friend said he felt a bit of sick rise in his throat when he came through the front door because it was so great: the garden with its tree house waiting to be discovered, the rope ladder, the old wooden-seated swing, and the yellow gate, under an arch of white clematis, that led down to the sea. âWonderful for children,â his wife said, peering out the kitchen window, a child at her breast. And so idle discussions about baby names began in the ad breaks between
Coronation Street
.
After a few months of happy and energetic effort, I knew we must have been doing something wrong. I poured through books about fertility and began to monitor my monthly cycle. I kept a thermometer on the bedside table and took my temperature every morning, him in bed beside me, snorting at my eccentricity. We started timing âintimacyâ (Dr Percyâs word for the act) around my most fertile days of the month.
I explored bits of my body Iâd never thought about or visited before. My cervix, was it low and hard? Or high and soft? And could I describe my cervical mucus as having the consistency of egg white? After âintimacyâ I held my legs in the air and kept them there for as long as tolerable, and slept through the night with a pillow under my bum, fighting the pressure in my bladder till the following morning. Joe watched, waited, suffered, drew back.
Another few months passed and still there was no baby, nothing to get excited about. I started to worry, went back to Dr Percy who told me to stop worrying, start exercising and give up alcohol and caffeine. I teased Joe about his swimmers being lazy; we laughed as we imagined them with snorkels, treading water or floating on their backs, taking it easy. Then I stopped laughing and started to look for answers elsewhere; I went online and tried all the things that had worked for other women. Doggedly I followed each of them. They didnât work. We got a dog.
I started eating almonds though Iâd never liked them, and bought ice creams â excellent for female fertility according to the books â from Teddyâs after work each evening. Joe would cycle along Sandycove seafront to meet me on the days he worked from home; eating ice cream is something you really canât do on your own.
I became fascinated and resentful of other women who seemed to possess an ability that I appeared not to have, like Anna who lived next door, the one Mum wasnât sure about, an introverted woman who I never got to know, who always seemed to be obscured by an open boot, or half inside her car sorting out her babies. Their cries used to travel down the chimney in the night, along the wall that the two houses shared, taunting me, infiltrating my dreams.
While we were in this nothing time, I sometimes caught glimpses of her from the window of the utility room â we had a house with aseparate utility room for goodness sake, we were clearly ready for kids. Iâd watch her and her husband and their rowdy get-togethers in the back garden with their friends and their children, their endless laughter heightening my loneliness, my exclusion from an exclusive family club: her husband, Lee, in knee-length shorts, muscular, sun-tanned legs and feet in ugly Crocs, stretching and scratching the hair above his belly, pulling on a polo shirt that heâd pull off just as easily to fuck his wife, to make more babies, when he was drunk and all the guests had gone home.
I carried pineapples, like tufty-haired cartoon characters, back from the local Spar and ate them each evening, but only around weeks three and four, as instructed, and took a tablespoon of cough mixture daily to make things more sticky downstairs. And I prayed and prayed and prayed to Saint Martha around the second half of each month and dropped in to light a candle for my baby whenever I passed a church.
We visited Dr Percy together. She told me I talked too fast, that I needed to calm down, that it
Coronation Street
.
After a few months of happy and energetic effort, I knew we must have been doing something wrong. I poured through books about fertility and began to monitor my monthly cycle. I kept a thermometer on the bedside table and took my temperature every morning, him in bed beside me, snorting at my eccentricity. We started timing âintimacyâ (Dr Percyâs word for the act) around my most fertile days of the month.
I explored bits of my body Iâd never thought about or visited before. My cervix, was it low and hard? Or high and soft? And could I describe my cervical mucus as having the consistency of egg white? After âintimacyâ I held my legs in the air and kept them there for as long as tolerable, and slept through the night with a pillow under my bum, fighting the pressure in my bladder till the following morning. Joe watched, waited, suffered, drew back.
Another few months passed and still there was no baby, nothing to get excited about. I started to worry, went back to Dr Percy who told me to stop worrying, start exercising and give up alcohol and caffeine. I teased Joe about his swimmers being lazy; we laughed as we imagined them with snorkels, treading water or floating on their backs, taking it easy. Then I stopped laughing and started to look for answers elsewhere; I went online and tried all the things that had worked for other women. Doggedly I followed each of them. They didnât work. We got a dog.
I started eating almonds though Iâd never liked them, and bought ice creams â excellent for female fertility according to the books â from Teddyâs after work each evening. Joe would cycle along Sandycove seafront to meet me on the days he worked from home; eating ice cream is something you really canât do on your own.
I became fascinated and resentful of other women who seemed to possess an ability that I appeared not to have, like Anna who lived next door, the one Mum wasnât sure about, an introverted woman who I never got to know, who always seemed to be obscured by an open boot, or half inside her car sorting out her babies. Their cries used to travel down the chimney in the night, along the wall that the two houses shared, taunting me, infiltrating my dreams.
While we were in this nothing time, I sometimes caught glimpses of her from the window of the utility room â we had a house with aseparate utility room for goodness sake, we were clearly ready for kids. Iâd watch her and her husband and their rowdy get-togethers in the back garden with their friends and their children, their endless laughter heightening my loneliness, my exclusion from an exclusive family club: her husband, Lee, in knee-length shorts, muscular, sun-tanned legs and feet in ugly Crocs, stretching and scratching the hair above his belly, pulling on a polo shirt that heâd pull off just as easily to fuck his wife, to make more babies, when he was drunk and all the guests had gone home.
I carried pineapples, like tufty-haired cartoon characters, back from the local Spar and ate them each evening, but only around weeks three and four, as instructed, and took a tablespoon of cough mixture daily to make things more sticky downstairs. And I prayed and prayed and prayed to Saint Martha around the second half of each month and dropped in to light a candle for my baby whenever I passed a church.
We visited Dr Percy together. She told me I talked too fast, that I needed to calm down, that it
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