Barren Mare

Week of Poo

Friends, it has been a Week of Poo, and for once I am talking literally and not metaphorically.  I figure this being a (primarily) infertility blog, y'all are quite comfy with talk of more a graphic nature and don't quiver and throw up yer dainty hands in horror at the mention of certain bodily functions. I mean, once you've discussed the finer points of your uterus with the Internets at large, I reckon a little chat about poo is not going to upset anyone.  Right?  Right.  Read on.

It began with a jolly walk in the park with Little Guy. I was a bit frazzled after a long day at work, and looking forward to burning off some steam romping in the park with the tiny puppy. Rompity romp romp. As we merrily scampered headlong toward the direction of the Scary Swan Pond (aieeee! Swan rage!), I felt a sharp *thwock* at the back of my head.  I paused.  E. and LG carried on apace, while I paused to  collect myself in the manner of "thefuckwasthat?"

I confess I momentarily blamed the blow to the head on the group of loitering tracksuit ambassadors ahead of us on the path. Until logic reasserted itself- as in , they are ahead of us and I have been whomped on the back of the head, Q.E.D.  Reaching up to assess the damage, my hand came away all sticky and covered in oobleck.  Of the bird poo variety. A bird had crapped all over my head. Yeah, I've heard it's good luck. To which I say, sure, you bet. It's also sticky, nasty and frankly, unpleasant.  Gee thanks, Jonathan Livingston Seagull!

Far from being good luck, I think it was actually a dark portend of things to come. Two days later, after eating nothing particularly out of the ordinary, I began to experience some rather weird gastro-intestinal phenomenon. It goes something like this: I eat food, and then about four hours later I am doubled over in crippling pain, with an almighty wind blowing through the toilet area and the passing of sound and fury. It's all wrong, wrong, wrong.

Unfortunately, it's one of those situations where I don't feel quite unwell enough for long enough periods of time to really justify staying home from work. I mean, the couple hours in between the eating and the horror are generally OK.  However, on the whole, it's become quite wearing.  Experiencing sudden urgent energy-sapping bouts of discomfort is one thing- but having to go through it in one of the office toilet cubicles?  Disaster. I can usually make it to the one private stand-alone loos down the hall, but there has been more than one occasion when I found myself trapped in the main bathroom, a steady stream of traffic coming in and out the neighbouring stall.  Cue knuckle-biting, sphinter-clenching agony while I tried to restrain the blaring of the foghorns until I am alone. 

And then of course, there is the issue of dealing with a still-not-quite-housebroken puppy. When I get home from work, I've managed to hold it together long enough to take him outside to do his busybusy before I sprint for the bog to deal with my own gastro-trauma. But inevitably, he wants to hang out with me, playplayplay, chewychewy on everything, notwithstanding the fact I am trapped on the toilet, Trying. to. Cope. with. Unspeakable. Emissions.  Plus, the other night it was absolutely pouring it down with rain, and he refused to do anything outside, other than huddle under the umbrella with me, whining and pawing the door. Finally, I couldn't wait any longer, so we came in, and while I was otherwise engaged, he snuck off and pooped, massively, in the corner of the hall.  Poo-o-rama. CIearly I am an idiot for not putting him staight back into his crate but at the time, my priorities were, uh, elsewhere.

On the upside, E. has more pro-active with puppy duty this weekend, leaving me free to lock myself in the bathroom in relative peace & privacy whenever the need comes upon me.  Also, the affliction shows signs of ceasing any time soon; failing which l will go see the doctor as soon as possible. Huh. That should add a little sparkle and colour to my burgeoning medical notes-rounding things out, as it were. 

Letting sleeping dogs lie

So, this long post which I was referring to earlier, the one I didn't have time to finish?  Meh.  Scrapped it.

In truth, it was not very interesting.  It was a long, vaguely disjointed rambling without any meaningful conclusions, and can effectively be summed up thusly:  I used to have a lot of time to spend mooching around online, researching stuff and talking to nice women about the shared crisis of infertility. Then about a year ago, we did IVF, it failed, and everything went completely pear-shaped with E. and I for awhile. When I emerged from the smoking wreckage, I discovered that suddenly my life was full of things other than the state of barren-ness which had hitherto preoccupied me. So much so that I had no time to deal with being infertile any more. Tra la la, the end.

There, that was it. You should be glad I spared you.

In fact, what I realised is that I was pretty much bullshitting myself with all this thrashing and complaining about being too busy to deal. OK, so rolling around on the floor tickling the puppy now seems to eat up the couple hours a day that I used to spend doing stuff like plucking my eyebrows or rearranging my back copies of Vogue magazine in chronological order. But the reality is, I'm not that busy- and even if I was, let's cut the crap. Fact is, people simply do find the time for things that motivate them.

I am not motivated by IVF. I am not motivated by the twinkling illusion that there might, just might, one day be a baby somewhere down the road. Sure, it bugs me we don't have a child, but if I really wanted to do something about it, then I would.  Evidently I do not. And I think it's not that the IVF in and of itself is all that much of an ordeal- it's just that everytime I reach up to the top shelf of the closet to look at the box in which I stored the whole particular problem, I find myself thinking: oh, yawn. I'd rather join the puppy in licking the paint off the walls than go there again. Who wants to stir up that hornet's nest of sadness, anger, frustration and pain again?  Nah. But what I haven't quite worked out yet is whether I'm just being a bit passive and lazy, or if there is something deeper sapping my will to even try.  I suspect a bit of both.

Better make up my mind soon, though. The waiting lists for treatment haven't gotten any shorter in this country, and I am not getting any younger. Tick fucking tock.

What I believe will invariably propel my ass into gear one day is that I can face up to the idea of not having kids because I wasn't able to get pregnant- what I don't think I can live with is the idea that the I was just too idle to even try.

Not on the bed!

I've been trying to find time to finish off a longish post- the theme of which is, er, how I seem to be too busy to figure out the plan of action vis a vis IVF. Unsurprisingly, it is not ready yet.

Meanwhile, the Little Guy continues to delight and occasionally exasperate. The housebreaking thing?  Not going so well. Pardon me for going on at length about it, but I've become slightly obsessed with the topic.

Little Guy is a clever boy, and I've taught him to ring a bell by the door when he wants to go outside for a poo. Good, huh?  But let's not get carried away with the congratulatory pats on the back. The bad news is that the learning has not quite sunk in when it comes to peeing side of potty training, which continues to be an ongoing daily battle with far too many carpet casualties for my liking.

I'm doing all the right things- taking him out every hour, crating him when I can't keep an eye on him, cleaning up the accident black spots with special pet odour remover. And yet, he continues to foil me with stealth pees . This afternoon, I turned my back for about five seconds and he jumped up on the bed, then piddled all over the duvet cover. 

I know, I know, it's completely my own fault for not watching him.  Vigilance is key, yadda yadda. I guess the trouble is that I am often left looking after him for hours on end, on my own, and I simply cannot give him my absolute undivided attention every second. And somehow sticking him back in the crate right after I get home to let him out seems on the harsh side. I figured because he had performed on cue half an hour earlier, the coast was clear to have a quick dash to the loo to attend to my own personal bathroom needs and then brush my teeth for a minute. Um. Evidently not.

I can sort of understand the temptation to pee on the bed (and please note how I daringly tempt the Google search weirdos with that sentence.) But rather more worrying is his willingness to wander into his little crate and let loose. We were using a larger crate initially, one we had inherited from E.'s parents. When LG started heading there for his bathroom breaks, I put it down to the fact that it was too big for him- big enough so he could pee at one end and sleep at the other- a major no-no in received housebreaking wisdom. So I got him a crate more appropriate to his size.  He seems to like it just dandy. He's fine in there for a couple hours during the day.

But then what did he do tonight, right in front of me?  While I was watching him? Walked straight in and away he went. Argggg. Here I had been secretly exulting that I had taught him to be so fond of his little den that he was happy to go in of his own accord and hang out in there, and meanwhile he's plotting potty naughtiness. Double argg.

Yes, yes, I know, he's only four months old, it will take more time. And the bell thing- yay! And also the cuteness- oh yes!  We will perservere.

 

The us in let's

E. and I were enjoying a quiet cuddle in the kitchen the other night; the puppy had fallen asleep at our feet after an extended session of charging around with a crazed apache look in his eye.

"He's very sweet, isn't he?  I mean, when he's not gnawing on the furniture, destroying the living room rug or trying to hump my leg," I murmured.

And E. concurred that indeed, the puppy is the sweetest.

"So what do you want for your birthday?" I asked, apropos of nothing.   

"A baby," E. promptly replied.

Oh. I didn't know what to say to that.  What do I say to that?  That they were all out of stock at the baby store when I checked last week, so it might be tricky sourcing one? That we just got a "baby", only he's small furry and puppy-shaped?  That I too would like a human baby, but it seems there is the small hurdle of IVF to be overcome to make it so. 

Thing is, E. is very good about stating, baldly and matter, that in his view, it is simply a matter of "making it happen." He always says this with a look on his face as if it is the most obvious thing in the world and why on earth haven't we gotten around to it already.  Unfortunately, there are two little problems with this approach.

The first is that the devil is in the detail.  I'll give you an example. We talked for a long time about getting this puppy. The fact of the matter is we both work all day out of the home. Fitting a small puppy properly into that equation takes some juggling and organising.  Whenever I pointed out to him the various concerns I had about the need to share responsibility for a dog, E. would shrug his shoulders and say calmly, "We'll deal with that. Let's just do it."

And therein lies the second problem- ultimately, despite all the avowals to share the load, the brunt of the responsibility invariably falls to me. I'm the one who runs home every lunch time and immediately after work to let the dog out, never mind that I have to re-arrange my schedule to ensure I come home early enough. I did all the researching and phoning around to get a suitable dogwalker booked, then scurried about getting a set of spare keys cuts (a saga in its own right- don't ask). I order Little Guy's food, I bought all his toys, his leash, his collar, his crate. I read the books on training and housebreaking and I take him to the vet.  And-all of that takes up a massive amount of time and energy in my already busy routine.

But somehow this is sort of overlooked when blithely asserting "let's just make it happen."  It's as if the "us" in that sentence gets lost somewhere in the void between letter t and the apostrophe s. 

Now, I'm not completely stupid.  I know E., I know how our relationship works, and when taking on something like a puppy, I knew exactly what I was signing up for. I wouldn't have done it if I had thought it would be an unbearable, intolerable burden, or even if it was more than I was prepared to tackle.  And in fairness, it's not as if E. doesn't help out around here; for example, he does virtually all the grocery shopping and cooking. He does all the driving, when there is driving to be done. He's always very willing to chip in if asked, and to a large extent, he does the best he can.

But that's the point- with the IVF thing, I don't want to have to ask. I don't want to have to designate tasks for him in order to get the job done, nor do I want to do it all myself. I don't want to end up taking sole responsibility for researching IVF clinics or the latest advances in treatment, or making the appointments, organising the scheduling and so forth. Aside from the fact that it's exhausting and I'm soooo not up for it, I've also come to realise that I took on too much on my own last time. In hindsight, it was a big mistake on my part. While it seemed OK while it was happening, I have come to the view that perhaps a lack of investment and involvement in the process on E.'s part contributed a lot to the problems we experienced afterwards.

I don't believe the struggle to get one's partner/husband/thingie to engage is an uncommon situation. I have had many discussions with women, who are all in the same boat.  Many of us have simply had to bite the bullet and take the lead on the treatment side of things- because let's face it, otherwise things never move forward beyond the aspirational. And I think for the most part, because we want the baby so very badly, we're willing to put up with an awful lot, including a lack of input or engagement that might not otherwise be acceptable.

But I learned a hard lesson last time.  It nearly broke me. And I won't put myself through it again unless I know things have changed, that it can be different. So the question is, and remains to be seen- is this something we can really do it together?

Because as far as I am concerned, the only way it can work is if I can really rely on the fact there's an us in that innocent little phrase:"let's make it happen."