All I want for Christmas...

Tricky couple of days. My period came yesterday - marking August 2008 out as the 28th month since we started trying for a baby.

In some ways, the dwindling summer and the length of time that has passed means I'm now resigned to another year ending without any "happy news". I anticipated the 2006 and 2007 festive seasons with first a certainty, then a forlorn hope, that I'd meet the expectations of my family and "be preggers by Christmas". I had secret visions of sitting at the dining table either rejecting lunch because of morning sickness or else tucking in with a sizeable bump nestled beneath my mum's "good" tablecloth. Smiles all round. It was a nice image.

I don't feel any such hope this year. Christmas is just going to be another tough kid-oriented nightmare to get through before we can present ourselves back at the clinic next spring, having served the ridiculous year-long sentence that has been imposed on us in punishment for my daring to be under 30 and infertile.

But even though I no longer really feel capable of hope, it's still upsetting when my period arrives. Which I suppose means I am still capable of hoping, just not of admitting to it.

Yesterday afternoon saw me sitting in the hospital visiting my grandfather (another story altogether), thumbing through a magazine someone had left lying around. It featured a full-page ad for one of those reborn dolls - a snip at just £80, as opposed to the usual "thousands of dollars" (so the ad claimed).

God, I wanted one. I fully appreciate in the still-sane part of my brain that getting a doll that resembles a newborn baby would be a Really Bad Idea. I mean, what the fuck would I do with it? Cuddle it when I got home from work? Get a pram and wander about the estate with it looking (as all women with prams do) vaguely smug? Actually start to believe it was real? No. It doesn't bear thinking about.

But I still want one.

Hubby saw the telltale flood threatening to spill over my lower lashes and grabbed the magazine to see what I was torturing myself with. "No," was his simple but firm advice. My mum's, when I mentioned it to her later, was more ferocious: "Absolutely not! Don't you DARE!"

And they're both quite right.

But I still want one.

Anyway. My last two periods have resembled the ones I used to suffer with when I was a teenager - really heavy, really painful (and this from a woman who's had an HSG); basically proper periods, the like of which I haven't seen for many years.

Perhaps this is my body finally getting back to normal. In the absence of anything obviously wrong, and of a better diagnosis, I do wonder whether my years on the Pill totally screwed up my system. Maybe things are only now getting back in sync. Or maybe it's related to the frigging harvest moon. Who the hell knows?

Last night I barely slept because of tearing, wrenching cramps. Hubby fetched me a hot water bottle when he got up and I lay with it clamped to me for an hour, trying to find the positive in the situation. Aside from a rather interesting mottled red patch on my tummy from the heat, I struggled.

But if all this pain and gore really is an indication that my body is back to its un-Pill-polluted teenage strength, I'll accept - even welcome it.

After all, with regular ovulation and a sustained effort from hubby and me, is there - just maybe - a chance I could be pregnant by Christmas? Or is allowing that thought simply setting myself up for a heartbreaking end to a difficult year?

I do not want to start another Christmas morning by failing a pregnancy test. And every year that bloody song upsets me because of the line "Baby, all I want for Christmas is you".

Crying at the TV

Watched a weird programme last night about "reborns". These are dolls that resemble babies so closely that they appear to breathe, move and smile. They have real hair and are weighted and jointed like babies. They can even have milk spots and be designed to look like photos of real babies.

Him indoors vehemently felt I shouldn't watch the programme, and retired to bed in despair when I insisted (I believe my exact words were "Fuck off, I'm watching it"). The reason I was so keen was that I thought it would inevitably cover infertility, and therefore feature other barren women who feel like I do.

One of the hardest things about this is feeling that I'm the only one. I have a few really close friends, but as lovely as they are, and as much as I need them, none of them is in a position to understand. My best mate from uni days got pregnant the first month she was off the Pill, and now has a gorgeous eight-month old son and, because our usual daily at-work email exchange is on hiatus because of her maternity leave, is rarely in touch.

Of my closest mates now, two are a couple of years younger than me, and whilst they are both sympathetic and willing to listen, neither has felt their own biological clock yet or is the least bit broody, so through no fault of their own they don't really "get it". My other close mate is herself a mum to an 11-year-old, who came along unexpectedly while she was very young. She's a brilliant mum, but she never experienced what it's like to yearn for a child and not be able to have one.

Anyway, this reborns programme didn't touch on infertility at all, and was frankly so odd that I was left thinking it might have been a spoof. The narrator just seemed ever so slightly surreal and sardonic. If it was a pisstake, I didn't find it funny - but then I wouldn't, would I? I'm too close to the subject matter; it's all too raw.

However, I don't have a problem with others trying to make light of a difficult topic. I think that's probably quite healthy. Channel 4 does good spoofs anyway - I remember really roaring at the Brass Eye paedophile thing that so many people complained about.

I'm ashamed to admit, I did cry at the reborns. I was doing OK until one woman was given her doll to take home. She carried it out to her car, and then you saw she'd bought it a car seat, which she proceeded to reverently strap it - this DOLL - into. That floored me, and I wept till my chest hurt.