damn bird

That bastard single magpie was back again today, mocking me from the tree outside my living room. I wonder if looking at it twice could possibly count as "two for joy"?

If you have time, please go over and offer B some support. She is marking the missed due date of her little Snowflake.

on the couch

So Significant Other and I have had two appointments with the counsellor at Rel@te. She's a very nice woman and I think that we will - that we are - getting on with her.

I have been pleasantly amazed by Significant Other's willingness to talk at these appointments, in fact the first one was 90% focussed on him. At the end of the first session he said that he "felt a bit better" but at last week's appointment he said that he had been feeling even more down...

I don't know if I am doing the right thing, dear Interwebs, by making us do this. I want to do everything I can to save our relationship but I don't want to make Significant Other even more unhappy than he is already.

This is all so hard. And I'm very tired.

the power of advertising

The first time I saw this ad I cried for ten minutes.

But it wasn't the sequence with the woman being pregnant or the woman cooking with her daughter.

It was the sequence at the end, where the woman and her husband play with their grandchildren.

That is never going to be my mother and father.

It's never going to be Significant Other and me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHcm1ec7CcY

What if...?

What if Significant Other never forgives me for losing our babies?

He almost left after we lost Starchild, he could barely look at me after we lost Bean, and now - four months after my last (and final) miscarriage - he may be about to leave for sure.

What if he never forgives me for robbing him of the chance to be a father, to leave something behind to carry on his genes and his memory and at least his partial likeness?

Significant Other may decide after all that leaving me is the key to his future. He may meet someone younger / more fertile / both of these things and have a child and be happy. But what if he can never forgive me for the loss of the three children that, in one way or another, my body killed?

What if he can never forgive me for the years of pain and sadness my infertility has caused him?

He was in love with me once, what now seems like a lifetime ago. Sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I think I see him looking at me with that same love. What if that love is still there somewhere, buried beneath the sand of this island of misery on which we seem to be stranded and we can find it again? What if we can, after all, live a different kind of life?

This post was written as part of the Bloggers Unite: Project IF. Click here for a list of heart-wrenching "what-ifs".
To learn more about infertility go to Resolve.
And this week - 24th April - 1st May is NIAW

crumbling

28th April 2008 we lost Starchild. It was the worst day of our lives, and both Significant Other and I were the saddest we had ever been. A week later, I was still crying a lot and Significant Other, in his own pain, told me that he couldn't face my sadness and was thinking of leaving me.

My tears dried instantly and he never saw me cry again until February 6th 2009 when we lost Bean. Mindful of what had happened less than a year before, I was careful, after that first outburst of pain, not to let him see me sad. Not when I didn't respond as well to the IVF drugs as expected, not when I miscarried for a third time on Christmas Eve, not even when my beloved grandmother died.

In retrospect, I might not have been as wise as I thought.

On Sunday morning, Significant Other woke up and said he was leaving. That he no longer wants to be in this relationship. And he packed his bags.

I crumbled. The held-back tears of two years' unremitting pain started to flow, as did the held-back words. I now don't remember exactly what I said, but whatever it was it has bought me some more time and Significant Other is still here, at least for now. What's more, he agreed to see someone and we have an appointment with a councellor at Rel@ate on Wednesday evening.

Please let this help. I can't lose three children and their father, I just can't.

lost in translation

Last night Significant Other told me that he "had an obligation" to stay with me, because if our infertility had been his fault, I would stay with him.

"An obligation".

For now I have decided that means something different in the Antipodes - you know, like "love you beyond measure and being without you is unthinkable". Because I just don't have the resources at the moment for it to mean anything else.

heartsease

I'm still very sad and defeated and exhausted.

But this evening a cup of tea (Ceylon) and a biscuit (malted milk) and my darling little cat (gorgeous) curled up next to me have proved to be a little bit of heartsease.