Infertility

It strikes me that there's a few folk here from NaComLeavMo who probably wonder whyfore this blog, given that most of the NaComLeavMo are infertility blogs and this chick just keeps crapping on about "fascinating" things she's read online like I've never seen the internets or something, who the hell does she think she is "discovering" things like street art which I was pretty familiar with actually, thank you very much, not being a complete philistine, as seems to be being suggested.

Jeez, bit over-sensitive, aren't you?

It also strikes me that in my last but one post I was a little unfair in alluding to high drama and not coughing up. I can only imagine the knuckle-curling frustration and quivering uncertainty with which you have been madly checking this blog in anticipation of, in the language of Extreme Makeover, The Big Reveal.

(Although it your collective blog-checking doesn't seem to be showing up on my stat counter — weird. Must be something wrong with it.)

So, to be clear, the parent blog of this blog was an infertility blog. Wilcox and I are infertile, barren, our cupboards — both of them — are bare. For this reason, about a year ago, we went on IVF. We weren't very good at IVF. I began to have a Pavlovian response to the word "scan" and the rather corporate waiting area of my specialist's rooms — honestly — I would walk in and start crying, even if it was just to pick up a script or something.

The drama of last week or month or whatever it was — a bit of a blur was what it was — was that our (lovely) doctor told us we should stop with the IVF, cause it ain't going to happen for us, and that our chances of ever being pregnant with our own genetic material were less than 1%. (Very specific, I thought. How did you work that quite specific percentage out? Then I realised she meant we have no chance. Bar a miracle.)

This left us with several options:

1. I could have a mental breakdown.
2. We could think about the possibility of donor eggs.
3. I could have a mental breakdown.
4. We could give up on having children and focus on other stuff, on having full, creative lives, of making books our babies, of doing our bit for kids in other ways. The book I've just written and am still editing is about a kid who was a ward of the state — he's dead, but sometimes I feel so close to him I think that maybe he is a pathway that leads to a picnic ground that leads to a tap that I could turn and release the flow of my need to mother.
5. I could have a nervous ... oh, but jeez, you can't cry forever, right? I so refuse to be bitter. These days, seeing children makes me cry. But it never makes me angry, and I want to keep it that way. My brother says, "It just seems to unfair." But I've never thought about it that way. Life is neither fair nor unfair, is it? It just does its thing. Do you know A. D. Hope's poem "Death of a Bird"? The final lines are: "And the earth, with neither grief nor malice / Receives the tiny burden of her death". With neither grief nor malice.
   

When I was in the middle of IVF, I remember seeing a flock of sparrows, and thinking, If one of those sparrows is infertile, which I suppose some sparrows must be, what does it possibly matter? Perhaps that sparrow, once a year, has some instinct akin to frustration or confusion. But the flock keeps on, sparrows are still born. Sparrowkind prevails.

All of you who reach this post through NaComLeavMo and are infertile will get what I'm saying. We have that bond thing, huh? Even those who have babies after infertility get it. While I've not been a really active member of the infertility blogging circle — I was too cowardly to face other people's pregnancies — I feel we share an experience that easily fertile women do not have. Amongst its otherwise very ordinary prose, Ben Elton's book Inconceivable expresses this feeling, I think, in quite a lovely way.

... every mother and child I see begs that question, a simultaneous moment of exultation and despair. Every pregnancy is a beacon of hope and also a cruel reminder that for the present at least there is nothing inside me except the longing. And perhaps there never will be. I don’t know why it is that women feel such a deep need to create life from within themselves, to yearn for a time in which their own flesh will bring them comfort, but I know that they do. That’s the one experience that women who have children easily miss out on in life ... The intensely female grief which accompanies the fear that those children might never exist.

The problem with infertility is that the end — when it is not the delightful gift of pregnancy, after which all is forgiven — is excruciating. I quoted Tim Winton in an earlier post: "The day you finish a book is simply the day you decide to finish. For everybody's sake."

Today is not the day we've decided to finish. But it's close, and, like any endurance race, desperately sucking oxygen into cramping, spasming muscles in those few final metres is not fun, not fun at all.