Today, Tom and I are at the pre-Christmas wedding of one of my old school friends – the kind who I bond with over oft-wheeled-out Nineties nostalgia and love dearly but haven’t actually had a conversation with in about ten years.
Relations between Tom and I are frosty. Tom doesn’t know why, but I have an internal monologue of rage that I cannot say out loud to him, so I am playing it out in my mind. I have come close to asking him again if he has been unfaithful so many times, but I cannot. I don’t have space for this in my mind. I need to get through IVF and then we will deal with it, as incongruous as that may seem.
I watch our friends say their emotive vows in front of a crackling fire with tears in my eyes and glance fleetingly at Tom. We’ve planned to do it ourselves. Quietly, with good wine and bad dancing. Children were – are – a priority over a wedding, but we intend to get there, eventually. Tom looks back at me, tries to read me. He is bewildered, I know, by my distance and my mood. If pushed, I blame hormones, the many, many drugs I am taking. And then I simply retreat.
Am I making a mistake? Am I attempting to bring a child into the world with a man I don’t trust? Or do I trust him, deep down? Do I know we will sort this and is that why I can shelve it? As he looks ahead, I stare at him again, trying to see, trying to reassure myself.
And today, there are more practical things to deal with. Inserting, for starters, some vaginal gel that involves, according to the packet, as this is my first one, lying horizontally. That’s okay, I thought, before we came. Someone I know will be staying at the venue and I’ll ask if I can use their room for ten minutes.
Except, because I have been a little distracted and thought of little but IVF recently, I know nothing about this wedding other than the train station we need to get to and what time we need to be there.
I look properly at the invite for the first time on the train. The wedding is in a tent. No guests will be staying ‘at the venue’, unless they pass out behind the pop-up bar and no one notices.
So 8 p.m. comes and the alarm on my phone goes off, and a minute later I am in a Portaloo, doing what looks like a yoga move to make myself as horizontal as possible. Despite my best attempts, I have always been shit at yoga. The gel insert, a bit like a tampon applicator, can’t go where it needs to go because I am too vertical so it keeps hitting bone – bone? Wow, I am clueless about my own body – and that brings tears to my eyes.
I am also nearly naked, because I wore my jumpsuit to this wedding, the leg of which is now trailing in some Portaloo wee.
I give up and run back into the tent crying to tell Tom that we need to go home now so that I can do this there instead, but as I walk in all faces turn to me and cheer.
They were waiting to do the speeches. Everyone else had returned; they were just holding on for me. And now I am here, with tears streaming down my face, a packet of vaginal gel sticking out of my bag and the wee of one of my fellow wedding guests on my trouser leg.
Fertility issues: drainers of energy, thieves of dignity.
We leave for home after the speeches and my vaginal gel finally reaches its destination as I lie on my own bed. I exhale. We missed a large chunk of the wedding but my medication has been done within the ideal time slot and that’s the important thing. Swoony first dances, boozy last dances: they, like the rest of the wedding and the rest of life, don’t come close to mattering at the moment.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t realise you needed help,’ says Tom.
‘There’s nothing you could have done anyway,’ I snap, cold.
Tom sighs. Gives up trying to speak to me. We might have left early but he’s still had enough free wedding wine to pass out on the duvet.
I can’t sleep though, so I sit up scrolling Harriet’s social media and noting her poised, together pictures. Is Rachel like you? I think again, glancing at Tom snoozing in his suit next to me. Is she poised and together like you? And I think about the fact that Harriet would never end up with wee on her jumpsuit or naked in a Portaloo, let alone doing both at the same time. And I think about Tom, and I picture them, again and again and again, together.