Houses, Moms and weird, scary baby dreams

We are in the process of buying a house which is very exciting. We weren’t planning on doing this until the end of the year but when we got notice from our landlord we decided to look and see. We didn’t want to move into another rented house. The first house we looked at we really liked. Then after looking at several more we saw the first house again and then loved it because compared to the rest of the crap it was a real gem. So we put in an offer and was accepted.

But the downside is that the house is small. Only 2 bedrooms and the second one is small. I have to try and visualise a baby living in that room at some point otherwise I why would be putting myself through all this hell. And it will be fine for a baby – who needs guests if you have a baby!

I would say that the last few months have been much darker than times before. I have had times of feeling utterly hopeless. In my dreams I sometimes have a baby in my arms but it isn’t my baby and I never know how to look after it. Then in each dream I always have this weird realisation that babies need to eat and I haven’t fed it at all. The baby is always fairly chipper and chilled out so I stuff it down the front of my shirt and carry on with my day – isn’t that weird? I wake up feeling like some sick freak who doesn’t deserve to ever have a child.

But I have to pour myself another glass of Chardonnay and put a smile on my dial and get on with life because…what other option do I have? When people say “you are so strong” it always leaves me asking what choice I have other to grin and bear this. That’s just the point – I don’t have a choice.

I flew up to see my Mom for the weekend. We went on a long walk and had a good chat. What I realised is the reality of her own hurt and pain about my infertility. Yes, she has 3 kids and she knows she is lucky and although she can’t really put herself in my shoes she feels pain because she sees the pain I go through. She is a really strong Christian and believes in the power of prayer. She wanted to take me to a famous pastor who has prayed for quite a few infertile couples and seen all sorts of miracles. I am also a Christian although my faith is fairly low-lying at the moment – but I will try anything! Being prayed for is a lot nicer than being poked and prodded and pumped full of hormones. We didn’t get to see the pastor but I know Mom prays for me daily.

She mentioned that she had a run-in with a good friend of hers. The friend came to stay and showed my mom hundreds of pictures of her new Granddaughter. My mom was feeling a bit strained after it all but was polite. Then her friend said some kind of sanctimonious crap about how God gives life and he takes life away – and that’s when my Mom hit the roof. She turned on her friend spitting fire and demanded that she take it back and how dare she imply that God ‘favoured’ her daughter more than me. Even my quiet step-Dad jumped in and told the friend to be more sensitive – hilarious! The next day there were all sorts of apologies from the friend and then my Mom actually sent her the Vita Alligood piece on Infertility Etiquette! It felt so good to know how much my Mom cares and how she feels what I am going through as much as she can.

All I can hope for is that one day I will have a bouncing baby who will squeeze into the tiny room in our new house and be surrounded by joy, laughter and a fiercely loving Granny!

A day so low I can’t even think of a better title!

I am feeling really low at the moment. My grandmother’s funeral was tough but a good family time and everything regarding TTC finally got put on the back burner for a few days UNTIL I got my period. Yup, debilitating cramps and sleepless nights thrown in.

I was really hoping for my miracle this month. We did everything right and I thought maybe God was going to give something back after taking Nana away. Even W was hopeful – he kept asking me when my period was coming. Getting my period was a kick in the face but I had to put it out of my mind. I did the Eulogy at Nana’s memorial service. I was also worried about my mother and step-mother being in the same house for the first time since my wedding 6 years ago (another post for another day) But now that all that is over and we are back to real life I have to face the big black baby shaped hole in my life.

What is really getting to me today is that I have never had not one single BFP. I am not saying that infertiles that get BFPs and then miscarry are better off. The pain of MC must be way worse. But it makes me feel dead inside, abnormal, deformed, hopeless. And the fact that they can’t find anything wrong with me is even worse because maybe the problem is at a far deeper lever which no one will ever figure out or be able to pin point.

I am continuing with acupuncture but my heart isn’t in it. My friends don’t understand. My husband is…I don’t know, either too fragile or too distanced and these days when I bring up the subject I get eye rolls and sighs. The loneliness of all this is the worst.

Nothing interesting or insightful to say further. I thought blogging might help me today but I don’t think anything can.

 

Starting to make up with my body

I started acupuncture sessions on Monday morning. It feels pretty strange to be doing things like this when I have already gone down the logical ‘western’ medical route because, lets face it, acupuncture is a little more vague when solving infertility issues. But I really believe that if it can somehow improve my health then it can somehow improve my chances.

I arrived very frazzled after being stuck in traffic and half hour late for the appointment. The lady is a well known acupuncturist in Cape Town and I was expecting some dreadlocked hippy, all tie-dyed and shit. But this was a very quiet,gentle and unassuming woman with a lovely house in the suburbs.

For once I felt…listened to. She asked me all about my lifestyle from how heavily I sleep to how often I poop. This is what matters! I often feel that small indications tell me that my body is not functioning at maximum capacity. Like the fact that I often feel very bloated or that my period stops for a full 24-36 hours in the middle of my flow. But this is something dismissed by regular doctors all the time.

After answering about 8 pages of questions she stood very quietly and felt my pulse. She didn’t take my pulse, like time it and write it down, she listened to it as though it was telling her something. And apparently it did tell her something. She said that my body is beyond exhausted but my brain doesn’t know it. She said that because my demeanor is upbeat and outgoing I don’t know that my body is not living up to what my brain thinks it is. My energy resources are low and it’s screwing up all the balances in my body.

It might be bullshit, but it felt so good to hear it. It felt good to have something identified and explained to you in such a gentle way. It was almost like a someone dead talking through a psychic and telling me it was going to be OK. Sometimes I feel that my body is the cause for so much of my unhappiness. My body image around weight has always been messed up and I have no idea if I am really fat or not so fat! I get angry with my body because it never responds to diets or exercise the way other people’s bodies respond. And in the last 4 years it has seriously let me down. It is not fulfilling it’s end of the bargain! I have been doing everything right and something within my body to revolting against me and refusing to co-operate and freaking conceive already!

But here was someone with my interests and my bodies interest at heart breaching the gap in communication and it was almost like a reunion, tenuous, but a start.

I just read this back – fuck! I am turning into one of ‘them’, aren’t I?

But just to end off. Isn’t it great that my infertility treatments now end up with me feeling like I have just been to the spa instead of the science lab? This I can deal with!

The Ugly Little Devil

Nana, I will miss you!

 

I haven’t written for a few weeks as I have been battling to keep my head above the water, never mind my sanity intact.

In my last post I mentioned that we went away for my Father’s 60^th birthday with him, my step-mom and my Gran (Nana). Well, the day we left Nana had a fall and that began the slippery slope to her death last Monday. It turned out to be a series of strokes that wrought havoc on her 85 year-old body. It made me so angry that our family had to go through more damage due to stroke. The stroke is an evil thing, as evil as AIDS and Cancer, it’s difference is that it kills a part of your body and leaves you hanging there with no hope of recovery and no definitive end as a stroke does not always offer you the peace of death. She was looking at a bedridden future until the Thursday when the doctors didn’t think her body would pull through and she ended up dying of lung infection. I took the 6 hour journey back to spend the weekend at her bedside. I am so lucky to have had that time with her as she battled with the idea of dying but to see someone you love stripped of every dignity is heartbreaking. I had to leave on Sunday afternoon and she passed away on the Monday morning.

Just a little note on my Gran: Nana was a strong, independent but loving woman, although God bless her, not the cleverest nor the most sensitive. Ours is a family full of strong women with strong views and her and I often clashed. I think it becomes a right of the aged to stop trying to empathize with the young. It’s almost as if your many years on this earth distances you from any current reality differs from your experience and you are entitled not to extend this understanding. Nana never experienced the stress of career balanced with the yearning for children. We always got into arguments about this. You had to choose one or the other. It would be much simpler if this was a reality in today’s world: choose 1 thing and do that well. But we have to work kids and a job into our life equation: otherwise the human race would be in quite a pickle! Anyway, this was a theme for some of our run-ins. But that aside we were close. As a midwife sister she gave me my first bath when I was born. As young children we often lived with her for periods of several months when my Dad changed career paths yet again. She loved my Mother deeply and was devastated when my parents separated. My brother and I were her only grandchildren and so in many ways we are all the family she had. So begins the journey of life without her.

But even in the turmoil of grief that little devil rears its ugly head and pokes and prods the wound. That nagging, little son-of-a-bitch called infertility, who will never let you focus on something else for a any amount of time. Oh no, you will go through the pain but it will make things sting even more. Besides the obvious idea of the cycle of life that you become so acutely aware of there is also dear Aunt Meryl (Nana’s sister) “Isn’t it such a pity you never gave her great-grandchildren”. But that is easily pushed aside as the ridiculous bleatings of the old.

Then W decides to throw me the curve ball that after a month of detoxing he has actually started smoking again. Yes, folks. The dirty habit of filling your lungs with tar and rat poison, also known as the biggest cause of male infertility! Oh, and don’t forget that Nana died of lung infection caused by the stroke because she never recovered from being a smoker 30 years ago. It is an understatement to say I lost it. Hysteria ensued and I had no ‘off’ switch. For the rest of the day I was overcome with anger and bitterness. So much so that I didn’t have room in my head for grieving the loss of my Gran. Is that sick? I felt so betrayed, I felt diminished, as if all my pain and agonizing over this has washed over W and not had any impact at all. That something so small as a nicotine craving could have more of an impact on his actions than my (and what I thought was shared) pain. I know none of this is rational, that cigarette craving is even less so but the equations in my head ran amok and left me shattered. After several hours of hysterics he caved and said he would quit again then and there. Immediately I felt like I had him back, that he was the person I thought he was. I was so relieved.

Cut to several days later. After a very busy week of travel for work, baby-making time popped up and we dutifully worked it into our very busy schedule. Saturday felt like a dream as we had no travel and no commitments other than a braai (bbq) with good friends (also Infertiles). Sunshine and my best friend, wine was in abundance. It seems the detox had one affect on W and that is 0 to drunk in 60 seconds. Luckily he is not often a belligerent drunk. After a shocking game of 30seconds the conversation moved to the dark side where we talked about death and loss. And for all 4 of us the waterworks were turned on. But that can be fairly cathartic and we moved on feeling released of some pressure. But later the ugly little devil worked his way back into our space and the old topic of IF came up yet again. It was good to talk as they understand what we are going through and lately it feels like the only space I feel safe to talk in. But from left field came W’s strange and emotional outcry. “We will never have kids and we need to start accepting it.” And then, “it’s all my fault and there is nothing I can do” and then “we need to give up now, I can’t do this anymore”. I know that men are not in touch with their emotions. I know my husband is even less so. But sometimes you forget that anything actually goes on deep down. Just because they are not in touch with what they feel it doesn’t mean that don’t feel anything. I was pretty startled, I must admit. But there was also no sense I could make in that conversation. He eventually went to bed stricken from the affects of too much beer and too few defense mechanisms. When he woke up he was a bit embarrassed about the melodrama but it was good for us in the end. It was good for me to be the quiet, still one and not the hysterical one. It turned the tables only for a moment but that restored some balance to our collaborative effort in dealing and processing all of this.

And so we are back on track –  maybe a little more worn and fragile but nonetheless on track. Track to…what?

Pappie

Toothy grin!

This weekend was my Dad’s 60^th birthday. W and I joined the family in a weekend away to celebrate.

My Dad is one of the reasons I really want to have a child. He is why I am the person I am today. Obviously my Mom and my step parents also helped mould me but my dad is so special. To have a relationship like that with a parent makes me yearn for the same kind of relationship with a child of my own.

Dad has lived a very exciting life doing everything from working on the docks to land surveying in Swaziland to being a motivational speaker and life coach. He has changed many people’s lives mostly through his wisdom and his quirky ‘left field’ approach to problem solving. Although he was absent having separated and then divorced from my mom when I was 6, as a father he was sensitive, loving and terribly exciting . He was always surprising us: once pitching up at my school play in Std 6 having driven 1500km across the country, carrying a single red rose. Later on, in my party years, he gate crashed a night on the town and beat all my friends at pool.

In 2003 I was living in Taiwan and after a big night of partying I came home to find a message saying that my Dad had had a major stroke (at age 52). A few days later I flew back to SA and walked into a hospital ward to find my father lying small and scared on a hospital bed. His paralysis was temporary although his feeling on the left side of his body was gone. But what had been stripped from him was his speech, ironically his greatest asset. He has expressive aphasia which means when he tries to form words mumbo jumbo comes out.

It’s selfish of me to talk about how this changed my life because obviously my father’s life changed tragically. But as a daughter it was so hard to let go. To accept that he wouldn’t give a speech at my wedding like he did at my 21^st. That I couldn’t cry on his shoulder and get the perspective I needed when I went through a tough time.

After two further strokes both again stripping him of more of his communication,dignity and independence his spirit still remains. Yes, I have lost a large part of my dad as a parent, but have been blessed to have him in my life these past 8 years.

One of the reasons why my Dad and I have such a special bond is that he says that I changed him. At my 21^st birthday he opened his speech by saying “SJ is not my child”. Hushed silence banged on my ear drums while I prayed this wasn’t some horrible airing of family dirty laundry. Then he said “I am hers”. He went on to explain how being a young, dope smoking hippy and finding out that his girlfriend was pregnant gave him the fright big enough to send him running for the hills. But once I was born he was a changed man. He always marveled at my every development growing up and my achievements were his biggest kick.

I sometimes wonder whether I will make a good parent or not. I suppose people would be horrified that I am not sure after all the pain and agony of the TTC journey. I am bossy, and over opinionated with a short fuse. But is it so wrong to want back what I lost with my Dad? It will never replace him but I know that having a child will change and improve me as a person more than anything else.

Happy 60^th birthday, Pappie. I love you so much.

 

I hate Facebook pregnancy announcements!

We have all experienced the hell, the hate, the dark black misery that comes from Facebook pregnancy announcements. All kinds of people from people with PCOS (that has never had her period!) to underage (try18?) to overage (oh, look! I’m 45 and we just had an oops!) to people we hate (read “I stole your boyfriend at varsity but bad karma won’t touch me because guess what…)

This is a great post from Yolk about the awful ways in which people infiltrate our day with this special form of hurt.

http://runnyyolk.wordpress.com/2011/02/16/the-facebook-pregnancy-announcement/

One of the comments asks why can’t we be happy for people who announce their pregnancy on Facebook. I agree that we need to realise that our hell is not a reality for most others. But to be able to bitch about it to people who understand is our reality and our right.

We all know that it’s very hard when friends say they are pregnant. I think from living “in the infertile closet” so long I have learnt to put on a brave face and smile through it. And even now when I am being more honest about my feelings I still have a sense that a friend has every right to want me to share her joy, otherwise am I really a friend? But then the other half of me says that she has the happiness which doesn’t depend on hurting me – she will be happily pregnant without my joy. This is still something I am grappling with.

I am quite a Facebook sharer but have never openly admitted to being infertile on FB. I hate the pity and all the crap that comes with it. Besides the many negative outcomes from announcing it I also have horrible visions of my ex boyfriend breathing a sigh of relief that we didn’t end up together (he has 3 little boys now but luckily all of them are very bad sleepers. He he!).

But one thing I do know is that I will be announcing my pregnancy (if it ever happens) on FB. I will disclaim it with the big reveal of the X number of years we have been trying. And I will wait until I am in the 2nd trimester. And I know that all my friends will be happy for me, even my TTC ones.

Until then I will have to try and breezily ignore all those silly ultrasound pics and pics of growing bumps.

An outsider to the circle

I am determined to have a better week than last week. There are options out there, there is support out there and there are people out there who feel the same way as I do. To you, friends, I applaud you.

Sometimes I feel a little like I am faking this. It’s like I have this out of body experience where I think that surely I must be imagining this all and that I can’t possibly be part of this circle of women who have gone through untold pain and heartache, that I am the outsider looking in. I think this is because for the first 3 years of TTC I didn’t tell many people and brushed everything under the carpet, convinced that I was missing something, that I wasn’t having sex enough or at the wrong times. I was so determined not to be one of those desperate, frail women who define their lives according to their ability to breed (a seriously dogmatic, hardarse and arrogant approach). But after my appointment with the doc back in November there was no denying it anymore – there is a serious problem at play here (although who knows what!). And I think it has been hard to stare this pain right in the face and, well, feel it! So now I find myself tapping on the window of the circle of women who have been honest and straight about their journeys, begging to be let in.

Now there are plans to be made and things to focus on to start getting this ball rolling again. First is the drinking. I have thoughts of my liver being renewed and refreshed! I don’t feel different, healthier or on top of the world. But it must be having a positive effect on a smaller scale and any improvement is good. Then in March I have my first appointment with Vicky Hindmarch who is an acupuncturist who specialises in IF. Then the following month I will pluck up the courage to make certain calls to enquire about IVF through government hospitals. So that is the POA – good advice from the circle has been taken!

Until then I am blessed with a lovely husband, 2 gorgeous doggies (Daisy and Sushi) and a (slightly unpleasant) cat called Minksy. The house is sometimes so full and chaotic that who knows how a baby will fit in!

A very hot day but Daisy insisting on loves from Dad. She is actually fast asleep!