Today is one of those days

Hiya,

Today is one of those days where I'm struggling to deal with the losses I've faced.

Today I found my diary from 2010, and the days were marked with my period due on dates and symptoms I thought I had if I was a couple of days late, as all of 2010 was spent trying to get pregnant. Eventually it worked, and on the 28th of December I wrote 'I'm pregnant. Best day everrrrrrrrrrr! I'm going to be a mummy!'

How foolish my hope seems in retrospect. I didn't even allow myself a second to think that this pregnancy could also be ectopic. I've covered what happened back in January 2011 in more than enough detail, but I haven't really spoken too much about how this affects me now.

For a while afterwards we tried to get pregnant again, even though we'd lost 2 babies to ectopic pregnancy and were all too aware another pregnancy could kill me. James took enthusiastically to sperminating me (ha!) every other day in my fertile window and again, life was full of hope, bitter-sweet masochistic expectation. Then came the revelation that James no longer wanted to be a parent, and maybe never had, and in 2014 he had a vasectomy.

Most days I think I'm OK with this, as after all I have the time-consuming business of chronic illness to keep me occupied, but some days like today it smacks me in the face as if afresh. There will be no child to call me mummy, no life lived anew through my progeny, no one to visit me in my old age. More than that, when a life reasonably full at the moment ceases to be more so with every death of my ageing family, this sense of wrongness about the whole situation will only be heightened. There is nothing can be said or done to make this realisation any less stark. Even knowing childlessness is probably the best thing all considered with my chronic illness doesn't really take the sting out of it.

Most of the time I can tuck away this pain I carry, but sometimes I have to take it out, polish off the dust and look at it to be able to survive. Being reminded of someone else's joy doesn't make me begrudge them theirs, it just makes me sad that I never got mine. Tomorrow is a new day, and I have no doubt tomorrow the pain will be tucked away in some hidden place with fortress walls around it so I don't collapse into a heap, but today is not one of those days.

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