High shame. Have re-started smoking. Am blogging it out here.

Here’s the boring “pregnancy announcements bite” post we’ve all heard a zillion times.

But don’t they?

The women in my mother’s group are all working on second children now. Two have just been born, one is around 20 weeks, and now… two more pregnancies have been announced – 7 weeks and 13 weeks. Then there’s my sister, of course – but my goodwill seems to stop after babies I am going to be related to.

I am so glad that I was one of the first women I knew to have a baby, so that I never truly had to deal with this while I was in the throes of IF.

I was lucky.

Because it’s hard even now not to be a bitter old cow: how fucking nice for you, people.

Even though I always said I only wanted one; couldn’t handle the two of my stepchildren fighting. Even though I don’t think I’d have the strength to face IVF and high risk pregnancy. Even though the fact of the matter is my husband says I’m not allowed to have more (and fair enough, he is in his 50s. One child was our compromise, after all.)

But still. Part of me wishes. And part of me still wants to punch things.

And part of me just wants to be able to let it go.

It seems lately that the only time I get on to post here is when I am having some kind of crisis. I feel like a teenager who writes angsty poetry and then closes her notebook until she breaks up with the next boyfriend.

But it happens.

Thank you for your support on my last, most tortured of posts. My sister has decided to keep the baby. Turns out she can stay on her current anti-crazy medication throughout the pregnancy, which was the deal-breaker. So I get to be an auntie again, and I’m betting on a little girl, if only so I have soemone to give “Anne of Green Gables” books to, and to see High School Musical Number 12 with.

I’ve been away, as I mentioned in a post a few weeks back. Right now I am sitting on the back porch in Norman Bates’ motel just outside of Auckland airport.

I’ve been in New Zealand for eleven days now, visiting an old flatmate of mine from ten years ago. She is British, and we’ve been writing to each other like boarding school penpals ever since. It’s been wonderful to catch up with her after so long – we’ve had some wonderful talks on rugged cliff-faces, and its been a fantastic opportunity to take stock of the last leg of the journey (actually the last several legs) and try and figure out where I’m going next. I need to process still, I think, but I won’t put you all through it now.

I miss my boys desperately, the big one and the little one. J said his first real sentence right before I left, holding his bottle out to me : “I want some more juice please”.  Cracked me up. He’s all about the damn juice right now.

He’s coping ok without me, T says; we’re both doing better than I expected, actually. Poor T is the one who has copped it all – alone, being pulled a million directions by J and his other two kids, who are now 16 and 12, and his ex-partner. He’s a gem, my husband. I need to tell him that more often (Resolution #1).  Supposedly J is being the metre-man – T can’t go more than a metre away before J starts getting clingy. Apparently he went to sleep quietly murmuring mama mama mama the other night. And then there was the bit where he pointed at the television – at vile, disgusting Charli from Hi 5 to be precise – and said “mama”.

Of course, I’ve been dreadfully worried about the damage eleven days away from mum will do to his psyche. Will he always have this looming sense of abandonment in his relationships with women? Will he be permanently seeking security in all the wrong places? Pure paranoia of course – everyone keeps telling me children are more resilient than we know. And of course they are.

Still.

Anyway, must go. Hope you all had a lovely christmas and new year. Hopefully won’t be long until I get off my butt to post again.

xx

Quickly, becasue I am visiting my step-kids and yet, things must come out.

My sister called this morning. She is pregnant. With an eight month old. And post-natal depression.

She said to me: “I’m not used to the idea”.

What my mother told me she’s saying: “I cannot keep this baby”.

I know it is not my decision to make. I know I can’t say anything to her. That she will do what is right for her, and she will have good reasons for it. And it will not be something she will take lightly. She is a natural mother, my sister – one of those rare kinds of mothers.

But I cannot help the infertile in me, the one put down the phone and went to the bathroom and shut the door. Who put her hands over her face and wept silently, violently, and like a child.

Thank you to you all for your thoughts and prayers. x

Well.

It looks like everything is ok. Ultrasound and mammogram both showed no “evidence of cystic or solid lesions”. The boob doctor told me that it looks like normal lumpy breast tissue to her – that it could be hormonal? She took a tissue sample and I’m going back next Monday to see what it had to say.

Still. There’s enough to be grateful for there.

The most terrible kinds of anxiety have been eased.

There is a lump in my breast.

It isn’t a small lump. It isn’t a pea-shaped lump. It is a big, hard mass of a two inch lump.

I think it just came up. Suddenly. This week. That’s what I think.

But I’m not sure; I’m doubting myself. What if that kind of lumpy tissue that’s been there for a long time – that seemed to be on both sides; that I thought was just breast tissue – what if it wasn’t?

I went to the doctor this morning. He didn’t help. Talk of his not being able to reassure me, talk of kicking heads if I couldn’t get into testing earlier this coming week. He gave me Monday morning off work to make the calls. All his manner, partially – another doctor would have said ‘We’ll get tests right away, but it probably isn’t the worst case scenario, at 31 years of age.”

But he didn’t. He thought it likely I would have to cancel my overseas trip – coming in three weeks.

And I am near panic. In and out of panic actually. For several hours today I convinced myself it was breastfeeding-related. Strange let-down sensations on both sides, two babies born around me in the last week. A bit of milk on the opposite side to the lump. Some weird, hormonal freak of nature – it happens, they say. My friend, two years past breastfeeding, said she startied randomly lactating earlier this year, for a week. Perhaps its a blocked duct. Perhaps its a cyst.

But I don’t know.

I’m so scared. So fucking scared.

Guess what?

My IVF poems just won a thousand dollars in a major poetry competition!

My writing doesn’t suck after all!

I won’t apologise. Because I am well aware that people hate it when bloggers apologise for being slack-arses. And – much as I adore all my bloggy friends – I haven’t, this time, been sitting here thinking “I must post” and feeling guilty about it. So something is either broken or fixed in my world. I’m not sure which.

Tonight I should be working on my book. That’s been taking up most of my spare time lately. I call it a book, but it only has a few thousand words. But it will be one. It might be crap, but fuck, it will be finished. I won’t ramble on too much about it – just to say that it started one place and then went somewhere else and then I stopped for a month or two and planned (like I tell my students to. You know.) and now it has momentum. I am trying to think of it as an experiment in Process. I am not allowing myself to read the draft back. I am forcing myself to write quantities that do not give me time to overthink anything. I aim to be finished the first draft by the end of January.

Meanwhile, everything else falls apart. Ha.

No, things are not too bad. With work / study / toddler / bed-abandoned husband (consistently co-sleeping, who me??) things are really hectic. It’s kind of nice. As always, I find I get more achieved when I have way too much to achieve. Like I need a stupid amount of responsibilities in order to actually do anything at all.

BB is growing so fast. He is 18 months old now, or 16 months corrected. He is lovely. Mostly. Other times, he isn’t. Other times he kicks and wriggles and runs away from me and slaps me on the face, and yells “Nononononononononon!”Mostly when we are in public places, when I imagine all the other people in the supermarket queue thinking “Why can’t she control her son?”

He is speaking a lot now. I remember MSNing Pru one night, and her telling me how her daughter P. was obsessed with animals. Buddha Boy is all about the animals right now: What does a dog say? What does a monkey say? What does a duck say? etc. etc. etc. That and body parts. It’s lovely to watch, really a delight. He still calls me Dada though, which is disturbing (Like Chicka, Skygirl, and “turtle”!)

He is big into kissing at the moment, too. I think it must be a developmental thing, because the other kids in our playgroup are doing it too, and they’re all within a month of each other. It’s just a non-stop pash-fest at playgroup. BB is an insistent little bugger too. He will just grab my face and hold it to his lips sometimes: Kiss kiss kiss kiss kiss kiss kiss…

Anyway, yo, I should go. I have ultra-important DVD piracy to achieve. My love to all of you.

Facebook me.

…But wait, I post so infrequently that no one knew I went away. But you must have missed my comments? Oh that’s right, I hardly ever comment either…

(*SIGH* Do you believe me when I tell you I do read? That bit is true…)

So. Just got back from the lovely tropics, where we visited my step-kids for a few days. It was nice. BB was charming and cute. Step-kids no longer really kids as such – being 16 and 12. (Crazy. They were 8 and 4 when I met them. When did this growing up  business happen?)

The flight there was a disaster area. BB was the official Toddler Who Cries The Whole Time, and squirmed and squawked on my lap and I had to take hime for walks down the aisle.

But then again, he is walking finally! Rah!

He certainly took his sweet time about it. But as I have been saying for weeks, I knew he would save his first steps for when his brother and sister could see them – that was what he did with his crawling too. And he did. We arrived about midnight Monday night, and he walked on Tuesday.

So there you go.

(I seem to blog with only half my conscious mind these days. It’s like I half-focus on it. So sorry for disjointedness. ..This is why I only got a shameful “Pass” for my uni subject this semester. Brain no care.)

I go back to the Work-of-Psycho-Bosses on Monday. So sucky. The feeling of dread is incredibly depressing. In fact, the feeling of dread at the end of school holidays is the reason I stopped teaching full-time and moved into the school library in the first place. Yet here I am, reliving it anyway via my megalomanic control freak micromanager boss. How ironic and sad. Let’s chant again: One day it will be your library… One day it will be your library….

In better news. I have now lost about 10 lbs. Go Weight Watchers. Not yet at first generation of jeans, but am feeling less frumpy. At least I will feel comfortable wearing something other than enormous Thai fisherman’s pants this summer. Heh. Maybe even a skirt. Heavens.

So anyway, much love to all in my slice of blogland. Thanks for bearing with my boringness in extremis for all this time. DD, happy birthday and good luck with your tummy next week. Everyone else… I have way too many feeds on my Bloglines right now, but trust I will be caught up with your news in the next couple of days…

(Pics to come soon, btw, and maybe video. Email me for password.)

Ex Oh Ex Oh.