We've been busy trying to book up accommodation and activities for our upcoming holiday. The Cook Islands, while have two islands rated as one of the top 10 most beautiful islands in the world, is apparently more of a 'honeymoon gazes and wine-soaked afternoons in a lagoon-side hammock' type of place than a 'let the kids throw spaghetti across the dining room' kind of place. Not that we are really into pasta flinging ourselves, but you get the drift. We have finally decided and booked a villa on the beach, a condo that has sliding doors flinging open to the sandy lagoon. It's the kind of place that we can leave our snorkels rinsing in the sink while we sit on the deck, eating with our fingers and talking about the day's activities.

I cannot wait. It sounds so completely fabulous, apart from the journey back (although we are stopping a few times on the way over, the way back has the following suicide inducing torture-a 6 hour drive, then a two hour flight, then a 12 hour flight, then another 12 hour flight. Moods will be high, and potentially not even video on demand will be able to pull us out of the blue.)

New Zealand is proving a bit trickier. We're going just as the New Zealand summer is ending, so accommodation is still at a premium. As we only have 7 days in New Zealand we've decided not to be brave and do a whistle stop tour-the north and south islands in 7 days! Never leave a car and forget what feeling in your legs was like! The truth is, I imagine you can live thereyou're your life and never see it all, so why try to do the whole thing in one week? Instead we are spending the entirety of the 7 days in one area on the South Island after we fly into Christchurch, as I think and hope we'll go back again someday.

New Zealand looks to be more family oriented, as though they expect and hope that you'll be there with a family of rumbly bumbly young '˜uns who flesh light and laughter into the place. And we will be there with two generally happy kids. The amazing thing is, the area we're heading into has more adventure than anywhere I've ever known.

One of the things we're thinking of doing (and which I am very, very keen to do) is to go swimming with the dolphins. They pack you in wetsuits and chuck you in the water with pods of dolphins that swim and dance and jump. The dolphins are often joined by sperm whales and killer whales. As these tours are eco-only, that means no touching or feeding them, you just swim along with them. Apparently, by all the counts I've read, they love swimming with the peoples, and the more your splash around they more they'll splash around. As I read up on it, I read the single item: The dolphins love pregnant women.

To which I think: Rub it in Flipper, and I'll re-think my pro-Albacore stance and push for you to be in the sashimi.

My period should hit right about the time I am donning my swimsuit in the Cook Islands. Naturally. But strangely, I am almost welcoming it (that said, I currently have the super extra plus stuffed up me as I type this, hoping to make it to London Waterloo before and leak through starts off and hopped up on enough ibuprofen to ward off the Dallas Cowboys' aches and pains.) I have another Period Fairy visit in about 25 days, then the Cook Islands Vampire Jamboree, and then I'm home.

Home, and hopefully reaching out to the other woman who is waiting in the same darkness as I am.

Home, and hopefully time to start the process, which is so serious it should really be The Process. I have to go to the IVF clinic this afternoon for some blood tests, the final in the rounds I have to go to as they need me to come in on day 2 of my period to test my FSH levels (I have no idea what FSH is. Something to do with hormones, babies, or pescetarians, I'm not sure. Either way, I've had the test before and it was just fine, the test results were only valid for 6 months and thus need re-doing). I also have to have an STD test that they forgot to do-I have no idea which one, but it does seem a bit torturous that they forgot one, seeing as I had the All-Ho Test Kit, the queen mother of STD tests they give to egg donors, one testing for STDs that I am pretty sure are old wives' tales (it was that jumping over the broom they made me do that convinced me).

Babies are a regular and heart-wrenching part of my thoughts. And it's not just me, Angus comments on it a lot-about the status of holidays next year (he's been thinking of infant-friendly places to go), how to manage Christmas, when to travel if pregnant, how to involve my family, etc. I keep thinking and hoping, hoping, hoping.

We won't be able to go through the process very many times. If it happens, it has to happen soon. I read about women that have gone through it 10, 12 times. I think I'd go mad well before my 10th try. The Process takes the whole world out of your hopes and soul and turns your heart into a ball of Play Doh. Ask any woman going through it all, and about the last thing we want to hear is 'You WILL be a mother, it is absolutely going to work!' It's called False Hope, and it hurts more than the Play Doh heart, because what happens if it's never meant to be?

I'll cross that bridge if and when I get there, and I have no doubt that if I have to cross it, it'll be the most rickety, difficult bridge I'll ever have been on in my life.

There should be a more gentle saying, one that doesn't imply hope while the purpose of it is to offer hope, encouragement and love. Something like, "Fancy a cup of tea?" or "How about a cookie?" Something benevolent like that.

In the meantime, I will swim with the dolphins who love pregnant women more than me, I will delight in the entire holiday, and I will wonder what's going to happen. I will avoid UK Lifetime TV (it's all babies all the time on that channel! Watch it for 30 seconds and you will find, to your amazement, that you will suddenly and incredibly be lactating as you swaddle the cat in the throw blanket over the back of the couch!) I will continue to take my pregnancy vitamins and my folic acid (if this works, the umbilical cord will be less of a cord and more of a titanium-structured rope the kid can bungee jump with someday).

And if we start after coming home from holiday, it will be a set number of days after my cycle. Once I made it to the office I idly counted up the days this morning on my Outlook calendar, and found that the number of days from my last period and the x days it will take before The Process can start would mean that if we started, I would start The Process on what is the English Mother's Day.

The irony is not lost on me.

-H.

PS-there are so many infertile bloggers out there, I am thinking of starting up an infertile bloggers website. I know we are scattered to the winds, I have seen long link pages all over the place, but what if we all had one place we could go to, a place where we could vent and cry and share info? Is anyone interested, or am I off my rocker? (By the way, you can email me, if you'd rather not let people know you're ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE, you know, like me, the INFERTILES. My email address is just below the picture of me on the sidebar).

Posted by: Everydaystranger at 09:44 AM | Comments (13) | Add Comment
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