my parents

I come from a close-knit family of many (many) aunts, uncles, cousins, second cousins, people who aren't related but are called cousins or aunts or uncles - you get the picture. News spreads round the extended family by some kind of supernatural osmosis. If I sneezed right now, here alone in my living room, I swear that in 10 minutes a cousin would be texting me to ask how my cold is.

Loving and generous though my family are, they are also mostly deeply religious and old-fashioned (it's mainly cultural) and they would find it difficult to understand assisted conception. In fact, I heard one of my uncles on the topic a few years ago and he is most certainly of the opinion that some people can't have children "for a god-given reason".

This knowledge makes me even more grateful than I already am to my parents, who not only know all the sad and often gory details of our quest to have a child, but are incredibly supportive. To be sure, my dad has to have most of the information filtered by my mum due to immense squeamishness (he almost passed out 2 Christmases ago when he saw the massive, purple bruises on my arms where my screening bloods had been taken), but they had my IUI days marked on their calendar, have spent ages with Dr Google scaring themselves silly and are constantly buy us treats (fancy chocolate, expensive coffee, hideous souvenirs from their holidays) because they feel so helpless otherwise. Not having to pretend or hide this from my parents, as I know so many people in the ALI community have to do, makes this tortuous trek so much easier.

Anyway, the reason for this somewhat incoherent ramble is I have been re-reading some of my past posts and have realised that I spend a lot of my time on this blog bemoaning my fate. I just wanted to put it down in writing for me to read again later on another "sorry for myself" day.