then and now

Then was May 1997. Everyone I knew was a Labour supporter. My flatmate and I stayed up until 3.00am watching the election results roll in, and we even went as far as recording the segment for our constituency, and watched the tape over and over again. We were all so hopeful and naively believed that it was the dawning of a new golden age...

Now is May 2010 and the Tories are back in.

Frack.

moved

I bit the bullet and asked the wonderful Mel to move my blog from the "general infertility" room to the "child-free living" section of her amazing blogroll.

It may not sound like much, but it was.

The next step will be to give away the pregnancy books and the maternity clothes from my first two pregnancies. That is going to have to wait a while though. I want them out of the house, but I'm not strong enough yet to retrieve them from where we hid them after Bean died.

I guess it's really true. I'm never having children.

girl power

Today was my friend's birthday and she, another friend and I painted the town, if not quite red, then certainly a pale pink.

We met for coffee and cake at The Crypt cafe. Then we set out into the drizzle to do a bit of elephant-spotting. This was followed by cocktails at the ridiculously opulent Gilg@mesh bar. Then we wandered around C@mden Lock Market, sampling pastries and trying on hats. This worked up an appetite for tapas and a final cocktail.

Inbetween all the shopping and imbibing, we talked and laughed and shed 20 years. I got home tonight more cheerful than I have been all year.

Whatever your age, sometimes there really is nothing like a day out with the girls.

green-eyed monster

Two months ago, a friend of mine had a baby boy, at the age of 43.
She hadn't been trying to get pregnant, as she had only been dating her boyfriend for 3 months.
She announced today on In Your F@cebook that she has just got engaged.

My brown eyes turned green in a heartbeat and the envy was so tangible that it took me a full four hours to clear a space through it to send her a congratulatory email.

It is not her fault that she is fertile, it is not her fault that she is loved by her partner.

Her happiness takes nothing away from me.

Have IF and loss changed me so much that I am made miserable by a friend's joy?

Will the old "me" ever come back?

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