On the whole, as a repository for my mental trash, this blog works quite well. I’m pleased, overall, with the varied nature of the results. That’s why I’m very irritated with myself to be bloody wittering about not being pregnant again. It’s just that I’m a proactive person. Stuff happens, I evaluate the situation and do something. Waiting is not my strong point.

I’ll have a period in a day or two, I promise and we’ll all be back on track. It’s only particularly bad because this has been a particularly psycho month…

Never mind, two weeks of waiting are in the bag. Only somewhere between 24 hours or a week to go - depending which menstrual cycle I’m on and NO! Don’t try to follow me on your moped.

That said, as well as period pains and sore boobs, I have thrush (aren’t anonymous blog’s great, who could I tell that to in the real world, apart from my Mum) a sure sign that the painters will be arriving in next two or three days.

At least I seem to be able to handle the temperature charting in a spirit of genuine enquiry rather than the desperate need to know which seems to dog my other family planning activities… except for the nookie, of course, thank heavens that’s still normal.

I do find this difficult though. If it was the 60s I’d be fine. I’d do my usual diet and when I got pregnant I’d reduce the exercise a little but not too much and that’d be it. It isn’t the 60s though, it’s the paranoid 21st Century so the advice conflicts.

On the one hand they tell you to avoid making a big thing out of trying to make children. Relax and continue with your normal routine while you try to conceive, they tell you. Possibly eating more healthily and taking exercise a bit more. Do what’s right for you, they say.

Well, doing what’s right for me, if staying sane is the right thing to do, is to cook a good meal every night and drink a glass of wine with it - not for nothing is my ancestry French - and I’m talking good wine here, too. Doing what’s right for me is having two apples for breakfast with a slice of aged Guyere, Brie and Comte. Nope, none of them are pasturised. Doing what’s right for me is enjoying exercise, quite strenuous exercise at that, 3 times a week.

On the other hand there is this suggestion that your baby is in dire danger from the moment you conceive and the slightest wrong move on your part could wipe it out.

Perhaps, what they really mean is, do what’s right for you, so long as it’s what we tell you…

That poses a tricky problem for me. It means there are going to be two or three weeks every month when I might contain a baby but I don’t know if it’s there or not and have no way of telling.

The suggestion is that once you are pregnant, if you should eat any unpasturised cheese - ie any cheese worth eating - drink wine or run around too fast then, if you have conceived and are growing a baby it will die. So what do you do, three weeks on the wagon and not exercising and two weeks off? Go on the wagon entirely under the guise of “getting healthy”?

I love my husband, I love our life together. I love my life and I want children to be part of it but I don’t want my life to be making children. It’s stressful and I am finding that making changes like giving up alcohol and cheese merely focus me on all the negatives of not conceiving when, month after month, my period arrives. That’s just going to make me miserable, a state in which, I’d lay bets, I am even less likely find myself in a position to leap up and cry “bingo” in the Mecca Hall that is baby making.

Conversely, if you have a miscarriage, they tell you it’s just bad luck that killed your baby and nothing to do with the fact you drank half a bottle of wine a night for the first six weeks of its life because you didn’t know it was there. So… on the one hand, there is this immense pressure “if you don’t give up all these things you’ll kill your baby” on the other when it all goes tits up, the story is “your baby died of bad luck, not because of what you ate and drank”.

Does that mean the whole food thing is a load of old cobblers then? I know they’ve just recently changed their minds about peanuts - peanut allergy is lower in countries where they eat a lot of peanuts, suggesting eschewing them while pregnant is not necessarily the answer. So the advice is now, “eat them unless you have a peanut allergic person in your family”.

As you can see. I am bad at waiting

Everyone says is. “Relax, you will conceive in your own sweet time.”

I say. “Fuck off!”*

* Mrs M, I think you may enjoy that one!

Here’s a whinge, the point being that if I can have an almighty hissy fit on line I don’t have to do it in the real world. Sorry peps. Also, if I manage to do it in an amusing way, somebody somewhere might laugh or conversely, realise they aren’t the only one and that would be i) positive and ii) make me happy again.

You know that bit in Pulp Fiction where Marcellus Wallis tells the boxer bloke “that’s just pride, fucking with your arse…” Well, this is just hormones fucking with mine, ok? It’s genuine though and when I sat down to write this morning, it’s what came out… so I’ve left it here.

Now, this month, I have been feeling distinctly hormonal, early. As you all know, Mr BC and I are trying to make spawn. Unfortunately for me, feeling pregnant is absolutely no different to the usual PMT I get so it’s impossible to tell when my tits start aching, my memory goes on the blink, my breath gets short, I feel dizzy and get sort of… preparatory stomach cramps whether it means I’ve hit the jackpot or am just up for a normal visit from the er… painters. Sometimes I think it may be extra bad because I’m growing a practise bag.*

*When you get pregnant the baby and stuff is inside a bag. Occasionally, you’ll grow one of these bags with nothing in it. You don’t need to have even been near a man for this to happen it’s just your body practising in case it ever needs to grow one in earnest, kind of like military exercises. This is perfectly natural and I have a theory that the months where I have particularly bad PMT, even for me and think I’m pregnant, only to get the blob as usual are months when my body is growing a practise bag. It’s a bummer but at least it means that if it has to grow a bag for real, it’s going to be very good at it.

So this month… looking at last month’s temperature chart, I thought that maybe I ovulate a bit earlier than I had previously believed and found that if this were the case, Mr BC and I had unwittingly had a shag at exactly the right time. Hoorah!

Even more intriguing, the following day I had gone for my bike ride and got the bonk, for the first time ever. Normally there is plenty of blood sugar and I’d had the usual large breakfast and not done anything out of the ordinary. It was so pronounced I had to stop and eat some blackberries on my way home. When I thought about this I remembered a friend who said she knew she was pregnant from the day after because her hormones were all over the place. I wondered but well… like I said, you never can tell…

So… a couple of days later my boobs started to ache, really badly, worse than ever before in fact - including the time I was pregnant.

Hmm… is she or isn’t she? I thought.

The painful bits abated to normal pre-blob levels after about five days but the curious light headed feeling continued and I have started to find myself getting very tired. Cautious optimism but I have a 30 day cycle, if I really have ovulated when I thought we’ve bingoed it on day 10, which means even with early testing kits I have to wait TWO WHOLE WEEKS (aaargh! For the love of God.) to find out whether or not we have created Mini Us and THREE to find out, for sure, since the first symptom arrived on day 11…

Now, not all of you will have tried for a baby but let me assure you, it’s not the fun it’s cracked up to be. You have two or three weeks where you may be pregnant each month and during those you have to decide whether you are going to act as if you are, abstaining from all things, or carry on as normal, potentially jeapordising - if doctors are to be believed - the life of your newly forming baby. So that’s three weeks of thinking things like this…

1. Should I drink wine at all? I shouldn’t if I’m pregnant but I might not be and I love the way it compliments my cooking.
2. Should I continue to exercise and if so, how, should I go about it? If pregnant “strenuous” exercise is to be avoided. How strenuous is strenuous?
3. They say “no heavy lifting” if you are pregnant. How heavy is the lifting involved? Would it cover items like the computer bag - containing my lap top and papers - which I carry down the path to my office each morning?
4. Would carrying a Dyson hoover up three flights of stairs count as “heavy lifting” if so how will I do the housework two weeks in every five?
5. What about walking down the hill from the supermarket with a bag of heavy shopping, does the heaviness go on weight or is it about what I find easy to lift? I’m always assuming the latter.
6. Does scrubbing vigorously at the fine layer of cat hair over the drawing room carpet (I was sure I closed that door) with the “stair attachment” until the perspiration drips off the end of my nose (it doesn’t, I promise but I like the comic effect of the idea) come under the title “vigorous exercise”.
7. I can go 10 miles a day on a bike at about 10 miles an hour without getting out of breath - I do get stiff and tired but not breathless… is that too vigorous?

The problem, as ever, is one of striking the happy balance between doing the things that I need to do, like housework and carrying heavy shopping, not to mention the things which keep me sane, exercising, enjoying fine wine, coffee and good food like prawns and unpasturised cheese and doing what you are supposed to do when you are pregnant - sitting still, as far as I can tell, or “walking briskly” (which bit of “my leg’s fucked and I can’t walk more than about a mile” do they not understand) not to mention avoiding doing or eating anything that might remotely be considered pleasurable (I told you this was a whinge).

So on the one hand, I should carry on as normal because otherwise when I get my period it’s ten times more galling and makes me very sad? On the other hand, while going on as normal is usually better for my mental health, if I don’t cut back and I am pregnant, will I kill my baby? What if I have been pregnant several times before now and not realised because I killed it with my sybaritic excesses? Scary. Huh?

(Yes boys, women DO over analyse… EVERYTHING, just like this in fact, I’m a laid back, pragmatic, un drama-queeny one. Even my husband says I am low maintenance.)

Now the sensible part of my brain says “you KNOW all the answers to these questions, just chill, relax and what will be will be”. It’s right, of course, but the sensible part of my brain has clearly never tried to make a baby - more to the point, if I took its advice the rest of me wouldn’t be, either!

Well… that’s what the emotion gremlins (new one for the list of fairies I think) have been doing to me for the last week. This is the most realistic and pronounced set of symptoms I’ve had outside my real pregnancy since it happened. The big tellers last time were… Sore boobs, feeling completely knackered - you know sleeping through the night and waking up feeling like you haven’t been to bed at all - and of course, feeling a bit dizzy and la-la.

This morning, I wake up and realise that no, I’m not pregnant. I’ve just got a fucking cold! Arse! D’you know, when I was a kid I used to get a cold in September each year and it would last the whole winter through. These days, it’s so long since I had one that I had forgotten what it feels like when you fight it for a while before it really takes hold. Yes! Got it in one the symptoms are sore glands (boobs), perennial knackeredness and, because your brain is slowly filling up with snot, dizzieness.

Bugger. Bugger. Bugger.

Anyone like to primal scream with me? Here we go. AAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHH!

Mmmmm… that’s better.

I loathe and detest having colds! They detach you from reality, it’s like living behind a pain of glass and it goes on for ever. It takes me weeks to have colds others will throw off in a day. Yes, I’d lay bets I’m the only woman in the entire world who gets Man Flu.

There’s no point wasting an early pregnancy test now, it’s obvious what it is and god help me not only am I not pregnant but I’m going to have to put up wall of menthol versus well of snot for the next week or two, to boot! Grrrrrr…!

Everyone has to have crap days or they wouldn’t appreciate the good ones and yes, I’d lay bets many of my brothers and sisters would give their eye teeth to have this as a good day. Things could be so much worse… but I just had to have a gripe about it somewhere because it’s so blummin’ irritating.

Right then, I’d better go do some work… pipple toot.

——————————————————————————–

Stop press (10 minutes later): have just had a blub on Mr BC and feel so much better. I know for sure that I would rather spend my life with him than anyone or anything else in the world… If we don’t have kids so what, we have each other… this whole baby making thing is stupidly stressy and I really shouldn’t let it or my racing hormones get to me.

I explained Mr BC that if it was just a case of having a go and getting pregnant or not it would be ok and how it’s the conflict between my pleasure and runny-about-loving existence and what you are supposed to do when you are trying for a baby (renounce anything remotely enjoyable) which causes me to worry. We agree that once you know you are pregnant, doing the right thing will be easy, just this simple rule, if it’s fun stop it!

I really do have a bare faced cheek to complain about anything but or course that, lovely readers, is why I do it here. You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to and because it’s here, I don’t feel the need to say it to the people I meet, those poor unfortunate souls who are trapped and can’t up and leave the way you can without being rude!

Thank you for indulging me.

Not that I’m a spoiled brat or anything.

Pipple toot.

Today I am mostly foiled by shite! Yes, it’s one of those days when if it can be phaffy, pointless and get in the way of progress it’s there.

First up, my post. It contains my credit card bill. My credit card company has changed hands again so this bill has been “simplified” by the new owners, to make it “easier to understand”. In other words, it’s printed on a bigger piece of paper and it tells me less so that there’s more room for the company to advertise its other products. Where my old one would contain records of all my transactions or - if there had been none - it would say “transactions this month, nil” this one contains no detailed information.

Normally that wouldn’t be a problem were it not for the fact that my bill is for “£-4.95 cr”.

Well what the fuck is that? Minus four pounds ninety five credit is a sodding anomaly.

Which do they mean?

Is my account minus £4.95 or £4.95 in credit? I need to know because if it’s minus I have to pay them something before July 25 or they’ll clobber me with a charge for interest or - if I’m mere pence over - a minimum admin rate of more than the interest would have been.

So I dial the 0845 number knowing I will spend the next 10 minutes choosing options and listening to hold music.

Obviously I’m massively chuffed when the first message is a robotic Scottish lady’s voice telling me they have a really high call volume today. Great, clearly I’m not the only one who can’t read their new dumb-arse bill. Never mind, my call will be answered in 9 minutes, that’s better than some call centres I’ve had to deal with on a good day. I wait while the Vivaldi plays and a similarly (also Scottish) female monotone interrupts the good bits to tell me I can save money by giving them more business.

Eventually after 10 minutes the phone is answered by an even more monotone, droning Scottish voice than the previous two recordings - think the slug in Monsters inc saying “you haven’t done your paperwork” only with less charisma, or (if you do obscure TV) the monotone delivery of the Geography teacher out of the Wonder Years.

She clearly thinks I am barking not to realise that CR is credit even when I explain that I do but that I also understand that a minus in front of it would normally be associated with a deficit.

Oh well, a couple of quid to the four winds to be condescended to by a woman who sounded so bored and was so unresponsive as to appear dead. So much so that I wondered if she actually was dead and being controlled by a computer with its hand stuck up her arse. No… I’m sure your average “vitally challenged” individual would have to be way more animated than she was.  This was just the aftermath of a lobotomy.

Next problem, I have a new phone. I have bluetooth headsets for it, one which is just too much of an Essex earring ever to wear in public and one which is a small ear piece with the main bluetooth brick at the end of a string which can be clipped onto my collar/seat belt or secreted in a top pocket rather than having to be worn on the side of my face so I look like some cyborg twat.

For some reason you have to have a security number to pair your phone and your headset up for the first time. Oh dear, both headsets are more than a year old… you can see this coming can’t you? Yep. Could I find the number? Could I bollocks? Never mind, eventually I found one and 0000 gave me access to the hideous Essex earring. The tasteful one is now almost 7 years old and came from Mr BC so only he knows the whereabouts of the box and in it, the security number. Never mind at least I can use my phone in the car today if I have to, even if it does mean looking like a tosser.

Third thing. Recently I have had a bit of trouble with my short-term memory. I’m not sure whether it’s down to a bonk on the head I received in January (see here for details) or hormones - it’s like it was when I was pregnant only I’m not pregnant… it could be some kind of infection, you know, crap in the blood making concentration a bit tricky - it did clear up for a month or two after the BV incident.

Whatever it is, it’s divorcing me alarmingly from reality. It’s as if I’m wearing a candyfloss crash helmet. Yes, nothing is quite… real. Thinking, concentrating, is physically… well… not painful exactly but it makes my head feel numb, weak even, itchy - but itchy on the inside…

During the day, I feel the way you do when you get up in the middle of the night to go to the bog, you know when your body makes its way to the loo on autopilot because really, your brain’s still asleep. It’s like that, only in the middle of the day after 5 cups of coffee… it’s as if I never truly wake up.

I know I’m not explaining it very well and more to the point, I have always been fairly scatty and vague. However, I’ve been able to cope with my vagueness until now. Now, vagueness management stuff that’s worked for me for almost 40 years is failing. My brain is blunt. I am losing my edge.

Obviously, because I have more imagination than sense, I’m scared I have a brain tumor, early dementia (please, god, no) - I’m nearly 40 after all - internal bleeding/bruising from pulling that pull-up bar down (and going with it) in January or something wrong with an important internal organ… kidneys, pancreas, something like that. Alternatively and most likely, it’s hormones and the only way to sort it out will be to go on the pill - just what I want when I’m trying for a baby - until everything settles down again.

Is it scary? Yep. So after worrying about it for six months on or off but being too frightened to go to the doctor in case it was something really grim and of course, forgetting to mention it when I went about anything else, I decided, this morning, that I would book an appointment and sort it out once and for all. The conversation went something like this - obviously the bits in italics are the things I thought rather than said.

“Hello, I would like to book a doctor’s appointment…” …because I appear to be losing my marbles.

“I’m terribly sorry we can’t book any appointments today, our computer system has gone down. Can you call back tomorrow?”

“No! You don’t understand! I can’t call back tomorrow, I’m having problems with my short term memory! I won’t fricking REMEMBER to call you toSODDINGmorrow because I’m losing my fucking mind!” Said my brain.

Luckily it came out of my mouth as.

“Yeh, sure, no worries. Bye.”

“Bye.”

There is very little to say, today. I am devoid of inspiration. I suppose there are two reasons, the first is because I’m still painting the fricking hall. It seems as if each brush stroke of oil based eggshell I apply to the banisters carries away a little bit of imagination with it although don’t get me wrong, it’s a creative process and I do quite like painting - apart from the smell, of course. For a start you can paint with the radio on, which I enjoy.  I just wish it wasn’t taking quite so long…!  I suppose I will actually finish the job before I turn 70 but I’m beginning to wonder.  I have spent nearly seven days on it so far and there is still a good two day’s worth of work left to do. Hey ho…

The second reason is the amount of copywriting work I have on. Far too much, frankly. I enjoy it immensely but writing is very cerebral in a way that most of the other things I do are not! I try to avoid being cerebral at every opportunity. I’m quite knackered as a result! It seems to be sucking my brain out through my fingers.

The third reason… no one expects… is hayfever. About 15 years ago they started to grow oilseed rape. At about that time, I started to get runny eyes. Each year they grow more oilseed rape and each year my hayfever gets worse. Each year it comes earlier because each year the plant the bastard stuff earlier to get more crops in.

We live in a town near a river with water meadows either side of it so it could be a lot worse. In most parts of the countryside they grow it up to people’s doors. One village in Essex had to be evacuated a couple of years ago because it was completely surrounded by fields of the stuff. The pollen grains of oilseed rape are so virulent that, as well as bringing the joys of hayfever to people who have never had it in their lives, breathing in too many of them at once can have a similar effect to nerve gas.

As we returned from Bali I noticed that where the landscape over Europe had been, for the most part, green, the countryside in Britain was flourescing yellowly. Sure enough the moment we left the airport I began to sneeze. It’s settled down now into the usual constant sinus headache and runny eyes.

The real pisser is that each year my stupid sinuses take longer to recover before it all starts again. I went to the doctor about it and she told me cheerfully that after an infection or allergic reaction the sinuses can take as much as 6 months to recover, especially if they are repeatedly assulted. Are you listening farmers? My sinuses don’t get 4 months to recover, let alone 6! They grow the effing stuff for 9 months of the year. I have about two weeks of being able to smell and taste normally these days before it all kicks off again. It drives me nuts.

What is the sodding stuff for, anyway, apart from making countless grumpy old bags like me even more miserable and tetchy? Eh?

Answers on a post card please… any farmers out there?

Ok, ok, I know what it’s for. They make bio ethanol out of it… which means there’s only going to be more and more. It’s a bit like being allergic to oil refineries I suppose… only worse.

Bugger.

I managed to embarrass myself impressively this weekend, if not at the party then the next morning! I lit a candle in the town church on the Saturday afternoon before the party and wrote all sorts of prayers for my various family members by name which I do, if I think nobody who knows any of us will hear because… Oh I don’t know, because it kind of affirms it some how, it’s like giving god a big pointy arrow saying “this one here mate”.

Anyway there I was, big, “Yoohoo! God! Over here!” Installed, confident that the prayers would be extra potent but that nobody who knew me would ever hear them… and then discovered a friend who’d been at the party was preaching the sermon.

Shite!

I didn’t connect the this-one-is-ill/psycho/sad-in-x-way-and-called-…-pointy-
out-to-god-in-big-letters-prayer and the somebody-you-KNOW-is-going-to-be-there factor until it was too late to go and remove the card…

Arse!

I never know if they do those things out loud or not but I’m hoping not or a lot of people I know will discover everything they ever wanted to know about my family but were afraid to ask… and then some.

Worse, if it gets back to any of the er… subjects - or should they be “victims” in this particular instance - I will be strung up because I mentioned a lot of things to God which nobody else is supposed to know.

Bollocks.

I was horribly hung over after the party, too… Not really ill - I ate an enormous breakfast - just very jaded! The journey home took some stamina, too, when a bloke got on eating a cheese and onion, hot-out-of-a-vending-machine Ginsters pie and sat next to me to with it on the first train of the three (we used to have them at work - they smell of sweaty jocks at the best of times and this wasn’t… etc.). Then a group of lads going to the races sat in my carriage and were very noisy and very pissed and smelled very strongly of alcohol all the way to the second big stop… Lucky it wasn’t the second to last stop though, where there’s another race course. I was VERY glad when they left the train.

It’s the second surprise hangover I’ve had in three months. I guess it was all that free wine combined with dancing and getting thirsty… I didn’t feel remotely merry - but I did suddenly realise at the end that the blood in my veins was probably a) almost solid and b) mostly alcohol. It was too late by then of course and what with the hormones (girlie time) and the travelling I was glad to get into bed last night for a nice long sleep. In fact, I still feel a bit dizzy today.

Hey ho…

I also managed to make this post “private” without even realising.  I wondered why nobody had read it.  Doh!  Channelling Homer S again.