The Embarrassment Gnomes Strike, the Beatles make BC happy and still she winges! 15, March 2007
Posted by babychaos in Adult Content, General Wittering, Grumpy Old Bag, Life and living, Light Fluff, Play, whinging.Tags: getting pregnant, Love, post miscarriage crap, pregnancy loss, sadness, Shocking!, Small Scale Disasters, trying for a baby
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Ok it’s not a great title but you get my drift. Last night, in the kitchen, with “the End” by the Beatles – the really and I mean REALLY funky bit at the end of Abbey Rod playing er… quite loudly I was laying up the trays for supper. We usually eat in front of the TV off trays, slobby but hey…
So there I am strutting about the kitchen Mick Jagger style (only it doesn’t look cool, rock ‘ard or even human when I do it it looks like I imagine the dog that plays the piano out of the Muppets would if he took an acid tab). As I’m rootling about in the draws, bum waggling and head nodding like Ralph the Dog (as previously described). I look up and there’s Mr BC. I dunno how long he’d been there, probably far too long because he was grinning.
You know those moments when you are doing something really fun but also really stupid. The kind of things you do on your own but would never want anyone to see? Er… maybe you don’t but my personality has this kind of life of its own which I am often unable to subsume… I suspect it’s because if I actually got embarrassed the way normal people do I just wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning.
Anyway, this was definitely a private do this alone and never be seen by anyone or you’ll have to kill them moment so I was swiftly attacked by the embarrassment gnomes and went into shy lady mode… He’s still taking the piss out of me about it this morning!
Then again, yet another of my friends is pregnant, once again throwing into stark relief the fact that I am very much not and that just like every single sodding month since we’ve been trying my er… go-days… this month, according to the Wee Sticks of Enlightenment are on days when there is just no hope of any action.
Tonight – massive wine tasting, Mr BC will be hammered and therefore accompanied by Snow White’s well known diminutive friends Sleepy and Droopy. So, no chance today – or tomorrow – massive dinner party, Mr BC and I will BOTH be a bit merry and sleeping over at some mates’ house with thin bedroom walls so no chance there either. And this seems to happen every month because most months, the week people tend to organise things is the week in the middle which is the BC fertility zone. Fucking sod it! (sorry non-swearers).
Anyway… getting to the point, I promise – what promoted the repeated playing of “The End” along with “Golden Slumbers” and more importantly “Carry that Weight” is because they are sung by what is clearly a raw and hurting Paul McCartney and when I’m raw and hurting they make me feel better – I do play them when I’m not sad, too because whatever mood one is in they are excellent lift-me-up material. But it was almost prescient that there should be a post on Chrisfiore’s blog which featured this music on the morning of the day I found this out. So I was already prepared and already listening to one of my favourite belt-up-BC tracks when I heard the news which though happy and good made me feel so sad…
Chrisfiore, I thank you.
Oh I’m delighted for her, don’t get me wrong but still empty and down and low and just pissed off for me… and of course, that makes me feel bitter and twisted and evil. Yes, sod the dwarves, I’m the Evil Step Mother!
“Hello, thank you for talking to BC, I’m afraid her generosity of spirit is completely absent right now… please leave a message after the beep or hold for the wrong kind of attention.”
Oh! Arse! And tonight, and tomorrow, I’m going to be hanging out with her and another pregnant friend, too (nose braced for upcoming rubbing in it two nights running) and I’ve got to be generous and happy for them and nice about it when I’m actually feeling slightly less kindly disposed to other humans right now, let alone a brace of pregnant ones, than Snow White’s Step Mum was to Snow White.
Oh sod! I will NOT be a miserable bag about this! I refuse.
Oh well, I have so much work I’m bloody drowning… perhaps I should stop winging, get off my arse and do some of that! It will make me feel more in control of my life and myself and therefore, better!
I’m not sure any of us have control of our lives but we do control the way we react although, that’s the most difficult bit…
So now I’ve dumped this here and I’ll have a quick dose of Abbey Road… perhaps with a little Comfortably Numb and a dash of I’ve Been This Way Before… The angst, the detachment, the jaw-droppingly fabulous VOICE. Mmm… a potent combo! That should do it. Yep and if it doesn’t… then I’ll think about how much I love my husband and how happy I am to have him whether or not we have kids and how I didn’t care whether I had any before the miscarriage and if it still doesn’t work I’ll get my iPod and Abbey Road and go cruising in the sun with the lid off in my car… and THEN get back to work. 
I should point out you are meant to laugh if you find the writing funny. The way I defuse the world, my emotions and er… pretty much everything really, is by turning it into a joke. Funny is not scary so funny is easier.
Hey ho… (or should that be Heigh Ho)? Pipple toot!
More Thoughts About Miscarriage 28, January 2007
Posted by babychaos in Grumpy Old Bag, Heavy Flow, Miscarriage.Tags: post miscarriage crap, pregnancy complications, pregnancy loss, Shocking!
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When I found out I was pregnant I was very surprised. Kids were not on the cards – even though I’ve always wanted them, Mr BC didn’t and I wanted him more. So when we got pregnant we were both surprised at how over the moon we were but especially him.
One miscarriage was bad enough for me. I don’t think either of us has the stamina to have more than two in a row. So Mr BC and I have decided we’ll have one more go and then, if that miscarries too, we’ll quit.
That said, who knows what the future brings… one of the things that struck me was how hard people try – how many miscarriages they have. My Mum had one with my brother – he was a twin and hung on – then after me another four. My brother’s was a difficult birth, they reckoned Mum survived because she was fit and that the pair of them had about 10 minutes left when they finally got her to theatre and fished him out.
Dad and Mum wanted 4 children but according to the doctor my brother’s birth didn’t do wonders for her insides and she did pretty well to have me. I remember one miscarriage, it must have been pretty late on for them to have told us and she was in bed for a few days afterwards. I also remember her going into hospital a couple of times when I was very young and us staying at home with Dad. One time he took us to the sea for a swim.
Another time I found out about afterwards was when we went to somebody’s house for the day. I remember it because there was a grave in the garden and it scared me – it was one of the house’s previous owners’ pet dog. I remember the day as idyllic in parts but with the trauma of finding the grave stone. My Mum started to lose another baby that day. At the time, I never noticed. She sat there, with my dad and us and those nice people and carried on as if nothing was happening. I so wish I could go back in time and give her a big hug. It must have been so crap, she must have felt so bad. Poor Mum.
I suspect there was a point where Mum and Dad decided to stick with us because I remember a kind of lifting of uncertainty, it wasn’t exactly resignation but I just remember being told that Mum was ok now and wouldn’t be going into hospital again.
I guess hope springs eternal and all that but to me that’s still very brave and all these other ladies, they’re pretty damn brave, too. Then again, perhaps it’s nature. Part of me was amazingly up for having another go straight away – I’d guess this is self preservation speaking here, get up and get on, hit the ground running, have another go NOW and get it right! All that stuff.
It sounds trite, but to me, the best analogy for this urge is a video game. It was like getting half way though level one when all your mates are onto level two. You desparately want to start again IMMEDIATELY and get through to the second level so you can discuss tactics, cheats and the quality of the graphic scenery on an equal footing with your friends.
I’d guess it’s a biological urge to stop you from sitting around getting depressed.
Mr BC is a dear and the miscarriage brought us together. I was very lucky that way, very lucky anyway, I guess because my husband is my best friend and without him, I’d have just sunk.
I went to a school reunion the other day.
Just about everyone I met asked me if I had children.
My mother always brought me up NEVER to ask this question. “It can hurt people so much” she has always said well I guess after all those miscarriages she knew what she was talking about. So after about the tenth one I just started telling them the truth. “Almost,” I’d say. “But not quite.” Then to the quizzical glance, “I had a miscarriage a couple of months ago.” I guess in a way it was kind of cruel – most of them were so embarrassed they didn’t know where to put themselves – but in another way, I felt I was educating them, gently, that not everyone is that lucky. They’re sure as hell not going to make the same mistake again.
I am evil and wicked but if the same thing ever happens to you I can recommend it. Cathartic? Oh yes!
Mwah ha ha ha haaaaargh!
Due Date Doodlings… 14, December 2006
Posted by babychaos in General Wittering, Heavy Flow, Miscarriage.Tags: observations, post miscarriage crap, pregnancy loss
4 comments
Well hello there campers.
My boobs are really aching today (I bet you wanted to know that) and it got me thinking about the miscarriage again. You’re quite on your own afterwards really, no two women are the same so it’s difficult for the medical folks to be able to tell a person what to expect.
On the upside, I was able to be surprisingly pragmatic about my loss – well, I was surprised anyway, I thought I’d be all over the shop. So I’ve discovered an interesting thing and that is that emotionally, I’m quite strong. That has given me confidence.
Life gets easier to deal with but I find it still catches me out every now and again. I find I occasionally well up and blub like a big girl because I’ve seen a baby or a push chair or something that just seems to be vulnerable and it brings out something in me I neither know nor understand nor, unfortunately, can control. As I said at the time, something’s opened up in me which I can’t close.
Seven months on… I know it’s something I will learn to live with, something that will, in the end improve the sensitivity of my “tentacles” as my mother always calls them – I believe “intuition” is the word normal people use.
The week my miscarriage happened somebody left a baby doll in our local park. It was clearly loved and cherished, dressed in a pink dress with a home knitted cerise cardigan. It looked so desolate and abandoned lying there on the asphalt. Pretty much the way I felt at the time.
I couldn’t leave her like that – all that pink, it had to be a girl – I had to put her somewhere away from the damp and creepy crawlies on the ground where her loving owner might see her. I was pretty sure I’d seen her in the park before, with a small girl owner and a toy pushchair. I sat her on the railings overlooking the car park and the next morning, by school time, she had gone. I like to think they were reunited. It makes me feel better that a small shard of good stuff came out of my sad stuff.
I have had horrible periods all year. Actually that is bad. If you have really crap periods, lots of pain and the kind of PMT that makes you not so much crabby as certifiable there’s not much fodder for being positive, except that for any other people who’ve had a miscarriage and are reading this I’m assured it’s normal and that your hormones can take as much as a year to settle.
Then there are other good things. I realised just how much Mr BC loves me, how much I love him too and how damned lucky I am to have him. There is still a lot of laughter between us, possibly more so now he has to make up a whole load of extra rubbish jokes to jolly me along when I get sad. Being married to him is a gas and that’s got to be a monster blessing!
I realised how much I wanted children – no… I knew that but Mr BC didn’t. Now, he’s prepared to have another go. If we miscarry again that may be it – he was pretty cut up and says he doesn’t think he could watch me go through it more than twice… Even so, that’s a pretty good outcomefor a woman who had resigned herself not having children because the man she loved didn’t want any – (and if I was going to have children with anyone I wanted his) so thank you to my little mite for that.
I will be confident that if we do make another baby it will be wanted by both of us. Perhaps if junior had come to fruition there would have been times when I would have wondered. Since the first miscarriage, we are surer of each other than ever before so maybe that will help us to give it a stable home life. That’s got to be a good thing, too.
So maybe I should stop behaving like the Grinch! Sod the fact I won’t be here! I’m going to get off my arse and put the tree up.
Not in the mood… 8, December 2006
Posted by babychaos in Heavy Flow, Miscarriage.Tags: holidays, post miscarriage crap, pregnancy complications, pregnancy loss, sadness
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I’m not in the mood for Christmas. When I was a kid it was great, full of excitement and fun. All it means now is guilt. Guilt that I’m not with my Mum and Dad or guilt that we’re not with Mr BC’s. It’s not that the day, itself, isn’t fun just that the guilt and the worry are the overriding things. Guilt that there might be a family member we haven’t sent a card to, visitied or contacted. It’s one long drag of worrying about other people’s feelings. Have we anticipated them, have we done it right, have we hurt them?
We go to one set of parents or the other and fit in with their routine or sometimes they come to us in which case we have to re-create their routine here. I don’t want to get it wrong, I want them to enjoy it, so although bits are fun I find my overriding emotion is stress. It’s selfish and mean to want a year where we get to do it our own way, with our own routine and in our own home but I do. We’re supposed to get a kick out of making other people feel good. Looking out for others is what Christmas is all about. In reality it just makes me weary and worried and I’m glad when it’s all over.
This year, we were up for our first guilt-free Christmas. We would be spending it in our own home, with a new baby. We had an excuse to make it our own. But there is no new baby and Christmas is the way it always was. And there’s no new baby. So it’s harder. And I keep crying, quietly behind the scenes. Yet another thing to hide behind my veneer of good cheer because I don’t want Christmas to be the same time of guilt and worry for other people that it is for me and if they know I’m sad it will be.
Maudlin, aren’t I? But this is a blog and this is what blogs are for. I dump this stuff here where it can’t do any harm, where it might make somebody else in the same boat feel less alone and a bit more normal and human. And I get on with being jolly BC who’s always fun and makes lots of jokes and is great with kids and never sad.
Here are some great words, they’re not great poetry and they’re actually about Love but they do the trick, written by the Man Himself, Mr Neil Hannon – or the Divine Comedy as he is also known.
“I found a photograph of you and me
Drinking sangria somewhere by the sea
There’s laughter in our eyes and dreams in our hearts
Before life waded in and tore it all apart
But when there’s no more lies to hide behind
And no more tears to cry. I know we’ll be all right.
For
Even though the skies are dark and cold and grey
I’m sure tomorrow we will see the light of day.
I found some letters from a happier time
I smelt the scented pages and re-read the lines
Why must the summer always turn into the Fall
Why must we lose love to ever know love at all….
When there’s no more lies to hide behind
And no more tears to cry. I know I’ll be all right.
For even though the skies above and cold and grey
I’m sure tomorrow we will see the light of day.
The light of day…. shining through our window pane.
But when there’s no more light to hide behind
And no more tears to cry. I know we’ll be all right.
For even though the skies above are cold and grey
I’m sure tomorrow we will see the light of day.
The light of day…. shining through our window pane.”
Ah yes. Thank you Mr Hannon. That’s my philosophy exactly. I know I’ll be all right I just have to wade through this bit to get from there to here.
Onwards and upwards eh?
