It's like Ally McBeal. I see prams and pregnant bellies everywhere. It's like being a diabetic in a chocolate shop," I explained to a friend. You don't hate chocolate, it's just not fun and makes you feel helpless.
You've tried every conception trick in the book. You've valiantly held your feet in the air, in vain. You're both starting to have occasional performance anxiety and "tiredness". Your gynae has suggested you take a HSG (Hysterosalpingogram for Blocked Fallopian Tubes) test to see if your tubes are blocked. You take it — a cold, clinical catheter test that turns out absolutely fine. "Your tubes are patent" barks the young attendee doctor, prompting the bitter thought that 95% of healthcare cost is an anti-climatic waste of money and then 5% of the time, you have cancer and die.
Everyone tells you, you look tired. I guess that comes from trying month to month, testing fortnight to fortnight and finally getting to the point where you've tried so much that you don't even want to be touched, you just want to curl up into a ball in bed in a melodramatic fervour, questioning your life choices.
I read a really good article the other day, which listed out the different things that one now-expectant mom did to help her over the conception frustration. Some struck me as slightly extreme, some as genuinely helpful. One of the things she suggested was just taking a holiday from all baby-related parties, families, or friends. Another was to work out a system with your husband (for example, she would not have him watch her take infertility treatments, in fear of revealing just how desperate she was, or how much she paid for them).
Another is to remind yourself of what you are grateful for — and there are so many things. I am glad of all the women and women's resources online, it has been a real comfort. I am grateful, really grateful for my husband. I am thankful for the relationship we have, for his inappropriate humour and for his strength in grounding me and cheering me up, even when I invariably blamed him that we should have, could have started earlier. He shares, as best he can, since no two people ever want the same thing equally, the sense of hope and the sense of ambivalence about what we are experiencing.
I can think of no better person to go through this journey with.
A few weeks ago, I was so upset, I had trouble sleeping and tossed fitfully for half a night. "I can't sleep", I told him finally, "I keep thinking, maybe I've wasted the good biological years. Maybe God's punishing me for turning him down and not trying earlier, for choosing other things first in my life." He told me, then you need to have a conversation with God. And even if it were true, that he was punishing you, you can't simply say, I'm sorry, now give me what I want. That isn't how it works. Maybe this is your wake-up call and the real question is whether you can say to God, that no matter what, even if I can never have a child, I will still love you. That sentiment, I realized, applies to God and about everything else in your life and I'm glad he was wise enough to remind me of it.
I am grateful for our precious goddaughter, for filling so many hours with laughter, play, wicked cleverness and absurdity, as only a three-and-a-half-year-old girl can. I am grateful for my friends, like her mother. Last week, we were having dinner and out of the blue, she piped up, Godma, is it you want a child? Across the quiet table, I could feel her father stiffen. Yes, I told her, do you think I should have a boy or a girl? (Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her father palpably relax).
Later, when we were baking in the kitchen, her mom came in and started hesitantly, I hear she asked you if you wanted a child? It's because, she explained worriedly, when we say evening prayers, we pray for you. Sometimes it does take pain, to realize not just the depths of concern and compassion, but also the constancy of having listened to the whining and complaints and still passed time with me by being there.
