I can post this little gallery of twee gorgeousness now, it's safe. My mooncup is securely in place, though to be honest it would seem more appropriate to be smearing blood on the walls in an orgy of celebration and gratitude.
So... I've had a slightly fraught month. I managed to convince myself I might have got pregnant. Having had unprotected sex in a moment of utter ovulatory confidence and conviction on the very first day of my period at the start of last month, I then spent every minute afterwards worrying about the fact that I might have miraculously got pregnant after all. I thought I was fine, that even the most tenacious of sperm live three days but then I googled it, and found something that said it was SEVEN, and it is possible to ovulate early, and blah blah, sure it's fine, but Oh God, are these various pregnancy symptoms I'm sure I'm displaying?
And that sort of went on for the month, until I'd convinced myself I was facing all the horrors of an unwanted pregnancy - and despite my vague disappointment at having had my last baby, I learned in no uncertain terms that it would have been a very definitely unwanted pregnancy. Stress gave me a little taste of the sort of exhausted and hormonal mother I'd be while pregnant with a third, and it was not such a pretty picture. The reality check lent wings to the idea that while I might dream of another birth, an other baby, it would have to be with my absolutely perfect soul mate who needs to be rich enough to buy me my own personal osteopath and a fleet of childcare experts to help me raise my existing two and stop me messing up the new one.
I was sanguine about solutions for the first couple weeks, and then emotionally swung wildly between horror at the thought of more years of breastfeeding and hormones and not being able to go anywhere and debt and marital breakdown and then reading abortion information and sobbing and fantasising about idealised Happy Families, bigger houses and a people carrier.
I've always been pro choice, and can't see that ever changing, but I've always maintained that there's nothing pleasant about the option and when faced with it (if only in my paranoid pessimism) the truth is that I've far more moral issue with the idea (of having one) than I thought I had. Guilt. I'd be crippled with it. I would have terminated the life of this hypothetical baby for my sake, first and foremost, but for my husband's, my children's and the child's own sake too, but I still felt a cold steel edge of guilt at the idea of denying it life based on my own weaknesses and shortcomings and selfishness.
This is not a comfortable subject. Nor is this post intended as a debate - it is purely a personal consideration. As such, I'm going to disable comments on this one, as I am emphatically not looking to comment on anyone else's feelings and experiences but my own, nor do I really want to discuss them.
For me, the horriblenesses of pregnancy, the hemorrhoids and thrush and skin problems and back pain and separating pelvis and sleeplessness and exhaustion and hormones, the pre and post natal depression (well, you can just read look back at the start of the blog for jolly examples)... are all subsumed by the vitality of being a protective vessel for the child I carry. I felt strongly aware and connected to both of my children before their birth and the thought of inverting, perverting? that role made me feel deeply... wrong. On all sorts of levels.
So anyway, I got talked down by the wonderful Ms Moon, and another friend who said that chances were with the breastfeeding, I wouldn't be ovulating til day 21 or so anyway, and had more than a couple clear weeks, no matter how tenacious the little swimmers might have been. So then I felt foolish.
But I did an early response pregnancy test anyway, in the toilet in Tesco (not the Bray ones, they're ganky and ALWAYS smell of poo, and it would have just been too tawdry and awful and I might have hit my head on the bogroll dispenser and woken up in Eastenders.
And it was negative, and I bought myself sunflowers. And Axel swore yet again that he would get round to buying condoms. And I swore that I would never have sex again.
And then my period was a day late, and I'd convinced myself all over again that the test was false, and I went and got another one, and it was still negative and I rejoiced all over again. And FINALLY got my period, and felt safe to write this post, and look at photos of tiny mini sweetie baby models again without my heart being in my mouth. There's a thousand other things to say about this all but ...
Back to the teenie baby dolls. I so want one of my newborns, I would love to have a little perpetual reminder of them at birth - I don't know about you all, but I've forgotten what they looked like. I'd like to keep that sight immortalised. I know they're overly cutesy, but I don't care! They remind me of Bodhi, those little dark haired boys.
