eyes off her for only a second but when we turned back she was gone.
Fuck, we said.
Diddley diddly dee went the musack.
Finally we decided we could work it out together. Were we not grownups?
Had I not received hours of valuable Bionicle Assemblage tuition from the Naughty Nephews?
Had not C once built a house (in a previous relationship yes but the experience still counts) and had he not just spent days laying lovely wooden floors and doing fiddly carpentery bits in the Big House? Well then.
We selected a few bras based on what appeared to be my current size but also on Colour, Pattern and Is This One On Sale?
Then we located the fitting rooms.
Then we entered the fitting room.
Then the Shop Assistant who had done the neat disappearing act early on suddenly appeared in the doorway with a stern look on her face.
Then C was barred from the fitting room on account of him being a loathsome bosom-less man.
Then I bravely entered the fitting room alone.
Then I bared my boobs and attempted to attach the first bra to them.
Then it twisted itself round the wrong way and laughed at my ridiculous attempts to wind it round my body.
Then all the little clips in all the bras suddenly and maliciously sprung apart. An image reared up before me, of me, struggling to survive in my scanty brightly coloured pre-pregnancy bra, now faded and torn with use and held together with pins and bits of sticky tape. I was destined to be bowed down with strained back and wrenched shoulders, shackled to the cold hard earth by the weight of my ginormous Milk Pudding Boobs.
Then my face went red and tears of frustration crept into my eyes.
Then I swiftly redressed, did some deep breathing, and flung the bras down (but neatly) on Disappearing Shop Assistant’s plush padded seat thing as I stormed out the door.
I looked for my husband and wept bitterly because he had wandered off to the electronics section and also because lo the pregnancy hormones was surging through my body and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth and odd looks from other customers.
Diddley diddly dee went the musack.
It was all too hideous.
C blew my nose and swiftly administered skim hot chocolate and small evil sweety thing to me and then we went into the Other Large Department Store.
Here we went straight up to the counter and asked for Someone Who Knows About Pregnant Bosoms.
And finally, finally the Someone appeared.
And Yes she knew Pregnant Bosoms and Yes she knew how to wrangle the nasty little clips.
C was once again banished from the fitting room but this time it was ok, I felt safe, I felt nurtured in the arms of wide experience, I was to be saved from back strain and wrenched shoulders (but alas probably not milk pudding boobs). I tried on bra after bra, was instructed on the mysteries of breast enlargement and shrinkage, advised on where my straps should sit, where my hooks should meet and where my nipples should point. She was very nice and very good and I felt much much better.
However after twenty minutes, I realised that I didn’t actually properly fit into any of the maternity bras she brought for me. If it fitted at the back then the cups were too big. If the cups were just right then we were right at the end of the hooks (and I had already been instructed that the bra should at this stage do up in the middle of the hooks).
(My friend Michelle later told me that I could buy a little extension thingy to increase the back of the bra for a few bucks and that would keep me going until I was ready for the next stage.)
Once upon a time, a long time ago, years ago, perhaps six, when C and I were in those first few months (stretching to the first year) of trying to conceive, C did buy something for baby.
It was a handmade patchwork quilt, just big enough to sit on a cot. Coloured frogs and rampant teddy bears were pieced together with boats sailing into clouds and wide eyed geometric cats. It was expensive, indulgent, impractical and beautiful. And perfectly fitting for C’s enthusiastic optimism for our impending offspring.
For years the quilt stayed folded up and hidden away. Once I unwrapped it, a year ago, when I was looking for blankets. It was a shocking reminder of our younger dreams. Instead of frogs and boats and teddies and cats I saw invasive tests and broken hearts and long empty years stitched together with self hatred and failure.
When we packed the flat and prepared to move to the Big House this year I found the quilt again. And the teddies were back and the quilt was beautiful once again.
C and I had decided to meet elsewhere in the department store and I sauntered towards him swinging my black and white shopping bag. C looked at it with interest.
No bra, I quickly told him.
No bra?
It’s a long story, I told him, but basically they don’t fit yet. So I bought a pair of trousers instead. They’re not maternity trousers but they fit comfortably over my tummy.
Also I liked the colour. Also, they were on Sale.
C nodded. It all made perfect sense. We held hands as we wandered out the door.
Behind us, racks of maternity bras jangled their fiddly hooks, waiting patiently for our inevitable return.
And diddly diddly dee went the musack.
Or at least, preggerscentric.
I’m willing to now admit I’m pregnant but it’s a far larger leap of faith to say there will be a baby when my feet hit the ground. Other pregnant friends are filling their baby rooms with monitors and cots and dingly dangly things. C and I have bought nothing (yet) but we have received a load of hand me downs which have all been hastily stuck in the cupboard where we can’t see them.
Anyhoo, the time seemed right to shop for maternity bras.
I had actually attempted to do this a couple of months back when my bra size changed dramatically but I chickened out at the last minute and settled for a couple of non maternity bras that were a bit bigger than my normal size. These were now right at the end of their row of little hooks and uncomfortably tight.
I am not a well endowed woman, bras have generally only ever really been things to stop my nipples poking out of my teeshirt on cold days. Bra-shopping in the past was a quick and haphazard event based on Colour, Pattern and Is This One On Sale?
It was clear we needed the help of an expert. I had heard the rumour of the necessity for proper fittings and the dire warnings of back strain, wrenched shoulders and milk pudding boobs that would ensue if said Proper Fittings were not had.
C and I wandered into the ‘intimates’ section of a Large Department Store and lingered awkwardly around the maternity section. Row after row of wireless, double clipped, enormous cupped, wide strapped bras dangled from their racks, taunting us.
We looked at them, we took them off the rack, we fingered their odd little fastenings and marveled at their extra hooks and eyes. Then we put them back because those whopping big cups were scaring the bejesus out of us.
Diddly diddly dee went the musack.
A chill wind began to blow and a lone tumbleweed scuttled across the floor.
C and I clutched at each other’s clammy hands. One of us may even have whimpered.
Someone will come, we muttered to ourselves. Someone Who Knows About Pregnant Bosoms.
At one stage a sales assistant did flit past, replacing frilly delicate non-pregnancy things as she went.
Why look! Here is Someone Who Can Help, announced C in his best Actorly Projected Voice.
Yes, I smiled, relieved.
We took our eyes off her for only a second but when we turned back she was gone.
Fuck, we said.
Diddley diddly dee went the musack.
Finally we decided we could work it out together. Were we not grownups?
Had I not received hours of valuable Bionicle Assemblage tuition from the Naughty Nephews?
Had not C once built a house (in a previous relationship yes but the experience still counts) and had he not just spent days laying lovely wooden floors and doing fiddly carpentery bits in the Big House? Well then.
We selected a few bras based on what appeared to be my current size but also on Colour, Pattern and Is This One On Sale?
Then we located the fitting rooms.
Then we entered the fitting room.
Then the Shop Assistant who had done the neat disappearing act early on suddenly appeared in the doorway with a stern look on her face.
Then C was barred from the fitting room on account of him being a loathsome bosom-less man.
Then I bravely entered the fitting room alone.
Then I bared my boobs and attempted to attach the first bra to them.
Then it twisted itself round the wrong way and laughed at my ridiculous attempts to wind it round my body.
Then all the little clips in all the bras suddenly and maliciously sprung apart. An image reared up before me, of me, struggling to survive in my scanty brightly coloured pre-pregnancy bra, now faded and torn with use and held together with pins and bits of sticky tape. I was destined to be bowed down with strained back and wrenched shoulders, shackled to the cold hard earth by the weight of my ginormous Milk Pudding Boobs.
Then my face went red and tears of frustration crept into my eyes.
Then I swiftly redressed, did some deep breathing, and flung the bras down (but neatly) on Disappearing Shop Assistant’s plush padded seat thing as I stormed out the door.
I looked for my husband and wept bitterly because he had wandered off to the electronics section and also because lo the pregnancy hormones was surging through my body and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth and odd looks from other customers.
Diddley diddly dee went the musack.
It was all too hideous.
C blew my nose and swiftly administered skim hot chocolate and small evil sweety thing to me and then we went into the Other Large Department Store.
Here we went straight up to the counter and asked for Someone Who Knows About Pregnant Bosoms.
And finally, finally the Someone appeared.
And Yes she knew Pregnant Bosoms and Yes she knew how to wrangle the nasty little clips.
C was once again banished from the fitting room but this time it was ok, I felt safe, I felt nurtured in the arms of wide experience, I was to be saved from back strain and wrenched shoulders (but alas probably not milk pudding boobs). I tried on bra after bra, was instructed on the mysteries of breast enlargement and shrinkage, advised on where my straps should sit, where my hooks should meet and where my nipples should point. She was very nice and very good and I felt much much better.
However after twenty minutes, I realised that I didn’t actually properly fit into any of the maternity bras she brought for me. If it fitted at the back then the cups were too big. If the cups were just right then we were right at the end of the hooks (and I had already been instructed that the bra should at this stage do up in the middle of the hooks).
(My friend Michelle later told me that I could buy a little extension thingy to increase the back of the bra for a few bucks and that would keep me going until I was ready for the next stage.)
Once upon a time, a long time ago, years ago, perhaps six, when C and I were in those first few months (stretching to the first year) of trying to conceive, C did buy something for baby.
It was a handmade patchwork quilt, just big enough to sit on a cot. Coloured frogs and rampant teddy bears were pieced together with boats sailing into clouds and wide eyed geometric cats. It was expensive, indulgent, impractical and beautiful. And perfectly fitting for C’s enthusiastic optimism for our impending offspring.
For years the quilt stayed folded up and hidden away. Once I unwrapped it, a year ago, when I was looking for blankets. It was a shocking reminder of our younger dreams. Instead of frogs and boats and teddies and cats I saw invasive tests and broken hearts and long empty years stitched together with self hatred and failure.
When we packed the flat and prepared to move to the Big House this year I found the quilt again. And the teddies were back and the quilt was beautiful once again.
C and I had decided to meet elsewhere in the department store and I sauntered towards him swinging my black and white shopping bag. C looked at it with interest.
No bra, I quickly told him.
No bra?
It’s a long story, I told him, but basically they don’t fit yet. So I bought a pair of trousers instead. They’re not maternity trousers but they fit comfortably over my tummy.
Also I liked the colour. Also, they were on Sale.
C nodded. It all made perfect sense. We held hands as we wandered out the door.
Behind us, racks of maternity bras jangled their fiddly hooks, waiting patiently for our inevitable return.
And diddly diddly dee went the musack.
Friday, April 14, 2006
One Night In Bed
So I was lying on my back feeling the baby slide around inside me and as it kicked I realised I could see my stomach rippling.
This made me laugh and so then there was more rippling.
And then my belly button bulged and heaved and other parts of my stomach contorted like a miniature earthquake was underway in my gut and I stopped laughing because to tell the truth it looked really quite disturbing and while it was funny before, now, frankly, it was just plain creepy.
This made me laugh and so then there was more rippling.
And then my belly button bulged and heaved and other parts of my stomach contorted like a miniature earthquake was underway in my gut and I stopped laughing because to tell the truth it looked really quite disturbing and while it was funny before, now, frankly, it was just plain creepy.
Thursday, April 06, 2006
The Kick Inside
We took the photo we received from the ultrasound up to Newcastle last week to show it off to my family.
My dad guffawed cheerfully when he saw it and my stepmother squealed with delight and told me that the baby had my nose.
Grumpy granddad said he couldn’t see anything but that might be because his spectacles were thickly coated with a yellowish layer of his own scalp tissue which has taken to flaking off in chunks and floating about his shoulders.
And yes I did offer to clean them (glasses, not scalp) and it took me nearly half an hour with the Windex and the paper towels and within a few minutes of my granddad putting them back on and exclaiming with delight at how clearly he could see the tv screen, I noticed the flakes starting to fall and cling to his lenses again.
My God this moving thing is slow.
Well not the actual moving out part, that was reasonably fast because we threw everything into cardboard boxes, and not the actual moving in part because two strong burly Chinese fellows named Johnny and Bob hurled our boxes into their truck and then lugged them up the stairs of the Big House.
The slow part is the unpacking part.
We have a bedroom, a bathroom and a large room for everything else in our cosy upstairs section of the Big House. At the moment this room features a couch, two desks, a dining room table and an enormous mountain of boxes, all full and all needing to be unpacked and sorted and stored.
Most of these boxes are labeled BOOKS or for a change LARGE HEAVY BOOKS. One of the boxes got broken somewhere between Johnny hurling it into the truck and Bob lugging it up the stairs and so a small collection of my childhood reading has been oozing out of the side of the box mountain. I can’t collect all those books together because that would necessitate putting them in a bookshelf which would in turn necessitate deciding where the bookshelves should go because god forbid we double handle things.
So instead I’ve been reading them.
I have gone through the Borrowers series and flirted a little with Anne of Avonlea and dipped extensively into the Little House series, even though I read most of the Laura Ingalls books not too long ago.
My idea of hell is that scene in ‘On The Banks Of Plum Creek’ where Laura Ingalls wickedly leads the hideous Nellie Olson into the part of the creek where the leeches dwell. Within a minute Nellie is covered in the bloodsucking fiends. And boy does she deserve it because she’s a nasty piece of work and a half but even so, it makes me wince.
And this is basically a long and raving introduction(which I blame on pregnancy induced mushbrain) into what I really wanted to say which is that this week was the 12th anniversary of my mother’s death.
My mother was born in a village in the Philippines on the island of Luzon. The country had been occupied by the Japanese army since 1941 and the local people hated and feared them. Within a few hours of my mother’s birth the village received a warning that soldiers were heading their way.
The entire village immediately evacuated and headed into the mountains. They planned to hide in some caves until the soldiers had passed by and then return to the village. There was no time to pack anything more than a few essentials. The tiny brown new born babe that wouold one day be my mother was wrapped in a rice sack.
It took them over an hour walking through forests and crossing a river to reach the caves.
The villagers hid deep within the caves and then one of the scouts told them that the soldiers were close by and they must all stay very quiet.
And then.
My mother began to cry.
The cry of a baby is piercing. Like an alarm or a siren. Or a betrayal. My grandmother tried desperately to feed her, to comfort her, to rock her back to silence but still she screamed.
The other villagers were terrified, they pleaded with my grandparents. The sound would draw the soldiers, they cried, they would all be killed. They had to do something, they had to stop her.
So my grandfather drew his knife and put the blade to the baby’s throat. He hesitated as my grandmother wept and prayed.
And then, just as suddenly, the baby stopped.
The soldiers passed, the villagers left the cave and made their way back down to their village. When they stopped to cross the river, my grandmother moved down to the water’s edge and unwrapped my mother from the rice sack so that she could bathe her in the river water.
And there, she discovered the leech. It must have made its way into the sack when they initially crossed the river. Now, hours later, it was firmly attached to the baby’s heel; black, glossy, swollen with blood and so fat it was as big as her entire foot.
When I imagine this scene, I think about how when my grandfather held back his knife, he spared not only his first born child, but also me, his first born grandchild, and my sisters and our children too. That ol' eggs within eggs thing again.
Today I should be unpacking boxes and writing things and Being Organised but instead I’m thinking about Mum and how much I miss her and love her. I look at the image of my unborn baby(week 21 - size of a banana), with its nose like mine, and its aunties and the grandmother it will only ever know from photographs and stories and the la la la of the one Filipino song I remember her singing.
I feel the familiar squirming deep within as the baby turns and stretches in my abdomen.
And there’s something more. Higher up, that soft pounding against my heart.
It’s been twelve years but I haven’t forgotten that grief kicks too.
My dad guffawed cheerfully when he saw it and my stepmother squealed with delight and told me that the baby had my nose.
Grumpy granddad said he couldn’t see anything but that might be because his spectacles were thickly coated with a yellowish layer of his own scalp tissue which has taken to flaking off in chunks and floating about his shoulders.
And yes I did offer to clean them (glasses, not scalp) and it took me nearly half an hour with the Windex and the paper towels and within a few minutes of my granddad putting them back on and exclaiming with delight at how clearly he could see the tv screen, I noticed the flakes starting to fall and cling to his lenses again.
My God this moving thing is slow.
Well not the actual moving out part, that was reasonably fast because we threw everything into cardboard boxes, and not the actual moving in part because two strong burly Chinese fellows named Johnny and Bob hurled our boxes into their truck and then lugged them up the stairs of the Big House.
The slow part is the unpacking part.
We have a bedroom, a bathroom and a large room for everything else in our cosy upstairs section of the Big House. At the moment this room features a couch, two desks, a dining room table and an enormous mountain of boxes, all full and all needing to be unpacked and sorted and stored.
Most of these boxes are labeled BOOKS or for a change LARGE HEAVY BOOKS. One of the boxes got broken somewhere between Johnny hurling it into the truck and Bob lugging it up the stairs and so a small collection of my childhood reading has been oozing out of the side of the box mountain. I can’t collect all those books together because that would necessitate putting them in a bookshelf which would in turn necessitate deciding where the bookshelves should go because god forbid we double handle things.
So instead I’ve been reading them.
I have gone through the Borrowers series and flirted a little with Anne of Avonlea and dipped extensively into the Little House series, even though I read most of the Laura Ingalls books not too long ago.
My idea of hell is that scene in ‘On The Banks Of Plum Creek’ where Laura Ingalls wickedly leads the hideous Nellie Olson into the part of the creek where the leeches dwell. Within a minute Nellie is covered in the bloodsucking fiends. And boy does she deserve it because she’s a nasty piece of work and a half but even so, it makes me wince.
And this is basically a long and raving introduction(which I blame on pregnancy induced mushbrain) into what I really wanted to say which is that this week was the 12th anniversary of my mother’s death.
My mother was born in a village in the Philippines on the island of Luzon. The country had been occupied by the Japanese army since 1941 and the local people hated and feared them. Within a few hours of my mother’s birth the village received a warning that soldiers were heading their way.
The entire village immediately evacuated and headed into the mountains. They planned to hide in some caves until the soldiers had passed by and then return to the village. There was no time to pack anything more than a few essentials. The tiny brown new born babe that wouold one day be my mother was wrapped in a rice sack.
It took them over an hour walking through forests and crossing a river to reach the caves.
The villagers hid deep within the caves and then one of the scouts told them that the soldiers were close by and they must all stay very quiet.
And then.
My mother began to cry.
The cry of a baby is piercing. Like an alarm or a siren. Or a betrayal. My grandmother tried desperately to feed her, to comfort her, to rock her back to silence but still she screamed.
The other villagers were terrified, they pleaded with my grandparents. The sound would draw the soldiers, they cried, they would all be killed. They had to do something, they had to stop her.
So my grandfather drew his knife and put the blade to the baby’s throat. He hesitated as my grandmother wept and prayed.
And then, just as suddenly, the baby stopped.
The soldiers passed, the villagers left the cave and made their way back down to their village. When they stopped to cross the river, my grandmother moved down to the water’s edge and unwrapped my mother from the rice sack so that she could bathe her in the river water.
And there, she discovered the leech. It must have made its way into the sack when they initially crossed the river. Now, hours later, it was firmly attached to the baby’s heel; black, glossy, swollen with blood and so fat it was as big as her entire foot.
When I imagine this scene, I think about how when my grandfather held back his knife, he spared not only his first born child, but also me, his first born grandchild, and my sisters and our children too. That ol' eggs within eggs thing again.
Today I should be unpacking boxes and writing things and Being Organised but instead I’m thinking about Mum and how much I miss her and love her. I look at the image of my unborn baby(week 21 - size of a banana), with its nose like mine, and its aunties and the grandmother it will only ever know from photographs and stories and the la la la of the one Filipino song I remember her singing.
I feel the familiar squirming deep within as the baby turns and stretches in my abdomen.
And there’s something more. Higher up, that soft pounding against my heart.
It’s been twelve years but I haven’t forgotten that grief kicks too.
Monday, March 06, 2006
Moving
We’re getting ready to move (next week) into The Big House (along with Naughty Nephews and their parents).
Half the belongings in our flat, the sturdy square edged half, is packed into cardboard boxes, the other half taunts us with its gamut of weird knobbly unwrappable shapes and thin fragile edges.
I’m doing most of the packing because C is working away on making the Big House habitable. My process is to pack a box, have a cup of tea, pack another box, eat five loaves and half an oxen and on it goes.
The other movements in our life are much smaller, but so much more impressive.
We’re at seventeen weeks now (!) and along with those tooth buds and the pissing-into-your-own-amniotic fluid-and-then-drinking-it-tendencies, apparently, if the Tiny Dancing Baby is a girl she’s growing eggs.
Eggs! I squealed at C. Teeny tiny weeny little eggs in her teeny tiny ovaries! How bizarre is that? And one day, one of those teeny tiny eggs might be half of a new teeny tiny baby. Only teenier! And tinier!
And then I stopped because all that high pitched squealing was hurting my throat and aggravating my mucous membranes.
Surely one of those most attractive and endearing Facet Of Pregnancy must be the cascading waterfall of slime that forms within one’s body.
One moment I could throw out my arms and inhale lustily the warm Sydney morning through my nostrils, the next I was drowning in snot.
Snotty Nose rapidly became Evil Mucous Dripping Down The Back Of The Throat. This led to much hacking. Quite quickly I managed to give myself a throat infection and a nasty chesty cough. This in turn led to much lying down and feeling sorry for myself.
About three days ago while lying on the couch I started feeling other sorts of movement.
Of the feathery flicking type.
As if a tiny dancing baby had decided it was time to give the uterus a bit of a clean with an equally tiny feather duster.
When I put C’s hand on my abdomen he could feel them too. For a moment we sat like that. Then he grinned at me and said: this is so exciting, I have to ring my mum.
And as he spoke to his mother I lay beside him with my hands down my pants feeling the sweet flick and flutter of someone with their very own tooth buds.
It was a very fine moment.
Half the belongings in our flat, the sturdy square edged half, is packed into cardboard boxes, the other half taunts us with its gamut of weird knobbly unwrappable shapes and thin fragile edges.
I’m doing most of the packing because C is working away on making the Big House habitable. My process is to pack a box, have a cup of tea, pack another box, eat five loaves and half an oxen and on it goes.
The other movements in our life are much smaller, but so much more impressive.
We’re at seventeen weeks now (!) and along with those tooth buds and the pissing-into-your-own-amniotic fluid-and-then-drinking-it-tendencies, apparently, if the Tiny Dancing Baby is a girl she’s growing eggs.
Eggs! I squealed at C. Teeny tiny weeny little eggs in her teeny tiny ovaries! How bizarre is that? And one day, one of those teeny tiny eggs might be half of a new teeny tiny baby. Only teenier! And tinier!
And then I stopped because all that high pitched squealing was hurting my throat and aggravating my mucous membranes.
Surely one of those most attractive and endearing Facet Of Pregnancy must be the cascading waterfall of slime that forms within one’s body.
One moment I could throw out my arms and inhale lustily the warm Sydney morning through my nostrils, the next I was drowning in snot.
Snotty Nose rapidly became Evil Mucous Dripping Down The Back Of The Throat. This led to much hacking. Quite quickly I managed to give myself a throat infection and a nasty chesty cough. This in turn led to much lying down and feeling sorry for myself.
About three days ago while lying on the couch I started feeling other sorts of movement.
Of the feathery flicking type.
As if a tiny dancing baby had decided it was time to give the uterus a bit of a clean with an equally tiny feather duster.
When I put C’s hand on my abdomen he could feel them too. For a moment we sat like that. Then he grinned at me and said: this is so exciting, I have to ring my mum.
And as he spoke to his mother I lay beside him with my hands down my pants feeling the sweet flick and flutter of someone with their very own tooth buds.
It was a very fine moment.
Sunday, January 29, 2006
And then
Three days ago I was lying on the couch, drifting in and out of sleep as I listened to C talking to some friends on the phone.
He was telling them that I was finally pregnant! With twins! Joyous shrieking emerged from the phone and C and I smiled at each other and tangled our toes together happily. At the end of the call he looked at me and said: I don’t think we should tell anyone else now. Not until after we really are 12 weeks.
It’s ok, I said. That’s only 6 days away.
Then we decided to watch an episode of The Sopranos and I got up to do a quick wee.
And then.
And then.
You know how this is going to go, don’t you?
For a couple of seconds, as I stared at the blood on the toilet paper, I simply felt confused.
Like Time had suddenly reversed itself and I was right back in that same place, in that same moment every month when I would hope against hope that this time, this month was our time, our month and each time I was disappointed. It was as if I had been tricked. I was wrong. I had never been pregnant at all.
I looked down at the toilet bowl filled with bloody water and I moaned, just slightly, the tiniest of sounds, and C who was in the loungeroom setting up the dvd heard that awful note in my voice and came running.
And when I saw his face my eyes started to scrunch up and I folded into myself and I started to cry.
It was a public holiday and everyone was closed and I had no idea who I could call and what I should do until in the end I rang the House Of Groovy IVF Love. And bless them, the Fertility Sisters were calm and soothing and understanding. They gave me advice and they wished me and C luck and said they were crossing their fingers for us.
C and I got ready to go into Emergency which means I packed a book to read during the inevitable long wait and he ducked down to the shops to buy me some pads.
I was expecting some Super strength, surfboard sized monstrosities but instead C handed over a pack of ultraslim regulars. I started to say that maybe the thicker sort would be better but he stopped me.
No, he said, quietly. I decided not to get those. Because you’re not going to need them. You’re not.
At that point there were more tears at his ever faithful optimism and that’s also how I know that babies have no kneecaps because the sticky strip on the back of the pads is decorated with whacky true facts.
I’m not going to bag on about the dire waiting room at the hospital with its Night Of The Living Dead atmosphere and its non-stop television advertorial for tooth whitening kits (“In just eight days?! I can’t belieeeeeve it!”).
The triage nurse grilled me about blood colour(not bright red) and amount(consistent but not gushing) and pain (no) and clots (no) and finally she suggested that perhaps the blood could be coming from my anus rather than being related to the pregnancy?
No, I said, firmly. It is not. It is related to my pregnancy.
Well, she said, it could be constipation related.
No, I said. I don’t have constipation.
Well, she said, I’m just warning you that the doctor may want to check that so don’t be alarmed.
Really, I wanted to say, I feel more alarmed at your enormously ugly headband, but thanks for the warning.
Two hours, half of The Wierdstone of Brisingamen, and one ultraslim pad later, we were in, sans anal probe, with the doctor who probed at my stomach, indicated that it would be several hours more to wait for an ultrasound (due to the public holiday) and then sent me home.
His diagnosis was that the bleeding could be absolutely fine or it could be the start of a miscarriage and either way there was nothing much that could be done. Did I want a bloodtest? There was still no pain, there were still no clots. I had my first appointment with the Antenatal Clinic the following morning at 8am. I decided to forgo the bloodtest and get some sleep.
Bright and early the next morning, we rocked up to the antenatal clinic, pristine Yellow Card in hand. I was calm and collected. I was also still bleeding. At the desk I managed to give my name in a steady voice. The midwife told me to wait for the clerical nurse.
But here’s the thing I said, and my Steady Voice suddenly went to shit, I’m bleeeeeedddiiing…..
Three minutes later I was across the hall in Ultrasound.
As the wand glided over my lubed up belly, C and I clutched hands and in my mind a little voice suddenly said: Please don’t take them both.
I had already thought about the possibility that we had lost the second twin, the one that was a week behind its sibling at the 7 week scan, but my greater fear was that we had lost them both and that now, my empty abdomen would be revealed in all its pathetic failure. That once again my crappy, infertile body had failed the test, only this time we got a little further in the ride, far enough to start discussing names and thinking about baby rooms.
Far enough for the universe to have a great hearty laugh at our clueless stupidity.
For a moment there was nothing to see but grey fog and amorphous sludge.
And then.
And then.
Suddenly, suddenly, it was as if the fog cleared and there was a baby there, a real baby, a tiny little person with a head and arms and legs and it was dancing and C was making bubbling, delighted sounds.
Oh, I said.
And then I started to cry, big racking sobs and the technician hastily handed me her tissue box.
I can’t see that second bub, she said carefully. And I nod, I know, its gone.
As my playwrighting pal sbs pointed out in the last load of comments, it has been a year since I started blogging about the Great Big Fertility Ride.
When I started I was angry and hurt and I needed to write down my experiences because I felt my life was sliding out from under me. This way, it might still slide but at least I could map out my journey and maybe some day, one day, I could look back and see there was a pattern and realize that it wasn’t just random buckets of shit hurled upon me from on high.
One of my friends is at the same stage of pregnancy as me and we would chat about diet and delivery options and for awhile I almost felt like a normal pregnant woman. Except, I didn’t buy my pregnancy vitamins in bulk. For a few weeks I was beginning to feel that the ride was over. That I had finally arrived. But I see now that for people like me it never really ends until a healthy baby is delivered into your arms. And even that’s just the beginning of a whole new ride.
And for now, I still can't see the pattern.
And those fucking buckets of shit, they still keep falling.
Back at the antenatal clinic, the technician measures the heartbeat of Twin A and types onto the screen.
It looks so cute, says C, so wriggly, and she smiles. They’re quite active at this stage, she says. This little bub looks very healthy.
I’m still crying and snotting into my tissue but I don’t do it in that way you do when you scrunch up your eyes and fold into yourself, instead, this time, I keep my eyes wide open and I stare and cry and cry and stare because I can’t stand to miss one nanosecond of our beautiful dancing baby.
He was telling them that I was finally pregnant! With twins! Joyous shrieking emerged from the phone and C and I smiled at each other and tangled our toes together happily. At the end of the call he looked at me and said: I don’t think we should tell anyone else now. Not until after we really are 12 weeks.
It’s ok, I said. That’s only 6 days away.
Then we decided to watch an episode of The Sopranos and I got up to do a quick wee.
And then.
And then.
You know how this is going to go, don’t you?
For a couple of seconds, as I stared at the blood on the toilet paper, I simply felt confused.
Like Time had suddenly reversed itself and I was right back in that same place, in that same moment every month when I would hope against hope that this time, this month was our time, our month and each time I was disappointed. It was as if I had been tricked. I was wrong. I had never been pregnant at all.
I looked down at the toilet bowl filled with bloody water and I moaned, just slightly, the tiniest of sounds, and C who was in the loungeroom setting up the dvd heard that awful note in my voice and came running.
And when I saw his face my eyes started to scrunch up and I folded into myself and I started to cry.
It was a public holiday and everyone was closed and I had no idea who I could call and what I should do until in the end I rang the House Of Groovy IVF Love. And bless them, the Fertility Sisters were calm and soothing and understanding. They gave me advice and they wished me and C luck and said they were crossing their fingers for us.
C and I got ready to go into Emergency which means I packed a book to read during the inevitable long wait and he ducked down to the shops to buy me some pads.
I was expecting some Super strength, surfboard sized monstrosities but instead C handed over a pack of ultraslim regulars. I started to say that maybe the thicker sort would be better but he stopped me.
No, he said, quietly. I decided not to get those. Because you’re not going to need them. You’re not.
At that point there were more tears at his ever faithful optimism and that’s also how I know that babies have no kneecaps because the sticky strip on the back of the pads is decorated with whacky true facts.
I’m not going to bag on about the dire waiting room at the hospital with its Night Of The Living Dead atmosphere and its non-stop television advertorial for tooth whitening kits (“In just eight days?! I can’t belieeeeeve it!”).
The triage nurse grilled me about blood colour(not bright red) and amount(consistent but not gushing) and pain (no) and clots (no) and finally she suggested that perhaps the blood could be coming from my anus rather than being related to the pregnancy?
No, I said, firmly. It is not. It is related to my pregnancy.
Well, she said, it could be constipation related.
No, I said. I don’t have constipation.
Well, she said, I’m just warning you that the doctor may want to check that so don’t be alarmed.
Really, I wanted to say, I feel more alarmed at your enormously ugly headband, but thanks for the warning.
Two hours, half of The Wierdstone of Brisingamen, and one ultraslim pad later, we were in, sans anal probe, with the doctor who probed at my stomach, indicated that it would be several hours more to wait for an ultrasound (due to the public holiday) and then sent me home.
His diagnosis was that the bleeding could be absolutely fine or it could be the start of a miscarriage and either way there was nothing much that could be done. Did I want a bloodtest? There was still no pain, there were still no clots. I had my first appointment with the Antenatal Clinic the following morning at 8am. I decided to forgo the bloodtest and get some sleep.
Bright and early the next morning, we rocked up to the antenatal clinic, pristine Yellow Card in hand. I was calm and collected. I was also still bleeding. At the desk I managed to give my name in a steady voice. The midwife told me to wait for the clerical nurse.
But here’s the thing I said, and my Steady Voice suddenly went to shit, I’m bleeeeeedddiiing…..
Three minutes later I was across the hall in Ultrasound.
As the wand glided over my lubed up belly, C and I clutched hands and in my mind a little voice suddenly said: Please don’t take them both.
I had already thought about the possibility that we had lost the second twin, the one that was a week behind its sibling at the 7 week scan, but my greater fear was that we had lost them both and that now, my empty abdomen would be revealed in all its pathetic failure. That once again my crappy, infertile body had failed the test, only this time we got a little further in the ride, far enough to start discussing names and thinking about baby rooms.
Far enough for the universe to have a great hearty laugh at our clueless stupidity.
For a moment there was nothing to see but grey fog and amorphous sludge.
And then.
And then.
Suddenly, suddenly, it was as if the fog cleared and there was a baby there, a real baby, a tiny little person with a head and arms and legs and it was dancing and C was making bubbling, delighted sounds.
Oh, I said.
And then I started to cry, big racking sobs and the technician hastily handed me her tissue box.
I can’t see that second bub, she said carefully. And I nod, I know, its gone.
As my playwrighting pal sbs pointed out in the last load of comments, it has been a year since I started blogging about the Great Big Fertility Ride.
When I started I was angry and hurt and I needed to write down my experiences because I felt my life was sliding out from under me. This way, it might still slide but at least I could map out my journey and maybe some day, one day, I could look back and see there was a pattern and realize that it wasn’t just random buckets of shit hurled upon me from on high.
One of my friends is at the same stage of pregnancy as me and we would chat about diet and delivery options and for awhile I almost felt like a normal pregnant woman. Except, I didn’t buy my pregnancy vitamins in bulk. For a few weeks I was beginning to feel that the ride was over. That I had finally arrived. But I see now that for people like me it never really ends until a healthy baby is delivered into your arms. And even that’s just the beginning of a whole new ride.
And for now, I still can't see the pattern.
And those fucking buckets of shit, they still keep falling.
Back at the antenatal clinic, the technician measures the heartbeat of Twin A and types onto the screen.
It looks so cute, says C, so wriggly, and she smiles. They’re quite active at this stage, she says. This little bub looks very healthy.
I’m still crying and snotting into my tissue but I don’t do it in that way you do when you scrunch up your eyes and fold into yourself, instead, this time, I keep my eyes wide open and I stare and cry and cry and stare because I can’t stand to miss one nanosecond of our beautiful dancing baby.
Sunday, January 08, 2006
Outed
Oh look I couldn't help it, alright?
We've told our families about it and the few very close friends who knew we were shooting up guineapig gonad juice or whatever the hell that stuff is in an effort to fall pregnant. We generally talk about it in hushed and sensible voices and the phrases "still early days" and "all being well" are scattered freely throughout the conversation. It's the sensible way of doing it but frankly it's not very satisfying.
But then last night we were out at the Robert Lepage show and maybe it was the unsettling puppetry or the soothing air of intimacy he created but afterwards we were chatting to some Not As Close Friends, one of whom has been through IVF and another who frequented the Chinese Fertility Goddess (and both of whom have 2 beautiful kids apiece) and we were talking about What We'd Been Up To Recently and finally I couldn't stand it anymore and I dragged the CFG recipient off to one side and said: ok, I do have some other news.
She looked at me. You're having a baby, she said.
No, I said. We're having two.
Oh my god, she said. Oh my fucking god. I am so Fucking Happy for you.
And then we did a little skipping hugging dance right in front of the theatre.
And it was deeply deeply satisfying.
We've told our families about it and the few very close friends who knew we were shooting up guineapig gonad juice or whatever the hell that stuff is in an effort to fall pregnant. We generally talk about it in hushed and sensible voices and the phrases "still early days" and "all being well" are scattered freely throughout the conversation. It's the sensible way of doing it but frankly it's not very satisfying.
But then last night we were out at the Robert Lepage show and maybe it was the unsettling puppetry or the soothing air of intimacy he created but afterwards we were chatting to some Not As Close Friends, one of whom has been through IVF and another who frequented the Chinese Fertility Goddess (and both of whom have 2 beautiful kids apiece) and we were talking about What We'd Been Up To Recently and finally I couldn't stand it anymore and I dragged the CFG recipient off to one side and said: ok, I do have some other news.
She looked at me. You're having a baby, she said.
No, I said. We're having two.
Oh my god, she said. Oh my fucking god. I am so Fucking Happy for you.
And then we did a little skipping hugging dance right in front of the theatre.
And it was deeply deeply satisfying.
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
Star Bright
On our very first New Year’s Eve together, 11 years ago, C and I stayed at a house near the ocean.
It was a little cottage that belonged to the hippie sister of a friend of mine and we house sat for a week while she chanted in an ashram somewhere and strained her own tofu.
The cottage was very sweet and rustic and full of home made crafts and home woven rugs. The kitchen was full of recycled glass jars crammed with home preserved vegetables and dried fruits. It reminded me of Little House In The Big Woods, with all its stored foodstuffs and preserves and Ma diligently making cheese out of the head of a pig and boiling maple syrup into sugar while Laura played with her cornhusk doll and plotted ways to kill or maim her perfect sister Mary.
That New Year’s Eve was meant to be quiet and intimate with just C and I and some nice wine and candlelight and half a tab of acid each. This was a new experience for me and naturally it ended in disaster. Instead of walking hand in hand through the moonlight and gazing in chemically induced wonder at the beauty of Nature, I tipped a candle over one of the chunky home woven rugs and spent the next eight hours obsessively picking wax out of every individual cotton fibre.
We spent this New Year’s Eve alone together too.
Just me. And C. And the twins.
On December 30th, the 7 week scan showed 2 sacs and 2 heartbeats.
I wish I could say I saw them twinkle like shining little stars in the ever expanding universe of my uterus but frankly we’re an older couple and the screen was so far away from the bed it was all C and I could do to squint at the shadowy peanut shapes inside the black blobs.
Even so, I felt my eyes become suspiciously moist.
The technician was excited. Look, she cried, as she twirled the dildocam like she was whipping mayonnaise. There’s bub!
All eye-moisture instantly evaporated. For some reason the word ‘bub’ coupled with her cheery upbeat tone and expectation that Everything Will Be Wonderful set my teeth on edge.
She twirled a little more. And here’s…other bub.
‘Other bub’ was said minus the exclamation mark. Even with our geriatric eyesight C and I couldn’t fail to note the discrepancy in size. Twin B was a week behind in development from Twin A.
I don’t have a copy of the scan but think King Kong and Naomi Watts and you get the idea.
As the technician measured the heartbeats (169 and 90-something) C, the eternal optimist, said: I’m cheering for the underdog!
The technician chuckled approvingly.
Mmmm, I said. And can you tell me, if Twin B fails, will I have a period?
The chuckling stopped.
Well, she said. You may get some spotting. Or it may simply be reabsorbed into the body. But…look, there’s a sac and a heartbeat. Sometimes the smaller one overtakes the other at around 20 weeks. I think we can give bub the benefit of the doubt! Let’s go with dad’s attitude!
So that’s what we’re doing. We’re going with C on this one. Go the underdog. And in the meantime I’ve started eating for a family of six. It is unpleasant to feel constantly hungry. It is even more unpleasant to feel you would like to rip the head off your husband and devour it because he took you to a function where there was NO FOOD and you didn’t eat for four hours. That only happened twice. I never leave the flat now without a handbag packed full of nuts and crackers.
I’m eight weeks pregnant now which is amazing and incredible and gobsmackingly weird. My body is changing before my eyes, (hey! I got cleavage!) I fall asleep at the drop of a hat and I eat and eat and eat. In the meantime we are working on a new show for January which is huge and monstrous and takes up a lot of my brainspace (the part that isn’t checking out my own cleavage).
I’m terrified and I’m elated and I’m cynical and trusting all at once.
I started reading baby books but after seeing the Narnia film I suddenly felt it was far more important to read all the books in the series again. I collect names of good doctors from my previously up the duff friends but I keep putting off booking my obstetrician and hospital. Apparently my subconscious thinks I can deliver on my own couch with my husband to bite the cord(s). There are times when everything seems too much and other times when I feel as if I’ve won the jackpot and this unsettled state is simply confusion because I’m finally getting what I want.
And meanwhile, the clock is ticking. I can pfaff about and read Voyage Of The Dawntreader and google potential doctors and freak out about scripts and shows but inside me, Stuff is Happening and will keep happening week by week.
Something about that makes me happy.
I apologise for the delay in starting up again but half of it was holiday and some of it was wondering how an infertile writes about being pregnant and then hitting the work again and there was tragedy too amongst the joy. I am going to try and write about this process as honestly and fearlessly as I can. And that’s the best I can do.
Apart from making headcheese perhaps.
On that first chemical New Year’s Eve, all I could do was concentrate on picking the wax out, thread by thread, knowing vaguely that one day, one week, one year, Nicole’s rug would finally be free of evil candle residue.
I remember stopping for breath, lifting my head for a moment to stretch my neck and seeing the Milky Way through the loungeroom window. The drugs were still coursing through my system and as I stared I saw that the stars had become huge and pulsating. They were like enormous shining crystals. I could faintly hear their tinkling and I wondered for a moment if I was seeing my mother amongst the angels, hovering in the night, fuzzed over with their own brilliance.
In those days there were no peanut shaped stars, no shining Kong and Naomi constellation.
The faint sounds you can hear come from this new galaxy which has only recently opened within me. A galaxy with two stars, tinkling, one a week behind the other.
That and the cheering of course.
It was a little cottage that belonged to the hippie sister of a friend of mine and we house sat for a week while she chanted in an ashram somewhere and strained her own tofu.
The cottage was very sweet and rustic and full of home made crafts and home woven rugs. The kitchen was full of recycled glass jars crammed with home preserved vegetables and dried fruits. It reminded me of Little House In The Big Woods, with all its stored foodstuffs and preserves and Ma diligently making cheese out of the head of a pig and boiling maple syrup into sugar while Laura played with her cornhusk doll and plotted ways to kill or maim her perfect sister Mary.
That New Year’s Eve was meant to be quiet and intimate with just C and I and some nice wine and candlelight and half a tab of acid each. This was a new experience for me and naturally it ended in disaster. Instead of walking hand in hand through the moonlight and gazing in chemically induced wonder at the beauty of Nature, I tipped a candle over one of the chunky home woven rugs and spent the next eight hours obsessively picking wax out of every individual cotton fibre.
We spent this New Year’s Eve alone together too.
Just me. And C. And the twins.
On December 30th, the 7 week scan showed 2 sacs and 2 heartbeats.
I wish I could say I saw them twinkle like shining little stars in the ever expanding universe of my uterus but frankly we’re an older couple and the screen was so far away from the bed it was all C and I could do to squint at the shadowy peanut shapes inside the black blobs.
Even so, I felt my eyes become suspiciously moist.
The technician was excited. Look, she cried, as she twirled the dildocam like she was whipping mayonnaise. There’s bub!
All eye-moisture instantly evaporated. For some reason the word ‘bub’ coupled with her cheery upbeat tone and expectation that Everything Will Be Wonderful set my teeth on edge.
She twirled a little more. And here’s…other bub.
‘Other bub’ was said minus the exclamation mark. Even with our geriatric eyesight C and I couldn’t fail to note the discrepancy in size. Twin B was a week behind in development from Twin A.
I don’t have a copy of the scan but think King Kong and Naomi Watts and you get the idea.
As the technician measured the heartbeats (169 and 90-something) C, the eternal optimist, said: I’m cheering for the underdog!
The technician chuckled approvingly.
Mmmm, I said. And can you tell me, if Twin B fails, will I have a period?
The chuckling stopped.
Well, she said. You may get some spotting. Or it may simply be reabsorbed into the body. But…look, there’s a sac and a heartbeat. Sometimes the smaller one overtakes the other at around 20 weeks. I think we can give bub the benefit of the doubt! Let’s go with dad’s attitude!
So that’s what we’re doing. We’re going with C on this one. Go the underdog. And in the meantime I’ve started eating for a family of six. It is unpleasant to feel constantly hungry. It is even more unpleasant to feel you would like to rip the head off your husband and devour it because he took you to a function where there was NO FOOD and you didn’t eat for four hours. That only happened twice. I never leave the flat now without a handbag packed full of nuts and crackers.
I’m eight weeks pregnant now which is amazing and incredible and gobsmackingly weird. My body is changing before my eyes, (hey! I got cleavage!) I fall asleep at the drop of a hat and I eat and eat and eat. In the meantime we are working on a new show for January which is huge and monstrous and takes up a lot of my brainspace (the part that isn’t checking out my own cleavage).
I’m terrified and I’m elated and I’m cynical and trusting all at once.
I started reading baby books but after seeing the Narnia film I suddenly felt it was far more important to read all the books in the series again. I collect names of good doctors from my previously up the duff friends but I keep putting off booking my obstetrician and hospital. Apparently my subconscious thinks I can deliver on my own couch with my husband to bite the cord(s). There are times when everything seems too much and other times when I feel as if I’ve won the jackpot and this unsettled state is simply confusion because I’m finally getting what I want.
And meanwhile, the clock is ticking. I can pfaff about and read Voyage Of The Dawntreader and google potential doctors and freak out about scripts and shows but inside me, Stuff is Happening and will keep happening week by week.
Something about that makes me happy.
I apologise for the delay in starting up again but half of it was holiday and some of it was wondering how an infertile writes about being pregnant and then hitting the work again and there was tragedy too amongst the joy. I am going to try and write about this process as honestly and fearlessly as I can. And that’s the best I can do.
Apart from making headcheese perhaps.
On that first chemical New Year’s Eve, all I could do was concentrate on picking the wax out, thread by thread, knowing vaguely that one day, one week, one year, Nicole’s rug would finally be free of evil candle residue.
I remember stopping for breath, lifting my head for a moment to stretch my neck and seeing the Milky Way through the loungeroom window. The drugs were still coursing through my system and as I stared I saw that the stars had become huge and pulsating. They were like enormous shining crystals. I could faintly hear their tinkling and I wondered for a moment if I was seeing my mother amongst the angels, hovering in the night, fuzzed over with their own brilliance.
In those days there were no peanut shaped stars, no shining Kong and Naomi constellation.
The faint sounds you can hear come from this new galaxy which has only recently opened within me. A galaxy with two stars, tinkling, one a week behind the other.
That and the cheering of course.
Sunday, December 11, 2005
Plagued
Bogong moths live in caves in the mountains for most of the year. They’re small and dark brown and apparently are chock full of protein with a delicate nutty flavour. Now and then you see them braving it in the big city and dashing themselves against car headlights or street lamps.
One year they all went absolutely apeshit and every single Bogong Moth in the Known Universe came to Sydney.
Like some sort of evil entomological Schoolies’ Week, they came, they fucked themselves stupid and they made a big bloody pest of themselves.
One particular evening they started flying in through the window of my flat.
I closed the windows and they started crawling in through the ventilation shafts. There were hundreds of them.
At first I tried to scoop them up and throw them out the back door but soon the whirring noises and the furry wings and the way their feelers poked through the slats first closely followed by their brown Bogongish head began to freak me out and I turned on the vacuum cleaner and started sucking them straight off the wall.
Vaccuuming up live Bogong Moths is not something I’m proud of and would never have happened if C had been home because he is like St Francis of Assissi to invertebrates and what he can’t catch with an empty yoghurt pot and a piece of cardboard isn’t worth catching. In fact it’s probably not an insect at all, it’s probably a piece of cheese or a raisin or something.
The joy at learning that I had finally been struck over the head with the Preggers Stick lasted for 48 hours and then the Niggling Doubts started creeping in.
I tried to shut them out, I tried to say to myself…feel the queasiness….witness the extreme fatigue… but eventually they won.
Why should you be pregnant? The beta was wrong. It’s like last time when you were pregnant for a minute and a half. This time you’ll be pregnant for an hour and a half but it’ll still end the same way...ooh, what's that? Your period??
On the weekend I gave in and called the House Of Groovy IVF Love.
I’d like to come in for another blood test, I told them. I got my beta last week and it all sounded very good but now…
The Fertility Sister was calm. Of course, she said, you want to make sure it’s all progressing the right way.
That’s it, I said. Because the thing is I have Niggling Doubts.
Mmmm.
I could hear the scratch of her pen as she wrote Nutter Incoming beside my name, but her voice was soothing.
If you want to come in and check that’s fine, she said, we understand. You want to put your mind at rest.
The problem with vacuuming up Bogong Moths is of course that you don’t actually kill them. Instead they rustle about inside the vacuum cleaner. Eventually you start to catch one or two, horribly mutilated, crawling out the nozzle.
Niggling Doubts are much harder to kill. Another beta will help, for now, but there’s no vacuum cleaner on Earth big enough to suck them all up.
And it’s not as if I could fry them up and eat them. Unlike Bogongs, Niggling Doubts have zero nutritional value.
And of course, as everyone knows, Niggling Doubts taste like shit.
One year they all went absolutely apeshit and every single Bogong Moth in the Known Universe came to Sydney.
Like some sort of evil entomological Schoolies’ Week, they came, they fucked themselves stupid and they made a big bloody pest of themselves.
One particular evening they started flying in through the window of my flat.
I closed the windows and they started crawling in through the ventilation shafts. There were hundreds of them.
At first I tried to scoop them up and throw them out the back door but soon the whirring noises and the furry wings and the way their feelers poked through the slats first closely followed by their brown Bogongish head began to freak me out and I turned on the vacuum cleaner and started sucking them straight off the wall.
Vaccuuming up live Bogong Moths is not something I’m proud of and would never have happened if C had been home because he is like St Francis of Assissi to invertebrates and what he can’t catch with an empty yoghurt pot and a piece of cardboard isn’t worth catching. In fact it’s probably not an insect at all, it’s probably a piece of cheese or a raisin or something.
The joy at learning that I had finally been struck over the head with the Preggers Stick lasted for 48 hours and then the Niggling Doubts started creeping in.
I tried to shut them out, I tried to say to myself…feel the queasiness….witness the extreme fatigue… but eventually they won.
Why should you be pregnant? The beta was wrong. It’s like last time when you were pregnant for a minute and a half. This time you’ll be pregnant for an hour and a half but it’ll still end the same way...ooh, what's that? Your period??
On the weekend I gave in and called the House Of Groovy IVF Love.
I’d like to come in for another blood test, I told them. I got my beta last week and it all sounded very good but now…
The Fertility Sister was calm. Of course, she said, you want to make sure it’s all progressing the right way.
That’s it, I said. Because the thing is I have Niggling Doubts.
Mmmm.
I could hear the scratch of her pen as she wrote Nutter Incoming beside my name, but her voice was soothing.
If you want to come in and check that’s fine, she said, we understand. You want to put your mind at rest.
The problem with vacuuming up Bogong Moths is of course that you don’t actually kill them. Instead they rustle about inside the vacuum cleaner. Eventually you start to catch one or two, horribly mutilated, crawling out the nozzle.
Niggling Doubts are much harder to kill. Another beta will help, for now, but there’s no vacuum cleaner on Earth big enough to suck them all up.
And it’s not as if I could fry them up and eat them. Unlike Bogongs, Niggling Doubts have zero nutritional value.
And of course, as everyone knows, Niggling Doubts taste like shit.
Thursday, December 08, 2005
Things You Might Do During A Two Week Wait
You might make a list of Jobs That Need Doing Before Christmas.
Sadly you will only make this list in your head and you will only ever recall the entire list once when you are lying in bed and can’t be arsed getting up to write it down.
For the rest of the Waiting Period you will be haunted by vague memories of The List as you determine to put things on and cross things off.
You might decide to get a haircut.
This is because you are attending a wedding on the weekend and you are sick of pulling your hair back into a boring ponytail and exposing your spotty forehead to the world.
But on the morning of the wedding you may wake up and go: oh fuck, I forgot to book that appointment. But then, genius may strike you!
Look, here in the shopping centre is one of those very cheap, very nasty, no booking places! All the hair cutters are standing about waiting for hair to cut. And here I am, practically standing in the doorway and I’VE GOT HAIR.
And one of them, Svetlana say, from an unnamed Eastern bloc country, will draw you gently inside. When she asks you how you would like your hair cut today you will start to explain your dilemma and then realize she is wearing her hair pulled back in a ponytail and she has a spotty forehead just like you.
Later you will emerge with your hair strangely layered and your fringe reshaped and a lurking suspicion that it’s not really a very good cut at all. You will attend the wedding with your hair pulled back in a boring ponytail.
This will be a lesson learned.
You might tell your sister in law that you intend making an entire nativity set using paper mache and roll on deodorant bottles.
To your surprise she may hand you a bag of washed empty roll on deodorant bottles which she has collected because she is a mother of three children and they Do Craft. Now you are stuck with this task because you will look like a wally if you hand the bag of washed empty roll on deodorant bottles back and you would feel guilty if you just shoved them into a recycling bin.
During your Waiting Period you might choose to start the Roll On Deodorant Nativity Set. You might sculpt your Christmas artworks on newspaper so as to avoid mess.
But then a breeze may blow through your flat and in a panic you may be forced to grab precious ornaments to weigh the newspaper down.
This will lead to precious ornaments being streaked with flour and water which dries with a cement like consistency. This will be irritating because it will be another job to add to The List.
A quick and clever fix however will be to put the Precious Ornaments somewhere people won’t see them like in that spot behind the bookcase.
You might start reading Messages From The Cosmos in word verification thingys when you go to comment on other people’s blogs.
This will be unsettling. The messages are very firmly one way or the other so as soon as you see the previously unreadable jumble of letters you will be struck with either joy or grief. They will also be spelt very badly.
You might have a mental blank and worry about whether ‘spelt’ actually is the past tense of spell or a primitive grain used to make tasty breads suitable for people with wheat intolerance.
You might spend long periods of time staring at your nipples in the mirror.
This is a natural thing to do as you are wondering if they are changing in any way to indicate pregnancy.
Then you might decide your boobs are sagging. Then you might start holding a breast in each hand and wiggle them up and down, pretending your nipples are eyes and your bellybutton is a mouth and it can talk to you. Then you will stop because this is not natural it's just stupid.
You might read on somebody’s blog that pineapple is good for implantation.
Immediately you will dash out to the fruitshop. However there will be two kinds of pineapple available and you will spend half an hour weighing them up in each hand and wondering which is best for the embryos.
Unluckily a fruitshop man will hear you muttering to yourself about pineapple and embryos but on the bright side the sheer embarrassment will encourage you to make an immediate choice.
Your sister might ring from New Zealand and chat while you both wait for the phone call from the clinic.
As you chat together she will mention that pregnant women have higher body temperatures. Inspired, you may get your digital thermometer and shove it in your mouth. Similarly inspired your sister will get her thermometer and shove it in her ear.
Strangely your conversation will flow unimpaired.
When you go in for your blood test you might feel a shock when the Fertility Sister asks if this is your “final” blood test.
You may wonder if she means your credit card is declined or if all the sisters got together and decided they hate you and your husband with his rice pudding scented head and they never want to take your blood again.
On your way home you and your husband might feel moved to hug and embrace a large piece of public art because it reminds you of a pair of enormous ovaries and hence it could be lucky.
You will need to do this surreptitiously because the artwork is in a public space surrounded by offices. This will make you feel like Harry Potter trying to run through the wall at Kings Cross station without anyone noticing except of course you will not be carrying an owl.
If you get the phone call that says your beta was 490 and you are “definitely pregnant” you will cry/shriek/attempt to speak calmly/scrawl notes in your diary that will later prove to be unreadable.
For 48 hours you will float on a bubble of happiness and sheer joy. You will share that joy and be delighted and encouraged by the enormous wave of love and support you receive both online and in person.
With a great screech of brakes and clunking of gears The Great Big Fertility Ride pulls in at the station. C and I gingerly step out of the carriage. Hope’s already brushed off the vomit and darted off to climb into someone else’s carriage and start the ride all over again. She’s such a roller coaster tart.
We feel exhausted.
We feel incredulous.
We feel very very lucky.
It’s the earliest of early days but to get to this point, for us who have never ever been pregnant, it seems an incredible achievement.
(In fact, even writing this down seems ridiculous. As if the phone will ring again and an apologetic Fertility Sister will say… oh dear there’s been a computer error…)
C and I stagger shakily past the ticket booth and make our way towards the exit.
In the background I can hear the crazy music start up again, the gears clunk into place, the doors on the carriages slam shut, the babble of excited voices.
I’d like to watch, wave them on their way, maybe buy a Cheese-On-A-Stick for old time’s sake but then I remember that Roll On Deodorant Nativity Scene isn’t going to paper mache itself and so we hurry on home.
Sadly you will only make this list in your head and you will only ever recall the entire list once when you are lying in bed and can’t be arsed getting up to write it down.
For the rest of the Waiting Period you will be haunted by vague memories of The List as you determine to put things on and cross things off.
You might decide to get a haircut.
This is because you are attending a wedding on the weekend and you are sick of pulling your hair back into a boring ponytail and exposing your spotty forehead to the world.
But on the morning of the wedding you may wake up and go: oh fuck, I forgot to book that appointment. But then, genius may strike you!
Look, here in the shopping centre is one of those very cheap, very nasty, no booking places! All the hair cutters are standing about waiting for hair to cut. And here I am, practically standing in the doorway and I’VE GOT HAIR.
And one of them, Svetlana say, from an unnamed Eastern bloc country, will draw you gently inside. When she asks you how you would like your hair cut today you will start to explain your dilemma and then realize she is wearing her hair pulled back in a ponytail and she has a spotty forehead just like you.
Later you will emerge with your hair strangely layered and your fringe reshaped and a lurking suspicion that it’s not really a very good cut at all. You will attend the wedding with your hair pulled back in a boring ponytail.
This will be a lesson learned.
You might tell your sister in law that you intend making an entire nativity set using paper mache and roll on deodorant bottles.
To your surprise she may hand you a bag of washed empty roll on deodorant bottles which she has collected because she is a mother of three children and they Do Craft. Now you are stuck with this task because you will look like a wally if you hand the bag of washed empty roll on deodorant bottles back and you would feel guilty if you just shoved them into a recycling bin.
During your Waiting Period you might choose to start the Roll On Deodorant Nativity Set. You might sculpt your Christmas artworks on newspaper so as to avoid mess.
But then a breeze may blow through your flat and in a panic you may be forced to grab precious ornaments to weigh the newspaper down.
This will lead to precious ornaments being streaked with flour and water which dries with a cement like consistency. This will be irritating because it will be another job to add to The List.
A quick and clever fix however will be to put the Precious Ornaments somewhere people won’t see them like in that spot behind the bookcase.
You might start reading Messages From The Cosmos in word verification thingys when you go to comment on other people’s blogs.
This will be unsettling. The messages are very firmly one way or the other so as soon as you see the previously unreadable jumble of letters you will be struck with either joy or grief. They will also be spelt very badly.
You might have a mental blank and worry about whether ‘spelt’ actually is the past tense of spell or a primitive grain used to make tasty breads suitable for people with wheat intolerance.
Then you will cunningly incorporate your ignorance into your post in an amusing manner.
You might spend long periods of time staring at your nipples in the mirror.
This is a natural thing to do as you are wondering if they are changing in any way to indicate pregnancy.
Then you might decide your boobs are sagging. Then you might start holding a breast in each hand and wiggle them up and down, pretending your nipples are eyes and your bellybutton is a mouth and it can talk to you. Then you will stop because this is not natural it's just stupid.
You might read on somebody’s blog that pineapple is good for implantation.
Immediately you will dash out to the fruitshop. However there will be two kinds of pineapple available and you will spend half an hour weighing them up in each hand and wondering which is best for the embryos.
Unluckily a fruitshop man will hear you muttering to yourself about pineapple and embryos but on the bright side the sheer embarrassment will encourage you to make an immediate choice.
Your sister might ring from New Zealand and chat while you both wait for the phone call from the clinic.
As you chat together she will mention that pregnant women have higher body temperatures. Inspired, you may get your digital thermometer and shove it in your mouth. Similarly inspired your sister will get her thermometer and shove it in her ear.
Strangely your conversation will flow unimpaired.
When you go in for your blood test you might feel a shock when the Fertility Sister asks if this is your “final” blood test.
You may wonder if she means your credit card is declined or if all the sisters got together and decided they hate you and your husband with his rice pudding scented head and they never want to take your blood again.
On your way home you and your husband might feel moved to hug and embrace a large piece of public art because it reminds you of a pair of enormous ovaries and hence it could be lucky.
You will need to do this surreptitiously because the artwork is in a public space surrounded by offices. This will make you feel like Harry Potter trying to run through the wall at Kings Cross station without anyone noticing except of course you will not be carrying an owl.
If you get the phone call that says your beta was 490 and you are “definitely pregnant” you will cry/shriek/attempt to speak calmly/scrawl notes in your diary that will later prove to be unreadable.
For 48 hours you will float on a bubble of happiness and sheer joy. You will share that joy and be delighted and encouraged by the enormous wave of love and support you receive both online and in person.
With a great screech of brakes and clunking of gears The Great Big Fertility Ride pulls in at the station. C and I gingerly step out of the carriage. Hope’s already brushed off the vomit and darted off to climb into someone else’s carriage and start the ride all over again. She’s such a roller coaster tart.
We feel exhausted.
We feel incredulous.
We feel very very lucky.
It’s the earliest of early days but to get to this point, for us who have never ever been pregnant, it seems an incredible achievement.
(In fact, even writing this down seems ridiculous. As if the phone will ring again and an apologetic Fertility Sister will say… oh dear there’s been a computer error…)
C and I stagger shakily past the ticket booth and make our way towards the exit.
In the background I can hear the crazy music start up again, the gears clunk into place, the doors on the carriages slam shut, the babble of excited voices.
I’d like to watch, wave them on their way, maybe buy a Cheese-On-A-Stick for old time’s sake but then I remember that Roll On Deodorant Nativity Scene isn’t going to paper mache itself and so we hurry on home.
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Letter From Two Bunches Of Cells (11 days Past Transfer)
dear ovagirl
got your letter.
have decided to stay.
please find enclosed beta of 490...as little thankyou present. more forthcoming.
love us.
ps
when we say 'us', that might mean just 'me'.
in which case i'll love you twice as much.
got your letter.
have decided to stay.
please find enclosed beta of 490...as little thankyou present. more forthcoming.
love us.
ps
when we say 'us', that might mean just 'me'.
in which case i'll love you twice as much.
Friday, December 02, 2005
Letter To Two Bunches Of Cells (7 Days Past Transfer)
Dear Embryos
I’ve been thinking about you both quite a lot and wondering how it’s all going in there.
It’s been a few days now. I think you’re both 12 days old now which is nothing to sneeze at, in anyone’s test tube.
You probably noticed that you’re not the first to occupy the place. Maybe you even had a little bitch amongst yourselves about being given a used uterus.
The truth is, one of your little mates was in there a couple of months ago. I haven’t been in to look myself and nothing’s shown up on the dildocam but I wouldn’t be surprised if he did a bit of tagging round the cervix, graffiti by the fallopian tubes...
Embryo Was ‘Ere... that sort of thing.
Frankly, I think he was that kind of blastocyst.
But let me assure you both, THE LINING HAS NEVER BEEN USED. I grew that one specially for you. (And you. )
And the other thing is, it really wasn’t occupied for long.
Embryo 1 decided not to stay. Not immediately. There was a little pfaffing in the womb, a little lounging around the Pink Palace before he finally jumped the fence.
It was enough to leave the faintest hopeful glimmer of a maybe possibility of a pregnancy.
(You embryos can be a little cruel, anyone ever tell you that in the Petri dish?)
I’m not going to come down all heavy even though I want nothing more than to grab you both in a headlock and staple you to the wall of my uterus. It’s important to let you embryos make up your own little minds (or whatever rudimentary cellular brain smudges you’ve formed) about whether you’re going to hang on.
And I’m not going to bag on about keeping away from the fence because look what a fat lot of good it did with Embryo 1 (known in certain circles as Julian).
Instead I thought I’d encourage you by telling you that a big exciting bonus about sticking around and actually being born is…meeting your dad. I’m pretty sure you’ll think he’s the best thing since…well since that new jello stuff the House Of Groovy IVF Love developed to grow you little guys in…and you all know how good that stuff is, right?
He’s gorgeous and talented and caring and he’s such good fun to play with, ask your cousins the Naughty Nephews.
And I love him more than anybody else in this whole world…for now.
Here’s a little something that no one else knows about your dad.
His head smells like rice pudding with cinnamon on top. True.
And sometimes, like apricots.
And very very occasionally like parmesan cheese but mostly it’s rice pudding and that’s one of my favourite smells in all the world.
And if you come into the world, and I really hope you do, he’ll let you smell his head whenever you like. I think I can speak for him on that one. I’m not sure about the rules on watching tv or spitting from the top floor of posh hotels but the rice pudding head smelling I think we can say is in the bag.
It might even be genetic, so along with his blue eyes and my brown skin, you could get a scalp that smells like a classic English nursery dessert.
It’s your dad’s birthday today. The very first present I ever gave him was a stovetop coffee pot. Wouldn’t it be cool if this year we gave him the biggest present ever…
So just mull it over okay? Think about your gorgeous dad with his blue eyes and his rice pudding head who can’t wait to hold you and love you and play cricket with you.
That’s all I ask.
Well that, and keep away from the fence.
Yours, with ridiculous amounts of love as always
OvaGirl
xxxxxxxxxxxx
I’ve been thinking about you both quite a lot and wondering how it’s all going in there.
It’s been a few days now. I think you’re both 12 days old now which is nothing to sneeze at, in anyone’s test tube.
You probably noticed that you’re not the first to occupy the place. Maybe you even had a little bitch amongst yourselves about being given a used uterus.
The truth is, one of your little mates was in there a couple of months ago. I haven’t been in to look myself and nothing’s shown up on the dildocam but I wouldn’t be surprised if he did a bit of tagging round the cervix, graffiti by the fallopian tubes...
Embryo Was ‘Ere... that sort of thing.
Frankly, I think he was that kind of blastocyst.
But let me assure you both, THE LINING HAS NEVER BEEN USED. I grew that one specially for you. (And you. )
And the other thing is, it really wasn’t occupied for long.
Embryo 1 decided not to stay. Not immediately. There was a little pfaffing in the womb, a little lounging around the Pink Palace before he finally jumped the fence.
It was enough to leave the faintest hopeful glimmer of a maybe possibility of a pregnancy.
(You embryos can be a little cruel, anyone ever tell you that in the Petri dish?)
I’m not going to come down all heavy even though I want nothing more than to grab you both in a headlock and staple you to the wall of my uterus. It’s important to let you embryos make up your own little minds (or whatever rudimentary cellular brain smudges you’ve formed) about whether you’re going to hang on.
And I’m not going to bag on about keeping away from the fence because look what a fat lot of good it did with Embryo 1 (known in certain circles as Julian).
Instead I thought I’d encourage you by telling you that a big exciting bonus about sticking around and actually being born is…meeting your dad. I’m pretty sure you’ll think he’s the best thing since…well since that new jello stuff the House Of Groovy IVF Love developed to grow you little guys in…and you all know how good that stuff is, right?
He’s gorgeous and talented and caring and he’s such good fun to play with, ask your cousins the Naughty Nephews.
And I love him more than anybody else in this whole world…for now.
Here’s a little something that no one else knows about your dad.
His head smells like rice pudding with cinnamon on top. True.
And sometimes, like apricots.
And very very occasionally like parmesan cheese but mostly it’s rice pudding and that’s one of my favourite smells in all the world.
And if you come into the world, and I really hope you do, he’ll let you smell his head whenever you like. I think I can speak for him on that one. I’m not sure about the rules on watching tv or spitting from the top floor of posh hotels but the rice pudding head smelling I think we can say is in the bag.
It might even be genetic, so along with his blue eyes and my brown skin, you could get a scalp that smells like a classic English nursery dessert.
It’s your dad’s birthday today. The very first present I ever gave him was a stovetop coffee pot. Wouldn’t it be cool if this year we gave him the biggest present ever…
So just mull it over okay? Think about your gorgeous dad with his blue eyes and his rice pudding head who can’t wait to hold you and love you and play cricket with you.
That’s all I ask.
Well that, and keep away from the fence.
Yours, with ridiculous amounts of love as always
OvaGirl
xxxxxxxxxxxx
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