20/20 Hindsight

Feeling bitter

I don’t think I can bear IVF. I don’t think I can do it. Having dragged our sorry, inadequate reproductive organs off to a specialist; female, our age – presumably as appealling as self-satisfied, over-charging IVF doctors can be – I remain unconvinced. If I end up a sad, childless old witch it may well be due to stubborness, because I still can’t accept that I need some “expert” to make my body do what everybody else’s seems to do all the time… when they don’t want it, when they don’t deserve it, all the bloody time. Babies bloody everywhere.

I wish I’d been a bad girl and got knocked up when I was “too young”, when I probably still had eggs and when I was naive and hopeful enough to just go with it and not analyse every possible choice and every possible outcome to the point of complete paralysis. I’d have a ten year old by now, and the hard bit would be over. Well one of the hard bits anyway. But now I have to choose whether to do this thing that is supposed to just happen; I have to think about whether it’s really the right thing to do. For me, and for the planet. God knows the world doesn’t need any more people and maybe I’ll have a better time drinking, travelling and buying shoes than changing nappies and generally being responsible for a whole other life. My God, I’m a cliche: The selfish modern woman who left it too late and now has to go running to the doctor to be rescued.

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There is a God – he’s not just an expletive. I just found half a packet of Tim Tams in the fridge. I’ll be allright in a minute…

Bleeding obvious

Yay! It’s my favourite time of the month! For the next few days I will allow myself pain killers and alcohol to celebrate the arrival of cramps and the accompanying grief brought on by another month of childlessness. I didn’t expect any miracles considering we had a total of two nights together this month, but I am cursed by a strange and uncharacteristic capacity for hope when it comes to the baby thing. As the day approaches I know the irrefutable evidence will arrive and yet I allow myself to think “maybe this time…”.

Maybe next time.

Singapore Sling

Absent husband’s trip gets extended and in recognition of my long-sufferingness, I score a trip to visit him in Singapore…

I’m a pathetic excuse for a vegetarian. I don’t even deserve the Fish and Chip’ocrite moniker anymore.. Faced with the choice of chicken or beef on the plane over here (having booked the flight too last minute to make a meal request) I chose the beef. My logic was; I am so hungry I have to eat something before I pass out, and I’d rather avoid the known evils of growth hormone and antibiotics in the chicken, and go for the probably equally offensive concoction that lurks in commercial red meat but that I haven’t done the research on yet.

Thank you, Chicken

Fast forward twenty four hours. Having had a brief interlude with husband who did very well to come to the airport to meet my plane and who said and did all the right things right through to breakfast the next day, I found myself suddenly alone again standing on Orchard Road while he sped back to the office.

I cut a rather tragic figure as I stand on the corner in one of the great shopping districts of the world; lonely western woman with credit card and no desire to use it. As much as I try to blame the humidity; I have a fever and feel like crap. Must have been the beef. Better eat something else. And as everybody knows, the best thing to eat when you’re sick is chicken. And as everybody in Singapore knows, the best dish to eat is Chicken rice. It’s clean, simple and delicious.

So I find a food court, head straight for the Chicken rice stall, avert my eyes from the rows of ruthlessly skewered dead bodies swinging above the cash register, kid myself that they don’t use growth hormones here and three dollars later walk away with a plate of delicate white flesh soaked in soy sauce and a bowl of steaming broth. Ten minutes later I’m rejuvinated. And not just in a oh-I-really-needed-to-eat-something kind of way, I mean in a blood energy kind of way. My chinese acupuncturist had regularly chastised me for not at least eating some chicken when I was run down, and especially once I began trying to conceive. And I think he was probably right. I think that chicken donated (albeit unknowingly and no doubt unwillingly) to me and a few other people (I only ate one breast) it’s very life force. And I’m truly grateful.

Time on my hands

Growing things; garlic and lentils

I was reading recently about the chemicals used in garlic production and how so much of it is imported. This goes for so many of the vegetables I use and most of the time I succumb to the appeal of convenience and try not to become paralysed by the wider ramifications of every purchase I make. But there are many things I can do that give me huge satisfaction and reduce my participation in the great pesticide-soaked-imported-produce system, and I’ve discovered that growing my own garlic is one of them!

I use heaps of the stuff and about a week ago I went to the organic produce place and bought a small bunch for about sixty cents. I broke up the cloves and planted them in a pot and now I’ve got gorgeous green sprouts, some of which I’ll chop off and use for a mild garlic flavour in salads and some of which I’ll allow to grow into fully fledged bunches. So satisfying.

I’m a sprouter; there’s usually a jar on the kitchen bench with a bunch of seeds in some stage of germination. I only do the easy ones; I’m too disorganised for anything that requires serious monitoring, so it’s usually alfalfa and lentils. Yesterday I planted the last of the lentils which had started to grow green leaves. They’re shoved in at one end of the garlic pot. They seem to be taking off. I wonder what they’ll do?

Deep and Meaningful 

I spend so much time alone, and it’s tempting to think that I’m a victim of circumstance; flung from city to city because of my partner’s work with no capacity to get on with my own life. But I’m beginning to realise that this isn’t accurate. However unlikely it might have been that I would take another path, for example leave my partner when his job began to require a lot of travel, the fact is that I continue to choose my situation and therefore have to take responsibility for it. And what I’m beginning to realise is that it’s that very freedom to choose that I’ve been afraid of. It’s been so much easier to stew in  frustration and resentment because I don’t have the life I was “meant to have” than to truly accept that I’m creating my own life every day. Heavy stuff huh? I’m going to leave it at that for now in case I disappear into my own navel.

Ovulating alone with cockroaches

It’s a public holiday. I’m really happy for everyone who has a nine to five job and I hope you get the rest you deserve. I’m more the working-from-home-freelance/ casual type and I kind of forgot all the shops would be closed today. I’m out of coffee and the milk is off. Like many people I guess, I tend to let things slip when there’s only me to think about.

I figure the chances of getting pregnant are pretty slim while my husband’s away on business, so I’m trying to focus on other things. He self-depricatingly suggested that I might have more chance if I did go out and pick someone up, but even if that were true, I’m very resolved about the fact that it will be our baby or no baby. Everyone has their limits, and that is mine. As much as I want children, if I can’t have our own biological children, I’ll just have to find other things to do with my life. So I know already that many of the myriad options out there for starting a family despite fertility problems don’t apply to us. We’re going to see how it goes and then move on if we have to. Wow, that sounds so much braver than I actually feel…

My uninvited house mates don’t seem to have any fertility problems. Holy crap I knew there were cockroaches in Sydney but this is insane. My benchtops are crumb free; I hardly eat anything when Husband’s away – there are no infestation-supporting food deposits in my kitchen and yet the little bastards are everywhere. I think they may actually be living in my keyboard.