If you’re here because you read my piece in the Daily Mail today, hello! Thanks for coming to visit. If you’re here because you’ve been following and got notified that there was a new post, welcome back.
I hope you’ve all been having lovely summers. I have. I’ve mostly been living my life as if Continue reading
If we’re looking for silver linings — which let’s be honest, we are, because otherwise it’s all one great big shitty grey cloud — phoning the clinic and telling them I was bleeding made them suggest I came in for an earlier blood test. So rather than spending the weekend knowing in my heart of hearts I wasn’t pregnant but having to wait for a blood test on the Monday to confirm it, I had the blood test on the Friday, Continue reading
I know we all try to manage our own expectations but I think it was the point when I was writing about embryo grading that I convinced myself that I wasn’t pregnant. It just seemed so hugely, utterly improbable when I was writing it down in black and white. And I know the odds mean nothing if you’re the one it happens to but still…
I’d already decided that I was going to do a home pregnancy test before the blood test. Continue reading
I’m sure it can’t just be me that thinks like this, but I do so often think about the lives I could have been living if luck or decisions had gone another way. If the morning after pill hadn’t worked when I was 19… If I’d gone on to marry S… If I’d got pregnant with my first IVF cycle – all these parallel lives that I’m not living, but so nearly did.
And I’ve never had such an acute sense of that as I do right now. Because (and I said this wasn’t going to be a dating blog, and it’s not, but this is kind of relevant to all the pregnancy stuff) I’ve met someone. Continue reading
I just realised you probably thought that this post was a reference to the fact that, as I’ve mentioned a few times before, this whole trying-to-get-preg-on-my-own type thing wasn’t exactly Plan A. Or maybe to the fact that what I’m doing is, as I’ve mentioned before, not exactly the norm within my group of predominantly hetero, predominantly married-with-children friends. But it’s not (well, it kind of is, because everything I write on this blog is basically about the same thing.) No, this is something I wanted to write before I’m actually mired in the depths of the treatment. As a marker, maybe, as a reminder of why I’m doing this. So here goes… Continue reading
I promised you the headfuckery, the emotional fuckwittery, the messy lifeness, the mental rollercoaster. And what better day to write about all that than at the very end of the year? Here! Have it! My unburdening, so I can sally forth into 2017, lighter, happier, whatever, I don’t know.
In October I wrote that I had made a decision. I wrote that after
thinking, and dating, and sleeping with unsuitable people, and thinking that something might become A THING — and then realising that it wasn’t going to…
I had decided to try to get pregnant on my own. And making that decision was exciting, and terrifying, and empowering, and terrifying, and for a while it made me feel utterly invincible. Which sounds like a totally Continue reading
I was recently talking to a friend of mine, who had been going through IVF, about her experiences, and she was talking about the cognitive dissonance that seems inherent in all this.
You might never have done IVF, and you might not call it cognitive dissonance, but if you’ve ever been a teenager, you’ll know what she’s on about.
Maybe it was just me (I assumed it was everyone) who, as a teenager, Continue reading
I SO have no intention of becoming a Bridget Jones-style diarist for my generation — not least because I can think of nothing more boring than counting calories or alcohol units. But given the undeniable link between my dating success (or lack of it) and the reason why I’m writing this blog in the first place, it seems ridiculous not to at least mention it, if only in passing.
Obviously this isn’t a dating blog. Amusing as my escapades over the last few years with a variety of ill-advised suitors may have been Continue reading
So I’ve sort of mentioned to a few people that I’m thinking that my birthday next year might be the point at which I accept that maybe, after all, I’m not going to go down the conventional route of meeting someone and having children with them. And that maybe, despite my myriad concerns about going it alone, I might have to resign myself to the fact that if I really want a shot at this motherhood lark – which let’s be honest, I’ve had my doubts about – I might just have to find myself a donor, and, as Nike might have said, “just fucking do it” – ironically, of course, without Continue reading
They say it’s just around the corner. But I’ve walked around the block so many times, and turned so many corners, I can’t even begin to imagine that there’s a corner left that I haven’t looked around. Even the corners that led to dark alleys that I didn’t think I wanted to go down, I went round them anyway. Just in case. But it wasn’t there. And the corners that I thought led to dead ends? I checked them too. I’ve turned corners, Continue reading
Egged On 