Running across the mountains

Since we more-or-less stopped ttc I have given myself permission to run again, and in February, after a long lay-off with a twisted ankle that kept swelling up, I started with a slow and painful 2.8 miles. I have managed to bully myself into keeping up the momentum and have managed to run 3 - 4 times a week, including a run at the weekend which I have lengthened by about 10 minutes each week.

Not last weekend, but the 3 weekends before I have run out from my house and run 14 or 15 miles in the beautiful Wye Valley. Often as I have run I have written poetic, life-affirming blog entries in my head. It is such a privilege to live where we do, and to be healthy and fit enough to run for more than two and a half hours as the morning mist clears. I have seen buzzards and canada geese, swans, moorhens and a heron. And last week R came with me and we saw a pair of hares (wonderful, wonderful animals) and just a few hundred metres from our home we saw a calf that had literally been born only minutes, and watched as it tried to struggle to its feet.

All this training has been towards an event tomorrow in aid of the mountain rescue team. I enter it most years, but have not been fit enough to run the 17 mile ridge route since 2002. Tomorrow that's what I will do, with a friend for company (R will be helping run the event, and therefore not running with me). I am not as fit as I was in 2002 (I had recently run my second consecutive London Marathon that year, and I doubt I shall ever be that fit again!) But it is good to know I have pulled myself together for this.

I apologise for that last post. And thank you for very kind and generous comments - you have big hearts, that I am not sure I deserve. I am not so unlucky.

Sorry for myself

I don't know whether I can keep this blog up. I think with adoption ahead of me I need to put the rollercoaster of the miscarriages behind me. I am not really finding any of this very helpful - I am really glad for those of you out there who are pregnant, but it is doing my head in. I got pregnant lots of times, so that means I'm not really much of an infertile? I am now 43, so I would be stupid, right, to continue hoping?
I remember long ago, before I started writing this blog, reading a miserable, rather bitter message on an IF message board written by someone who had 'gradually seen everyone else get pregnant and move on'. She described how she felt - it was like a sense of abandonment by the people she had once turned to.

This is a bit raw, and is not meant to sound as though I am like her. I don't feel abandoned, but I feel I may need to abandon you. I read more blogs than I write posts here, but your blogs mostly make me sad or jealous.

I didn't just lose one baby - I lost 6.
I know when each one happened, but I don't mark the 'would have been due' dates. Apart from the one on my birthday and the one on my dad's birthday (which are obviously hard dates to forget for other reasons) I don't mark the days that the miscarriages happened. After all, when does it happen? The day the beta doesn't double? The day you start bleeding a tiny bit? The days you cramp and bleed and pass the huge clots? Is it over when the bleeding stops?

And I don't have a current or even a future pregnancy to look forward to. No-one expects it of me anymore. I have helped them to get to this point, and I am happy that I have, because the pressure had to stop. I will never be a mother. Never. Be. A . Mother, Vivien.

If we have a child, if this adoption process is eventually "successful" I will not breastfeed it. It will not look either like me or like R. People will always refer to his/her 'real' parents. It will belong to me even less than any birth mother's child.
I will never give birth.
Give. Birth.
That is really something to give.

KT said at our last meeting that she did not doubt mine and R's capacity to love and empathise with a hurting child. (What else are we, though a little older?) She felt we were warm, loving people who could offer a child a great deal. But we needed to give serious thought to how we would cope with not being loved back. I said I would carry on loving, (a child never needs your love more than when s/he least deserves it) and KT said that being a parent was essentially about giving without any expectation of receiving anything back. Sounds about right to me, but what do I know?

What if I find I can't give any more? Sometimes I feel that I can't already.

Please excuse long pauses between posts, but I am struggling to keep this blog going. I am not sure if it has a point.

Angry post.

Here's a rant, and probably of very little interest, but it bugged me, so I shall write it down.

My brother, a lifelong smoker had his 52nd birthday at the beginning of March.
His wife, 39 and seriously overweight.
Both bone-idle, live in south London and generally live in a state of inactivity, with the attitude that the world owes them.

My brother undoubtedly adores his 2 year old daughter.
But has no contact with the kids he had, with his first wife, a daughter in 1979 and a son in 1980.
He left (or was thrown out) in about 1985.

This is his second chance.
His son was born on 21 March.
A perfect baby.

They grumble that it wakes them up.
They send their daughter back to her room repeatedly in the mornings until they can lever themselves out of bed (often well after 9am)
Hell, they couldn't even get out of bed for us - we spent 2 hours on Sunday morning entertaining their daughter (a pleasure and delight) until they finally emerged, groaning.

I realise I am not the best judge here, but do you get where I am coming from?
If I had ever hoped for fairness I was being unrealistic, I know.
I spent a long time after returning from the weekend in London depressed, and finally sobbing. How else can I deal with the injustice? Always in the knowledge that I don't have any right to a child, but I swear, my brother has had 4.

In the meantime, while they go on in their own sweet way, we continue our meetings with KT. She mellows and we have frank discussions about attachment and our concurring if slightly radical views.

I told her about my anger with my brother, who spends his time telling me how devoted he is to his daughter, while barely giving the child the time of day.

I told her about my anger with the colleague who had her baby just before Christmas and came back to work full time at the beginning of April.

You know what - I think I shall be contentious. I think this is wrong. Just wrong. And selfish.
She says she needs the money, they took on a big mortgage blah blah blah. A mutual friend tells me they just spent a ton of money on a new music system and huge flat screen TV. It's about priorities really, isn't it.

Children who go into childcare very early (6 months) appear to thrive and socialise, but of course they are being pushed to soon into self reliance, they are learning to be carers instead of having the security of being cared for. This is the discussion I have had with KT. She feels like an ally, which I daresay is her job.

I am coming through a period when I have questioned whether I can go through with the adoption thing. But R is my rock, and is really looking forward to being a dad. I feel I need to get to the stage when we meet the child but that is still a long way off.