Crying at the movies (again)

I watched The Time Traveller's Wife on Friday night. It's one of my favourite novels and I was excited to see the film, though my not-as-good-as-the-book reaction was inevitable.

I expected to cry - it's a tearjerker and I've been known to weep at a TV advert in which a cartoon mobile phone is abandoned by its owner. For context, when I was reading the last few pages of the book, hubby banished me from the marital bed because my rasping sobs were keeping him awake. However, I underestimated how much the baby-related section of the story would get to me, now that we are where we are.

I first read the book four or five years ago, during a time of my life now reflected on as BGBFFN (before great big fucking fertility nightmare). Then, it was the romantic tragedy of the story that affected me - the concept of star-crossed lovers being parted by death.

I reread it about two years ago, by which time I was weepy at the end but now faintly irritated by the couple's persistent and excessive drooling happiness. At that time I remember crying more at the part where the main female character has repeated miscarriages because the baby shares its father's time-travelling gene and keeps travelling out of the womb before it is old enough to survive the journey.

In the cinema on Friday, this bit got to me so much that I could do nothing but sit and attempt to stifle what wanted to be great gulps of misery, while tears ran down my neck and saturated my T-shirt. There is a scene in which the newly pregnant heroine is told, by her husband who has travelled into the future and met their daughter for the first time, that it's OK, that this pregnancy will endure and that everything is basically going to be all right. Happy tears and hugs all round ensue, and I thought my chest was going to rupture.

My best friend, who was sitting next to me, wordlessly reached for my hand during this and the birth scene it segued into, which helped, but I couldn't recover. Most of the time I manage to get through the days and weeks and months and years of this intact but there are moments - and they're getting more frequent - when there's nothing for it but to howl.

So that's what I did when I got in my car after the movie. All the while thinking thoughts along the lines of "you stupid, stupid cow, it's just a story", but unable to do anything about how bad I felt. Because that's what I want more than anything else: for someone to look into the future and tell me I'm going to have a child.

I wouldn't mind if it's years away. I wouldn't care about whatever physical pain and trauma I have to endure to get there. If I could just be told, for certain, that it will all work out, that I will not die childless and alone, that all this misery will not ultimately end in more misery, that I will not be this unhappy forever, I'd be OK.

We are dealing with a challenging situation caring for my elderly grandfather at the moment. He is physically well but mentally not, and he requires constant and sometimes quite frustrating care. We're glad to do it, of course, but during the course of some of these ministrations both my parents have made jocular comments to me regarding how difficult they plan to be when they reach their dotage.

It perhaps reflects the morbid state of depression and despondency in which I now find myself that my reaction to these observations has been a sort of deep, cold dread. At the root of this is my horror - because horror is the only word for it - that by the time I reach my eighties, if we remain barren, I will have nobody to care for me or even spend time with me. It's a selfish and extremely negative viewpoint. But it's one of the things that scares me most.

It's been a tricky few days. I got my period on Sunday, a day early. That ticks off the penultimate "last chance saloon" month in which I might conceivably - fnarr - have got pregnant just before IVF.

(And on that subject, I am bone-achingly, stomach-clenchingly, mortally SICK of hearing tales about people who this happened to. I wish sometimes that I wore a badge which reads:

"Hello. I am infertile and about to start IVF. Please do not share with me 18 separate anecdotes about friends' cousins' colleagues' dolls who magically found out they were pregnant immediately before they started this process. I DO NOT CARE AND DO NOT WISH TO SHARE IN THEIR SMUG FUCKING JOY. Thanks."

I mean, please. Why do people imagine I would want to hear this? It does not give me hope. It does not give me cause to imagine I may be granted a similar heavenly reprieve. It just pisses me off and cements in my mind the notion that I must have been a really wicked bitch in a previous life to deserve this level of shit in my current one.)

Anyway. This means I may not actually have another cycle to call my own before we begin. We attend the clinic on September 30th to sign consent forms and collect drugs. I had assumed I'd then need to wait for day one of a new cycle before commencing the nasal spray to shut down my system, but a relative I saw over the weekend who is presently a fortnight into her spray said no, you can start the day you get the drugs, no matter where your cycle is.

In some ways, I suppose, it takes the pressure off. We know now, categorically, that any baby we might have will not be conceived in our home, in our bed, as a result of a natural act of love. Instead our child will be conceived in a petri dish in a clinic and replaced in my womb by a catheter. So it takes all focus off sex, and perhaps means we can attempt to rekindle a normal physical relationship.

In other ways, as I have alluded to before, there is a certain measure of utter despair that it has come to this, mingled with terror that I will go through all that only for it to fail.

I also found out this morning that a friend who has been battling with her own fertility woes is ten weeks pregnant. I'm pleased her nightmare is over but it hit me like a sledgehammer to the face.

What a miserable, bleating entry this has been! I should say that all the wonderful comments left by people who have missed my absence mean a great deal to me. To know that there are people out there who have been wondering how things were going for me, and who care and empathise that they've been going shit, is of so much comfort. I don't know what I would do without the support and catharsis afforded to me by this blog.

But in typical style I am going to end on a sad note, because I feel so very sad today. I've been listening a lot to Kings of Leon after watching them live at a festival this summer. The lines that resonate most at the moment come from their lovely song Cold Desert:

"I never ever cried when I was feeling down,
I've always been scared of the sound.
Jesus don't love me, no-one ever carried my load,
I'm too young to feel this old."

That just about sums it up for now.

More crazy behaviour

I'm not, as my nana would say, in the best of fettles at the moment.

A colleague and my best friend from university have just announced pregnancies - in my mate's case, it's her second.

I have done the gracious congratulations and I am happy for her, inasmuch as you can apply the word "happy" to a situation that makes you feel like you are being stabbed repeatedly in the throat with an ice pick.

I don't mean to sound like a bad friend - and in fact, it is worth saying that she is an exceptionally good one to me, because she broke the news as she knew I'd prefer her to, in an email which ended with her saying that I wasn't to feel pressured to send my congrats and that she'd understand if I needed some time before getting in touch.

Unfortunately, I read the email shortly after arriving at work one morning, and had to repair to the toilets to cry for twenty minutes before being able to control myself, but she wasn't to know that. The thoughtfulness of allowing me the privacy and reflection time afforded by an email was an extremely graceful gesture on her part. After all, she has nothing to be sorry for. This literally is just the way the cookie crumbles.

No, one of the things that makes me sad is that these circumstances have inevitably meant we've grown apart a bit. I still love her dearly and deeply, but we don't see enough of each other and try as we both might to empathise with the other, there's a slight lack of understanding between us now that can't be helped by either of us.

I can't really fathom her frustrations with the tiredness and difficulty of motherhood any more than she can imagine what it's like to yearn for pregnancy so badly that it physically hurts.

Before all this we always shared everything and went through lots of life-changing experiences together, not least preparing for our weddings, which were less than a year apart. I remember us traipsing round what felt like every wedding dress shop in Scotland and northern England, having an unseemly amount of fun. We both assumed that sharing baby stuff and all that went with it would naturally follow. But it feels like things have worked out very differently for me than they have for her.

Anyway, there was that, and then a day or two later a colleague made her announcement. She's not a colleague I know well enough that she knows about my situation, so she broke the news with chipper joy and I didn't know how to make my face make the right shapes and my mouth form the right words.

I think she was puzzled by my frosty reaction and I've agonised over whether to email her and explain myself, but have decided against it in the end. I'm sick and tired of feeling like I have to make excuses, as if I'm some irksome toddler, for a situation beyond my control that I hate, hate, hate and never wished for.

But the thing that has vexed me more than anything else of late was the remarks made by a TV presenter last Friday night, which saw the screening of the UK's biennial charity telethon Comic Relief.

The woman in question - the culprit - was Davina McCall, a woman who found fame presenting the braindead shitfest that is Big Brother. She has three children, or twelve, or eighty-seven - I can never remember as she appears to be pregnant every time she graces the screen. I'm amazed they haven't televised her squirting one out during the annual Big Brother bonanza. After all, it must be like shelling peas by now.

Anyway. Davina was presenting a link about children - babies, mostly - in Africa dying of diseases like malaria and AIDS. It was deeply, deeply upsetting television. After the film ended, up pops fucking Davina with: "This call goes out to all the mothers out there. It takes a mother to understand the suffering of these children. Come on, mums, we're all in the same boat..."

It went on and on, and I started to feel like something was crawling up my spine and setting each vertebrae on fire as it went. Because what the fuck? So because I'm barren I'm not entitled or expected to feel any sympathy at the sight of a baby dying in agony? How DARE she?

This sort of idiocy is voiced quite often, though. It's amazing, the stupidity of people. It always happens when some sort of dreadful crime is reported - a child's murder or sexual assault, say - you get these muppets showing up in TV news footage uttering ridiculous statements like "Speaking as a parent..." as if to imply that everyone without children must be sat at home silently applauding the criminal. It's sheer nonsense. It's insensitive and just basically ignorant.

I ought to pause for breath. I'm hammering the shit out of this keyboard.

My period appears to be on its way. I'm on day 37 and actually got a bit hopeful last week that our Parisian love-in might have borne fruit. I bought a two-pack of pregnancy tests in Boots after a lunchtime "craving" sent me in search of a vanilla bean smoothie, and did one of them that night, which allowed me to retain some hope by attributing the negative result to the weak evening wee brew.

By yesterday morning, still with no symptoms when really I should have sore boobs and brown drizzle by now, I did another one and got into a complete fury when it was negative. I actually managed to snap it into three pieces, sustaining minor cuts to my hand in the process.

It's coming to something when you think that a single pink line in a plastic window looks smug.

My plan is to give Clomid a whirl when my period eventually does descend. It can't hurt, and I clearly haven't ovulated since this cycle has grown to epic lengths and those tend to be anovulatory.

I just hope they don't grill me too much about my emotional wellbeing when I present myself at the clinic. I'm too near tears on this most of the time to be able to lie convincingly. And while I very much think I should explore the avenue of infertility counselling, I don't particularly want to stall the process any further by making the clinic think I need to be psychoanalysed before commencing medication.

It's just as well they can't see me in my own time, mind you. I do the strangest things. If the destructiveness with the pregnancy test above isn't odd enough, try this for size as a parting shot: I had a bath an hour or so ago. Standing up to dry myself gives me a full frontal view in my bathroom mirror. I stood there and sang the following in a crazy falsetto to my lower abdomen whilst whacking it with the towel: "Look at you, you pathetic piece of shit that doesn't work."

Now that's not right.

The barren woman's hate list - item #1: other pregnant women

Obviously I realise this makes me sound like a demon, but the point of this blog is to be honest with myself about my feelings and hopefully reach out to other women who share them.

So yes, I loathe, despise and detest other pregnant women with a fanaticism bordering on psychotic. Particularly the ones who absently stroke their bumps while talking to you or browsing the supermarket shelves.

They just look so bloody smug. And they're everywhere - or did I just not notice them before?