the baby thing

While I was pregnant, the idea of having more than the one child I couldn't believe I already had (what?) never crossed my mind. As my new son was handed to me though, right smack bang on the tail of The Lightening Bolt of Love that came with him, was the absolute knowing that while this purple faced, screaming infant was my entire universe, I wanted more. Kind of like, in keeping with the universe theme, how it reaches to infinity but is growing. Into what? I ask, and in much the same way I ask, what kind of bullshit analogy am I trying to use anyway.

Point being! Daniel means the world to me and he is absolutely enough, and wanting more children doesn't make him any less so of those things, but I do want more children. Or more to the point, I want to know I tried.

It echoes why I set about doing IVF Daniel's lifetime ago. Back then, I wasn't yet aching for a baby and back then, I also didn't actually think I'd get pregnant. In fact, I knew I'd always be childless (Ha HA). Mostly I was doing it because I didn't want to regret never having tried. I didn't want to regret throwing so much of my life away, first with anorexia and then with someone I grew to realise I didn't want to spend the rest of my life with.


So yes, I'd had Daniel and I'd barely come back from theatre before I started making plans for my next production, and I'd been home a week when I contacted my reproductive endocrinologist's rooms to make the appointment.

I figured that at the very least, I'd get that husky voiced, gin soaked fallopian tube fixed. At my age though, even if I wanted to, I don't have time to get that bitch fixed, then find someone to fall in love with before trying to get knocked up the good old fashioned way, so when my appointment arrived, I went along hoping against hope that I still qualified as being medically infertile, despite the three month old in my arms suggesting otherwise.

Time for revisiting the legal educational: if we forget about ol' crusty, I'm also what's known as socially infertile, which in my case means that I've got no partner to knock me up. Legislation doesn't allow fertility treatment for someone living the sex life of a cloistered nun (hello!), or who is getting down with someone with boobs and without a block and tackle in her pants. However! On the list of qualifying questions, the one asking "are you medically infertile?" comes before the one asking you're socially so. Check that first box and *bam* it's as if the second doesn't exist. To put it in real terms, a lesbian couple with no medical reason causing their infertility wouldn't qualify for any reproductive help, while a lesbian couple with one or both women having medical reasons why they can't get pregnant, would. In summary then, treatment isn't available to anyone who walks in wanting medical intervention to get knocked up. You have to need it.

So yes, based on appearance only, having Daniel was an obstacle to my desire to shoot up drugs that would make me ovulate like a sow.

Which is why I followed the endocrinologist, not the practice.

*taps forehead*

Smart. See?

The last practice was privately owned and beautifully appointed, this new one is situated in a public hospital and at mealtimes, smells of reheated food and congealed gravy. Private or public though, our government still subsidises the treatment, and because I'm subsidised finacially, there's not much difference between the out-of-pocket expenses after Medicare costs are met. Choosing a clinic then is really just a matter of which decor and aromas you prefer.

I prefer neither but I do prefer my doctor. He was a real brick before and he totally was this time too. The last time he'd seen him, Daniel was a blobby thing with nubs for arms and legs, so he was particularly chuffed to see him now, all chubby and round and complete. I told him that I want a family not just for me, but for Daniel too. I'm all he has and more to the point, he's all I have - and that's a big responsibility for not just a little boy, but for a grown man he will be too, the one trying to make a life for himself without worrying what's going to happen to his poor old ma. I told him too that when I was growing up all I wanted to do was get married and have a big, ol' family, the cat and the dog and the white picket fence. I told him that I still wanted that dream but that I don't have the luxury of achieving it in that order.

Marc took my case to the ethics committee who predictably wondered why I didn't wait to get pregnant the old fashioned way. Firstly and obviously, unless I start to channel Mother Mary some time soon, I need to start going out at night fuelled by loads of alcohol with only a few ancient condoms in my purse, it being the lack of mechanically actions conducive to getting knocked up that they are referring to. The drawbacks to that plan working are, one, reliable baby sitting and two, time, people, TIME! I could get in touch with my inner slutty aibee and keep getting smashed and then laid, but it'd all end up the same. Three years would pass and then I'd be back saying "See? I really DO have fertility issues, you bunch of legislative windbags. Also! Crabs. Thanks a bunch." I don't think that's the argument he presented, but he must have presented a good one because when I saw him again, he told me that I'd been accepted into their IVF program.

Getting things rolling since then has been a balancing act and while I'd wanted to wean Daniel at his pace, I needed to wean him after a year because with each month, my egg quality reduces. Then there was the muppet face syndrome. What if this fool plan worked and I actually conceived a brother or sister for Daniel? So that got pencilled into the diary for after a year when Daniel was weaned, and before IVF, which is when conceivably I would come a fishwife with several children hanging onto my skirt with another bun in the proverbial oven and absolutely no chance of having my weird face issues addressed. The surgery got delayed so weaning Daniel did too, and the original plan of getting back up on that ol' fertility horse has been pushed back some more, but for the last year and a half I've been aiming at this. Obstacles have come along and I've taken them in my stride and I've always kept my eye on the ball. Which sounds kind of icky when talking conception. But! There's only one more bridge to cross and at the end of the month I'm seeing my craniofacial surgeon as there may be more surgery. Once that's done, I'll at the reproductive unit and leaping on the table with my legs in the air, ready, able and more than willing to give this a go, faster than you can light up a cigarette and ask "was it as good for you too, darlin'?".

I want this to work, but don't think I'll be devastated if it doesn't because while it will be sad to not succeed, I'll still have Daniel, and I'll also have the knowledge that I gave it my best.

In the meantime, I'm maximising my chances of conceiving. I'm selling all my baby items on ebay because Murphey's law being what it is, by the time I've sold the last damn thing, I'll probably need them all back again.