Barren Mare

Peace

Ugh. I had all these grand plans of catching up with things over the holiday period; somehow I had this fuzzy notion that being off work for a couple weeks was going to help. Oh hahaha. Instead, while my sinus infection segues neatly into another ghastly chest cold, I've been in blue arse fly mode. Last minute presents! Food for dinner! Register Botany and myself at a doctor's which does not involve a 40 minute walk and/or parking nightmare! Cards- em, yeah, those! Bake something! Wrap something! Jingle around the clock!

For extra amusement value, Botany is cutting molars top and bottom, has her own cough to contend with, and at the start of the week, was in the foulest of moods. When not screaming or throwing a raging tantrum about something mystifying (cup? no cup? that other cup? the cup is too full? not full enough? what? what? what?) she clings to me like a barnacle. And happy as I am to carry her about with my increasingly buff arms, it does get a little tricky trying to do basic life stuff, never mind Christmas preparation while toting a 16 month old about. 

 Anyway- I feel I need to explain myself about this post which has upset a (now apparently former) reader. Due to the general life backlog (see above) I only just got around to reading the comment, hence the delay in responding. 

For the record, I apologise if I caused offence in any way. Evidently, I have.  My intention was certainly not to represent the period of my life during which I struggled with infertility as "halcyon" in itself. God knows it wasn't. Rather, I was referring to the community in which I experienced a tremendous amount of support and friendship, and what it was like to be blogging then, and how it changed my life forever. Even when things were at their crappest, it made a huge difference to know that there were people out there who understood. That was the halcyon part, not the circumstances that brought us there. What Pru's blog was referencing, and what I was picking up on, is that some extent, that original sense of community from that time seems to be gone- or at least profoundly changed, and I was attempting to muse on why that is. 

 I would never, for one second, wish the experience of infertility on anyone, or try to depict it as a merry lark which was delightful to go through. Never. Nor have I forgotten what it was like. My heart goes out to anyone who is still struggling. For a long time, I felt like I was last one left behind, while everyone else moved on, and there is not a day that goes by when I don't feel grateful for how things turned out for me as far as being able to be a mother to Botany. 
 
 I try to be conscious of the feelings of anyone out there who may be having an IF nightmare but still somehow tunes in to read what I have to say. Personally, I couldn't hack reading parenting blogs while I was struggling with infertility for the very reasons Jen mentioned in her comment- it does hurt like hell from the other side. No matter how gracious you might be, or how much you wish the person well. You want it to be you, goddamnit, and you sit there, aching and thinking, "Why her and not me? Why?" And it's worse on the days when you sense the recipient of such good fortune is perhaps less than grateful for what they have.  I am aware of that, really I am.

At the same time, the reality for me is that parenting, particularIy as a single mother, is really damn hard. There are days when I honestly don't know how I am going to hold it together to do everything that has to be done without having an exhausted breakdown. Yes, I desperately wanted this, and I got it, whereas others have not. And I realise that sucks. But what I am dealing with(the state of singlehood not being one of my choosing, I might add) is taking an immense toll on me at the moment. I try to keep a lid on what might well be perceived as whining and complaining, because hey- how is that fun to read? At the same time, there is stuff going on that I need to be honest about. Because I do enough effing grinning and bearing it with my stiff upper lip all day without coming to my personal blog and pretending everything is great all the time.  
 
I regret if that rubs anyone up the wrong way. I just want you to know that no matter what, it is absolutely not my intention to belittle, or demean, or be insensitive to others, especially those who are in the middle of their own infertility difficulties. I'm truly sorry if anyone felt otherwise.

Next time: some good news, I promise!  And until then- I wish you all peace and a happy holidays.

Incy wincy had a very shiny nose

If you're wondering if you've missed the reveal of my good news referred to earlier, the answer is no. I've been saving it up to tell at Christmas. No peeking!

I have also been working on a post telling the story of how I ended up living in Scotland. But it's beginning to assume epic proportions, and it's taking me forever. So, to tide you over as an interim measure:  I was inspired by the vision of the bird thing on top of the tree at the Hairy Farmer Family abode, and realised the world might appreciate a glimpse of my own little macabre festive ornamentation.  

It's a little hard to capture the full pecularity of it, but I bring you what is probably the first ever picture of the Christmas spider. 

   

If you are thinking, what in the name of arse is that, well- basically what it looks like. It's a knitted spider which lives on top of my Christmas tree, and has done annually for the last 30 years or so. Except last year, when we didn't have a tree because of the dog and my general exhaustion. Or the year before that, when there was no tree because of the dog and my general pukiness. And possibly the year before that, when I was so depressed by the failed IVF and E. trying to break up with me that the decorations consisted of some fairy lights on a large potted plant. But this year, the Christmas spider makes his triumphant return!

I think, once upon a time, the spider went with a Little Miss Muffet doll and accompanying knitted tuffet, all lovingly handmade by my slightly odd grandmother and now lost forever. I'm not quite sure how Mr Spider survived to haunt my Christmas tree, although if memory serves, my brother had something to do with the original adornment, probably as a means of trying to piss me off. The Christmas trees of my childhood were filled with a funky assortment of stuff anyway- paper airplanes zooming between the branches, strange handmade wooden toy soliders, and the grooviest, ugliest retro plastic star you've ever seen. Except that it was the Seventies, so not really all that retro at the time, in fact. It was lost or broken some years ago, causing much mourning amongst the more nostalgic family members, i.e. me.

Anyway, for Botany's sake, I thought it was high time to revive some of the quirkier family traditions, starting with the Christmas spider. Not that she can really see it. And the rest of the tree looks decidedly normal when you omit the top, albeit in a half price bargain artificial sort of way.  Now all we need is some presents to go under it. Mmm. Tick tock.

They paved the internet and put up a parking lot

For a few days now*, I've been ruminating on a recent post from Pru about Infertility blogging: the Halcyon Days Gone By. It made me all wistful and nostalgic and even a little...homesick. It was a time in my life where I had little else to do in the evenings but roam the internets, read blogs, write comments, write my own posts (I used to try to post every other day! Imagine!). The quality of the company was just stupendous. There was, for at least a short time, a real sense of community and togetherness; I for one had the feeling I had found my tribe and my sad, bitter little infertile voice could for once be raised as loud as I wished. It was an amazing revelation to me to learn that people could have serious, soul-destroying problems and still be funny, still laugh about things, still find a  snarky comic joy during some very bleak moments.  

If you are a blogger now and weren't around then, this is not to make you feel all left out. To be honest, even though I have fallen out of the habit of reading so widely, I had kind of assumed that in some ways, the tradition continued on unabated, although it did seem to me at one point that there were now entirely too many blogs to humanly keep track of. That was part of the beauty of the old days, I think. It used to be on Infertility Island, everyone knew their neighbour and nobody locked their tent at night. But the population seems to have grown and grown. Odd having a overpopulation crisis in a group of people unable to populate themselves, but there you go. I even heard a rumour that there may be a brand new condominium going in by the ferry dock.

For me, blogging changed irrevocably due to three factors. The first, and most serious, was that E. found out about the blog a couple years ago around the time of our first near break-up. Well, I say "found out" but in reality, I did tell him. I think we were having a huge fight about the underlying web of secrets and lies in our relationship and it seemed kind of disingenious to be keeping it from him, considering what a huge amount of time and effort I was spending online. He wasn't particulary amused about it and even though he indicated he wasn't going to read it, from then on I felt eyeballs on the back of my shoulderblades whenever I sat down to write. And I started doing a lot of undesirable self-editing.  

And that self-editing became even more self conscious after I got trainwrecked. I hate to even bring this up, since it was a ridiculous incident and it bothers me in the extreme that those sad little fucks (who went around targeting sites to subject to ridicule) might have somehow, in any small way, gotten to me. But it did make me question to some degree as to how my writing might be coming across. That can be an insidious mental journey to take, and in my opinion, one guaranteed to fuck with your blogging head. Who is reading? How often? Do they like me? Do they still like me? Why do they like me? Will they like me if I say...this. What about that? Oh God, I really want to say that but then they might hate me and stop reading. Or maybe they are only reading because they hate me. Oh God, I hate me. Maybe I should just give it all up and work on my knitting. Etc.

The third thing was, obviously, getting pregnant with Botany, her subsequent birth and the mayhem of my ensuing life since then. I no longer have an iota of the free time I used to for the internet; most of my days are spent patching the leaks in the liferaft and trying to keep us afloat (all the while singing a rousing chorus of Incy Wincy Spider at top volume). So it's perhaps easy to wrap up the fondness I felt for the Halcyon Days with the same longing for say, a long lie-in followed by a leisurely coffee while reading the Sunday papers. Or even just thirty uninterrupted seconds to pee in peace.      

Anyway, I am not sure where I am going with this little walk down memory lane. But if you're out there blogging, wondering in Jack Johnson fashion- where'd all the good people go, then I hope you somehow manage to carve out your own little happy corner of cyberspace. Everyone should have their own Halycon era. For no matter what fresh hell comes along in future, I think I will always be the better for having experienced that time.

*Nothing gets done quickly around here anymore. I have grey roots showing, I may never reach the bottom of my laundry basket and there are still cardboard boxes from the move sitting in the hall awaiting recycling. Admittedly, the boxes do make great tunnels in which Botany can play. 

The fridge magnets do not lie

  

Little red riding hood

It seems Botany and I have had a cold forever. It's getting to the point I can't even remember a time when I wasn't hacking, spluttering and mopping both our noses in a futile effort to keep the snot at bay. I'm taking my vitamins, I've tried various boosts of Vitamin C, zinc, you name it. Nothing works.  It feels like I will never be free of it for the rest of the interminable winter, caught in a veritable Pleistocene epoch of rhinovirus, the Ice Age of nasopharyngitis.  

One of my greatest fears as a single parent (other than my child's death, maiming or disfigurement, abduction, long term illness, profuse bleeding, vomiting, or excessive poop disasters, roughly in that order) is that I myself will at some point be so unwell that I will be either unable to function, or function very poorly and that there will be no one else to help.  Back in the pre-baby days, I remember coming home from work with a storming migraine, lying prone on the sofa making small whimpering noises, and thinking, "actually, maybe it's a good thing I have no kids. How on earth do people manage in circumstances like these?"

As it happens, I have had two opportunities to answer that very question. In short- pick up wriggling child from nursery, stagger to car, drive home with temples on fire, stagger out of car, up the stairs, wrestle coat off child (who now has hands vigorously thrusting down front of my shirt in effort to attain boob), pick up wailing child, stagger to kitchen, throw up in the sink, grab bottle of painkillers, swallow large dose, stagger to bed. Flop. Nurse. Hope she wants to nurse for two hours or at least until drugs kick in. Fortunately, on both occasions, I was back to functioning by dinnertime or at least able to move around without feeling of steel spikes through brain. But it was...a little grim.

On Sunday night I woke up about midnight and started vomiting. This continued on and off for the rest of the night. Aside from feeling like death, I worried what I would do once Botany was up at her usual crack of dawn and in bed nursing with me, since I wouldn't exactly be able to jump up to run to loo to puke. My solution- a pot strategically placed within arm's reach above the pillows. I figured, she's slept through my hacking up a lung so she might not even notice me barfing over her head. Happily, there was no need at that point- but when we woke up for the day, I was on the phone to E. first thing for assistance. Luckily he was off work anyway and so able to help out, but it got me thinking. What if he had been out of town, as he sometimes is? What would I have done? Who would I call?  I feel I need to put some back-up systems in place, but I'm feeling a bit limited in that regard. And it scares me.

Anyway. As I mentioned before, I am somewhat conflicted about putting pictures of Botany up on this site. However, I was looking through the photo albums recently and noted there are quite a few shots where she has her back to the camera. Forever on the move, it's quite hard to get her to stay still to take a picture and often by the time the shutter has clicked, she's off and away. I then had the amusing notion of posting (for your enjoyment and mine) a series of pictures entitled "Botany from the Back". I don't think she is all that identifiable (thus assuaging my guilt about potential violations of her privacy) but it's enough to give you the general flavour of the goofy cuteness. Here's the first one:

       

Incidentally, she pitched a major fit when I took off that red cardigan for bathtime. I tried to explain that wearing jumpers in the bath was a bad idea but she was having none of it. Little red riding hood must have her armour against the wolves.