A lot can happen in 15 months

I cant deny, or try to gloss over it, being infertile is not a a good experience, it is a journey that causes you to grow and to develop but one I where if at all possible I would change course, I would leap off at the next stop and change direction, you wouldn’t have to ask me twice.  However, much like a sailor nursing a broken mast I am at the mercy of the tides and these last weeks they have brought me rather close to the rocks.

I have found that in the mess of infertility I have had some good days and weeks where blissfully untroubled by our infertility I bob along much like a “normal” person.  But sometimes in the normality of life I have found the trickiest of obstacles that bring the rocks  rearing up close.  Take today for example…

A good weekend, the best for months in fact, a walk by the river, my first surf this year (things must have been bad), no discussion about treatments, Dr appointments or what-to-do-next, just ralxing with my wife.  Given the unseasonally good weather we are experiencing I decided to get my hair cut!  As it turns out the hairdresser who was booked to sort out my unkempt mane used to regularly cut my hair until one day she seemed to have left,or so I thought (remember I’m a guy and don’t pick up on sublte signals), it turns out she had been on maternity leave  and had had a little boy “Archie” 15 months ago.

In the course of the conversation it dawned on me how very normal it is to have a baby take maternity leave and come back to work, all in the space of 15 months.  I also realised how unnatural it was for us to have not moved on even an inch in our attempts to tobecome parents.

Conversation moved on to, of course, holidays.  I was in the hairdressers after all.  In her 15 months she and her baby boy had been abroad four times (maternity pay sounds good!).

 To my surprise this knocked me sideways the most.  My DW and I have felt so ground down by infertility, we have retreated so far in to our shells that even a trip to the coast for a surf had felt impossible all year and a trip abroad just too much to get our ever-so-slightly-depressed heads around.  Instead I had spent my Monday )the beauty of being your own boss) looking at holiday cottages for two.

Of course many parents and single friends would love a quiet week away romantically snuggled up with your other half and of course  I will enjoy this too, but when I acknowledge I would have so liked a cottage for “two or more” it just makes me sad.  It is the simplicity and normality of wanting to become a parent, to raise a child, that the sadness becomes burdensome.

Walking away from the hairdresser I realised too that like her if all had gone to plan our baby would have been 15 months (and 20 days) old.

I realised walking home that a lot can happen in 15 months and in that moment entirely without choosing I was reminded of our intransigent, stubborn  infertility.