The joys of domestic goddess-hood

This summer I have really gotten into baking. More for the sake of something to do than anything else, but I've also noticed how appreciated it is when you visit friends or family with some home baked cakes. My mother in law is a typical Irish mammy who has no truck with "shop bread", so when I started visiting bearing gifts of homemade banana bread and madeira cakes, I was elevated to status of daughter in law numero uno.

Years ago I bought "How to be a domestic goddess" by Nigella Lawson for my sister for Christmas. Not that I thought she needed any help in that department, Lord no, this is the woman who single handedly made our wedding cake. But she said in passing that she was dying to get a copy of this particular book. As it turned out, by the time I had bought it, she had already bought a copy from a book club. So I kept the copy I had, flicking through it occasionally but rarely baking anything from it, apart from pizza base.

So early this June I dusted down my copy, and started a baking habit. As I write I have a lemon madeira cake in the oven. It's baking 101, but so yummy.

Here's how it goes:

240 gr softened butter
200 gr caster sugar, plus extra for sprinkling
grated zest and juice of one lemon
3 large eggs
210 gr self-raising flour
90 gr plain flour

Butter and line a 23 x 13 x 7 cm loaf tin. Preheat oven to 170 C or gas mark 3.
Cream butter, sugar and lemon zest. Add eggs one at a time with tablespoon of flour for each. Gently mix in rest of flour, and finally, the lemon juice. Sprinkle with approx 2 tablespoons caster sugar as it goes into the oven and bake for one hour. Let it cool in the tin before turning out. Tuck in. Yum-yum.

All hail Nigella.

Dole office 2009

It's now over three months since I swapped my corporate Amex card for a much less glamourous social security card. The first couple of months were great. I really enjoyed the novelty of having time on my hands, to visit people, potter about the house and garden and just relax for a while. If I was to believe the purveyors of assvice, the relaxing should have done wonders for my ability to conceive. Well newsflash, it hasn't.

But this post is not about infertility, it's about unemployment in the noughties. I went through a fairly long stint of unemployment when I left university, and I have to say Ireland was a pretty grim place to be back in the early nineties before the boom happened. There was very little money about. Now we're back to that again, but I really don't think the reality of it has hit home to a lot of people yet.

I see people walking into the social welfare office in designer jeans. I see people driving up to the post office to pick up their welfare in 4x4 jeeps. Obviously the trappings of former wealth. I think there are a lot of people out there who have received redundancy lump sums who just haven't had the reality of their situation really hit them yet.

The first day I went into my local social welfare office to sign on, I met a girl I knew who used to work in the same manufacturing plant as me. She and her family moved over here from the north of England when the company closed the plant there and moved the production lines to our facility in Ireland. Anyway the Irish plant has now downsized hugely (from a workforce of 500+ to approx 160, which in a town with a population of around 7,500 is a huge blow to the area) and many people opted to take voluntary redundancy.

Anyway, I overheard this girl (you couldn't but overhear her, she was talking at the top of her voice in a very small waiting area) saying the following (think Yorkshire accent) : "Ah missed mah signin' date last week, cuz I were in Baaacelona for t'Man Unigh'd match. Now they've told me I 'ave to sign on in two weeks, but I'm gonna be in fuckin' Mexico on me 'olidays, in' I?".

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Dole Office 2009.

That was easier than I expected

Turned out Saturday night's birthday gathering was just for immediate family, spouses and kids. So no awkward questions from people I haven't met in over a decade as regards our family situation or lack thereof. Phew!

I stayed with my sister on Saturday night and on Sunday morning I went to mass with her and my nieces. I'm not a regular Sunday mass punter, but when in Rome, or in this case Kildare, do as the Romans, or Lilly Whites, do. So off I trotted.

The second reading made me remember why I don't go to church more often. It went something along the lines of "If you want something, pray for it. If your prayers are not answered, then you are not praying correctly". Well that told me rightly, didn't it? What about my sister in law who died of cancer in her mid thirties? She had half the country praying for her recovery. Were all these people not praying correctly?

Bye bye clomid!

No, I don't have any "good news", today is CD2. Bleughh! I was of course holding out for this being one of those stories that goes something like "and believe it or not, just when we decided to ditch the fertility drugs, I found I was already knocked up!". Not so for me. No bun in the oven. Meh.

So this month is going to be totally free of fertility drugs. No horrible shitty clomid. No horrible stingy hcg injections. Hopefully I will start feeling a little less down and a little more energetic. Part of me is still holding out for the off chance that we will just spontaneously hit target all of a sudden. But if it hasn't happened after almost a year of ttc on clomid, I don't think it's going to happen au naturel.

This Saturday I'm going to Dublin for my brother's 50th birthday party. He's decided to make it an early evening gathering, so as to be a family friendly bash. Cue Jane being the only one rocking up to the party without an ankle biter or a teenage offspring in tow. I'm already laying bets in my head as to how many drinks I will be down before someone, an in law or friend of the host who I haven't seen in several years, asks the question "so do you have any kids, Jane?" and I give them the inevitable answer, while trying to keep a pleasant smile on my face "No..."
Guaranteed to kill the conversation stone dead every time.

You really like me....boo hoo....

Thanks so much to Melissa at What? IF? and C at Cats with Passports for nominating me for a One Lovely Blog Award. Apologies for the late acceptance, but better late than never! I can't help thinking of Craggy Island's Lovely Girls competition when I think of the term Lovely Blog. Those of you who are Fr Ted fans will know what I mean, those of you who are not, look it up on youtube, it's bound to be there.

Anyway, I'm passing on the award, so the nominees for lovely girls and boys of the IF/pregnancy/parenting blog world are:

Cats with Passports
Murgdan
Diary of a Miracle
Nuts in May
Hot Mama Bear
Paint it Black
Sarah
Hairy Farmer Family
Fee Bee
Mick
Womb4improvement
Xbox

As I haven't been surfing around the blogosphere as much these days as I used to, my nomination list is a little short, and it's one of long term favourite reads.

Not gone away yet.

Throughout the month of August I seem to have been struck down with blogger's block. The truth of it really was that I was beginning to get a pain in my face from all this infertility shite. The clomid and hcg shots were making me more and more exhausted and depressed. We went away for a romantic weekend to Killarney in the middle of the month and AF arrived two days early. That put paid to the romance I can tell you! We still made the best we could out of the weekend, but it was still a downer.

We signed up for counselling a couple of months back, after the false alarm debacle, and I have to say it did help us to get our heads around where we are with this whole journey and what we want to do next. We came to the conclusion that since I am now on my thirteenth consecutive round of clomid and facing into my seventeenth round of hcg shots, it's time for a break. So we went back to the clinic last week and I pretty much threw a hissy fit at the doctor and said (no, sobbed!) that I had had enough. So the plan of action is this: after this cycle, if there's nothing happening, I am going to take a break from meds for at least two months. Then I am going to try another fertility drug, femara. If that doesn't work after a few months, then we are going back to our GP for a referral to a mainstream fertility clinic, with the view to doing IUI.

One piece of possible good news is regards our health insurance. John's employers pay our policy for us, and recently they changed insurance provider. It turns out that the new provider is going to allow a contribution of EUR 1,000 for one course of fertility treatment, either IUI, IVF or ICSI. given that IVF costs approx EUR5,000 per cycle in Ireland that is not a huge contribution, but as they say, it's better than a slap in the belly with a wet fish. AS far as I know, IUI costs around EUR1,000, so that would cover one round of treatment. It's good to know it's there in any case.

So we'll see what happens with this cycle, and after that I am going drug free for a while. I feel as though a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. Clomid is nasty stuff and I really don't think anyone should be on it for more than six months. It's just too damn hard on the system. At this stage I am really beginning to wonder if this will ever happen for us, and the idea of it never happening seems far too hard to contemplate.

I have wanted to be a Mum ever since I was twenty years old, when I used to help my mother with minding my oldest nephew. When I was 21 I met my first husband, and I was sure back then that I would be a mother in my late twenties. However, the time never seemed right. I wanted to be married before we had kids, I suppose you could put that down to a traditionalist Catholic upbringing. Then when we did get married, I was 27 at the time, we were renting a tiny flat and were stoney broke trying to save the money for a house deposit. I was in a low paid job and the time just didn't seem right. I started my exams, which was a four year part time course, so the goal posts of starting a family were pushed out for another few years. The plan was to get the exams in the bag by the time I was 31 or 32 and then it was baby time. Every time I felt the tug of maternal instincts I just pushed them out of my mind. We would do it when the time was right, that's what I kept telling myself.

Unfortunately, baby time came around a little early for my then husband, earlier than it came around for me. He started an affair less than two years into our marriage, I actually think it wasn't his first one, and after a number of months of very strange behavior on his part I confronted him and he admitted his guilt. I left shortly afterward, and around that time he and his 22 year old girlfriend conceived their son. It was a very hard kick in the stomach for me. Like now, every time I walked down the street I seemed to see pregnant women. I was like they were creeping up through the cracks in the pavement. Cute babies everywhere. Work colleagues having babies and bringing them into the office to show off. Me fast approaching thirty and further away than ever from motherhood.

I was lucky to meet John soon after my first marriage ended. As a friend of mine said, I met a good guy before I had the chance to grow bitter. It took me a long time to get over the heartbreak, plus I had to wait four years before I could file for divorce, so we both knew that marriage and babies weren't on the cards for us for a few years. All the while we attended weddings of friends and family, and watched many of them start and complete their families while we just sat in limbo. All the time I just kept telling myself it will happen when the time is right. I remember going to visit my sister in hospital when her third child was born. It was two days after John's sister's funeral. As I took my new niece in my arms, a combination of emotions hit me at once. First of all it was the joy of seeing a new life, the grief that I had just witnessed the death and burial of a beautiful vivacious 36 year old woman, and the sheer anguish of "am I ever going to hold my own baby?".

I have felt that anguish, that yearning so many times since then. When at long last the time felt right, my body didn't seem to concur with my mind. Sometimes I feel like it's saying "tough shit, you had your chances, you should have just taken them". Nowadays I go visiting friends who are ten years younger than me, bringing gifts for their newborns. Some of them have already completed their families. Everywhere we go we see couples with babies. Every shopping mall, street, park, restaurant they are there, the happy families. John still smiles and says "that will be us, just you wait and see". I just shrug my shoulders and say "maybe".

Happy Blogoversary to me!

This day last year I took the plunge and decided to start a blog. I had been following and commenting on a few infertility blogs for a while, mainly The Waiting Game and Xbox4nappyrash . It was around about that time that I realised that I was not going to be a mother before my 40th birthday. This was something I found extremely difficult to get my head around. One year on, and I realise that I am not going to be a mother before my 41st birthday. Such is life. At this stage I don't know if I ever will have a baby of my own.

I have been on clomid for more cycles than I care to count at this stage (I think it's around 12). I have been on pregnyl injections for I think 17 months. I beginning to feel like a 12 stone hamster on a very large wheel. A very very tired hamster to boot. All these fertility meds have taken a huge toll on my body, and even though I have been out of work for two months now, I still feel exhausted. I heard yesterday about the possibility of a new job, but it would involve over an hour commute each way daily. I know that doesn't sound like a lot, but when I am this exhausted on a constant basis I really don't know if I could manage it. We'll see, I will cross that bridge when I get to it I suppose.

In the past few weeks John and I have started going to counselling. After the highs and lows of last month's false alarm I really felt like we needed help getting our heads around this ongoing torture. Luckily enough, I am still covered by my previous employer's benefit plan, one part of which is the employee assistance scheme which provides five sessions of counselling free of charge if needed. Since it is not costing us anything, I thought feck it, why not, so we have had two sessions so far. We're trying to see where we go from here, come to some sort of decision as to how long we will keep on the road we are on, and then see what other options are open to us. So we will see how it goes.

Like all other infertility bloggers, I have gained an amazing support network of online friends in my first year of blogging. It seems funny to know so much about the day to day lives of people I have never met face to face. Last week I met face to face with another infertility blogger (hi M!). We live a twenty minute drive from each other, are the same age and have both been through the experience of miscarriage. Like us, her and her husband are trying to conceive their first child. We met for a coffee, which turned out to be a three hour chat. It was lovely to connect with someone my own age, as most of my friends here are much younger than me, and very few of them have been through a miscarriage. It was both strange and nice meeting someone face to face whom I had read about online. We both admitted that our husbands had misgivings at the idea of meeting someone from the internet. John was cracking jokes that my body would be washed up in Lough Derg without any kidneys, and her husband was worried about me finding out where they lived! Don't worry lads, neither of us are bunny boilers.

To all the wonderful people I have met in the last year, I just want to say thank you for all your friendship and support. Some of you have attained the holy grail of a healthy pregnancy, and to you I wish every congratulations and continued good health and luck. Some of you, like me, are still on this long road, and I hope and pray that we will see the end of it soon, and that one of these days life will bring is the joy that we have awaited for so long.