Happily Ever After_ - Benison Anne O'Reilly [30]
So that Tuesday in September was the day I realised that fairytales never really do come true. What I didn’t understand for quite some time was that our baby was not the only thing that we lost that day.
6
The joys of motherhood
It took me a while to be ready to try again for another baby - four months in fact.
Once again it took a long time to conceive. Not quite as long as my previous pregnancy: it was ten months rather than fourteen. But there was no early period of anticipation to liven proceedings this time. It was down to business straight away and therefore it seemed to take just as long. And somewhere along the line Tony and I stopped making love and started having ‘sexual intercourse’. Sex became the dull reproductive variety my class had snickered over in Personal Development lessons at school: one of those 1950’s style black and white illustrations of a man inserting his penis in a woman’s vagina, the only objective creating a baby. It all seemed joyless and clinical; the fun and passion were gone.
Every month I didn’t fall pregnant was a blow. The sight of blood dripping down my thighs or tell-tale cramps in my abdomen taunted me like a bullying schoolgirl - I’d failed again. It was only my cheerers and supporters on the online chat group, those fellow travellers on the infertility bandwagon, who kept me going during this time. They alone seemed to know that conceiving a baby and carrying it to term were not God
given rights.
Eventually a test came up positive again. But my troubles were not over. The next nine and a half months were to be amongst the most miserable of my life - I was terrified up until delivery day that something would go wrong.
If it had been possible to hold my breath for the entire pregnancy, that’s what I would have done: every tummy ache and pain, every visit to the toilet (would there be blood?), was fraught with anxiety. I relaxed a bit after I passed the eighteen-week ultrasound with a live and healthy foetus, but even then refused to make any plans, buy any clothes or equipment, or imagine any sort of future life with a child. I didn’t want to get my hopes up, only to have them dashed on the rocks again.
The use of the word ‘I’ here is deliberate. Tony consciously detached himself from the whole process this time.
‘I can’t go through it again,’ he said, when he advised me not to take into consideration his schedule when making the ultrasound appointments.
‘This is because you didn’t get counselling when you should have. You haven’t dealt with it properly.’
‘Whatever…I still don’t want to.’
‘It’s a shame I don’t have that option. What will people think?’
‘They don’t have to know. Say I’m working or something. I’m sure your mum will go with you. Or my mum, even.’
Pamela! Not likely! So, humiliated and disappointed, I took my mother instead. Tony got to see the images later. I insisted on continuing with the same obstetrician, Greg, but considering the frosty relations that existed between the two after my last pregnancy, I wasn’t so disappointed that my husband refused to attend any antenatal appointments with me. By this time I was just hoping he’d consent to turn up for the birth.
Ultimately I had what doctors call an ‘uncomplicated pregnancy’, but they only make that assessment in crude medical terms.
It was on the occasion of Douglas’ birthday that we decided to tell Pamela that I was pregnant again. We’d been summoned to the family home for lunch.
‘I thought you must have been expecting as soon as I saw you,’ she said when we were alone together preparing lunch. ‘You’re carrying quite a bit of extra weight. But forgive me if I don’t get too excited yet. We’ll have to see if you’re capable of carrying this one to term first.’
I don’t know why she didn’t just grab the kitchen knife she was using to slice the tomatoes and plunge it into my chest. Probably it was the thought of bloodstains on her marble benchtops - it certainly would have been no more painful. That was the thing about