Very superstitious…the ladder’s ’bout to fall…

Sorry, I’ve gone all Stevie Wonder on you.

In truth, I went that way about 5 years ago.

Let me start by saying that I’m not a believer in anything preternatural or supernatural.  Raised a catholic, I’m now firmly entrenched in the ‘devout atheist’ category, much to my mother’s chagrin.  [At this point, those that haven't been put off by me being an atheist and/or a catholic by birth, please read on.  For anyone else, may your god forgive my foolishness.]

There’s something about going through a period of hardship in your life to make you hope for some sense of reason, some sense of predetermination or predestination – it gives us hope (that dangerous word) that everything that is happening (or isn’t happening in the case of our IVFs) is for a reason; one that might be beyond our own paltry and pathetic human understanding, but we’d appreciate once we’d shuffled off this mortal coil and (in my case) descended into the fiery pit of demon-controlled eternal damnation.

For many people, a brush with our own mortality is enough to convince the most hardened of atheists that actually it’s worth hedging your bets and suddenly becoming a reborn religious zealot.  In our case, it was repeated failings of IVFs which started to play in the back of my mind.

Whilst J isn’t particularly religious (and didn’t have a religious upbringing like me), she does believe in a higher power – a godhead.  She also has some strange habits…or rather, superstitions.  The most obvious is not wishing to walk over triple access covers (manholes) in the pavement that we have in the UK, typically placed by telcos.  She’ll divert her course along the pavement to walk around them rather than walk their full length.  Single or double access covers is fine – it’s just the triples.

Where does something like that come from? What causes someone to look down at a triple manhole and think “my, walking across that could generate bad luck…”? I suppose, like some other superstitions, it might – just might – have some sense.  Not walking under a ladder, for example, is actually a very sensible piece of advice. The bad luck that might be generated could manifest itself in catching a falling paint tin on the head. Or – since ladders are rather precarious things – even being caught underneath the thing (and the 15 stone guy perched up it). And, I suppose, the manhole thing might have some normality of thinking.  Let’s face it, walking across any large, covered hole in the floor is not ideal, so a triple-length hole doesn’t perhaps offer the sturdiest under-foot support.

Stranger than the actual superstition is that fact that I’ve found it contagious. Despite my rational dismissal of anything which could smack of unnatural consequences of normal actions, I started avoiding them too.  Initially it was the gentleman in me: walking arm-in-arm I deliberately avoided them so that J wouldn’t have to cross them.  Then I caught myself doing it without her.

Why?  I think – like those people who find religious redemption on their deathbeds – I just wanted something so valuable that I thought it couldn’t do any harm to hedge my bets. If J was convinced walking across them brought her bad luck, would it do me any actual damage to keep it up on her behalf?  After all, when we’re spending thousands of pounds on IVF each round, if success might be even infinitesimally by keeping my fingers cross, hands in the air, and only walking across the road backwards whilst barking like a dog, I’d have probably agreed to it.

Of course, about four years of doing that didn’t really help us.

Then things got even weirder.

It all started with a BFP.  A big, fat positive. 

[A little sidebar for people who aren't familiar with the TTC blogs.  In the world of assisted reproduction (Trying To Conceive), TLAs (three letter acronyms) are commonplace.  Turning something horrendous into a TLA in some ways seems to lessen the blow.  Don't ask me why - watching J put herself through down-regulating, pumping herself full of all sorts of drugs, undergoing painful treatments, spending obscene amounts of money, and then getting a call which starts with the dreaded words "I'm so sorry...", isn't going to be affected to too great a degree by turning it into 'BFN' (big fat negative).  But we still do it.]

J peed on a stick and for the first time we saw the line. Big, bold, even after just a few seconds.  Part of me panicked that it might disappear before the 2 minutes you have to wait, but needless to say, it didn’t.  It was there, strong as you like.  We were finally pregnant.

And that’s when it happened.  At the back of my head, I thought: “it could be twins…”  I’d read about people who knew in advance of the scans that they were carrying twins because they didn’t just feel pregnant, they felt *really* pregnant.  Double the morning sickness, double the tiredness etc.  This line was not just strong, it was doubly strong.

Because the test is done first thing in the morning, after calling our respective parents and coming down off the ceiling.  I got ready for the day.  I showered, feeling more alive than I every had.  Then I filled the handwash basin to shave.  As I pressed down on the top of the shaving gel and squirted a small bead of into my palm, I stopped.  I very deliberately moved the can a few millimetres to the side, and squirted again.  I watched as the two small blobs on my palm began to grown and transform into milky white foam.  Twins.  It had begun.

Every morning thereafter, no matter how distracted I was, or how crappy I was feeling, or how stupidly early in the morning it was, I took a moment and consciously squirted two small balls of gel into my palm.

Then we went for the first scan.  And sure enough, two single, flashing pixels.  Two hearts beating.  Twins.

So the bi-squirting continued. Multi-beading.  Doppiosquit.  Every morning I repeated it.  Post-rationalising it now, I guess it was purely a way to remind myself of the incredible act of nature that was happening inside J that I wasn’t privy to, other than being suitably impressed by the size of her protruding belly, which put my mere amateurish gut well and truly in the shade.  [In fact it put her entire lower half in the shade for most of the pregnancy, but don't tell her I said so...]

What did I think would happen?  That one twin wouldn’t make it?  I don’t think I ever went so far as to believe that by only squirting one squiggle of gel into my palm that some Gillette-demon would whisk one of the twins away from us, but I still continued on.

And then they were born.  And it became a tiny, ritualised celebration of the fact that our wildest dream came true.  No matter how sleep deprived, my little bead>bead action continued.  And I’m still doing it.  11 months on and I’m still taking two seconds longer to shave than I ever used to because of the double-push.

Am I insane?

Perhaps so – perhaps superstitions are really just mild insanities generated in all of us by extreme emotional attachments to something we really cherish.  When it was just manhole covers it was my astonishingly wonderful wife J – I mirrored her actions to keep her safe and perfect.  And now it’s Ollie and Ella – who, despite their teething hell and determination to rid us of sleep, are perfect.  These three people mean everything to me, and if I have to add oddities into my behaviour just on the off chance that there is a god of facial hirsuitedness who has to be appeased by gel beads, then so be it.  I’ll protect them in any way I can.

Just don’t tell anyone who has access to those forms for sectioning people…

Written by the victors…

They say that history is always written by the victors, and that’s certainly the case with my Dad’s funeral.

If you’ve read my previous post about the day, you’ll have seen that one small statement really stood out for me in the eulogy – that my father and his second wife, B (for whom he left my mother) had first met 40 years ago.

I must confess that for some of the eulogy I was zoning out, lost in my thoughts and mulling over whether I should feel more upset (o, callous me). However, my ears pricked up at that point, and it was certainly a line which wasn’t lost on my mother, as I’d suspected.

She called me at work today, ostensibly to ask if I’d help on another issue, but dropped into the conversation that she’d like to chat about something else, and was I in tonight? I didn’t need to ask what she wanted to talk about.

I’d actually had a warning from my elder sister, C, who lives in the Netherlands. Despite her positional geography, her emotional position is even further from my father and she had no interest in attending his funeral. She did, however, have an interest in the gossip that might have resulted, and didn’t want to miss the opportunity to launch a few verbal volleys in B’s direction. She’d spoken to Mum already and told me that she thought that B had simply made the statement up, just as a last little undermining of Mum’s memory of her relationship; a twist of the emotional knife.

So I was prepared when she called tonight.  I saw no benefit to Mum giving the statement any more than a moment’s thought.  If she thought the statement reflected a genuine commencement of a relationship it would have damaged the small modicum of happiness that she might still have had of their time together.  Likewise, if she thought that it had been imagined deliberately, it would be open season in the small village again and that would only cause her more angst. It would be akin to picking the long-healed scar tissue to see if it could bleed once more.

As a consequence, when she asked me what I thought of it, I downplayed the comment. I didn’t think it really meant anything, I began. J and I met when we were about 11, but we didn’t become friends until I was about 15, and didn’t start going out until I was 18 (I put a lot of groundwork in as you can see). Admittedly, it helped that we lived in the same small village, where the average age was about 75 and caught the same train to school – our paths were always likely to cross.

My Mum wasn’t going to give up quite that easily.  40 years ago, we were living not far from London - a long way from where my Dad and B re-met – and I was either a huge bump inside my Mum, or had just been born.  Either way, for my father to have remembered bumping into/being introduced to a stranger (or vice versa) was at least distinctly unlikely.

All it signified, I consoled, was that they had met before.  Met.  That’s all.  There was no suggestion that it was any more than that. And anyway, if it was true or not, what did it matter now?

I’m not entirely convinced that she accepted my explanation.  But then I’m not sure I do. But either way, there’s no way to change what’s been said.  It was B’s opportunity, as the victor, to write the history as she saw it, whether precisely accurate or not.  And, unfortunately, the defeated don’t get to argue the result.

To dust…

The funeral yesterday morning passed without incident. My mother hid at the back and extricated herself from the crematorium without having to pass down the line and shake hands with her usurper.

It was a strange service – not least because my aunt said that it was exactly the same (hymns, reading, location) as my grandmother’s, which my father arranged twenty years ago. He obviously *really* liked those hymns…

The eulogy was reasonably restrained. It began just with a short description of the facts of his life, and then – blam – we hit the issue. The vicar (who my Dad’s widow told me was the same who’d performed that original funeral, who married Dad and she, and who’d christened her granddaughter) had mentioned how he’d married my Mum, had four kids, and then I suddenly discovered that Dad had met his second wife 40 years ago…apparently. That was news to me, and to my sister, and definitely to my Mum. At least he (or rather, my Dad’s second wife) had the grace no to suggest that anything started at that point. The vicar also avoided mentioning in his ‘they discovered they had similar upbringings and shared so much in common’ bit that they got together via adultery, secrecy and family desertion, but I guess such condemnation from a man of the cloth was expecting a little too much…

I don’t know why, but I was surprised to see the place reasonably full. It turned out that the majority were Dad’s ex-colleagues, who all had that look of resignation like they were starting to tick each other off the list of survivors.

I decided not to go to the wake. Was that wrong of me? I do feel bad, not because of my stepmother, but because it meant my sister and her boyfriend were there on their own from my side of the family.

My Aunt J (my father’s only sibling) was made to feel distinctly unwelcome at the ceremony – she wasn’t invited to sit in the front row and was told that she wasn’t invited in the funeral limo.  They didn’t exactly have a close relationship, and only really re-instigated contact after about 20 years around the time my Dad fell ill the first time, but she didn’t deserve the treatment she received.  Her suggestion that she might attend the wake with her son (who’d pulled a night shift in Northern England and caught the train down to support his mother for the day) was met with the kind of steeliness that I’ve come to associate with my Dad’s second wife. 

[I don't know why, but I've never really taken to considering her a direct relative - a 'stepmother' - not just because of the way they got together, but to a greater extent because I just don't like her very much. That hasn't really changed with my Dad's death either - I think it's unlikely I'll now have anything to do with her at all. Should I feel guilty over that?]

So despite Aunt J having come all the way down from Northern Scotland to get to the funeral, catching one ferry, about four trains and spending 23 hours travelling, she turned around after the service and caught a lift back the local station to head home.  All with dignity.

Regarding the wake itself, I’ve not yet had the chance to find out how it went for my sister, but from a text message I received from her it didn’t sound too traumatic. Instead, J and I went to a nice pub in a picture-postcard village and had a truly lovely meal before heading home to see the kids.

And within just a few minutes of being home with O&E, everything was right in the world again. It’s amazing how they just make the world a better place.

I softly whispered a vow to them as they slept last night; a vow to love them, and tell them so, as often as physically possible. I hope I’m learning to do this fathering thing. It’s too high a risk for me to fail to the degree my own father did.

Still – that’s all in the past. If I had any religious or supernatural beliefs at all I’d say that I hoped he was at peace. And I’d probably believe myself saying it, too.

Passing

My father died this evening at 7pm.

Since the day after Boxing Day, he’d been in hospital after another fall (he’d damaged ribs and a cartilage after a previous collapse) and had been steadily declining.

If you’ve read the previous posts on my relationship with my father, you may have come to one of two conclusions:

1) I am emotionally immature and should have not let unimportant issues separate me from my father at his most difficult time; or

2) He was a difficult man who was selfish, too aggressive, and unable (or unwilling) to express either regret for the hurt he had given to his family, or even his love.

Regardless of which you feel is most true, you’ll probably be surprised to know that I took the kids to see him on Christmas Day and that we had a brief, fleeting and reasonably understated reconciliation.  It may not surprise you to know that I am feeling pretty hollow, calm and unemotional at the moment about his passing.

I phoned first thing on Christmas morning and his wife B answered my opening gambit wish of a ‘Merry Christmas’ by saying ‘I can’t talk to you now, I’m keeping the line free for the Doctor’. He returned my call himself at about 1.30pm and said that he would welcome me bringing the twins over, but could it be now? I apologised to my mother-in-law (as we were just sitting down to Christmas lunch) and headed on over, bringing the gift of the photobook of the kids that I had ordered for him online.

He looked rough.  Unshaven, sunken and still talking with a softness and hollowness that made it sound like his voice had to rattle around inside him before it could find its way out, he looked the terminal cancer patient I already knew him to be.

It was a rather strange visit – he was pretty much permanently confined to bed already so I knew we would be in his small bedroom upstairs, but I didn’t expect for the face-to-face reunion to be in front of  his wife, her eldest daughter and the granddaughter. As a consequence once again we didn’t speak about much other than the children. 

For a brief few minutes they left us alone, and which point he told me that they’d told him he was terminal (his wife had known since November he discovered) and that there was nothing more they would do.  He stared, as in a child’s daydream, into the distance, and I briefly expected a tear. But he composed himself, turned to me and told me that he had been getting a lot worse recently.

When I asked if he meant since the fall, he hit me with it.  ‘Ever since you said what you said, that took it all right out of me…’

Despite knowing him so well, I was surprised. Even at this time, he wanted to dig at me.  It almost felt like he was trying to apportion blame for his situation on me. Can’t have a go at the cancer? Pick on your kids instead…

At this point, his step-daughter came into the room with her own 18-year old daughter with an absurdly spurious request: “Is it ok if K holds one of the kids? It’s just that she’s never held a twin…” I could only think that she’d been listening outside the door. We’d probably been alone for no more than three or four minutes.  Dad looked at me, awaiting a response to his rather accusatory comment. 

For some reason I was silent – I just couldn’t bring myself to apologise for something which I really felt was of his own making.  What did he expect me to say? ‘Well Dad, I know that you left my family, paid my mother the absolute minimum of maintenance, ignored my sister when she tried to reinstigate contact after her own children were born, didn’t even bother to try to be reconciled with my brother, and left my younger sister completely screwed up, all to join someone else’s family, but of course you’re still the head of mine…’

And then something changed inside me.  Perhaps this wasn’t really just an attempt to make me feel bad.  He was reaching out for sympathy – to get a reconciliation, by appealing to my soft side.  He wanted to resolve matters, but just couldn’t ask directly.  He knew his time was limited, and he wanted to bury the hatchet.  Sadly, I realised that despite the finality of his situation, he couldn’t see from anyone else’s perspective, and still probably felt that it was right that I should be the one to offer an apology.  After all, he had nothing for which to apologise…

I knew he’d never change. I knew that the moment I’d imagined where on his deathbed he told me how he regretted not having much of a father:son relationship, apologised for leaving us all and for how it affected us all, apologised essentially for not being a better Dad, would never come to pass.  This was just the way he was wired.

I gave him what he craved.  As K cuddled Oliver, I looked over to Dad and said ‘I’m sorry for that.’ He half-smiled, nodded, and mumbled “It’s ok…”

The others were soon back in the room.  After more idle twins-chat, his wife indicated that it was time to leave him alone to rest.  He asked me if I would be coming back to the village again soon, and I told him that we didn’t have any plans to, but were flexible and could if he would like us to.  As I stood up with Ollie in my arms – my own son hanging off me, oblivious that his grandfather lay dying in front of him – I leant down and grasped and shook his hand and he clasped mine firmly in reply.  I bent over and kissed him, and as he kissed me back I knew it would be last time I would see him, and I think he knew it too.

His fall two days later, and the confusion and delerium that quickly followed, resulted in a dash to the hospital. He was extremely dehydrated.  I later discovered that he hadn’t been eating or drinking at all – possibly to save himself from having to try to get up to the toilet (the cause of the previous fall).  The dehydration was obviously addling his brain and causing him to hallucinate because apparently he thought he was on board a ship, piloting it in as he did for so many years.

After a few litres of fluid intravenously, he was more comfortable, coherent, and had even been visited by a physiotherapist to talk about wheelchair exercises to prevent DVT.

I know this because I called the hospital ward (my little sister gave me the details) and refused to accept the nurse’s suggestion that I should just call his wife for any information.  I’m glad I did, because when I called his wife at home and asked for an update, all she really volunteered was “he’s comfortable.”

My little sister was beside herself.  It was hitting home to her the finality of the situation, and she hadn’t had a chance to tell him what she needed to. That weekend she went to visit, despite his wife’s initial suggestion that he didn’t want any visitors.  She’s glad she did – it gave her a sense of closure.

When I heard that his liver and kidneys had failed and that time was short, I had a rush of ‘what if?’ guilt: what if I felt after he’d gone that I wished I’d said goodbye again? etc… I called the hospital as I knew she would be there.  I told her that I thought I needed to see him again one last time.  She said no. She told me that he’d specifically said that he didn’t want to see me, and had even not wanted her to tell me that he’d been admitted to the hospital. It was clear that she either blamed me, or wanted to blame me, for his present state. For an hour or so I was fuming – ‘how dare she stop a son saying goodbye to his father?’ – and then I realised that it wasn’t important.  I’d already really said my goodbye.  We’d made up – albeit not quite the way I’d hoped and all pretty one-sided – and he’d die having seen the twins once more.

This evening when she phoned, his widow, B, was evidently struggling.  I do genuinely feel sorry for her.  She was still with him at his bedside. She would soon have to go home to the empty, silent house, bereft of her partner of 24 years, but surrounded by reminders, each an echo of him, imparting the suggestion that he could at any moment walk back through the door.  It will be very hard for her.

I thanked her for letting me know and immediately tried calling my little sister. I called my mother, who called my elder sister.  I called my elder brother, only getting through to his wife.  Pretty soon everyone would know.

There will be a funeral, which I will probably attend for the sake of my younger sister most of all.

And then life will carry on. It always does.

J is worried about me. She hasn’t seen any mourning yet of his passing. I’m explaining that I’m reconciled in my head with both his death and his behaviour in life and am simply at peace.  I hope he is finally too.

Bye Dad.

Whole again

When I got out of bed at 4.45am this morning, I did so with a spring in my step.

As I shaved, bleary-eyed and fuzzy-headed, I couldn’t suppress a grin (which added to the challenge somewhat…)

I didn’t just jump in the car, I leapt.

Even an hour and half of traffic, roadworks and contraflows couldn’t dampen my spirits.

After I parked the car, the crispness of the early morning air bit through my shirt, but my shivers were more from excitement.

I quickly downed a coffee to keep me awake for the drive back.

And then, when I saw them, I was whole again.

J, Ollie and Ella appeared round the corner and passed through the doors into the arrivals hall.  I bounded like a demented spaniel up the walkway and enveloped J in a hug that seemed about a week too short. She turned to her friend T who she’d been staying with and who’d accompanied her on the flight back from Cape Town to assist with the twins and gave one of those looks that women are trained to deliver: the one that says ’sorry about him – I’m going to have to have him fixed one day…’

In front of the double buggy, I squatted and cooed and grinned like a loon. Ollie, who had apparently only just awoken (after sleeping right through the landing, the disembarkation, passport control and the luggage retrieval) appeared to be considering either crying or feigning death to escape.  Ella meanwhile, in the true spirit of the moment, smiled her six-toothed smile and filled my heart with 10000 watts of tungsten light.

By the time we’d walked back to the short stay car park at Heathrow Terminal 1, I’d already lifted Ollie out of the buggy and was leaping about with him.  I was determined that even if he’d forgotten me in the two weeks that we’d been separated, that he would quickly love this strange man who kept cooing ‘dadadadadada’ in his face. Thankfully, it appeared to be working.

Even as they all slept in the car on the way home, a warmth spread through me and my smile got so broad it’s a wonder my whole head didn’t shear off at the jaw. They were all home. My family – and my heart – was complete again.

A truly great day.

Cancer

I have blogged in the past about my relationship (or lack of a genuine one) with my father.  In my last post on the subject I was venting spleen over what I felt to be an incredibly insulting, patronising and vicious email from him.  I decided to write to him, telling him exactly what I thought, cathartically expunging from my soul the full list of pain and suffering that had built up since he walked out on us twenty-odd years ago.

Then my younger sister phoned me. She is still in contact with him (the only one of four children). She knew about the email.  She asked me not to write to him, or at least, not to send it. His cancer had returned.

It had been no longer than a couple of months since he’d had the news that his primary (a bowel tumour) had disappeared, and the secondaries on his liver and lungs were so small that the consultant believed them to be dead.

But back it had come. And this time it would mean a different course of chemotherapy. This time he would lose his hair. This time he would also not have fully recovered from the last treatment.

I thought long and hard about how I felt about the news. Was I upset – certainly. Did I want him to suffer? No, definitely not. Did it change my decision to break contact? No.

A few weeks later, on a Saturday morning, I bumped into him. J, I and the twins were back in our hometown, staying with J’s parents. The tiny High Street in the town is only perhaps 400 yards long, and he was walking towards me as I pushed the twins on their morning constitutional to take in the sea air. It was awkward. He was evidently delighted to see the twins, which didn’t sit altogether well with his statement (which is etched in my brain) that not to see the twins ‘wouldn’t be the hardship I obviously thought it would’.

We spoke briefly – I asked about the new treatment that was lined up to start in a month or so’s time, and he asked about the kids. As we parted and he walked away, he call back to ask if I’d send photos of them. Soon.  As I crossed the road away from him I said I’d see.

About a week or so later, he was already asking for pictures. I asked J what she thought of the situation. In her ever-wise way, she told me that I needed to decide for myself, but that any decision that I made, I would have to be comfortable with in light of the fact that he might not live too long. If I decided not to reopen contact (and didn’t ever tell him how I really felt), would I carry guilt/anger/sadness with me for the remaining 30-40 years of my life?

I still couldn’t really understand the turnaround from not wanting any contact with me or the kids, to wanting to see photos of them regularly.  Perhaps it’s the simple fact that he wanted to resolve things but couldn’t (or wouldn’t) apologise. Perhaps he felt he didn’t need to, that the problem was of my making. He is certainly stubborn and unable to see things from anything other than his own viewpoint.

I decided that I would not send the letter. I would send a few pictures. But they wouldn’t be accompanied by any real communication in the email.

His treatment started. I heard from my sister it wasn’t going well.  He was losing weight again, and rapidly.

But he replied to the photos email and was enthusiastic, effusive about the twins.

Another email request came in a few weeks later. I sent some more – again, wonderful praise for how gorgeous they were.

My mother informed me that he wasn’t doing well.  Was this a dying man reaching out?

I decided, after talking to other members of the family, that I had to say something.  I emailed that I couldn’t forget his email, especially the comment about the children. And that there was evidently talking to be done.  But now was not the time – he needed to focus on getting well again. And I included some more pictures.

He emailed back, again, so full of praise for the children, saying how the pictures brightened up his days. This time he included how bad he was feeling, how he’d lost a huge amount of weight, and couldn’t walk far; how he was sleeping for days straight and finding it difficult to get up and down stairs.

When I left J in Cape Town, she sent some pictures back of them all to comfort me in my loneliness.  I knew he would welcome seeing them too.

On Sunday, he phoned. He told me that he was too tired to email – found concentrating at the computer too difficult – but wanted to thank me for them. We spoke for a bit – staying on the same topics: he asked me about the children and I asked him about his treatment and how he was coping.

His voice sounded hollow.

I don’t think he’ll make it through this set of 12 chemotherapies. They’ve already postponed one because of his weight loss and have put him on steroids.

I knew he’d made a big effort to call. I reciprocated. I said that when J is home, it’s likely that she’ll want to head back to our hometown to see her parents and show them how Ella is crawling and all their new teeth. Would he like to see them? Definitely, but he told me he couldn’t get out. Would he like me to bring them round? Yes please. He had evidently changed his mind about me not being welcome in his house. Is this a sign that the nose that he cut off to spite his face is being slowly glued back in place? Perhaps.

I’m going to take the kids round and I hope that he cherishes the time. Unfortunately I think he may only have limited opportunities to spend with them. I’d love to turn the clock back twenty years, have all the conversations that we should have had, had the relationship we should have had. But that would have meant him changing massively, and sadly I don’t think he ever would have done. Perhaps this new reminder of his own mortality may be changing his attitude a little. I’d like to think so.

I have sent him more photos since the call. I may even phone to check that he’s had them.

At this point I don’t think I’ll ever have the real conversation that I need to have with him. Maybe children never really do, and that the scars inside just help us be better parents to our own.

Am I foolish? Am I heartless? Should I just put it all behind me at the risk of carrying it round as emotional baggage for the rest of my life? Should I try to talk it through with a stubborn, selfish, and decidedly sick old man? Am I doing the right thing?

I hope the pain is light for him.

Appreciable depreciation

I’ve just got back from Prague, where I had to spend one night and two days, meeting up with a prospective partner and visiting a trade show.

On the way out at the airport, I decided to buy some currency.  I knew we would need some for taxis etc (I went with my company’s Alliances Director) so I spent £104 buying 2,500 Czech Korunas.

I bought the currency at 6.35am, on Wednesday, at a rate of roughly 24 Korunas to the GB Pound.  When I arrived back in the UK at about 8.00pm the following day, I still had 600 Korunas in my pocket, so I decided to change them back.

I was astonished to discover that apparently whilst I had been away the Czech economy had collapsed, prompting a massive depreciation in the value of their currency.  Perhaps there had been a coup d’etat? Or maybe a huge natural disaster which struck at the heart of the country’s financial districts?  After all, what else could explain the fact that I was invited to buy back GBPs with my CZKs at the astonishing rate of 34 to the pound.  Let’s just recap – yesterday 1 pound bought me 24 Korunas.  Today, to buy back that pound, it would cost me 34 Korunas.  That’s a 30 percent difference in the value of the currency.  And I had to pay £3 commission on the first day too!

I couldn’t believe that Thomas Cook could have such a huge delta in their rates.  I almost literally had to pick up my jaw off the counter.  The woman behind the counter just shrugged and agreed that it was ridiculous.  But after all, what choice did I have?  Would I find anyone else interested in buying Czech Korunas off me at a better rate?

I watched as my expected £24 was suddenly cut to £17…and for some reason thanked her as she handed over the depleted cash.  I should have double-checked that I still had my watch on my wrist.  I had to suppress a desire to whistle ‘You’ve got to pick a pocket or two’ as I trudged away…

On my lonesome…

We’ve got a relatively small house, I guess.  It’s probably about 1200sqft, a typical Victorian semi-detached with two good double bedrooms and a single, ‘box’ room which you’d struggle not to decapitate a cat in if you swung it round.

But the house seems enormous at the moment.  Truly cavernous. 

It’s because I’m here on my own.  About three weeks ago I flew with J & and the twins off to Cape Town, South Africa.  J’s best friend had been over to visit and meet the twins and had suggested that it might be a good break for J to come over and stay with her family.  J’s friend T has two full-time maids (not unusual in Cape Town when you’ve got children – T has four under the age of 7) and a big house in a nice suburb.  (Of course, they still have Armed Response, an electric fence around the perimeter and panic buttons in the house – it’s not exactly the safest place in the world…)

Anyway, I flew over with J as she wasn’t able to fly with twin infants on her own.  I had intended to literally turn round at the airport and fly straight back as sadly I have no holiday left for the year.  However, since we have a few partners in Cape Town and some customers we’d not met before, I went and did the ‘grip and grin’ of handshake and smile and was allowed to spend a few days working there, which saved me having to take days unpaid whilst still spending a little time with J and the twins.

However, before I’d even settled in, it was time to come home, and so for the last week and a half I’ve been on my lonesome.  It’s disturbing how the ‘character’ of a house seems to change when it’s not got the burbling undercurrent of noise from busy occupants.  I almost feel like I’m letting it down…

It’s been really dreaful though. I’ve just about managed to speak to J most days, but I had to spend a couple of days in Prague this week with work and was heartbroken that I couldn’t get the times to work in between flights and conference sessions to get a proper chat in.  Add to that my incredible stupidity at forgetting to pack a plug adaptor – so when my laptop ran out I couldn’t even email her either – I was really missing them all.

The wonders of Skype gave me a boost last weekend as we video called and O & E were paraded in front of the webcam for me.  Neither really understood what was going on, but at least one of them looked excited when Daddy’s head jerked about on the screen in front of them.  We’re going to try it again tomorrow and hopefully they’ll be a little more enthusiastic.  If they can remember who I am of course…<gulp>

So much for the twins has changed since they’ve been away – for a start E has grown another two teeth and O has added one.  It’s only been a couple of weeks!  Thank God I’m not separated from them for a month or two – they might grow other limbs…

What’s been most surprising is that everyone said to me that I’d love living like a bachelor again for a few weeks – not clearing up the house, watching what I want to watch on the telly, not having to get up early to feed and change the kids every morning.  And you know what?  I really haven’t.  I’m missing it all – all the crap stuff that people assume you’ll be desperate to escape from.  I can’t wait for pooey nappies again, for early wake-up calls on the monitor, but most of all for the chuckles.  Nothing stirs you heart so much as those that you love in fits of laughter.  I really can’t wait to cuddle J and hear her laugh.  I just hope after the return flight with T (who’s being the other adult on the way back) and a baby each, that she’s in the mood for giggling…

Dangerous hope

A life without hope is no life worth living.  But sometimes that same hope can be what undermines the real value of the life we lead.

Optimism’s fine.  Optimism starts from a position of level emotions – a relative contentment, with just a positive spin for the future.  Hope’s starting point resides at a much lower emotional ebb.  Hope is comfort we struggle to achieve when warming optimism’s burned out, and pessimism’s icy grip is tightening on our vision of what lies ahead.  Hope, like its sibling Faith, is essentially blind – unfounded on the reality of the given predicament.  We rely on hope to illuminate the darkest recesses of our mind which threaten to engulf us at our most difficult of times.

But it is this blindness, this faith, that makes hope potentially one of the most damaging, dangerous thought process.

When we headed into the IVF treatment, I was optimistic, confident of success, excited about the on-rushing parenthood, which seemed pretty much guaranteed.

In truth, the reality of the situation hit home well before that first phone call from the clinic, which the nurse began with “I’m sorry…”  [Bebs sums up the dreaded call so perceptively in her recent Bebbles Babbles blogpost.]

I recognised the subtle clouding of that shining vision of my future family; mists blurring the dream. By the second unsuccessful IVF, confidence had gone.  Optimism was teetering precariously on the brink of the abyss.

But then people started feeding that dangerous entity: hope.

“Oh, I’ve just *got* to tell you about this friend of mine,” they would say. “She’d had five years of trying, at least a dozen attempts. She and her partner had a broad history of infertility issues, and they had one last attempt.  They’d completely given up.  She didn’t even take it that seriously…”

The killer blows were approaching like an express train…

“She drank wine, gave up on the chinese herbs and the acupuncturist, pretty much forgot everything.  And what do you know? She got pregnant.”

The knife turns slowly in your guts…

“I guess you never know when it might just work.  Perhaps it’s when you least expect it to…”

I’m sure they thought they were doing you a favour – perking you up and rebuilding the optimism.  But all that happens is that you’re suddenly stuck with Hobson’s Choice.  If you carry on, you risk compounding the pain, both physical and emotional, putting yourself unnecessarily through the wringer still with sadly limited statistical chances of success.  But if you didn’t…then you’d never know.  The ‘what if?’ scenarios play out in your head like a film loop.  Just one last go – a definitively last attempt - definitely no more after this.  A sliver of hope forces you onwards.

In Milton’s Paradise Lost the entrance to Hell was adorned with the phrase ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’.  I think that wouldn’t be a bad message to etch above the door of every clinic in the country.  Hope’s dangerous.  It can encourage you on, perhaps beyond rationality.

People asked me if the hardest decision with IVF was the decision to start – to put yourself through such medical atrocities.  Even J, who had by far the worst of the deal, would probably disagree.  The hardest decision is when to stop.  To give up on hope.  To finally hang up your syringes and accept that you’ll never see a child that looks like you, that shares your genetic weirdnesses, to step off the treadmill of ongoing treatment that ultimately begins to define you; that takes a strength that I’m eternally grateful that I didn’t have to find.  After an astonishingly long campaign against infertility, my brother and his wife made that decision.  And I am in awe at how they have coped.

With all this in mind, it now seems strange to me that I am becoming the very person that I steered clear of.  I embody that story of hopeless success – the twins were conceived on what we had already agreed would be our last attempt.  Admittedly, we didn’t go at it lightly.  We got every weapon in the IVF arsenal, no matter what it cost, and loaded J up with everything for one last onslaught.

I read the blogs of incredibly strong, courageous people, struggling to overcome infertility, and writing with such honesty, openness and also wonderful style, even erudition.  I recognise and share their pain.  But unlike the other commenters, to some extent I feel like an interloper.  I’ve got the twins – the babies that everyone else reading is so desperate to conceive.  Perhaps I’m attempting to assuage a bit of guilt, but I want to help – I want to let them know that it can work out.  All too often these blogs can be non-Hollywood – unfortunately there isn’t the happy ending.  But it isn’t always the case.  Ollie and Ella are living proof.

Maybe it’s driven by that same guilt, but I feel the need to apologise to any TTC blogger that I upset with comments on their blogs or my own posts. It’s really not meant to encourage you to continue beyond what’s right for you – and hopefully (if you’ll excuse the word) you’ll recognise that I’m also not trying to flaunt my success.  If I could resolve all your problems I would in a heartbeat.  Even with Ollie and Ella, I know how desperately unfair infertility can be. 

I guess the real message I’m trying to give is: don’t give up on hope, but temper it with reason, and sense.  Take advice where you feel it appropriate, and politely decline the success stories if you feel they’ll upset that delicate hope:sense balance.

My very best wishes are with you all.

The accusatory bottle

In 1998, J and I were married.  It was the big traditional white wedding, where 70% of the guests were friends of the family or relatives, and the few remaining places were our own friends.  I’d been in a new job for about 7 months and it wasn’t going particularly well.  I’d not invited my boss to the wedding (thankfully everyone had already been invited well before I switched so there was never any problem with that fact), and so I was surprised when he gave me a wedding present: a boxed bottle of Dom Perignon Champagne, 1985, a good vintage year.

We joked about how I wouldn’t need to drink it at the wedding as there would doubtless be a lot of it flowing (my father-in-law is something of a wine connoisseur), and so he said as a throw-away line: “oh well, save it for the Christening.”

I put it in the little portable wine rack and the bottles around it were disappeared and were replaced, and all the while it just sat there, quietly, brooding. 

For many months, I chuckled to myself at his suggestion.  What a great thought – save it for the Christening.  The months turned to years, and slowly but surely the bottle started staring at me.  We moved house and had a wine rack built into the end of the kitchen units, by the doors into the garden.  Every time I went in or out of the house, there it was.  A reminder of the lack of progeny.  An accusation in a box: “you’re not producing!” it would silently whisper.

[As you can probably tell, I have a slight problem with anthropomorphism.  J constantly berates me for the shouting matches I have with inanimate objects that get the better of me.  Every time I try to do anything which requires even a modicum of manual dexterity or mental application, it normally results in copious under-breath swearing, and gnashing of teeth as yet another inanimate object shows greater resolve and obstinacy that I am capable of overcoming.  Perhaps the bottle was the start of it...]

The years progressed and we had almost given up hope. I began to wonder about what I would do with it.  I couldn’t bring myself to just open it up and drink it at any old time – not after so many years of self-induced Dom Perignon abstinence. I had vaguely considered it unlucky and was tempted to pour it down the toilet in a kind of feng-shui statement.  But ultimately I held onto some hope of having children, and whilst I retained that hope, I retained the bottle.

It got to the stage where I didn’t even care if the champagne inside had corked, turned sour and had a faint taste of urine when it came to opening it – I was going to have children and drink it at the Christening.

And then I forgot it completely. J had fallen pregnant with the twins and suddenly nothing else mattered.  I forgot many of the issues or hang-ups that I had – not because I was suddenly care-free, but more because they were replaced with other ones, normally around trying to keep J as compacted into cotton wool protection as I could possible get her without driving her mad.

A few months ago, J mentioned having the twins Christened.  A lightbulb illuminated inside my head.  I searched online for a drinking guide for Champagne.  Dom Perignon…1985…still good…hmm…interesting.

We booked a date, invited the godparents we’d planned ten years ago if we ever were successful, and I opened the box.  The bottle was just a bottle.  No evil pattern etched into the glass, no pattern of sediment resembling a face of the devil.  Just a bottle.

Unfortunately, as luck would have it, J became unwell. She’s struggled with a condition which is making her feel less than perfect, and as a consequence, we postponed the Christening, till probably the New Year, 2010. 

The bottle got a temporary reprieve. 

I think secretly it’s chuckling at me.