My purpose!

Anon77 - 19 Oct 16

Present Day

I’m 39, have a well-paid contractor job, great friends, loving mother and sister, about to move into a lovely flat a stones throw from my nearest tube, have a boyfriend who calls me his “peach”………………….but I am childless.

The Fairy-tale

Rewind 7 years to 2009 when I met “E”, a whirlwind romance involving a few “time of my life” trips to California, gigs every month and a ring on my finger in 2010.  All seems perfect doesn’t it!- that was until we started trying for a baby!  The memories are a bit sketchy in places but after only about 4 months of trying I fell pregnant.  This was a surprise considering a few years before that I had been diagnosed with mild PCOS and under active thyroid, so as you can imagine we were thrilled.  I have never been ambitious, yet always found myself in good jobs but ultimately always felt that having a baby was a natural progression after marriage – this is what I had been bought up to believe.

Devastation

The day before our 12 week scan I started bleeding lightly.  After a few frantic Google searches, I came across a baby advice site that told me it’s very common to bleed in the first trimester as this is probably the baby bedding in.  From this point on that naivety and excitement you feel when you first start trying for a baby with the man you want to spend the rest of your life with was gone forever and never to return again.  My head became flooded with positive and negative information that confused me but gave me hope at the same time.  Then, suddenly a few days later that hope was snatched away – I had the shock of my life when I ran to the loo with a weird feeling in my never regions!  I won’t go into details but let’s just say, it was a like a horror story right there before my very eyes in my toilet bowl.  A scan a day later confirmed our little “bean” was no longer there. We were of course devastated. I opted for a natural miscarriage rather than D&C which I read had its risks.

Sand slipping through your fingers

From that point on the running theme in my life was 2 steps forward and 5 steps back.  The next three years involved dieting to shed the weight I had put in between trying and not trying for a baby, research into the best consultant to see, into other people’s experiences, blood tests, advice from friends who had kids and knew that “it will happen one day”, chasing hospitals for appointments, chasing for answers and having to disappoint our parents with bad news. In between all of this, friends and colleagues around me were announcing their 2nd, 3rd and even 4th pregnancy whilst I sat with my well-rehearsed “I’m really happy for you” fat (through comfort eating) face.

Now, I’m sure that what I’m saying is not news to anyone who has experienced miscarriage but when you have experienced countless miscarriages (4 to date, although I know some women have had plenty more than me) with no light (baby) at the end of the tunnel, it certainly does something to your mental wellbeing.  I became obsessed with all things miscarriage, searching for anyone that might have been through the same thing as me, as I couldn’t really discuss it with well-meaning friends who were busy in baby world.

Grrrrrrrrr

Suddenly, I started looking at my husband in a different light.  His little quirks that used to make me smile and laugh now grated on me.  His relationship with his parents seemed to become stronger as our relationship became strained and his way of trying to sweep it all under the carpet simply irked me.  I became very angry (with myself more than anything) and probably hard and not very fun to be round.  He didn’t know how to deal with what was going on in my head and I couldn’t communicate it as the anger over took any rational conversation or thought.  His suggestions of “let’s go to a Beyoncé” gig, that would have excited me beyond distraction in the early throws of our relationship, suddenly became meaningless and frustrating.  “I don’t want to go to a bloody Beyoncé gig, I just want you to understand why I’m so upset and down……………………IT’S NOT FAIR”. He probably meant well at the time but I just couldn’t see it.  We were becoming worlds apart.

Life changing

Then, in October 2013, something even more life changing and shocking happened which took the focus off us and our miscarriages completely for the very first time in 3 years.  In 2013, my father was diagnosed with a very rare, terminal pulmonary sarcoma in between his heart and lungs.  Oh yes, this was in addition to the cancer my mum had on her hand a year before, a very bad fall that resulted in her needing a metal plate in her ankle and months in a wheel chair. It took 3 months to diagnose my Dad’s disease by a specialist consultant.

Suddenly, I had a purpose for the very first time in my life.  This sounds so macabre but what I mean is, my unconditional nurturing kicked in, a feeling you might have for your own child.  Suddenly my strong willed, funny, loud, loving Father became vulnerable and weak and I spent every opportunity loving and cuddling him, reminding him that he wasn’t a bad person and had not been punished.  Right up until the minute he died, I did everything I could to make my parents life more bearable in those retched, evil dark days.  Suddenly the urge to have a baby was replaced with the urge to find a “cure”, to keep my mum from falling under, and to just exist and get through each half hour. Dad passed 3 months later and I immediately moved back in with mum to further care for her emotional needs in light of the massive void that has been left behind.  I hasten to add, my marriage was not strong enough to survive the battle so all this coincided with me moving out of our martial home.

I still have thoughts of having a child one day but I have been left so emotionally drained, scarred and anxious that I am petrified at the thought of starting all over again and to be honest right now today, those thoughts are not as strong as they once were. The explanations of why I may be having re-current miscarriages, became so hard to digest and understand.  To this day, it’s still not a clear cut “case” but I know that if I tried again for a baby (with time running out) I would need to inject my stomach with blood thinning and take steroids. All this and no guarantees over having a baby. I feel very emotionally unstable sometimes and I dread to think what this surge of hormones and even the weight gain alone would do to me, along with the added fear of having a 5^th miscarriage.

Keep Calm and Carry on

I crave for a  significant period of calm in my life where I don’t have to worry about my mum and sisters’ way of dealing with my dad’s death. All three of us have dealt with it in different and often not very cooperative ways,

In the 2 and half years since losing dad, I have been privy to tones more pregnancy announcements but have been too distracted by the knock on effect 6 years of hell to feel sorry for myself.  I have a loving caring and understanding boyfriend and still those great friends, some mini dramas that come and go and I feel like I just want “to be”, not make big life decisions, just appreciate what I have (however big or small) and live in the now…………..for now.

Anon77

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