Bed

Overcast and mild. Still in bed at midday!!

Hollie is under the weather and has the day off. We've spent it in bed so far... such a luxury. Watching ABC family drama and talking about how our family tree will look. Working out the plan for this evening (the sperm logistics!) and talking about worries. Talking about what we are looking forward to. Sorting out Christmas plans. The cat thinks all his Christmases have come today, with both of us still in bed for hugs.

This time together feels really important. We might make a baby together tonight.

Fingers crossed!!!

Feminist

Cold, dark. Warming up my feet before getting into bed.

Julia Gillard lost the leadership spill tonight. I was moved that what brought her almost to tears was not losing the position, thanking her family, etc, but her hope that the next time a woman made it to being Prime Minister, it would be easier than it had been for her, that having been there first would have made some kind of a difference. 

Closer to home, this week we managed to talk about sperm and how to hand it over. On Facebook. God, what a weird, weird thing this is. Glad to get the logistics sorted though - if we were blushing online, it's probably good we're all clear on what to do in the actual event. 

So soon now. Feeling happy. 

Day One

Sunny. A perfect winter day.

Today is special! Before I started keeping track of my cycle, month by month, I'd always thought of getting my period as being the end of a cycle - my body's way of saying, well, you didn't get pregnant (of course, how would I have?!) so we'll scrap all that and start again in a few days. However, as the fertility charts count it, the first day of your period is the first day of the new cycle, a definitive new beginning. Somehow I've swapped over to that way of thinking, which makes today the first day of the cycle in which we might, MIGHT, make a baby. (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!).

Partly I think I've swapped ways of thinking because of my joy each month over the way that ovulation shows up with all its miraculous temperature shifts and fern shaped patterns on a microscope slide - it means that the excitement is all over by about Day 14 and then it's just about waiting for my period to come so that I can start a new chart. Also, I can see the emotional benefit of understanding it as a new beginning, rather than marking the end of a failed attempt, once we are actually trying to get pregnant. It's a bit kinder on your feelings that way, I guess.

I've been thinking a lot about how it might feel to see 'not pregnant' turn up on the little tester stick thing. The odds are not in favour of getting pregnant first time, apparently. Dr Google seems to say that you have about a 1 in 4 chance each time of getting pregnant, with the reasonably common complication of miscarriage still to add into the equation after that. Another way of looking at it is that on average it takes six months of trying. I'm never sure how to feel about these numbers. Six months is not a hugely long time in some ways... It's only six tries, after all, but then any baby-making site, anywhere on the Internet, has story after story of people who do not get pregnant despite good health and best efforts, month after month, and the people who are telling those stories seem BROKEN by the accumulation of those negative pregnancy tests.

Will I feel broken too, if it takes a while?

My aunts tell me that I come from a line of "one fuck wonders". (Not my words!). I hope I inherited that!

X

Long, long days

Wet. Again. A second week of having the Preps inside every lunch time will send me completely crazy!

The weekend was also crazy. Actually, our whole life feels like madness at the moment... Too much work and not nearly enough sleep or time to talk. Hollie's hours are even more long and ridiculous than usual and in addition to the usual truly insane work hours, she had a paper reappear from the job she had two years ago that needed one final edit before publication. She is one of the toughest people I know, when it comes to just knuckling down and doing it, but her life is looking pretty crazy from the outside. I don't really know how she is feeling on the inside... That would require seeing her for more than the hour before bed when we try to eat dinner and catch up and do the dishes and iron and work out what to do about the fact that we have no milk and it is raining... again!

I have also been working stupidly hard. I came apart at the seams a week ago though (my threshold is lower than Hollie's but it is still only the second time I've ever cried at school), and since then I've sorted out some things that should help, with the ever wonderful Harriet and a little bit of footstamping in the Principal's office. The school stuff is all looking significantly more do-able now, with a few new strategies and resources and the holidays also coming very soon. More than anything, I was struggling with the emotional task of managing all those kids, parents and co-teachers. I know that I couldn't possibly teach any other way, but when people tell me that teaching must be some much more emotionally easy than counselling was (my previous job) I feel like running down the list of emotional work that I do each day and explaining just how much this job requires all the same involvement of heart and mind... only unlike counselling it's not all over in discrete hour long blocks, you never have any idea what is coming up next, you get all of them all at once, all day long, not one-at-a-time with a reasonably certain lunch break. And in counselling, my job wasn't kids. Wild, wonderful kids who bend towards you like plants if you water them with love, making it double, triple as important to do it right, treat them well, love them back. Oh well.

The problem is, even with school on the up and up, a brand new dishwasher and Julia the German exchange student - who  we've employed her to come and clean the house (and named the dishwasher after) - insemination #1 is approaching and we haven't really got much time for last minute getting ready. Emotionally, I mean. I remembered the other day that I have to find a needle-less syringe somewhere, but it's the emotional preparation I am wondering how we'll find the time for in the next couple of weeks, Actually, I feel prepared. Surprisingly, I feel calm - happy and quietly excited. But I think Hollie has a few last worries to work out. Obviously, it's not like we have ALL the emotional preparation to do in the next two weeks or I would be REALLY worried, but still. On the weekend, we should have talked about it, but we were so tired, emotions ran high, it was hard, there was arguing.

Anyway. Like school, the answer is always love, finding more time for love. I know this about Hollie: it never takes much. A head scratch and dinner. Flowers. Clean pyjamas. In the Complete Guide to Lesbian Conception, Pregnancy and Birth they say that before you have kids you should do this:

The Love Map (Truly! That's what they called it!)
- make a list of all the things that make you feel loved.
- from this list, prioritise and mark the top four ways of being loved that you absolutely must have or you start to feel stressed, insecure or alone.
- make sure something on the list happens every day.

I think Hol and I do a particularly good job at love in general, but the thoughtfulness that is behind this way of approaching each day is worth remembering in these days of 8pm finishing times. So, to dinner.

X

How much gratitude?

Sunny Melbourne day! I spent the morning building a chicken pen at school in the warmest of autumn sun.

I got this message this morning: "Soooo, we are just planning July - when are you fertile?"

How much gratitude can you possibly feel? The newspaper is full of disasters, school has been a week of struggle and sadness, but that message makes me feel like the sun shone just for me today.

Mother, parent, mum...

Wet and getting colder... the air was crisp this morning!

I went to the doctor yesterday for the second of my HepB vaccinations. This is because a month or two ago, my GP recommended that I get a set of blood tests done to check things pre-baby-making. I'm not actually sure what they checked, to be honest. Whether I'd had chicken pox and what my iron levels were like? Anyway, the same week, I also had my breasts scanned as part of the routine of managing whatever risk it is that I may or may not have inherited. (This post so far makes it sound like I have a lot of medical tests which is not actually true!) The ultrasound lady had said it all looked fine, but then a week later, I got a letter from the doctor saying only that I had been 'Recalled: For Discussion of Test Results'. Of course, I panicked... but it was only that I'd apparently never been vaccinated against HepB.

Anyway, the point of all this is that while I was getting the injection, the GP casually handed me a package of pamphlets that she "always gives to people who looking to get pregnant" and recommended that I take them home to read in case there was information in there that I needed. It felt absolutely bizarre to accept the package... I felt like the honest thing to do would be to hand it back and tell her that we were actually just pretending and that she should save it for genuine prospective parents! It was precisely the same feeling as being handed my the class roll on my first day of teaching as a 'real teacher'... I really felt like I'd got into a situation where somehow I'd accidentally been mistaken for the teacher when really I should probably be joining the kids sitting with their legs crossed on the floor.

I've been thinking about this, about how having a baby makes you a parent, a mother, 'mum', since seeing the counsellor the other week. Hollie and I were talking about it in the car afterwards, because a fair bit of the session was given to explaining and working out what it was that we were imagining as roles for everyone in this situation. Anyway, some of the mother/parent/mum words feel easier to approach than others. 'Mother' and 'parent' feel relatively more simple when you make them into verbs, for example. Mothering, with all its emotional and practical tasks is something I feel strongly about even in my work as a teacher, and babies fit so snugly into my arms, so it's not something that seems like an unmanageably huge stretch to imagine myself doing - although, God, I really, really hope that I do it well. Parenting feels like an extension of this... the day to day running of a household with children - probably because this is how we've been defining it for the purposes of distinguishing between 'parent' and 'dad' when people ask about what Joey's role will be. That also seems approachable enough... I did enough parenting duties for so many of my nanny jobs that I hope I've at least got the basics. To be someone's mother, though - that seems unfathomably huge. And the idea of being called mum by a kid - and not just a kid at school who has got comfy leaning against me at silent reading and forgot I wasn't Mum after all - that also seems enormous. I guess any new role takes a bit of getting used to - and, after all, I do feel like a teacher now, I teach, I am someone's teacher... I presume the same magic will work itself so that 'mum' also feels real enough for me and Hollie by the time it comes around. I am so curious to know how we are all going to end up relating to this potential little person. Two mums is only the beginning of the web of love I hope we manage to make.

Four weeks to first try!

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