baybeasts

this whole trying to make babies caper is doing weird things to me. i have never been a celebrity whore (merk! merk! merk! goes the liar alert - remember U2 when you were 16?). you know, i’ll read new weekly at the supermarket checkout or in my cousin’s toilet, but i never buy it. and the various random fertility of the britneys, marys, and katies-sorry-kates of the world has on the whole produced nothing more than the usual level of fairly banal curiosity.

but for some reason bloody-angelina (as she is now known in our household) has really got to me. i find myself musing aloud to bean as we drive around or lie in bed trying to fall asleep, hoping that b-a had a natural labour, that she is holding her baby a lot and breastfeeding, that she is in love with it even though she gave it an awful name, that she is happy…

i guess it’s because not only have i always thought she is totally gorgeous (oh yeah), but in a weird way her mediated life has kinda matched up with mine. look:

mid 1990s: b-a is into lesbianly stuff like making the movie about gia carrides and bonking jenny shimizu (sorenson comes out in 1996)
late 1990s: b-a is into s&m stuff like knives and blood (sorenson joins bad girls mailing list and starts buying pat califia books)
early 2000s: b-a makes a film where she plays a video game character who is tough and cool and much loved by both boys and lesbians (sorenson starts a phd on lesbians and comics - there’s sort of a geeky link)
early-mid 2000s: b-a gets involved the UN and starts trying to save the world (sorenson gets a job with the government in some kind of misguided hope that she can ‘make a difference’ to the odd citizen)
mid 2000s: b-a goes all motherly and adopts babies and then makes one (sorenson goes all motherly and tries to make a couple of her own)

and so i have taken that identification one step further. now i want her to have the birth and baby experience that i want so badly…because maybe then it will happen for me?

(weirdly, bean, who has always professed to dislike b-a because of her big lips, has joined me on this weird trip, and has been musing back at me on similar themes)

update: so rumour has it that she had a caesar for a breech presentation. oh well, i probably would have done the same…

this morning it was so cold that there was ice on the dark wood of the rail overpass. somebody had written a chalk-board sign - ‘IC on bridge go slow’. on the platform, all the people were shivering in their own personal clouds of steam that made visible the space they were taking up in the world - body plus breath. a more new-age person might say it was like they all had white auras (am i channeling my mother? i have been thinking about her a lot lately). there was just enough fog in the air to make all the trees and buildings soft against the sky, and the haze was lit by a huge orange sun that gave everything an illusion of warmth.

i am glad i can still see the small beauty in the world. lately i have been seeing so much ugliness everywhere. i have been feeling impotent in the face of its fucked-up-ness, and bean and i have been having those ‘my god why would you want to bring children into this world?’ type conversations. yesterday it was the front pages of the newspapers - always a reliable source of rage. how is it that one stupid man with too much money who wastes it on putting himself in a very dangerous situation is more important (to the tune of huge colour photos of his face) than over 5000 poor people who were just living their lives when they were suddenly shaken into death? could it be that one is white and the others are not? is it that simple? if that many people were killed in california would it be buried as deep within the pages of the papers as the java earthquake is? or maybe it is just about new(nes)s - we are so used to poor people dying that it barely registers, in the same way that domestic violence is barely news but a shark attack is front page material.

of course, the irony is not lost on me, as we white (comparatively) rich girls go through our own self-induced hell of IVF, left with only the energy to feel mad and impotent with the world but not motivated enough to act.

we are down to the last few frozen pips now, and the big debate of the last week has been whether to transfer one embryo or two, also known as the ‘for fuck’s sake i just want to get pregnant already’ vs ‘holy shit not twins!’ debate.

these have been delicate negotiations - when we are done with all this i think we should definitely apply for jobs as diplomats! and maybe all this practice in working out solutions for difficult issues that we don’t always agree on will stand us in good stead through all the other challenges that life (especially children) is likely to bring.

but in the face of the horror of the world and the difficulty of the process of ivf, the desire to have our own quirky family is still so strong it almost hurts. last night we watched a beautiful episode of australian story, with a gay man who has donated sperm to a bunch of women (both lesbian and straight). he knows about half the kids, and his relationship with them and their mums was just gorgeous. we both sobbed as we watched him talk about his kids and the two oldest of them (stunning young man and woman) talk lovingly about him. a photo of the eldest girl just after she was born with masses of black hair and a squished up face reduced us both to howls.

yes, we are a mess, but at least love and hope are so tangled up with anger and sadness that the whole has a kind of chaotic beauty about it…

i keep writing emails/comments and then thinking that i should post them as a blog entry. so they are:

1. bean and i have been trawling the internet and various scientific journals for whatever information we can lay our hands on about factors in ivf success rates. one day, i came across a fascinating paper published in the journal of reproductive medicine that claimed to prove that intercessionary prayer improved ivf success rates. of course, it didn’t take long for it to come out that the main person behind the study is known as a fraud and con-man obsessed with trying to prove paranormal events. for a fleeting moment though, i considered begging you all to get down down on your knees and pray to the lord on our behalf. hallelujah!

2. once upon a time i was hanging out on az’s blog as i often do, and i followed a link to nix’s blog (i do love to blog hop) , which i then lurked on until recently, when he wrote a post called ‘the future’ that spoke to me so much that i had to post this comment:

hello - i came here via az’s blog and have been lurking - i hope you don’t mind! anyway i wanted to respond to this post because i identify so strongly with what you are saying. when i was a teenager and in my early twenties, i used to tell my mother (to her great horror) that i thought i would die before i turned 30. i seriously believed it at the time, because i just couldn’t imagine a future with me in it. how things have changed! now i am 32, and i didn’t die before 30 (though my mother did, to my horror), and i am in a very serious and lovely relationship, and we have bought a house and are trying to start a family - these are all things that i never thought would be possible. i never even dared to dream of them. and yet, and yet - like you, now i can see a future. i can see myself old and comfortable and happy pottering in my garden and cooking beautiful food for my beloved. it took me years to get to this point, but fuck it’s nice to be here. weird, but nice.

(hm, i think i need to post this on my own blog! it’s something i have been thinking about for a while)

We are very bummed. We are also very amused that someone found our little blog by googling ‘Capricorns are beautiful’.

Respect.

It was a woefully bad idea to go to work in a maternity hospital on mother’s day. I think I may have been the only non-mother there (apart from the odd visitor). I tried to smile as my colleagues all laughed together about getting burnt toast and other assorted offerings from their offspring.

And like the daughter I am, I rang Mum when I got home and told her what a crap mum she’s been for not answering my emails lately (I then found out she had sent one - it just got lost somewhere over the Atlantic). Mum said in a small voice that she does have good intentions, and she does. So, of course, I feel like the crappest daughter ever.
Bad barren bairn.

My beloved grandmother finally delivered the ‘just relax’ arrow. She wasn’t clear about at what point there should be more relaxing. Maybe our donor needs to chill out more? Maybe we should light a smelly candle and give him some trance to listen to while he produces the goods? Or was I meant to relax more when the eggs were retreived. Oops, too late, already unconscious. Hmmm…

I wasn’t even there when the eggs fertilised, so can’t blame me for that one. So I guess that just leaves my damn uptight unrelaxy uterus. Maybe I’ll ask Dr David for a script for Valium to cover the entirety of the two week fucking awful wait.

Maybe that’ll relax me once and for all.

Thanks to Julie for these hilarious icons.

I woke up this morning feeling very flat after scary dreams about dead babies. Sometimes the women I look after have a very sad obstetric history…
S caught my funny mood, and we were both moping around the kitchen until we decided to plant out some recently bought flower seedlings.
We planted poppies first, so I said ‘if this pip sticks, we’ll call her Poppy, or him Pop-eye’.

Heh heh

Hmmm…

As we were leaving the house, we found a parcel in the mail! It was a belated birthday present from my best friend Julie, who lives in Sydney - a great gardeny present, with seeds and a 1 year subscription to Diggers. It came with a beautiful catalogue of drool-worthy produce which kept us very nicely distracted from transfer stress. The geographical separation from Julie impedes our regular joint consumption of red wine, earl grey tea, cardamon coffee and all things chocolate, and this is a great shame.

We had a very peaceful drive into the Royal Women’s Hospital for our third (lucky?) transfer. They thawed a 5 cell embryo (all cells survived the thaw), and it had divided to 7 cells by transfer. I would have preferred 8 cells, but S thinks it’s still pretty good.

This month, we will not be doing any HPT/POAS/early home pregnancy testing as it was so heart breaking to lose the faint line last month, and heartbreak is very boring and makes little fodder for blog entries. I think we have recovered better this month after the soothing balm that is the visit of beloved interstate friends. Thank you so much Wang and Alison for making the time to see me.

I am eating pineapple. I am staying hopeful.

LH surge this morning, so the next transfer will be on Wednesday. Dr David was again lovely when we went in for yet another cheap lube saturated wang cam scan. He’s still very optimistic.
This will be try number 13 for me. Lucky number 13?

We caught up with our donor and his wife for yum cha yesterday. We had such a lovely time - we all said at the end how great it was to catch up ’socially’ as opposed to in the context of negotiations. We were reminded again of how lucky we are that they agreed to come on this crazy journey with us, and how much we adore them.

work is NUTS! i will never skite about being a cruisy public servant again. hence the lack of blogging. but there is hopefully some good worky news to post in the next couple of weeks…

the lawn has ‘taken’ - that is, it is green-ish and getting longer. phew - that’s the scary thing about instant lawn, that it may just turn up its toes and die on you, making a mockery of the expensive convenience of instant lawn.

the winter vegies are finally in - carrots, onions, silverbeet, broccoli, peas and beans, and an experimental crop of potatoes (i think it will be too cold but you never know until you try!). i’ve also planted a mess of flower seeds - pansies, lobelia, columbines, calendula and marigolds, scabiosa, and goodness knows what else. i am hoping for a flowerful spring this year - which reminds me, must get more bulbs (tulips!).

i finished an exquisite baby jumper with a shawl collar in mottled maroons and blacks - it is so beautiful i get all squishy when i look at it. i am now working on very dinky orange and cream stay-on booties for my pregnant boss at work (soooo many pregnant women at work!) because she is very cool and i want to give her something nice.

after looking up the definition in the dictionary i’ve decided we are definitely not bourgeois. well, i hope not anyway. might post more on this later. you know, we make a lot of our own stuff. and stuff. ah shit…

and we are feeling a lot better than we were a week ago. chins up, looking forward! here we go again.