baybeasts

Below is an email from my 85 year old grandmother who is such an excellent person. It is written in response to our request for letters in support of the recommendations of the Victorian Law Reform Commission (VLRC).

I finally was able to access my emails. John had forgotten to plug in the telephone and although I could turn on the computer I couldn’t reach the emails. So thanks for all of yours. Very pleased you are both feeling well. I have written a letter to the Attorney General and sent the information on to a few of my friends so they may send something off too.Thanks for the pattern for pilchers. You didn’t say what size needles or what ply wool. You know you have to wash woollen things very carefully, probably hand wash in luke warm water.

Your aunt and I are interested in going to Canberra for your Mum’s concert and then we will all come down to Melbourne to see you two and B 1. We think we will stay in a motel or hotel near you and just visit. Looking forward to it. No more news, Love Gran.

She’s 85 and just back from a trip to Alaska!

No copyright on this pie recipe so here goes. It’s a winner!

Finnish Blueberry Pie (Mustikkapiirakka)

Crust:
100 g butter or margarine
½ cup sugar
1 egg
¼ cup cream
1 ½ - 2 cups plain flour
1 tsp Baking Powder

Filling:
500g frozen blueberries
2 Tsp potato flour or breadcrumbs
½ cup sugar

Cream the butter and sugar. Add the egg, then the cream. Mix the flour and baking powder together, and then add it to the batter. Don’t beat it too much or the dough will get tough. Form into a ball and put in the fridge for half an hour or so. Roll out the dough and place on the base of a buttered pie pan (diameter 26-28 cm) and sides.
Combine the berries, potato flour/breadcrumbs and sugar. Spread the berries over the dough. Bake at 210°C in the mid section of the oven, for about 30 minutes – until the pastry is golden brown.

So easy, so yummy.

In gestational news, S is 20 weeks today - halfway! I finally felt a good strong kick the other day. Her tummy is just starting to become beautifully rounded and we have relaxed no end since seeing the little one on the scan. Our four chickens are arriving this week, followed by B1 in only a matter of weeks and B2 in 20. Life is not going to be boring…

The Auditor-General has finally made public the Victorian Law Reform Commission’s report on access to assisted reproductive technology and adoption. Thankfully, the recommendations are pretty good - if they were all made into law, we’d both be considered legal parents of our children, and they would be legally siblings; and a lot of women wouldn’t have to go through the expensive and heartbreaking process of travelling interstate to access fertility treatment. There are also some sensible recommendations about adoption and surrogacy. The hardest step now is convincing the politicians to actually change the law.

Sadly, the homophobes are already out in force, including our fearless leaders John Howard and his lackey Tony Abbott. It never ceases to amaze me how mean our opponents are about our little families - we create them with such love and care, and yet all they can spout is hatred and bigotry. Why?

I’m having an issue with my hair. It looks a bit like this:

I’ve been growing it for over two years now. I’m not sure why, exactly. Bean has been too ( I think it is lovely – though she is lucky enough to be beautiful enough to carry off pretty much any hairstyle). This post is very much about me, not her (though I think she feels a bit the same about some of the issues I raise).

I am struggling to know how to frame this post. Sometimes the discomfort with my flowing locks seems to be purely in the realm of fashion crisis, shallow and irritating. It’s fluffy and it annoys me. At these times I think I should just get a different hair cut, maybe sleeker and less layered, or maybe I should learn how to use a hair dryer and the straightening tongs.

But I know that even if I did these things, it wouldn’t solve the sense of discontent I feel every time I look in the mirror. It feels like something much deeper – symbolic of a series of crises of gender and sexual identification, aging, work and my place in the world. And these are what I am struggling to articulate.

It is much harder to take these feelings seriously – sometimes when I flippantly say at work that I want to cut my hair off because I’m tired of not being recognised as a dyke my (uniformly straight) colleagues look at me strangely and say, ‘why does it matter?’ I can never seem to come up with a convincing twenty word answer. This post is my attempt to explain. It will possibly be the final thinking through that will send me to the hairdresser, cherishing the moment when I can say the words ‘cut it all off’. Or maybe by the time I work it all out I will be renewed in my commitment to keeping it long for just a little bit longer.

I had lovely long hair as a young adult – straight and shiny almost down to my waist. Cutting it off when I came out in my early twenties was a revelation. For the first time in my life I liked what I saw in the mirror – I felt like I belonged in my own skin. I felt sexy, spunky, even a bit cool and edgy. These are feelings that I never had as a teenager. I never quite understood how to be a girl – I didn’t know how to make boys (or anyone really) like me, I didn’t know what clothes to wear or how to put on makeup, I always felt awkward and like I was unsuccessfully faking the femininity required of girls in my country town. I never felt like a boy either though – I just felt uncomfortable trying to match up with the gender expectations that I thought were critical to finding love and connection with other people. Sure enough, I was unqualifiedly terrible at picking up! So when I came out as a lesbian I felt like – well, there’s no way to say it that isn’t a cliché – I felt like I’d found myself. I still often felt awkward in my skin and terrible at picking up, but it was much less severe and interspersed with times of feeling decidedly spunky and comfortable (and I did pick up much more successfully!).

Now in my early thirties, I am in a stable, beautiful relationship, and I have taken this opportunity to test a theory that I had – that feeling more comfortable in my skin and cutting my hair were correlated rather than causally related. The real underlying cause, goes my theory, is that I was older, more confident, and trying to pick girls rather than boys (much more within my comfort zone). So I am still older and more confident, and I have picked up my ideal woman so have no need to worry about that anymore – therefore I should be able to grow my hair back to its lovely shiny length and still feel good. And I should do this one last time before it all goes grey.

With the loving support of Bean I struggled through some very dark days of mid-length, uncontrollable hair, and I now have the shiny locks I wanted. I get a lot of praise for them, especially from family members who are thrilled to see me looking like a girl again. But every time I look in the mirror or at a photo it looks kind of wrong. I don’t feel pretty. I have never felt pretty – the best I have ever felt is spunky, and I definitely don’t feel spunky with long, fluffy hair, no matter how good the cut is.

Something I find strange, though, is how strongly it is about the hair, rather than clothes or even weight (though these things also impact on my confidence in presenting myself to the world). With short hair I was still happy to wear skirts, and I still am, though I always feel more comfortable in pants. And while being overweight upset me because it impacted on the clothes I could wear and feel good in, it wasn’t quite the same as the slightly dysphoric feeling I get when I have long hair.

I use the word dysphoric deliberately, because while I don’t feel transgendered in the sense of not wanting to be a woman, I do feel dislocated from the set of expectations and ideals that are generally attached to the concept of ‘woman’ by the first world consumer culture that I occupy. I also feel confused, because there is no clear gender ideal that I aspire to be – I feel a bit like I have to invent it for myself. Actually, thinking about it, I guess I do have an idea of my ideal gender – it is a variant of woman, one that veers towards the androgynous but likes to play with both femininity and masculinity, one that is strong and sexy and a bit spiky. It definitely doesn’t have long, fluffy hair.

Those are the internal reasons. There are external ones as well – a whole realm of desires and confusion about wanting to be recognised as something other than the nice, straight-looking long haired lady I present to the world at the moment. I want my sexuality and my dissatisfaction with the rules of the culture I occupy to be written across my appearance. I don’t feel comfortable in the straight, conservative world I live and work in, and I want it to show, partly out of a sense of defiance, and partly as a system of semaphore, flagging my queerness to those who can read the code, flaunting my difference to those who would otherwise think me one of them.

So why do I bother keeping it long, I hear you ask, dear reader. Well, it was bloody hard growing it out – two years of suffering through every day being a bad hair day. Also, I can see that the hair itself is kind of lovely in its own way, and I would feel sad to lose it even though I can only appreciate its beauty as something not quite attached to me. Once I cut it off I know I will never grow it ever again. And it is actually kind of easy to manage – no product, less frequent haircuts, less trying to come up with a new funky style every few months. I almost never wear it out (which kind of defeats the whole purpose of growing it long, I know), and it is pretty easy to just get up in the morning and tie it back, rather than fiddling with hair product until it is sitting just so.

So for the moment I will keep it, slight sense of hair dysphoria and all. I’ll try and get a sleeker, less fluffy haircut. And one day, one glorious day, I will cut it all off and feel like myself again.

of course the football story is so much more complicated than i ever imagined. on sunday i just happened to be driving around listening to the radio, when i heard a story about the history of migrant soccer clubs in Australia, called Beautiful Game, Lucky Country.

The standard of play and the size of the crowds grew in leaps and bounds throughout the decade, yet to many Australians soccer remained ‘wogball’, a game for pansies. They also associated it with spectator violence, especially towards referees and a level of nationalistic fervour that new arrivals were supposed to have left behind in the old countries.

despite promising myself that i wouldn’t get up for the game last night, i found myself wide awake in bed at 1am, and so i did watch. it was still very exciting, even though we was robbed. Tim Colebatch wrote a prescient opinion piece in today’s paper. i have no idea whether he actually knows anything about football, but i almost always think his economics opinions are enlightening, so i’m prepared to take his word as truth.

in garden news, we bought a mini nectarine tree with the unfortunate name “nectazee”. despite the name, i think it will be a very sweet little tree! and we finally put in the avocado that i have always wanted. we harvested something like 25 pumpkins - we have given quite a few chunks away, but have still managed to store enough to last us for nearly a year (if they don’t go mouldy on us). i took a photo - i’ll post it when i download it onto the computer.

in ivf news, the lovely dr david is away this cycle, so we went to see his covering doctor. she wasn’t nice at all. it was all rather disheartening. normally the post-period visit to the dr in preparation for the next transfer gives us a boost, clearing away any lingering misery after the last failed cycle. dr david’s optimism, cheerfulness and careful attention is infectious, so that we feel excited and happy and optimistic all over again. this time, we just felt disrespected, stupid and insignificant. no surprise that it has been harder to bounce back. dr david definitely deserves a pumpkin when we see him next.

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…

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.

ever since we first embarked on this family adventure, i have thought a lot about the details of how i want all this to play out. (insert standard disclaimer about life being unpredictable and things changing blah blah blah.) i find dreaming about it all totally irresistible. for example, i have thought long and hard, and have very passionate feelings about:

and so on and so on (really, the list could go on forever).

that’s not so strange, i think.

what is strange, is how reluctant i am to tell most people about the kinds of conclusions i am reaching as i consider these things. i am more reluctant to come out about my beliefs and desires about parenting than i am to out myself as a lesbian.

of course, i’ve talked endlessly with bean about these things, and for the most part we agree. lucky.

i hope that, as with coming out as a dyke, i become more certain over time about the fundamental validity of my choices. yeah.

ps [edit] this ps had a list of the specifics of the kinds of things i am talking about. but on reflection, i have decided to take this list down. there are several reasons for this. one is that i don’t want to offend anyone. the things we want to do are not intended to be judgements of the choices that other people make - just things that feel right for us (even though in many cases they go against traditional expectations and ideas about parenting). another is that it is a list in progress - how i feel today is different to how i felt a year ago, and will undoubtedly be vastly different to how i feel once we have a couple of real live little people to deal with! the most important reason, though, is because the content of what i am talking about is beside the point. the point, because i don’t think i was clear enough, is that i feel sad that i don’t feel like i can talk openly about my ideas about parenting without fearing negative judgements. this is not a reflection on any of my friends and family - rather, it is a reflection on the profoundly rigid and highly charged field that parenting and family occupies in contemporary western culture. so there. yeah.

I’m very sorry if I’ve ever been der with people who have been going through a really hard time. This is a steep learning curve for me too. I always thought that offering platitudes would make my friend/acquaintance feel reassured. Not so, I find. Platitudes make the person saying them feel better, and the other (infertile) person feel nothing, or feel worse. I understand that the intent is good. There are widespread popular myths around infertility, and not one single person who is having trouble conceiving has escaped ‘just relax’. It is not a novel suggestion, and has no basis in medical fact. It’s a very rare woman who is so stressed that she actually stops ovulating. Studies have not shown that women who are worried about their infertility are impeding their chances of getting pregnant.

We had a classic “But have you tried…” from an old family friend recently. She looked so dismayed when I talked about starting IVF, that I almost felt sorry for her. She then came up with all the typical ‘assvice’ in the book. One we cherished was… “But have you been to see a naturopath ? There’s a really really really good one I heard about. She’s getting incredibly good results. Um… I think she’s in Melbourne, but I can’t remember her name”.

Finally, here are some ideas for helpful things to say to someone struggling with infertility…
‘I’m so sorry you are having such a crap time’
‘I hope this next time is the one. I really hope you have good news soon’

NO-ONE can promise me that I will have a baby.
Nevertheless, we are optimistic about IVF, and know that we have as good a chance as any.
(For a very funny look at unhelpful suggestions, check out this infertility ’study’).

plagiarised (and edited) from an email to a good friend - may as well recycle good words, i say!

***

the critical thing about this infertility is that the repeated disappointment month after month is really really hard. and it just gets harder, each time. we do do things that make ourselves feel better/vaguely sane, it’s just that these aren’t things that are traditionally regarded as ‘fun’ - socialising, going out etc. those things have always been mixed bags for me - sometimes really fun, sometimes just hard work, usually a combination of the two. it’s maybe harder than people think to be around others and enjoy stuff *despite* lack of pregnancy - it’s definitely on the hard work side of socialising rather than the fun side. so we concentrate on doing things that make us feel better, but don’t necessarily involve other people! like watching movies, going out for dinner, and working on the house and in the garden.

i also don’t think i can fully explain the depth of longing and disappointment in all of this. it is especially hard for bean, who has wanted to start a family for as long as she can remember. i cope a little bit better because it is all still a bit new and exciting and terrifying, but the disappointment for me each month is still keen, and seeing bean so sad and not being able to do anything much to cheer her up is heartbreaking.

i guess i am just trying to say it is a *really big deal*, and while the ways that we are coping with it are maybe not the ways that other people think we should, ultimately we have to do what works for us, regardless of what other people think (a rather new experience for me!). i feel bad that a few times now i’ve had to cancel social events that have fallen on period due dates - it has been terrible planning on my part, as well as a fair bit of bad luck. we are still pretty sociable and happy in between times!

i really want my friends to understand how big this is, what an enormous life change it is, how hard it is to cope when it’s not working out, how full on and crazy and beautiful and terrifying it will be when it does happen…and i want them to be supportive without being judgmental (at least not to my face!).

so, no, we’re not terribly ok, but it’s ok that we’re not ok if that makes sense! that is, we are dealing with it, clumsily and messily, but we’ll make it through…