In remembrance of things past

Once upon a time, I was one of those women - you know, the ones who we're all secretly convinced are in fact an urban infertility myth - the ones who get pregnant just before they're about to start their first cycle of IVF.

The month before we were due to start treatment, we went on holiday. I'd stopped charting at that point, so it wasn't until we got back home that I realised that I was a whole week late. Prompted by Mr H, I took a home pregnancy test for the first time in my life. I sat and watched incredulously as that magical second line appeared. Just to be sure, I took another test the following morning - and there it was again. I went to the doctor's, where a third test confirmed that yes, I was in fact pregnant. For two whole weeks, I hugged the precious secret of my pregnancy to myself. With every wave of nausea, it started to seem more and more real.

And then the bleeding started.

They booked me in for a scan later on in the week, but by then I already knew that I'd lost my baby. 'You've been a very lucky girl,' said the sonographer. 'The evacuation is more or less complete; you won't need surgery.' And so, two years ago to this day, I was discharged from the early pregnancy assessment unit at our local hospital.

That was it. My one brief experience of pregnancy.

And two years on, two attempts at IVF down the line, I can't help but wonder whether that was in fact my one shot, my only chance. Would all the subsequent BFNs somehow be easier to deal with if I hadn't had that one brief positive?

Friendships lost... and found

I've been a bit hopeless at posting over the past week - I begin composing posts in my head, but then never get round actually to writing them. Instead, I've been mulling over all the assvice I received last week from our friends and family - and this in turn has got me thinking about my best friend, Stella.

Stella and I met on our very first day at university. We lived in the same halls of residence, and were doing the same degree course. Our friendship really cemented itself, however, after we left university. We saw each other through shitty jobs and broken hearts. We went out dancing, and stayed up all night talking.

After dating a number of inappropriate men, and crying on each others' shoulders when it all went wrong, we both settled down with our respective partners. Eventually, the inevitable happened - Stella invited us round for lunch, and told us that she and her husband were expecting a baby. I held it together all the way through the meal, but then fell apart in the car on the way home. 'Don't you understand that that's the way it's supposed to happen?' I shouted at Mr H. 'You come off the Pill and then you get pregnant a few months later. It's not supposed to take eighteen fucking months.' Up until then, we'd been doing a pretty good job of pretending that we didn't have a problem - Stella's pregnancy was actually the catalyst that led us to make that first appointment with the doctor.

Eventually, Stella had her baby - a boy. Eighteen months later, she had a little girl. In the meantime, we underwent the standard battery of tests, and were placed on an NHS waiting list for IVF. As time went by, my weekly telephone conversations with Stella became more and more one-sided: she talked about her children, while I listened.

And then I had a miscarriage. We hadn't told anyone about the pregnancy - we'd agreed to wait until we were safely into the second trimester - but Stella was one of the first people I had planned on sharing my news with. After I lost the baby, I couldn't face picking up the phone to let her know what had happened, and so I sent her an email instead. Over a week later, she sent me a text message: 'I hope you're feeling better now'. When she did eventually ring me, I explained that I was a little hurt that she hadn't got in touch sooner. She then proceeded to tell me about an article she'd just read in a magazine, which suggested that a miscarriage was a bit like having a particularly heavy period. After that, I didn't really feel like phoning her again.

That was just over two and a half years ago. Stella has not made any effort to contact me since that last phone call. I've sent her Christmas and birthday cards, but she hasn't responded. I really thought that we would be friends for life, but it turns out that our friendship wasn't strong enough to survive me losing a baby.

As I fell further and further down the rabbit hole of infertility, I felt increasingly isolated. And then one day, I stumbled across the infertility blogosphere. I couldn't believe it - here was a group of articulate, angry, witty, sarcastic women who were just as pissed off as I was! For a long time, I lurked, silently and nervously - it seemed such a tight-knit community, would they let me in?

Eventually, I took a deep breath and started writing. It felt a bit like throwing a message in a bottle into the ocean - I had no idea whether anybody out there was actually reading. But then Melissa actually mentioned something I'd written in one of her Friday roundups! Gradually, the comments started to come and I began to realise that I was in fact part of an extraordinary grass-roots movement. When my first IVF cycle was cancelled and I put out a plea for help on Lost & Found, so many people whose blogs I'd never even visited before rallied round to offer their support and advice. After I'd been away for a few days last week, several people stopped by to say 'welcome home' - and at the moment, this does feel like home. I know that, here in the blogosphere, I will meet with more support and understanding than I have received from the majority of my 'real life' friends. I'm sorry that I haven't been around over the past week - I've been lax at commenting, as well as posting - but just wanted to say thank you, all of you, for being there.

My mother-in-law

Mr H's mother is a woman of firm and decided opinions, many of which appear to have been gleaned directly from the pages of the Daily Mail. She is a devout Catholic, I am a committed feminist. There are many issues on which we do not see eye-to-eye: a woman's right to choose, UK immigration policy.... I could go on.

Mr H is one of five children - a fact which may well be attributable to his mother's religious beliefs, rather than to any strong maternal instinct on her part. She fell pregnant with Mr H and his brother soon after getting married and, in her own words, was 'absolutely devastated' to discover that she was carrying twins: 'I didn't want to be pregnant at all, let alone be having two babies'. Ten months after Mr H and his brother were born, she gave birth to a daughter. After what one can only assume to be a period of some twelve years' abstinence, there then followed two further babies - a girl and then, five years later, a boy. Although I can accept that ambivalence plays a necessary and important role in mothering, and that coping with three young children ten months apart in age is in particular a lot to contend with, from what Mr H has told me about his childhood, his mother reminds me of nothing so much as a turtle, who swims up to the beach, lays her eggs and then basically f**ks off and leaves her offspring to get on with it.

I will draw a veil over many of the more tactless remarks she has made over the time we've been struggling with infertility - suffice it to say that our difficulties in conceiving have not met with any degree of understanding or compassion from Mr H's mother. After I miscarried, she sent Mr H an email (she apparently could not be bothered to pick up the phone to speak to either of us in person). One particular sentence will forever be engrained on my memory (and please bear in mind that, at that stage, we thought we were dealing with male factor issues only): 'it is good that Ms H has finally relaxed enough in order to be able to conceive. Maybe next time, when she is less stressed about her studies, she will manage to carry to term.'

I was - and still am - speechless at her insensitivity. Had she perhaps been reading one of the many Victorian medical textbooks that warn of the dire effects of intellectual work upon a woman's reproductive system, or was this something she'd picked up from the Daily Mail? Does she in all honesty believe that my eggs have been addled by too much thinking?

Mr H has a few days' holiday left, which have to be taken by the end of the month. We are accordingly going down south to spend a long weekend with his parents. When you also factor in the smug fertiles and their intrusive questions, I think it will be a miracle if I get through the next four days without losing my temper and telling someone exactly what I think of them.

Letter to my body

We've been together a long time, you and I. Like many long-term relationships, ours has shifted and developed over time.

In my teenage years, I was very bothered about how you looked. I spent a lot of time comparing you to other women's bodies. I measured you against the bodies of my friends, and against the bodies of the airbrushed models in fashion magazines, and I felt inadequate in comparison - somehow, you didn't quite seem to measure up. At that stage in my life, I was hung up on external appearances; your internal rhythms remained a mystery to me; your monthly bleeds were nothing more than a messy inconvenience.

In my twenties, a late period was a cause for panic, rather than optimism. The decade seemed to pass by in a whirl. I stayed out late, and subsisted on coffee and KitKats. I took it for granted that you could handle whatever I threw at you. I didn't treat you with the respect you deserved. For all the Big Macs and the tequila slammers, I am truly sorry.

In my thirties, I began to take better care of you. I ate right, and exercised. And I grew increasingly angry with you when you failed to repay that care. I felt frustrated and betrayed by your inability to do what you were designed to do - to conceive and sustain new life. Paradoxically, it was only after I suffered a miscarriage that I was able to let some of those negative feelings go. The only way I could begin to come to terms with having lost a baby was by trusting in you - by accepting the fact that you had recognised that the foetus was not viable, and so had dealt with it as quickly and efficiently as you could. I decided that I needed to have a little more faith in you; I learnt to respect your rhythms and chart your cycles. But the odds were stacked against us - tests had revealed that there were fairly major problems with Mr H's sperm. And so we felt we had no option but to turn to ART - ICSI, to be precise.

Over the past three months, I've put you through a lot. I've pumped you full of artificial hormones designed to put you into a temporary menopause. As if that wasn't enough, I then took even more drugs designed to make you work overtime, and to produce more eggs than ever you would when left to your own devices. And, perhaps understandably, you rebelled. You failed to respond to those drugs.

Next month, I'm going to ask you to do the same thing all over again - only we'll be using even more drugs. And this time round, I need you to trust me; as alien and as counter-intuitive it might feel to you, this seems to be the only way for us to have a baby. Please, please work with me on this next cycle.

Yours, hopefully,

Ms H xx

The Letter to My Body project was initiated over at BlogHer. My own letter was prompted by Melissa's thoughtful post on how infertile women in particular view their bodies. You can read Mel's own letter, as well as links to those of other women struggling with infertility and loss by following this link.

Looking back to the past

This week marks the first anniversary of what would have been my due date.

I have thought a great deal about how to phrase that sentence, but however I try to express it, it sounds awkward. There is no cultural ritual that would enable me to mark an event that never took place. There is no commonly held discourse through which I might explore my feelings about that not-yet-baby who never fully formed either in my body or in my mind.

When I think back to my pregnancy, I cannot think beyond seven weeks. My imagination does not carry me on into the second trimester, to seeing my belly visibly swell, to feeling the baby move for the first time. I cannot imagine myself preparing for the birth, or bringing a baby home from the hospital. I cannot picture myself as mother to a one-year-old child, making plans for a birthday party.

Instead, I am precipitated back to that hot, airless weekend in June when I miscarried. I remember the cramps that first alerted me to the fact that something was desperately wrong. I remember how, after the bleeding started in earnest, I lay in a small patch of sun at the end of the bed, knowing that my body was ridding itself of the baby I had so desperately longed for, and that there was nothing I or anyone else could do to halt the process. I remember being faintly surprised that losing a baby was such a slow and insidious process - my sense of what it might be to miscarry had up to that point been largely gleaned from television dramas, in which actresses collapse suddenly and dramatically, clutching their stomachs.

Everyone, even Dr Abrupt, tells me that the fact that we did once conceive spontaneously is cause for optimism. But I am haunted by the possibility that that could have been my only experience of pregnancy. What if that was my one chance? Would all the subsequent BFNs be easier to handle if I had not had that one positive?