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…
No comments:
Post a Comment