baybeasts

The other day, on the train on the way home, three women sat down opposite me, one older woman and two teenagers. If the red hair and matching delicate features of the teenagers hadn’t given away that they were related, their behaviour would have. The two girls, so clearly sisters, were almost in love with each other – looking at each other with warmth and humour, teasing each other gently, the older sister biting back with the soft iron of a mother cat disciplining her kittens when the younger sister went that little bit too far. At one point, they were all three playing a game of shifting along the seat, forcing each other further and further up the seat until the three of them were squished into two seats, giggling the whole time.

They were beautiful.

And as I watched them furtively over my newspaper, I felt a strange mixture of longing and sadness and hope that my own, hypothetical, children will love each other so much; that my family will interact with a similar gentle playfulness underpinned by true affection.

I think if the way that bean and I are now is any indication, we might be ok. We are daggy in our sense of humour, but we enjoy the way we amuse each other. (For example, the other day bean said to me, ‘if I could change anything about you, anything at all, it would be to make you love Blade…’) Our kids will undoubtedly moan at our jokes and pull away from our hugs, but hopefully they will also sometimes join in.

But I can’t help being scared, because my own family was so different. We had humour and love (my mother was genius with the terrible puns), but we also had strong unruly conflict and an accumulation of wounds that never quite healed. I just hope desperately that I can take what worked and avoid the dramatics.

It’s all a bit more poignant at the moment because bean’s mother came to stay. It was a very good visit – she was in good spirits, and they got along as well as they ever do. But it was still hard work, and I wondered if our own kids would find us as hard to spend time with. At work the other day, a colleague spoke of booking a holiday with his adult children, and I thought, I will know that we have succeeded as parents if our kids actually enjoy spending time with us once they have grown up.

Bean says she doesn’t want to write on the blog anymore. I think it has been infected with the taint of failure. The same thing happens with anything that is associated with infertility for us. When we first started trying, we decided that we would do something nice each month to try and make up for the disappointment of a failed cycle, and being us, that something nice involved dinners out at lovely restaurants. After a few months though, the glorious flavours of fine dining turned to ashes in our mouths, as eating out became associated with the dry, grey taste of disappointment. We stopped marking the arrival of bean’s period with anything other than hot water bottles and a visit to the DVD shop.

Now the blog has become a litany of failed attempts and sadness, so that is boring to write and probably even more boring to read. We don’t have the biting wit of Akeeyu or Julie, or the warmth of a Tertia or a Julia, and we can’t think of anything interesting to say about the world like Az or Ange or Nix can, because our world has become so small. So the easiest thing to do seems to be to just give it up.

But somehow, I expect that I will still post every now and then, even if bean doesn’t. Sometimes I like to have a semi-public place to ramble, even if I don’t have much to say.

The guard is changing in another way too. We have decided that, given my age and our frustration with not having managed to produce a baby yet, that I will start trying now too. I’ll start the old-fashioned lesbian way, with furtive exchanges of jars of sperm (thanks R!). Hopefully my ‘legendary’ fertility will step up to the plate and a syringe and a prayer will be enough to get me pregnant. Wish me luck – I certainly need it. A good dose of hope (a scarce commodity when infertility is around) wouldn’t go astray either.

no luck
very sad and tired
am going off the air
thanks for your attention

Eggs
As bean mentioned in the last post, pick-up went very well indeed. It was much less stressful for me, as we worded the anaesthetist up before-hand – bean doesn’t want to be awake during the procedure, please, so no wriggling please. The first drug they give her must be something really good – last time she was cracking jokes about how spunky I looked in my scrubs and funny blue showercap; this time she was demanding that somebody in the theatre tell her a dirty joke. The theatre staff are used to it, I guess, and always play along good-humouredly. The recovery nurses were not so lovely – after telling me that I couldn’t stay by bean’s side because they needed more room, they proceeded to use that room to discuss the merits of the new patient trolley she was on, using their feet to shift her sleeping body up and down as they raised and lowered the trolley.

Also unimpressive are the lectures we keep getting from the nurses and scientists when we ask for detailed information about our embryos. It’s like pulling hen’s teeth. They hate to give away anything, usually because ‘you shouldn’t get too invested in the cell numbers/number of embryos/whatever because things might change.’ Well, der! They keep talking to us as if we are completely uninformed about IVF, and the best solution to that is to keep us as uninformed as possible. In fact, we are very well informed, and like to know everything. After all, these are our embryos, this is bean’s body, and the outcome of all of this is the stuff of our life. Not to mention the obscene amount of money we are paying them. So we keep pushing, and luckily for us Dr David understands where we are coming from and supports us by pushing as well, so eventually we found out that we have seven four celled, grade 1 and 2 embryos (one of which is hopefully blissfully cosy inside bean right now), which means that we have six very good frozen embryos plus a couple of not so great ones. This takes a great deal of pressure off us, because if this one doesn’t work, we’ve still got another six good chances.

Daffodils
Last Friday was Daffodil Day. A mate of mine at work was keen to get involved, and so we plotted fundraising activities, primarily selling bunches of daffodils and cupcakes. As the Cancer Council had run out of pre-ordered daffodils, we managed to find a way to get into the wholesale markets (thanks Russell!) to buy them ourselves. It was magic. It was a rainy morning, still pitch dark when we arrived at 4.30am. The flowers were all in a huge shed that smelt of florists. There were masses of all kinds of flowers at ridiculous prices, and people wandering around in fluorescent vests piling huge bunches of them onto big trolleys. We bought 130 bunches of ten daffodils each, and I bought several bunches of poppies and tulips for home. That day, my lounge room was filled with daffodils. I will update this post with a photo soon.

Doctors
I think we mentioned that Dr David is leaving our IVF company to set up his own, smaller, friendlier clinic. We are terribly sad about this. This might sound a bit odd, but I keep having faint echoes of the kind of feeling you get when someone breaks up with you – a sort of sick, betrayed feeling mixed with hopeless affection. We will miss him a lot – the warm smile; the way he worked out really quickly that we were well informed and then adjusted his language accordingly; the way he listened to what we wanted and went along with it if he could; his badgering of the nurses and scientists to give us information; his unfailing politeness; and the way that, when we gave him home grown vegies, he would always manage to remember and report back every single meal that they were used in. We have an appointment with another doctor, should we need her; and if the worst happened and we needed to do another stim cycle we would consider going to his new clinic, but the chances are that we won’t see him again, for the wrong reasons (the right reason would have been because bean was pregnant). And I’m sad.