best bridesmaids you could imagine . . . my hen-do . . . wow! But that’s another story). But still, kids are definitely not on the radar right now for either of them.
Caro has a boyfriend . . . Piers. He’s a banker (naturally), but they seem to communicate electronically mostly.They’re certainly nowhere near moving in together, let alone getting married or having kids. She hates them anyway. I can just imagine Caro’s ‘I smell dog-poo’ face if I told her I was trying to have a baby. When we go out, she always sighs and growls if there are kids around. James calls her ‘Herod’ because she wants to kill all the children.
And Rob, well, Rob is too busy having fun and shagging her way alphabetically through the nationalities. There’s no time for kids right now in Robyn-world. Kids would get in the way of extreme sports, and they’d need to go to bed when she was trying to drink tequila shots off a salsa dancer called Paulo. She’s always said she wants them one day, but for her I think one day is ten years or maybe more in the future. She’d fall over in shock if I told her we were trying for a baby now. James was right. I’d tell them when, and if . . . there was something to tell. Not before.
It wasn’t like I didn’t have support . . . I kept visiting the baby website, and reading the threads about trying to conceive. I didn’t post . . . I didn’t have a story to tell yet, and I had so much to learn. There were lots of women who’d been trying for five years and more. Lots of them were on fertility drugs, had undergone IVF, or had had miscarriages. It was a bit like having a thousand really close friends . . . I got to know the names of many of the regular posters, and they’d let us know when they were expecting their period to start. Together, we’d count the days, and if they didn’t come on when they expected, they’d start wondering whether they should take a test.
Every now and then, someone would excitedly post that they’d had a BFP (it took me ages to work out that this meant Big Fat Positive), and there’d be hundreds of congratulatory messages. The women who managed that then left the TTC group and went to join a group with other women whose babies would be due in the same month as theirs. It was like a graduation.
I found myself logging on every evening at home, then, when I got more involved, I’d log on at lunchtime at work too. I lived through a rollercoaster with Pink_Girl32, who’d been trying for a year. She was about to start fertility drugs, but then out of the blue had a BFP. We wished her well, and she went off to join a birth group, but a few days later she was back, having had an early miscarriage. The doctor had advised her and her partner to try again immediately, and that’s what they planned to do. Then I picked up on the story of Curvy_Sue and her husband, who had finally saved enough for their first round of IVF. Everyone in the group had gone through the drugs and the egg harvesting with her. I first read one of her posts the day after she had had her embryos implanted. I read back through the threads she’d posted on, and found myself totally invested in her story. Along with everyone else, I counted the days until she could do a test, then cheered for her when one of the embryos stuck. I had all this ahead of me, and I felt happy that these women, or others like them, would be there to support me when the time came.
I didn’t even notice that I’d missed a period. Well, strictly speaking, I hadn’t . . . I only have about six a year. That’sone of the symptoms that sent me to the doctor in the first place, so it didn’t occur to me to count the days of my cycle like the other woman in the TTC group did. Also, it was Christmas . . . we were dashing out to parties and going down to Sussex to spend time with James’ mum, then dashing to Hendon to see my dad. We were having sex a lot, but I certainly wasn’t thinking . . . well, anything really. The
Caro has a boyfriend . . . Piers. He’s a banker (naturally), but they seem to communicate electronically mostly.They’re certainly nowhere near moving in together, let alone getting married or having kids. She hates them anyway. I can just imagine Caro’s ‘I smell dog-poo’ face if I told her I was trying to have a baby. When we go out, she always sighs and growls if there are kids around. James calls her ‘Herod’ because she wants to kill all the children.
And Rob, well, Rob is too busy having fun and shagging her way alphabetically through the nationalities. There’s no time for kids right now in Robyn-world. Kids would get in the way of extreme sports, and they’d need to go to bed when she was trying to drink tequila shots off a salsa dancer called Paulo. She’s always said she wants them one day, but for her I think one day is ten years or maybe more in the future. She’d fall over in shock if I told her we were trying for a baby now. James was right. I’d tell them when, and if . . . there was something to tell. Not before.
It wasn’t like I didn’t have support . . . I kept visiting the baby website, and reading the threads about trying to conceive. I didn’t post . . . I didn’t have a story to tell yet, and I had so much to learn. There were lots of women who’d been trying for five years and more. Lots of them were on fertility drugs, had undergone IVF, or had had miscarriages. It was a bit like having a thousand really close friends . . . I got to know the names of many of the regular posters, and they’d let us know when they were expecting their period to start. Together, we’d count the days, and if they didn’t come on when they expected, they’d start wondering whether they should take a test.
Every now and then, someone would excitedly post that they’d had a BFP (it took me ages to work out that this meant Big Fat Positive), and there’d be hundreds of congratulatory messages. The women who managed that then left the TTC group and went to join a group with other women whose babies would be due in the same month as theirs. It was like a graduation.
I found myself logging on every evening at home, then, when I got more involved, I’d log on at lunchtime at work too. I lived through a rollercoaster with Pink_Girl32, who’d been trying for a year. She was about to start fertility drugs, but then out of the blue had a BFP. We wished her well, and she went off to join a birth group, but a few days later she was back, having had an early miscarriage. The doctor had advised her and her partner to try again immediately, and that’s what they planned to do. Then I picked up on the story of Curvy_Sue and her husband, who had finally saved enough for their first round of IVF. Everyone in the group had gone through the drugs and the egg harvesting with her. I first read one of her posts the day after she had had her embryos implanted. I read back through the threads she’d posted on, and found myself totally invested in her story. Along with everyone else, I counted the days until she could do a test, then cheered for her when one of the embryos stuck. I had all this ahead of me, and I felt happy that these women, or others like them, would be there to support me when the time came.
I didn’t even notice that I’d missed a period. Well, strictly speaking, I hadn’t . . . I only have about six a year. That’sone of the symptoms that sent me to the doctor in the first place, so it didn’t occur to me to count the days of my cycle like the other woman in the TTC group did. Also, it was Christmas . . . we were dashing out to parties and going down to Sussex to spend time with James’ mum, then dashing to Hendon to see my dad. We were having sex a lot, but I certainly wasn’t thinking . . . well, anything really. The
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