baybeasts

there is nothing that makes waiting easy. last night i said to bean, citing directly from my own experience,

“it’s like when you are a kid, and you know you are going to australia’s wonderland next weekend but you just can’t bear it that you have to wait between now and next saturday for the weekend to be here and you can just feel it like a big squirmy feeling in your chest and your stomach and it is unbearable.”

and she said,

“no it’s not, it’s like you might be going to australia’s wonderland next weekend but your parents haven’t said if you can go or not, and they won’t until the morning that you are supposed to be going.”

that’s exactly what it is like.

the advice that so many people give us - to forget about it, try and think about something else, keep busy etc - simply doesn’t work for us. by far the most satisfying activity in this particular wait has been - wait, this deserves a story.

bean told me this story when i asked her why she wanted to be a midwife (because she is so brilliant and beautiful that she really could have done anything she wanted). when she was a child, she loved visiting her aunt, who was a nurse. this aunt (perhaps because of fertility problems of her own) had an interest in all things reproductive, and had bought two gloriously gory textbooks, full of dry words and frightening pictures of women’s insides and all the things that can possibly go wrong as a zygote divides a gazillion times to make a baby. i can’t remember - perhaps the books were forbidden to bean? anyway, she would pore over these books for hours, and this is one of the places where her fascination with all things baby began.

i love this story - the image of a little bean so engrossed in these big, heavy textbooks with their knobbly bloody illustrations. and so when we went to brisbane and visited this aunt in her home, i asked for verification - is it true that bean loved your textbooks? and she not only verified, but disappeared upstairs and came back down carrying the very textbooks in question. they are indeed gloriously gory and almost quaint - the kind of textbooks that you see in op shops with their dull covers and grainy black and white photos and diagrams revealing the outdated, the mysterious and the freakish.

in this two week wait, bean and i have pulled out the one on embryology, and have been tracking the little four-celled pip’s hopeful progress from zygote to morula to blastocyst - it is now called something very long and complicated that i can’t remember, and if we are the lucky 30% it will have embedded itself deep into the endometrium and established primitive circulation. to follow up the bread and jam analogy, the pip has found its way through the jam and is sitting right up against the bread, and is just starting to send out little thread-like roots into the bread.

i don’t know why we hadn’t thought of doing this before. i think actually seeing the perfection of those four tiny cells on the screen before dr david gently squirted them inside bean has made it seem more real - we can easily imagine those four cells dividing and dividing again. before, we didn’t even know if the sperm and eggs were managing to meet at all.

and it helps. knowledge is power, in a situation where power is so far out of our reach.