I have been thinking about speaking to my mum and dad about my fertility issues since Kit brought it up. But they FaceTime before I get chance to call them.
‘Have you got a job yet?’ my mum asks.
There are minimal pleasantries, no chit-chat. My mum has little patience for small talk. She allocates that to my dad, who’s only marginally better at it than she is. Sometimes I genuinely believe she comes to the phone armed with a list of bullet points.
‘Yes. The freelance one. My job. That’s my job.’
She points out that I am wearing pyjamas and it is midday and that there is no real job you can do in which that is acceptable. I start explaining bloggers, influencers, coders and how actually the world is being run in pyjamas, but she is glazing over.
‘You’re in your thirties, Lexie,’ she says. ‘It’s been ages now since you left the other job.’
‘Yes, but I left it to do this job. This isn’t the in-between job. It’s the new job.’
She starts talking about pensions and healthcare.
‘If you have children, you’ll need more security. And you’ll barely get any maternity pay.’
Silence. Is it more awkward or less when you can see each other’s faces?
I crack first.
‘Well, I’m not pregnant. So maternity pay isn’t an issue for me.’
It’s not something I hadn’t gone over the impact of losing. But in the end the financial security came second to my sanity.
‘Yes, not now,’ she pokes. ‘But maybe one day. Is that in the pipeline? Something you and Tom talk about?’
She says it hurriedly, like she can rush conception along if she just speaks a bit faster. Save me some time since I seem to be squandering so much of it. I consider telling her I think Tom is cheating on me, just to change the conversation, but I don’t have room in my head for her thoughts. I don’t have the brainpower to balance out making her not hate Tom, but not blame me, either – not get defensive, not become overwhelmed and distraught.
I don’t trust myself to speak. I realise that she wouldn’t think my fertility was an issue because she presumes I would tell her if it was. But I don’t believe that’s an excuse for storming any conversation in your boots and leaping around, stamping. People should take more care with others’ hearts, especially the ones that belong to their own children.
It spirals, then, because I don’t do anything to stop it. Mum quotes a piece she read the other day about fertility versus careers. I barely have a career to prioritise, we’ve just established that. So now we are clear: I have no children and I have no career. I have nothing. Except for a fake pie, which I tell her needs to come out of the oven before biting my lip through goodbyes.
I cry for a good few minutes when we end the call before I decide to try to run it off; although the tears keep flowing even as I jog. Is that normal, to run and cry at the same time? No one seems to look at me. Maybe they just think it’s sweat, streaming down my face. Or maybe half the people out there are running to chase away today’s sadness.
The tears are finally starting to dry up and I am heaving my way around the park to a cheesy dance track, when a No Caller ID pops up on my phone and I answer in case it’s some much-needed work. Perhaps even a real job. Or at least someone offering me a bloody pension.
I am leaning up against the wall of a Thai restaurant, inhaling shots of lemongrass in swift, sharp breaths as they speak.
‘It’s the nurse from the reproductive medicine unit,’ she says. ‘Confirming your appointment for an ultrasound tomorrow.’
My breath speeds up and my heart races like I’ve just powered into a sprint.
What?
This is the first I’ve heard of any appointment and I panic. Did I miss a letter? A call? There isn’t a chance in hell that I would have and yet this is what I do: I focus instantly on how it could have been my fault.
I always presume that over a belief that it could be down to anyone else. If I sat back to analyse that, it would say some terrible things about my self-esteem.
‘I didn’t get the letter,’ I say, panic rising in my voice as my breathing gets even shallower. The lemongrass suddenly makes me gag. ‘But yes, I’ll be there. What time? Where? I’m so sorry.’
I’m babbling now, imagining what would have happened if they’d never called, whether I would have been blacklisted forever and never had a baby, all because of my own idiocy, even though there was no idiocy, but, somehow, still, my brain is saying there probably was idiocy.
I go home to calm myself and get an early night before tomorrow. A date that is now not another non-event Wednesday but a major marker – the start of something huge.
But sitting on the sofa in a towel with a herbal tea cupped in my palm, I feel sick.
Because what I didn’t tell Tom, when we decided to go to the doctors, was that I was already in the system. That a few months ago, frustrated by Tom’s refusal to get help, I had booked an appointment with the GP to tell her that I was having trouble getting pregnant. Tom wasn’t ready, but I was so very ready, and I did it on an angry whim, knowing the whole process would be long and drawn-out anyway.
I had blood tests and checks – all clear – and I was referred for more detailed investigations. Warned there would be quite a wait. I felt proven right: all I had done was get us a head start, so that when Tom was ready, we had skipped a stage.
I planned to tell him when the letter came and we had moved up the queue. Now, with the letter never arriving, the news was too late and too fast.
There is no option for cancelling – or of Tom getting here in time – so the only option is to go alone and deal later with admitting that I had gone behind his back. As he had gone behind mine recently, too?
The next day I leave a ridiculous amount of time to travel the twenty minutes to the hospital and despite my guilt, I feel good. Finally, I get to nail this, to be proactive, the definition of which is to act, not to stay stagnant, waiting, complaining but doing nothing. I have done far too much of that.
At the hospital I am in a frenzy writing lists, replying to emails, sorting the nights out I have planned, and I think I look happier than the other women in the room, heads buried in phones, Kindles or simply staring at walls where there are statistics I am trying to avoid looking at.
This won’t be me, I think, disassociating from what I cannot stop thinking of in my head as Fertility Club and pulling out a Tana French with enough raging Irish crime in it to distract me. I’m always grateful when I’m reading the right book for the moment I am in; this is one of those times.
Because what is happening here is a blip, not a long-term problem, and I’m on the way to sorting it. I am not in Fertility Club. I’m a bystander. A visitor. They’ll find a small, surmountable problem and then they’ll fix it.
Except, they don’t. When I have my ultrasound, there is no obvious problem. No reason why I haven’t got pregnant again in the two years since our miscarriage. Instead, there is a whole load of nothing.
‘That’s good news,’ says the doctor, smiling gently at me, and I smile back, politely.
‘Is it, though?’ I ask her inside my head. Because it feels like an anticlimax. Because without a problem, how is there a solution? Do we go back to just trying and failing, trying and failing? And because despite trying not to look, I saw that chart in the waiting room with its big ‘unexplained infertility’ chunk of pie. No problem is still a problem and it’s a harder one – surely – to fix.
‘Let’s get you booked in for a follow-up appointment to discuss what’s next,’ the doctor says to me and I nod, try to look enthusiastic.
In the hours between that news and Tom’s key going in the door, I become bleaker and bleaker, picturing a life that awaits me without children. I hear Harriet opening doors and walking across the floor and playing the piano and being fine.
Harriet hasn’t been for an ultrasound today. Life is strolling along nicely for her. It’s okay for you, Harriet, I think, feeling that out-of-body rage towards this almost anonymous recipient again. It’s all so fucking okay for you.