Falling Pregnant...a negative trajectory

Getting pregnant seems to be a bit of a bitch so far.

At first I thought it would happen immediately. The Mirena came out *pop* and boom I would be fertile as hell and Tommie would just walk by me and voila!
Little Grovetjie on the way.

As the months passed I started realising that this is not so.
Why not? Teenagers all swear they only did it once and fell pregnant.

Am I too old? Are my ovaries so conditioned by the fervent please-don't-let-me-be-pregnant prayers I've been saying every night for the past ten years?

Other people say it's because I am stressed. How does one tell exactly how stressed one is?
I usually know my stress levels are through the roof when my eyes start twitching and I stop going number two for weeks on end, which culminates in extreme stomach ache and moodiness.

These days whenever I feel moody I assess what time of the month it is.
Since going off my antidepressants (blog to follow) and birth control I have had insane PMS every month but only a few days before Aunt Flo visits.

This past month I had PMS-like symptoms for two weeks before hand, headaches every day, bloatedness and crazy dreams.
Thus, said my mind, I must be pregnant, finally.

And this time I felt ready.

The last time I thought I might be it scared me a little and I groped for the bottle.
Since then I stopped drinking (blog to follow).

I mean, since Feb. I have stopped my sleeping tablets, antidepressants, mood stabilisers, antihistamines and alcohol.
I am extremely sober and feel everything.

Am I not a worthy subject for a child?

This seems to be a common conclusion in women that struggle to fall pregnant. What's wrong with us? Do we have so many feelings of guilt and shame that we believe we don't
deserve a kid?
And then when the kid is there it also seems like a kind of punishment.

Then women seem to think back to all the grief they gave their own mothers and start feeling like God gave them a difficult child to get back at them.
Granted this does seem to be the cycle of life.

We are born, we give our parents hell and then we have our own children who give us hell until they in turn give us grandchildren who give them hell and so on and so forth
until the sun supernovas and kills us all.

Let's start at the beginning.

In Feb. my Mirena has done its job for five years which means it was time to have it removed.
Getting it in was such a mission that the doctor had to put me under to succeed and a 15 min operation turned into almost an hour.
He said my cervix was so small I barely needed the damn thing.
So understandably I was a bit worried when he said he'll just yank it out in the chair without any drugs of any sort.

At this point you might be wondering how a person like me is ever going to survive labour or even a c-section.

Anywho, I decided to trust the man and went to the appointment ready to be yanked. At least I was still drinking back then so I had that and a holiday we were planning
to look forward to.

When push came to shove, or rather yank came to shove, I was petrified and steeled myself for excruciating pain but before it could even start feeling like pain it was
over and I felt like a kind of Mirena birthing goddess.
A highly fertile one.

So off we went on holiday because whenever one of us quits our jobs we have to go to the coast to "wash off the misery" before starting the next one, and I had just finished
my notice month at the hell I worked at for five and a half years (blog to follow...maybe).
The first time we did it I thought we were pregnant. I mean isn't that what sex-ed taught us all? Sex leads to pregnancy?
It seems this is only true for teenagers.

I started talking to other women, customers actually, some of which went to school with me or studied with me. A lot of them had also recently started trying for kids
and had varying degrees of success.
They gave me tips about downloading apps and eating certain things and lying on your back afterward to "help the little guys" and so on and so forth.

So I downloaded an app which tells me specifically when the "window is open" and we must get down to business, so to speak.
This quickly grew tiresome.
Scheduling sex time is not supposed to have to happen in the first two years of marriage, I believe, but you know how it goes...right?
Sometimes we are busy and tired and whatever, but the "full window has to be used" according to the app.

Other sites say that every second day is fine. This is still way too much thinking and planning for me.
And why on earth did God make us so that we can only really fall pregnant one day out of the month. Is it so that we won't have millions of children running around without planning them?
Because that seems to happen anyway. To people that aren't me, anyway.

Spending time with little kids also doesn't seem to be a good idea because they look like extremely hard work and can be highly annoying (when I suspect I might be up the duff).
Other times they are adorable and beautiful and give meaning to life (when I know I am not pregnant).

This see saw is driving me crazy.

The worst part is seeing other people fall pregnant around me.

I have a friend who is planning on having a baby on her own and has started the process. We have been dreaming of falling pregnant together for three years.
What if she manages and I can't?
What will that say about me?

I have my issues and am still struggling with a few things but that can't be why, right?
I should be healthy and fertile as fuck right now but noooo.

It might be because husband and I still smoke. Now, I have been told that quitting drinking and smoking at the same time is a terrible idea and I am blindly following all instructions
I receive from people that have been sober now for over a year because they obviously know what they are doing.
Then I realise that I am 33 years old, the age my mother fell pregnant with me, her fourth child.
An unplanned "laat lammetjie".

I've quit smoking before with Mr. Carr and it wasn't hard but I don't want to screw up my sobriety, which I consider the most important thing in my life at the moment.

So we are back at square one. The square where everyone tells me to "just relax" and "stop trying so hard".
What does that even mean? Should I think about all the horrible parts of being a parent so the universe will knock me up just to be spiteful?
At some point I decided to just enjoy all the things a childless person can enjoy, which previously came down to mostly one thing: drinking.
A thing which parents actually seem to embrace with a passion once the little bundle of love is off the breast.
But I  hear other things I can add to this list are: sleeping, leaving the house and not worrying/crying all the time.

On the plus side, I am losing weight. It seems that the Mirena can increase appetite and bmi. Also, we all know alcohol is fattening.
After 30 anyway, before, it seemed to be slimming, haha.

I'm going to go read a book now...another thing I can add to the list of things children seem to take away from you.
Sigh.

Zolpi-DONE

Ever since matriculating my life has been one long line of heart breaks and chemical warfare against myself.
I guess at times it was fun but at the beginning of 2016 a little voice spoke up in my mind.
She sounded exactly like the Child Empress in Neverending Story but instead of asking me to say her name, she said:
"You are ready to wake up, now".

The Child Empress has never before been one of my "voices" so this was interesting and new and so I started keeping an eye out for
signs of what this might mean.
She might have been referring to the fact that I never truly woke up before 17:00 in the afternoon because then work would
be done and I could get my freedom on. But I knew this was a problem and didn't need a Child Empress to enlighten me to this.

Secondly she might have been trying to wake me from an actual coma in which case I would probably be an old lady in a dilapidated hospital and all my loved ones would be gone or dead or
given up on me. If this was the case the first thing I would do when I woke up is clobber the doctor who had obviously been giving me the generic drugs while I was out because much
of my time was spent having awful nightmares about screwing up my life and getting absolutely nowhere.

Thirdly, I was about to drink my last sleeping tablet that night and it was the end of the script.

I had a choice now;

1.) Go to the doctor and try and persuade him to give me another script and no I am not abusing them. Yes I am on some psych meds too. Why? Because I'm crazy that's all.
Lots of people are crazy. Everyone should be on pills. Okay?! JUST GIMME THE EFFING SCRIPT YOU BITCH!

2.) Stop taking sleeping tablets.


The second option was terrifying. I had never been a good sleeper and when I did sleep I had vivid night terrors which caused me to rocket from my bed and run screaming into the night.
Don't believe me? Ask anyone, literally anyone who had spent the night with me, before I had started taking the knock out tablets.

No there aren't that many guys that have had the privilege.
And that's not the point...Judgy Mcjudgerton, sheese.

In order to survive these awful nights of never sleeping again ever, I started working on one of my fabled plans.

Queue mission impossible theme song:

I would get home from work, cook dinner and have wine.
Then watch TV, having more wine.

Then when the clock struck 21:00 I would have a relaxing candle lit bubble bath.
This was easy because the bathroom light had been blown for months so I had to use candles and I still had bubble bath from my first kitchen tea in 2009.
The bubble bath had survived my first marriage *hang head in shame for failing at first marriage and never using bubble bath during it*.

Have more wine in romantic bath.

Maybe invite husband to join me.

Husband not interested in having romantic bath with drunken wife.

Send husband for more wine.

Husband refuses and pours last glass of wine down drain.

Freak out.

Husband feels so bad that he gets more wine.

Get into neatly made bed with fresh glass of wine.

Read a book. Not Steve King, no, we are looking for calm dreams, maybe some light Marian Keyes.

Read until eyelids start getting heavy.

Switch off light and feel extremely awake.

Ask husband to smother you with pillow, just a little.

Husband refuses.

Husband = rebel.


After executing this plan the next night because my sleepers were then depleted, I didn't sleep at all.
This sucked a lot because sleeping seems important. And fun.

The sun rose and found I had turned into an extremely hung over zombie.

Luckily it was a Friday and most people at the company where I worked operated at half speed on Fridays anyway, actually mostly because they too were hung over zombies.
What is it with a Thursday night and drinking our heads off?
Is it because it's almost Friday and we might explode from excitement because we get to do nothing but drink for two whole days?
And then wake up Friday morning never wanting to drink again?

Yeah that seems logical enough.

Back to me.
That night we had a braai with friends and I told them all about it and how terribly hung over I was *said sipping on wine*.
And they were very sympathetic and supportive *also sipping on various alcoholic drinks*.

And that night I slept, if you could call it that.
My brain had effectively blocked all memory of the dreams I had but they were incredibly horrible. Like a David Lynch movie had a child with a Japanese horror movie.
And that child turned out to be a nightmare and I gave birth to it.

This kept on going and was later joined by feelings of weirdness. That is the best way I could describe them.
I googled Zolpidem withdrawel and boom there it all was, listed neatly from top to bottom and some of them I could still look forward to.

But as with all highly unpleasant circumstances, this passed and I sort of became a normal sleeper again. Actually better than how I used to be with only the occasional leaping from bed and running yammering into the night.

My husband who had only ever spent the night next to me after I had a firm Zolpidem habit underway was in for a treat.

Now because I am always asleep when these night terrors catapult me into the dark of night, I usually don't remember what I dreamed about or where I was headed or sometimes that anything had happened at all.

But the latest one I remember clearly.

In the dream husband and I were in a garage of some kind when suddenly the garage door started closing and somehow falling sideways towards us.
Me having noticed this was frantically trying to get out from underneath it and astonished to see that husband was not bothered.
In fact he looked like he was sleeping, peacefully.

Luckily my cat immediately caught on to the fact that some catastrophic (pardon the pun) event was transpiring and speedily vacated the room in a flash of Siamese coloured fur.

My desperate clawing and sputtering finally woke my husband and he said something that stopped me dead in my tracks because of its bizarreness.

"Wat gaan aan, blaashasie?".

Translation: I can't...it Just doesn't work in English. But it involves a bunny rabbit.

Suddenly the garage door vanished and I was standing next to my nice safe bed in the middle of the night, looking down into the confused, half smiling face of my husband.
I was trying to make sense of his question when I realised my cat must have been roused by my sudden scuffling, assessed the situation as Mommy has gone Loco (again?)
and left as a result, not because of a garage door falling in slow motion towards him.

And it was funny.
It was so funny that the sound that came out of me next was a loud, unexpected guffaw of mirth.
The fact that he had called me a "blaashasie" joined in on the hilarity and saw me hysterically scream-laughing for the rest of the night.

This time when the sun came up it found a very different picture of me.

Lying in bed, gripping the covers, eyes half closed, still weakly giggling and happy as hell.

Hasta la vista, Zolpidem.

Wine; Gateway Drug to Pole Dancing

I love having a plan and am pretty good at it, even if I say so myself.

Now even though my personal development plan (PDP to the corpees out there) always said my “area of development” (aka shit I’m not good at doing) said “planning” in big red letters the last six years of my employment, that’s not entirely accurate.

I just didn’t like the kind of planning they wanted me to do, is all.

But when it comes to my life, my actual experience as a human being, planning is crucial to me.

Now, this might conjure up images of me having a Filofax (#80’s), an immaculate diary and a daily routine that flows seamlessly from point A through to point Z, at the end of which I slide into my perfectly made, pethairless* bed, legs shaved to a silky finish but still somehow tanned, my flawless body lovingly dressed in a beautiful negligee, close my eyes and drift into the kind of slumber reserved specially for those who have everything under perfect control.

That would be a misconception of epic proportions.

When I said “plans” I really meant “backup plans”…even “escape plans” might describe the things I hoard in my head a little better.

In other words, these plans are there so that I can continue living through mildly to extremely unpleasant events while only being sort of present. The other part of me will be off preparing the future scenario in my mind, where everything will be completely different and obviously much nicer.

Even though that doesn’t even matter either because by the time that reality is in the present, half of me will be off to the next hypothetical scenario, fluffing the pillows of that next, glorious bed, metaphorically speaking.

Okay, let’s talk real examples.

One night in the not so distant past, I was sitting hunched over on the couch with a box of cheapish red on the coffee table and a very grimy wine glass in my hand, staring at the clock. It said 02:00. What a depressing time to be awake and holding a grubby wine glass.

This behaviour had been spiraling slowly out of control over the previous two weeks or so and I knew the signs when I saw them.

I was drinking too heavily and gaining weight at an alarming rate. This could also partly be ascribed to continuously stuffing my face with potato chips to get the wine taste out of my mouth. Insanity, thy name is annoyance!

But, being a wise and experienced sage, I chose not to:

aa.)    Put down the wine and go to bed like an adult

Or

bb.)    Pour all the alcohol in the house down the drain like a crazed alcoholic.

No

.

I quietly kept sipping my wine as I got out my little note pad and started jotting down ideas of how to address this problem realistically.

Of course, this was fraught with danger as an inebriated mind can come up with some crazy shit at two in the morning.

And mine did not disappoint.

Plan number one was *drumroll* pole dancing!

If I went to pole dancing lessons all the time, I wouldn’t have time to drink, it will obviously whip me into fabulous shape which in turn will boost my self-esteem so much I wouldn’t feel like drinking as much and the big one: I will learn how to pole dance, heck yeah!

I already felt better just dreaming about how amazing I was going to be, so the rest of the wine and potato chips tasted a little less depressing and I managed to weave my way through the house to bed where I breathed vile fumes into my poor husband, who I shall refer to from here on forth as Truluv* (gangsta for True Love)’s face.

A truly wonderful plan has as much merit in being made as in being deployed.

Which is a good thing because my hangover lasted ages and The Plan couldn’t unfold until I could face daylight without hissing again.

Finally, after toying with the idea of ditching the plan just to screw with myself a little more, I found a place and went to my very first class.

This was sobering for two reasons. For one, I was used to having my first tittle by this time of the evening and two; instead of sinking into the couch with said tittle, I was standing in a room filled with poles, younger and thinner women -girls even- and swaddled in what can only be described as an eclectic mix up of garments I thought people generally learn pole dancing in.

Run run run until you get to London! Said brain.

Glub glub time? Enquired addictive personality centre in brain.

No, replied I, squaring my double chin.

The instructor flounced in with a body to weep over but teeth that soothed my jealousy, ever so slightly.

She made the newbies sign waivers so we couldn’t sue them if we dropped on our heads and developed resentful feelings.

Then we did a few little exercise-esque things and I felt impatient to start with the good stuff. When with the flying and the beautifulness, miss?

So I was very excited when she clapped her hands together and announced the time to start poling.

She showed as a step up thing that seemed as easy as cherry pie until I tried it and found that I weigh a million pounds and as a result have extreme difficulty getting off the ground and onto the pole.

Also once I finally managed to heave myself up I experienced a sensation I imagined akin to having your shin flayed, then doused with boiling sea water.

Sliding from the pole with yelp of surprise and expression of indignation, I almost enquired WTF dude? From the smirking instructor. But she seemed used to this sound and expression being expressed in her studio and calmly handed me some liquid chalk for my sweaty palms, which made me forgive her instantly because Ohhhhh! It’s not because of me being grotesquely overweight, it’s just slippery hands causing this ungainliness! ohhh!

Trying out the basic spin she showed us and losing the top layer of skin behind my knee, I found another highly unpleasant factor of this class, and funny enough it was not the loss of previously mentioned skin.

There is a giant mirror, no not a mirror, a WALL made of mirror, in the front of the room…and I…in it. Plainly visible to the naked eye. Painfully large and with a stunned look on my face and red shins.

How to deal with this problem.

Subconscious Brain was luckily quick-footed and sure of wit because apart from the first spin I managed to execute quite nicely, after spotting the lesser spotted and in fact much avoided me in the mirror, I instantly lost the ability and could only turn in semi-circles, always away from the mirror.

Coming to a screeching halt inches away from facing myself again, the thought did cross my mind that this activity, although sobering, was much trickier than previously anticipated.

As I drove home, it started raining and a tiny wave of goodfeelingness didn’t exactly wash over me, but sort of climbed on top of me and lay there.

This is good, I did something! I worked out and did a basic turn! I wonder if I should have a glass of wine to celebrate. Oh no, I thought of wine! What do I do?

So I went home and I honestly can’t remember whether I had wine or not…which probably means that I did…but that’s not the point.

I kept going to the classes and sometimes there would be other beginners, no that’s not a strong enough word for what we were, EXTREME beginners who would practice on the same pole as me and have the same difficulties and sheepish looks on their faces, which really helped. One of them were even a little bit bigger than me, which helped a whole lot.

Most days-after I wouldn’t be able to walk like a natural person and would hobble from dentist to dentist (I’m a dental sales rep) with, let’s call it a primateal bounce gait*.

But after about three weeks of going to two classes per week, I started feeling a little tighter around the midriff and stomach.

This was probably as a result of both exercising as well as not drinking and pigging out on Tuesdays or Thursdays, so yay for me, even though I was still indulging my head off on all other days of the week…especially Sundays… I hate you Sunday.

Alas, this brief window of respite was not to last…

On a dark and stormy night, far away from home, in an evil cave called Protea Hotel Polokwane, I was destined to slip and fall in the dumb shower/bath while rinsing the shampoo from my hair…and DIE!

Well die, if by dying you mean landing on the side of the tub rim with your ribs and straining your intercostal muscles, causing you to screech uncontrollably and then in turn causing severe pain in the event of uncontrollable screeching, which causes an infinite loop of uncontrollable screeching.

Thus bringing my budding career as a stripper to a premature end.

Or did it?

*copyright dibs on the phrases “Pethairless”, “Truluv” and “Primateal Bounce Gait”