yoga positions and lovely husbands

Lucky me - I had a visit from an amazing Scaravelli yoga teacher friend yesterday who came to my house to teach me some postures for opening up the pelvis (as this seems to be a running theme from all the alternative practitioners I have consulted). Lying on my horrifyingly grubby carpet aside (how could I not have realised how bad it is until I'm facedown on it?), it was a wonderful morning leaving me feeling restored and energised. I am going to practise some of the postures every day in an attempt to get energy flowing more freely throughout my pelvis. I keep promising myself I'll use the hula hoop R bought me to loosen up too but found it confoundingly difficult to keep the thing spinning around my waist (stuck, moi?). My neices took to it like a duck to water, reminding me how free and unfettered our childhood bodies are until we get them all locked and blocked with our stuff.

R's second sperm test is on September 18th - I am really holding out hope as I feel he has been amazingly committed to improving his testicular health. An avid cyclist, he used to cycle about 26 miles a day (a 13 mile commute to and from work) in all winds and weathers. He now sets off walking to the station every morning despite having to get up at the crack of dawn and has done for nearly 3 months now. Though not really a heavy drinker, he has cut drinking down to a sporadic ale with friends and I have admired his complete resolve when we have been at parties or festivals over the summer. He has also been taking a (very expensive - he nearly fell off his chair when he saw how much good supplements cost!) supplement that helps boost sperm health from Biocare. Surely all of this will have some kind of effect?

Even if it doesn't, and his sperm is still pretty poorly or non-existant, I'll be safe in the knowledge I have the most wonderful, caring husband who wants a baby with his whole heart (and not, as all the books tell me, just because I do) and is willing to change his life in order to maximise the chances of it happening. I am very blessed. Lucky me indeed!

Emotional health and fertility

As someone who generally pursues the holistic approach to most things, I am very interested in how our mental health affects our ability to get pregnant. The current medical approach to infertility is the use of a lot of invasive tests and procedures that tend to leave couples feeling more isolated, depressed and useless than when they started. The terms used to describe individuals struggling with fertility problems, such as 'barren', chip away at already fragile self-esteem. I personally find that the medical approach to most things rarely takes into consideration the complex mind-body balance and this seems most vital when it comes to creating new life.

Take, for instance, 'unexplained' fertility problems when a couple cannot conceive for years despite nothing being 'medically' wrong with them. Sometimes, the partnership breaks down and they both go on to have children with other people (a celebrity example is Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman), indicating that they were both capable of having children but their bodies decided not to. For anyone struggling with unexplained fertility problems, I do not mean to belittle your experience or make you mistrust your body more than you may already do. What I am saying is that often there is something deep within us that we have to process, let go of or confront before we are ready to be parents.

I know I am pretty new to this fertility quest lark compared to some old-timers, but I am increasingly aware of the need to process some deep-seated guilt and sadness from my late teens before my womb is ready to carry a child. It is amazing what we can store on a cellular level in areas of our body. I have had clients who have really cried and released some deep, old emotions after deep-tissue massage - this kind of stuff can get trapped in the body and fester there, sometimes causing more serious problems like cancer. In most cases, people who come to me with bodies like rock are unable to let go of things and fear letting people get too close to them. They often have a jolly, bright facade that hides this deeper malaise but as soon as I touch their back, it tends to radiate trapped anger, resentment, grief or whatever they are holding on tight to.


So, back to getting pregnant. Girls (and boys) are generally brought up in our culture with only a fleeting education on their sexuality, mostly revolving around some product-pushing Tampax lady saying that the only option is to stick some bleached, chemical-ridden, TSS-causing, landfill-filling bit of tat up inside our bodies. We don't really have words that celebrate our burgeoning sexuality throughout our teens, instead we have words heavy with hatred to describe our most precious parts. Because we aren't taught how sacred our bodies are, and how beautiful, unique and vital our sexual organs should be, there's a tendency for teenagers to fall into bed at the first drunken opportunity. Talk to any adults about losing their virginity and it is pretty much an accepted norm for it to be an awful, embarrassing and at times, horrific, experience. Not just because of a fumbly condom-inside-out moment, but because emotionally they didn't feel ready, and somewhere deep down, on some subliminal level, they know that it should have been more special than that. Sharing our bodies with others should be special, should be sacred. Not that I'm advocating monogamous, wait-til-you're-married relationships for everyone by any means; sexual experimentation can be fun and exciting and can be a wonderful part of growing up if approached with a healthy love and respect for your own body and that of your partner. But too often it isn't - it's about sex with someone you just met at a party when you're off your head and feeling depressed and soulless after. Maybe our bodies remember these violations? And what about sexual abuse, incest and rape survivors too? These deep, deep sadnesses build up in certain parts of our bodies and sometimes it is hard and frightening to let them go.


This is a curious subject for me because I always felt certain that all of this ('this' being our current inability to get pregnant) is happening for a reason. I had a Eureka moment last night thinking about the things I needed to address and let go of emotionally before I really, truly am ready to carry a child in my womb. The tough bit is how to do it! I started having counselling for the first time in my life a few months back and was able to release lots of emotional stuff. In the end I finished my sessions because I found my counsellor's incessant requests that I get myself a GP in case I lost the plot a little off-putting. She simply couldn't understand that I don't want, or currently feel that I need, any intervention from a doctor. I want to search within and get some answers, not go seeking them elsewhere and absolve responsibility for the healthy working of my body. I have a few ideas I am ready to pursue so will post how I get on.

In this same vein though, I am interested whether we carry deep memory of events during our own conception, our mother's pregnancy and our birth? R's parents had a rocky and difficult relationship prior to his conception and she had several miscarriages. R seemed determined to stick around when she got pregnant with him but his birth was traumatic and did nothing to ease the difficulties in his parents' tumultuous marriage. They divorced, in a flurry of recrimination, when he was 11 and have not spoken since. I began to wonder, after his sperm tests came back, whether his body, on a cellular level, feared creating the same problems and refused to begin a new life until they are properly addressed (on an emotional level, by R dealing with his own grief at his parents' difficult marriage - going to an all-boys school meant he didn't tell anyone they'd divorced until he met me 7 years later). When I put this to him he looked at me as if I were a little mad, and maybe I am. Yet it seems to me we are a complex mix of our physical, emotional and spiritual selves and none exists in isolation.

To say we can fix infertility with drugs and surgery (our current medical model) seems to me to be looking at one piece of the jigsaw and wondering how to make a picture out of it.

On the plus side, however, R has taken to talking to anyone who will listen about his sperm tests which is great. If we can get people talking about fertility problems and it becomes less of a taboo subject, then we are a lot closer to looking at it through an holistic perspective.

Preparation for parenthood classes

Had a wonderful day yesterday at my neice's birthday tea party - she has grown up so much in the last year and seems wiser than her seven years. What I love most about my neices is their amazing interaction with their worlds; having not had the excitement and zest for learning erased through intensive schooling, these home-educated girls are like sponges, absorbing, analysing, questioning, learning joyfully all the time. It is a very special gift my sister and brother-in-law share with them.

Woke up this morning to skies full of rain and a sofa covered in sick, an offering we presumed was from our littlest cat. Whilst we were arguing how to clean it up (R having found numerous websites saying use bicarb of soda), the dog heaved up another pile of sick on the carpet. So our morning was spent cleaning up sick and administering water, love and homeopathic remedies - if anything prepares you for parenthood, I'm sure having pets must be it!

Feeling lucky...

I spent some time today with someone who had just had a miscarriage and my heart went out to her. She had been trying to get pregnant for some time and then lost her baby at about 11 weeks. In many ways, I feel very lucky that our fertility journey has so far been relatively short and pain-free. We all know someone for whom it has been a terrible long, drawn-out struggle. A friend of mine now has two children and is expecting her third; after thirteen years of unexplained infertility and 2 IVF attempts, she got pregnant naturally. Of course, after all that heartache she had almost given up and that was when her babies arrived. I believe that our children are souls waiting to make their appearance earthside and they choose the time they want to be born. At times I have doubted this and wondered if, like all religious ideas really, it is a way of making the unexplainable or unknown an understandable concept. This makes life easier to handle when we are faced with disappointment or misery. However, I personally feel that our fertility journey is a gift to us, as individuals and as a couple, to know ourselves and each other better. Whether we will get a baby at the end of it, I don't know, but we have learnt a lot trying.

I guess in terms of grieving or how difficult we find fertility problems depends on lots of factors and it's all relative. We have found not being able to have children very sad but of course there is still a lot of hope in our hearts and we have age on our side too. Nonetheless, I do now realise that fertility problems are something you have to go through to truly understand. The feeling that your body is failing you sets an atmosphere of mistrust within, something I have to battle with a lot. Although it is R's sperm count that is low, I know that there are factors that may affect my ability to get pregnant too, namely grieving for two abortions in my late teens. It's been an interestingly complex process; attempting to let go of the guilt and stop blaming myself for not taking the chance to be a parent at a time when I truly wasn't ready and was very confused. I have apologised from my deepest depths to the souls who chose me when I wasn't ready for them.

On the whole though, I feel that we are lucky. We have each other and a loving family and plan to adopt if we can't get pregnant soon.

Lack of awareness of male fertility issues

I have increasingly found that the books we have bought and borrowed concerning natural fertility are aimed at women. As a feminist, this grates a little. Whilst I absolutely categorically disagree with either party being 'blamed' for fertility problems, there is a long history of women carrying this sadness alone. In many cultures, there is never even a question that the fertility problem might be down to the man, and women are beaten, disgraced and made to feel worthless for not 'producing' children. In order to protect male feelings about virility and masculinity, they are not getting treatment that could help them have children.

Whilst a couple is trying to conceive, it is often the women who give up alcohol, smoking, drugs, bad food or whatever. This is great, but what about the men? There is now more of move towards recognising the health and lifestyle of the male in conception and a healthy pregnancy and baby, but boy, has it been a long time coming! I have a friend whose partner gave up drinking and smoking weed for a month or so whilst they were trying to conceive - when they were unsuccessful he went straight back to it, saying it clearly didn't make a difference! The average sperm and egg take around three months to develop so laying off the booze/drugs/fags/cheeseburgers etc. for three months prior to conception should surely be what men are encouraged to do?!

I wish the books we have got would be more helpful with male fertility issues - with fertility problems in general being divided pretty equally between male, female and unknown, it seems odd that every book lists 101 things a woman should be doing to optimise her chances with maybe a page saying that men should avoid saunas or something. Come on, we can't make these babies on our own!

Thoughts on adoption

We watched the film 'Raising Arizona' the other night, a Cohen brothers (love their films) comedy in which a childless couple - with no hope of adopting because of the man's chequered past - abduct a baby from a rich couple with quintuplets. They figure that the couple has plenty of babies already and won't mind losing one. Though it is all pretty light-hearted and mostly resolved at the end, it did make me think about the desperation of women who want a baby so badly they'll do anything to get one. I remember reading tales of abduction when babies were taken from prams outside shops or stolen from hospitals (and shortly after found and returned, not like recent media tales of abduction which appear more sinister) and I always felt sorry for the woman doing the abduction too as envariably she was mentally unstable after years of miscarriage or just the inability to conceive. Sometimes not fulfilling that primal urge can tip people over the edge.

At the end of the film there are scenes depicting an extended family sharing an afternoon together and I found myself crying, much to my surprise! I guess the idea of children and then grandchildren to share your life with, whilst it is idealised in the media, calls to something deep within us. The idea of the unknown - that certainty rocked by years of not conceiving - is shocking. Maybe my husband and I won't have a big extended family to share our later years with?

That led me on to adoption, which we have been thinking about a lot lately. Whilst I fully respect couples who pursue the dream of having their own family at all costs through IVF and other methods, my husband R and I really don't want to go down that route. I have seen people driven half mad by the hope, expectancy and disappointment, not to mention financial strain and physical invasion, for what are very slim odds. I don't want to be poked around by doctors, having studiously avoided them for so long. If R's sperm test results come back negative again on September 18th, we have built a barrier of protection around ourselves - we will go for adoption.

I have a mountain of books on adoption by my bed as I know it is not an easy choice, not just for us but for the child being adopted. They will have all sorts of grieving to do too. The process itself takes an average of 18 months so we're keen to get started as soon as possible if we're not going to make a baby ourselves.

I have started looking around our house and seeing it through the eyes of a social worker; uh oh...sink overflowing - check; animals everywhere - check; haphazard and sharp-cornered second-hand furniture - check; dust, fur and pawprints on every surface - check; just about enough room to squeeze in two people and four pets with none leftover - check. I have been having Home Improvement kind of dreams of creating a mezzanine in our tiny bedroom in order to squeeze another in. When we thought we were just going to get pregnant, easy-peasy, we planned to co-sleep and maybe wedge a basket in somewhere if R's flailing nighttime limbs got too much for the babe - the couple who used to live in our cottage had two babies here and managed ok, utilising the top drawer of their chest of drawers, pulled out of course! Something tells me a social worker isn't going to be that impressed by this particular idea - 'yes, we plan to pop 'em in here, next to my smalls'.

The beginning...

I have been meaning to start this blog for so long and tonight feels as good a time as any. The following post is to give a picture of where we're currently at in our quest for a family.

The journey to parenthood begins long before the child is conceived

I have always wanted to be a mum. When my sister was 7 and I was 4, my brother was born and we spent many a happy hour dressing, bathing, cuddling and playing ‘mummy’ with him. We even cajoled my mum into letting us wheel him around the supermarket, reveling in delight and truly believing that other shoppers would think he was ours! My first niece, born when I was 19, brought back a flood of memories of the wonderment of the newborn. The smell of her skin; her wide, knowing eyes; the feeling of utter love she engendered – all these things are familiar territory for the new parent falling in love for what feels like the very first time.

My husband and I began thinking about children long before we got married. We stopped using protection a while before, with a sort of secret excitement about a hidden bump under my Oxfam dress. The May woodland wedding came in a flurry of bluebells, and then we whisked ourselves away for a magical honeymoon in Thailand, living the simple life in idyllic beach huts. I thought I was pregnant then, but wasn’t surprised to discover that food prepared ‘Thai spicy’ (the equivalent of the much more handleable ‘tourist spicy’), rather than morning sickness, had had an effect on my digestive system.

The months following our wedding were filled with a kind of anticipation. Friends and family knew how keen we were to have children and there were knowing smiles over happy meals shared. Not long now… My diary is filled with entries in the two weeks following ovulation predicting the presence of a new life. My husband and I honed our antennae, trying to sense the presence of another in our lives. We walked up to the ‘badger’ tree – a beautiful, striped oak tree under which he proposed to me years earlier – and, awed by its magnificence, asked to be blessed with a child. With the sun shining down on us and the leaves rustling conspiratorially, we felt filled with hope.

My sister gave us a book on spiritual conception and we began to fill notebooks with our wishes and hopes for our future children. We wrote letters to them. These secret beings grew in our hearts; they have names and futures we have dreamed about.

I began to follow Fertility Awareness Method or FAM, as it is known, a fabulous way to get intuitive with your body as it changes throughout your cycle. Wow! - is all I can say about the female body. So many messages and signals are given to us through our cervical positioning, fluids and body temperature. I am growing an ever-deeper respect for my body every day that I chart these things. I realised that no mechanised ‘fertility predictor kit’ was ever going to come close to watching and recording the private rhythms of my own body. No one knows your body like you do! My cycles changed according to external things – the myth of ovulation on day 14 that so many women have been spoonfed was out the window. I would urge every woman to get to know her cycles, to get pregnant or to avoid pregnancy – this is true girl power.

We went to see beautiful films about pregnancy and natural birth and sat crying together at the back, overwhelmed with the intensity and uniqueness of each birth. I was so happy to share these things with my husband – after each profound experience we became closer and closer.
During all this time, we had friends having their own pregnancy, birth and parenthood journeys, some wonderfully empowering, some devastatingly hard. We have been blessed with gorgeous god-children and watching them grow into delightful little people has been such a gift. I have always had a newborn in my life.

When the monthly anticipation became too much, we decided to ‘relax and stop worrying’ (words anyone who has been trying for a baby will recognize as those from well-meaning but completely unaware friends!). We planted an oak tree in our garden as a symbol of our hope – ‘no conditions’ my husband said, just hope for a child, however they choose to come into our lives.

Around this time, my husband went to the doctor for the first time in ten years to have a sperm test. Emotionally, lots of stuff was going on for me. I was peeling emotional layers back to my teens when I had a late, and confused, abortion, and then another about a year later. Familiar guilt was rearing its head and I went to an acupuncturist who intuitively began to work with stagnated energy around my pelvis. I bought a hula-hoop at his suggestion and found it a lot harder to master than it had been as a child. I decided to see a counsellor to talk about some of the grief I hadn’t spoken to anyone about. It felt like real progress.

My husband’s test results showed problems with his sperm. It was a real shock and we spent a day grieving - for what we weren’t actually sure, but the doctor had been so doom and gloom we felt hopeless. We retreated into a sorrowful little den to lick our wounds. A bright, sunshiney morning later, and a bit of research on the internet, plus lots of talking to friends and family reassured us that there was still plenty of hope. My husband has to give up cycling for a month – his absolute favourite pastime – meaning his daily commute is almost doubled but he’s giving it a go. The doctor’s other suggestions weren’t relevant to him as he hasn’t drunk in three months, has never smoked and eats a very healthy, mostly organic diet. We only ever use natural products for ourselves and our home, we even use fennel toothpaste so there’s no chemical nasties sneaking in behind our backs. My husband bemoaned the fact that plenty of fast-food-gorging, fag-chuffing, drug-addled men have no trouble conceiving but I am beginning to think this is somehow part of a bigger picture.

As I said to my husband last night, when we get past the stress and the sadness, this has been an illuminating eighteen months. It has brought us closer together than ever. It has made me so much more aware and empathetic with my clients who are struggling through invasive IVF or bereaved after miscarriages. One in three couples experience difficulty in conceiving. If our children choose us, and when they come to us, maybe they are setting us the ultimate challenge – to know ourselves, to peel back the layers and understand it all on a much deeper level. In these past few months I have felt a strong sense of being guided, when I let that feeling shine through it’s like a gift.

In the meantime, my husband and I are booked for counseling and I have encouraged him to face his fear of needles and try acupuncture, which research has shown to have a profound effect on fertility. Our little oak tree is growing handsomely…watch this space…