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Please know that I understand and appreciate the concern people have shown me in the past months, which I do not take for granted, and may even be helpful in the future.
However, as I write this, I am in a very specific, extremely personal place in my life. I do not speak for any other women in my situation.
I don’t even speak for my future self, as I know how easy it is for things to change and move and evolve and for EVERYTHING to never be the same as it was before.
But for now, for right now, this is how I feel and I want to share it to give this issue, which is so often shied away from and stigmatised, a voice.
Isn’t it funny when people are full of opinions and advice when they have absolutely no clue what you are going through?
Life is full of them, even the ones who mean the very best, which makes things difficult.
Life is also unfair. And if you thought life was difficult and unfair, the business of making new life, for some of us, is even more difficult and astronomically unfair.
Trust me.
After 28 years of wanting to have babies (but waiting diligently for a stable relationship where conditions were ideal)...
Then 4 years of planning to fall pregnant (and diligently working on that relationship, making conditions ideal)...
5 months of actually trying to fall pregnant (tracking and tabling bodily functions, trying for when conditions were exactly ideal)...
2 months of being pregnant (Bliss! Wonder! Excitement! Happiness and all things squeeeeee!)...
Losing the pregnancy (sad, sad memories)...
And now 5 months of subsequent complications from a miscarriage and D&C (and thus not being able to try again until conditions are ideal, which will be who knows when)…
The more I want it, the further away it seems to be.
They tell me not to think about it, those helpful individuals.
They say that I should think happy thoughts, just let it go, while sprouting musical scenes from Disney movies or Biblical references.
Which is about as helpful as offering a spa day to a bomb-victim.
He might not have legs, but if he could just follow the yellow brick road to – wait – what?!
This is the kind of advice I have been given, both in English and in Dali-Lamaism’s - as though happy thoughts could magically remove the scar tissue lining my uterus due to a botched D&C.
They say, in their blindingly ignorant ‘wisdom’ that it was “not meant to be” and that I “should not think about it”.
Double what?! I’m not even going to tackle the ‘meant to be’, but lets talk about the ‘Just don’t think about it’.
That is difficult to say the least. Like telling an alcoholic not to think about the drink he so desperately wants, and shoving him into the nearest bar just to prove a point. BE BIGGER, BE GREATER, just OVERCOME the desire.
Like handing a lit cigarette to the life-long smoker who just quit, and telling them to not even ‘want’ a drag let alone ‘think’ about it – not think about the thing they can see, smell, touch… taste?
Just don’t think about it. Mind over matter. Don’t let yourself want that baby.
If you don’t stop thinking about it, conditions won’t be ideal. If you think about and miss the unborn baby, you will never let it go. Happy thoughts. Happy baby-free thoughts. If you feel that you need another baby, you will be clogging up your pipes.
(Subtext: It’s your fault, really, and you will be the reason you won’t have a baby in the end. But if you would just unplug your mind and simply shut it off…)
That is the worst advice ever given to a woman whose clock has ticked its optimal tock. Whose timer is ringing loud and clear and waking up the entire neighbourhood. Whose baby-making hormones have been unleashed on an unsuspecting husband (you can never be prepared, dear men, never) and whose new mantra IN life is to GIVE life.
It’s evolutionary, it’s embedded in us. It’s elementary, that at a certain age for many women... tick tock. It’s downright conjury! A rational human being, with rational wants and desires and rational ambitions can be diminished to a rabid libido, foaming at the mouth when the moon is right and she’s fresh off the pill.
Telling her to relax, not think about it and it will happen – is like lighting the fuse to a ripe and able time bomb.
She’s no longer in the state that you once knew her. She is no longer of the same chemical make up. Something inside switched over, the catalyst already thrown amongst the ovaries, and what you have on your hands is a new atomic nuclear threat.
You cannot tell a woman who wants to have a baby - and who has already been pregnant only to lose it - that she shouldn’t think about it. She will not take to that advice kindly.
You’re likely to lose a hand but, if you’re lucky, she’ll just burst into tears at your desk.
I can’t simply turn it off. Once it’s turned on, it’s on. THERE. IS. NO. OFF. SWITCH.
And even if there was, it’s pretty difficult to not think about the one thing I want when it is all around me, all day, every day, always.
The Bar and the Alcoholic. The Cigarette and the Smoker. Conditions which don’t make it ideal, but make things infinitely worse: the fact that everybody around me is having babies.
And I mean EVERYBODY.
The lady who passed me in Woolies today with her newborn and a look of shocked euphoria on her sleep deprived face – I have never wanted a good night of no-sleep so much ever in my life!
Even if I could ignore all the women I see in the streets with their bundles of joy happily occupying their 3 month maternity-leaves, what about my Facebook feed? It is drowning with litters of kids.
Seems that everyone I know (and their sister’s cousin) is having babies and posting #newbornselfie’s.
Which is also fine and great and they should be merrily capturing the happiest moments of their lives, (who can blame them?), but, Hashtag Hang-myself-with-the-newsfeed-proof-that-everyone-out-there-can-procreate-but-me.
No? Still not close enough to home?
Still think I should just ‘hide’ the lactating offenders and de-friend the exhibitionist mothers? Still think I shouldn’t feel that I’m being cosmically left out and just look the other way?
Think ‘Happy Thoughts’? Do something else - busy myself in my work or a new hobby or get a degree or something?
Anything but think about it! It’s just Facebook after all. Just a condensed, cherry-picked depiction of other people’s lives and all that jazz. Don’t let someone else’s happiest day ruin your worst nightmare or some such hog wash…
Here’s a Facebook post-it of hope for you: Babies can’t buy you happiness.
Oh yea? Well neither can a child-free track record on top of a miscarriage when conditions were supposedly ideal, compounded by a man-made disease called Asherman’s Syndrome, bestowed on me by my first gyne who did the initial D&C that complicates matters even more.
So, even if I closed my Facebook account in an elaborate attempt to shut out all the goo’s and gaa’s and the inner wants and needs for a nestling head and milky breath in the early hours of my mornings that are currently, lets face it, wasted away with sleep… What about the fact that my small group of closest friends are churning them out like new characters in the latest Game of Thrones book?
One had her first in January. Another is pregnant with her second. A third is pregnant, even though she didn’t plan it and isn’t even with the father anymore. And another trio are trying, and possibly freshly knocked-up as we speak.
Even though I’m thrilled for them and look on in awe, filled with excitement and can’t wait to pop that champagne on the big day (and love it when I get to cuddle their little ones) I am left, once again, standing out in the barren cold, nose pressed against the proverbial maternity ward glass.
Do you still think that I shouldn’t want it so much? That I am just being a bit ‘desperate’ and a little ‘ridiculous’, ever so slightly ‘single-minded’ seeing a baby behind every bush?
Well, the final blow to hit home right now is the one in my own family.
I have 11 nieces and nephews. Which is awesome! My siblings make offspring like popcorn on a rainy winter’s day. We like to call it the Family Forest, rather than the family tree.
My brother is having another on the same day that I was due to have mine, had it lived, and my own niece is pregnant and due any day now.
I will be a Great-aunty before I get the chance to be a mommy myself.
My sister-in-law, though not knowing it at the time, had a brand new cluster of cells firing away in her womb the day that she cried with me over loosing mine. I never imagined that I would be the only one in this great tribe of fertile people who would struggle to make a mini tribe-ling.
I have decided that the Universe might be mocking me with all the well wishers. Handing me the cigarettes, lighting them, and then saying – nope! Not for you!
This is your Lesson. Your moment to Grow. To Let it Go. To find the hidden Purpose and Reason.
You just get to watch as the rest of the planet continues to populate - while your line of descendants stay locked in that box right there.
But don’t worry – it just wasn’t meant to be. Conditions just aren’t ideal for you. Don’t think about it, just accept it. Put that drink down! Put it down! Don’t you dare… DON’T. YOU. TAKE. A. SIP!
Sigh.
I am alone. As Mothers day came and went, I felt it even more, pressing down on my empty belly. I am not the mother I want so desperately to be. It is the lonely condition – suspended in space and time. Not ideal, but there you have it.
I suppose that is not entirely true. I am not alone in this waiting and in the wanting.
At least at the end of the day, after suffering yet another blow, yet another disappointment, yet another round of hormone treatments and surgical procedures; Another Facebook blast of flash-mob baby boomers;
However, as I write this, I am in a very specific, extremely personal place in my life. I do not speak for any other women in my situation.
I don’t even speak for my future self, as I know how easy it is for things to change and move and evolve and for EVERYTHING to never be the same as it was before.
But for now, for right now, this is how I feel and I want to share it to give this issue, which is so often shied away from and stigmatised, a voice.
Isn’t it funny when people are full of opinions and advice when they have absolutely no clue what you are going through?
Life is full of them, even the ones who mean the very best, which makes things difficult.
Life is also unfair. And if you thought life was difficult and unfair, the business of making new life, for some of us, is even more difficult and astronomically unfair.
Trust me.
After 28 years of wanting to have babies (but waiting diligently for a stable relationship where conditions were ideal)...
Then 4 years of planning to fall pregnant (and diligently working on that relationship, making conditions ideal)...
5 months of actually trying to fall pregnant (tracking and tabling bodily functions, trying for when conditions were exactly ideal)...
2 months of being pregnant (Bliss! Wonder! Excitement! Happiness and all things squeeeeee!)...
Losing the pregnancy (sad, sad memories)...
And now 5 months of subsequent complications from a miscarriage and D&C (and thus not being able to try again until conditions are ideal, which will be who knows when)…
The more I want it, the further away it seems to be.
They tell me not to think about it, those helpful individuals.
They say that I should think happy thoughts, just let it go, while sprouting musical scenes from Disney movies or Biblical references.
Which is about as helpful as offering a spa day to a bomb-victim.
He might not have legs, but if he could just follow the yellow brick road to – wait – what?!
This is the kind of advice I have been given, both in English and in Dali-Lamaism’s - as though happy thoughts could magically remove the scar tissue lining my uterus due to a botched D&C.
They say, in their blindingly ignorant ‘wisdom’ that it was “not meant to be” and that I “should not think about it”.
Double what?! I’m not even going to tackle the ‘meant to be’, but lets talk about the ‘Just don’t think about it’.
That is difficult to say the least. Like telling an alcoholic not to think about the drink he so desperately wants, and shoving him into the nearest bar just to prove a point. BE BIGGER, BE GREATER, just OVERCOME the desire.
Like handing a lit cigarette to the life-long smoker who just quit, and telling them to not even ‘want’ a drag let alone ‘think’ about it – not think about the thing they can see, smell, touch… taste?
Just don’t think about it. Mind over matter. Don’t let yourself want that baby.
If you don’t stop thinking about it, conditions won’t be ideal. If you think about and miss the unborn baby, you will never let it go. Happy thoughts. Happy baby-free thoughts. If you feel that you need another baby, you will be clogging up your pipes.
(Subtext: It’s your fault, really, and you will be the reason you won’t have a baby in the end. But if you would just unplug your mind and simply shut it off…)
That is the worst advice ever given to a woman whose clock has ticked its optimal tock. Whose timer is ringing loud and clear and waking up the entire neighbourhood. Whose baby-making hormones have been unleashed on an unsuspecting husband (you can never be prepared, dear men, never) and whose new mantra IN life is to GIVE life.
It’s evolutionary, it’s embedded in us. It’s elementary, that at a certain age for many women... tick tock. It’s downright conjury! A rational human being, with rational wants and desires and rational ambitions can be diminished to a rabid libido, foaming at the mouth when the moon is right and she’s fresh off the pill.
Telling her to relax, not think about it and it will happen – is like lighting the fuse to a ripe and able time bomb.
She’s no longer in the state that you once knew her. She is no longer of the same chemical make up. Something inside switched over, the catalyst already thrown amongst the ovaries, and what you have on your hands is a new atomic nuclear threat.
You cannot tell a woman who wants to have a baby - and who has already been pregnant only to lose it - that she shouldn’t think about it. She will not take to that advice kindly.
You’re likely to lose a hand but, if you’re lucky, she’ll just burst into tears at your desk.
I can’t simply turn it off. Once it’s turned on, it’s on. THERE. IS. NO. OFF. SWITCH.
And even if there was, it’s pretty difficult to not think about the one thing I want when it is all around me, all day, every day, always.
The Bar and the Alcoholic. The Cigarette and the Smoker. Conditions which don’t make it ideal, but make things infinitely worse: the fact that everybody around me is having babies.
And I mean EVERYBODY.
The lady who passed me in Woolies today with her newborn and a look of shocked euphoria on her sleep deprived face – I have never wanted a good night of no-sleep so much ever in my life!
Even if I could ignore all the women I see in the streets with their bundles of joy happily occupying their 3 month maternity-leaves, what about my Facebook feed? It is drowning with litters of kids.
Seems that everyone I know (and their sister’s cousin) is having babies and posting #newbornselfie’s.
Which is also fine and great and they should be merrily capturing the happiest moments of their lives, (who can blame them?), but, Hashtag Hang-myself-with-the-newsfeed-proof-that-everyone-out-there-can-procreate-but-me.
No? Still not close enough to home?
Still think I should just ‘hide’ the lactating offenders and de-friend the exhibitionist mothers? Still think I shouldn’t feel that I’m being cosmically left out and just look the other way?
Think ‘Happy Thoughts’? Do something else - busy myself in my work or a new hobby or get a degree or something?
Anything but think about it! It’s just Facebook after all. Just a condensed, cherry-picked depiction of other people’s lives and all that jazz. Don’t let someone else’s happiest day ruin your worst nightmare or some such hog wash…
Here’s a Facebook post-it of hope for you: Babies can’t buy you happiness.
Oh yea? Well neither can a child-free track record on top of a miscarriage when conditions were supposedly ideal, compounded by a man-made disease called Asherman’s Syndrome, bestowed on me by my first gyne who did the initial D&C that complicates matters even more.
So, even if I closed my Facebook account in an elaborate attempt to shut out all the goo’s and gaa’s and the inner wants and needs for a nestling head and milky breath in the early hours of my mornings that are currently, lets face it, wasted away with sleep… What about the fact that my small group of closest friends are churning them out like new characters in the latest Game of Thrones book?
One had her first in January. Another is pregnant with her second. A third is pregnant, even though she didn’t plan it and isn’t even with the father anymore. And another trio are trying, and possibly freshly knocked-up as we speak.
Even though I’m thrilled for them and look on in awe, filled with excitement and can’t wait to pop that champagne on the big day (and love it when I get to cuddle their little ones) I am left, once again, standing out in the barren cold, nose pressed against the proverbial maternity ward glass.
Do you still think that I shouldn’t want it so much? That I am just being a bit ‘desperate’ and a little ‘ridiculous’, ever so slightly ‘single-minded’ seeing a baby behind every bush?
Well, the final blow to hit home right now is the one in my own family.
I have 11 nieces and nephews. Which is awesome! My siblings make offspring like popcorn on a rainy winter’s day. We like to call it the Family Forest, rather than the family tree.
My brother is having another on the same day that I was due to have mine, had it lived, and my own niece is pregnant and due any day now.
I will be a Great-aunty before I get the chance to be a mommy myself.
My sister-in-law, though not knowing it at the time, had a brand new cluster of cells firing away in her womb the day that she cried with me over loosing mine. I never imagined that I would be the only one in this great tribe of fertile people who would struggle to make a mini tribe-ling.
I have decided that the Universe might be mocking me with all the well wishers. Handing me the cigarettes, lighting them, and then saying – nope! Not for you!
This is your Lesson. Your moment to Grow. To Let it Go. To find the hidden Purpose and Reason.
You just get to watch as the rest of the planet continues to populate - while your line of descendants stay locked in that box right there.
But don’t worry – it just wasn’t meant to be. Conditions just aren’t ideal for you. Don’t think about it, just accept it. Put that drink down! Put it down! Don’t you dare… DON’T. YOU. TAKE. A. SIP!
Sigh.
I am alone. As Mothers day came and went, I felt it even more, pressing down on my empty belly. I am not the mother I want so desperately to be. It is the lonely condition – suspended in space and time. Not ideal, but there you have it.
I suppose that is not entirely true. I am not alone in this waiting and in the wanting.
At least at the end of the day, after suffering yet another blow, yet another disappointment, yet another round of hormone treatments and surgical procedures; Another Facebook blast of flash-mob baby boomers;
After having refrained from punching yet another helpful individual who found it in themselves to offer me advice and tell me it wasn’t meant to be and to not think about it and that if I sing a Disney song backwards and cut all sugar out of my diet and turn children to bubbles in my mind then puff the magic dragon will produce me an egg-child and I shall reign supreme, Mother of Dragons, Deanerys of Cape Town…
After having to deal with all of the above, I do get to go home to enjoy the relationship I am in, with the love of my life and in which conditions are, in fact, ideal.
