Mama Mia

by Mia Freedman

  AN EMBARRASSING ADDICTION

  SMS to Karen from me:

  ‘Got my period. Shattered.‘

  Discovering that getting up the duff was not, in fact, quite so easy, not for me, not this time, was a slow-dawning shock made more acute by the way my last pregnancy had ended. The first month was disappointing. The second month upsetting. The third month devastating.

  After a bit of googling to establish exactly where I had to stick the thermometer for my daily temperature check (my mouth), I started charting my graph. It was confusing. My temperature was meant to spike around day fourteen of my cycle, but it didn’t. Some months it didn’t seem to spike at all. Others it sort of spiked but not convincingly.

  Oh, and if one more person told me to just relax and not think about it, I was going to stick a chopstick in their eye and see how relaxing that was for them. Not very, huh? So shut the fuck up.

  Sometimes it seems like your chances of conceiving are inversely proportional to how much you want to be pregnant. Sixteen years old? Dating someone entirely unsuitable? Skipped one day of the Pill when your script ran out? Condom broke during a one-night stand? Bingo. A sperm and egg hook-up is practically guaranteed.

  But if you’re desperate to conceive after a miscarriage? Battling infertility? Biological clock ticking at deafening volume? That’s when sperm will say, ‘Look egg, sorry, but I’m just not that into you,’ before swimming away. Or egg will decide it can’t be bothered venturing into the uterus singles bar to mingle with desperado sperm, and will stay put inside an ovary eating Tim Tams.

  Morale deteriorated. We found ourselves muttering words like ‘stressful’, ‘not again’ and ‘over it’.

  There was other sexy conception talk too. I quickly discovered there’s nothing guaranteed to put a smile in a man’s pants faster than the words ‘ovulation’ and ‘basal body temperature’. Just try to keep his hands off you after that.

  Also, forget the lingerie. All you really need to turn on your partner when you’re trying to conceive is to wave a thermometer around while he’s shaving in the morning and shriek like a fishwife: ‘Fucking hurry up, will you! I’m OVULATING!’ If he demands proof, you can always pore over your ovulation graph together. Who needs porn when you have a graph!

  At conception time, the cliché about men not getting enough sex in long-term relationships is spectacularly turned on its head. Suddenly, it’s the blokes who are feigning headaches, pretending to be asleep or trying to hide from demented naked women chasing them around the house while frantically waving a graph.

  I had a few friends who were also trying to conceive around this time or who’d been through it in the past. They were invaluable venting buddies.

  ‘It’s the only time you’ll ever hear a guy say, “You want to what? Tonight? AGAIN? Really? Do we HAVE to?” to a naked woman who wants to have sex with him,’ said one.

  ‘Why do my most fertile nights never fall on a weekend or any other time I actually feel like it?’ complained another. ‘Usually for me it’s a Monday or Tuesday, which are my go-to-bed-early-wearing-old-nanna-knickers-nights.’

  A friend in Melbourne trying for her second child emailed me this complaint: ‘How can I enjoy it when my head is full of clinical thoughts like: “I wonder if this will work…Oh God this is only night one of the fifteen shags in a row I have to have this month…Why didn’t I start this ten years ago when I was more fertile? What time does kindy start tomorrow and is it dress-up day?”’

  Sadly, the first casualty of conception is romance. Next? Spontaneity. Finally? Dignity. Bye-bye. All gone.

  ‘I’ve started standing on my head after sex,’ emailed my Melbourne friend after trying to get pregnant for eighteen months. ‘Maybe gravity will help.’ Her husband, bless him, used to hold her feet up against the wall. After six months of headstands she gave up, did IVF and fell pregnant on her third round, four years after she first began trying.

  I tried standing on my head too. Until I read that elevating your legs too high can actually cause the sperm to pool behind your cervix and defeat the purpose entirely. That put me the right way up, quick smart.

  I didn’t tell Dr Bob about the headstands when we went to see him for a follow-up appointment. Couldn’t bear it. I felt pathetic enough.

  I passed my four graphs to him across the desk. They were crumpled from being held anxiously in my frustrated hands several times each day as I studied them in search of an explanation for why it wasn’t working.

  ‘Why isn’t it working?’ I demanded. ‘I can barely work out when I’m ovulating or if I’m ovulating at all. What else can we do? IVF?’

  ‘No, not yet. The average couple takes a year to conceive and you’ve only been trying for four months. I’m going to send you off for an ultrasound to check your ovaries and some blood tests to see where you are in your cycle and make sure you’re ovulating. That will give us more information so we can decide on our next move.’

  I was comforted a little bit by the idea that we were all in this together. Me, Jason and Dr Bob.

  I dragged my sorry self out of his office and made the ultrasound appointment where a diagnosis was made by the sonographer. ‘It looks like Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome,’ she said, pointing to the white blob-like shapes on the fuzzy image of my ovaries that appeared on the screen.

  Oh, okay. Terrific. I knew from numerous Cosmo articles that PCOS was a leading cause of infertility. Fantastic.

  Dr Bob prescribed Clomid to stimulate ovulation. I was relieved that we were doing something proactive but I continued my downward emotional spiral and became anxious on top of it. It was hard to tell where my angst began and ended, let alone what it was caused by. My skin was still terrible, which made me feel ugly. My hormones were all over the place due to the Clomid and coming off Diane. My overwhelming feeling during this time of trying to conceive was of failure. Desperation and failure.

  This feeling was reinforced every time I took my temperature and it didn’t spike on the days it was meant to. Every time I did a pregnancy test and one line came up. Every time I saw a pregnant woman in the street. Every time I heard about yet another friend or acquaintance or even celebrity who was pregnant.

  All of this was, of course, a fantastic backdrop to having conception sex.

  On we trudged into month five. Then six. Weary is an understatement. ‘I think maybe this month we should just try on the days we really have to,’ ventured Jason one morning.

  ‘We’re already doing that,’ I snapped angrily. ‘I know it’s hideous and you’d rather stab yourself with a fork but it BLOODY WELL HAS TO BE DONE.’

  When you’re trying to conceive and it’s not working, this type of conversation is known as ‘foreplay’.

  And then I fell pregnant. Two lines. I couldn’t believe it. The second line was faint but it was there. I did three more tests in the next twenty-four hours and the lines got a little stronger. I held my breath. I checked my graphs, went online and tentatively entered the date of the first day of my last period so I could calculate my due date.

  No. It wasn’t possible. I entered the numbers again. And again. Each time the due date came up onto the screen I blinked.

  It was the same due date as the baby we’d lost. How on earth was this possible? It seemed surreal. Too obvious. The idea that our baby had come back to be born on the same day she’d been due four years later was just too much to wrap my mind around. Was I really being given the chance to have my baby again?

  I was overwhelmed. The pressure felt too much. We told no one. I held my breath. And then, at about the six-week mark, I started to bleed. I’d almost been waiting for it. The grief hit me like a train, full force. Instantly, I withdrew into myself, raw with the emotion of shredded expectation. Again.

  I fought the temptation to lash out at Jason, even though I wanted to so badly. With no one to blame, I turned the anger and the bitterness back on to myself. After a few weeks of this, I went back to therapy for a while to sift through m
y feelings. It helped enormously.

  This time, I reached out to Jason and accepted his support, and together we got back to the business of conception.

  Another three months of baby-making. Woo hoo.

  It was around this time that I realised I had developed an unhealthy and secretive addiction. This addiction was a fleeting oasis of happiness at a time when I was deeply unhappy. It was expensive, and I grew horribly dependent on it. Soon, the length of time I could go between hits became ever shorter. I hid the evidence at the bottom of my bathroom rubbish bin. I was ashamed and I was spending a fortune.

  I was addicted to pregnancy tests. In no time, I was buying them weekly. Sometimes I’d splurge on half a dozen a month. Why so many? Well, my twisted thinking went something like this.

  1 pm. Buy pregnancy test during lunch hour, a two-pack. Promise self not to use it until a week before period is due.

  1.20 pm. Can’t stand anticipation. Read back of box for hundredth time to check how early a positive result could show. Box says one week before period due. Already knew this, but had hoped box might somehow have revised its earlier answer to two weeks. Period not due for ten days. Promise self to wait three days.

  2 pm. Box burning hole in handbag. Can’t wait. Perhaps ovulated early without realising. Perhaps dates wrong. The thought that news of possible pregnancy could be just one wee away too much to bear. Take test out of box and stuff under shirt. Scurry to office bathroom.

  2.05 pm. Wee on stick. Can’t face sitting in bathroom for two minutes so wrap stick in toilet paper and stuff back under shirt.

  2.07 pm. Back at desk. Sneak furtive glance at stick now sitting in handbag in nest of toilet paper. One line. Maybe needs longer to develop.

  2.08 pm. Still one line.

  2.09 pm. Still one fucking line.

  2.10 pm. Fuck it. One line. Not pregnant.

  2.11 pm. Wait, might still be pregnant but did test at bad time of day. Decide to repeat test first thing in morning when urine more concentrated.

  Of course the next day, after I’ve done another test, it’s still nine days before my period is due. Technically, it’s too early still for any pregnancy to show up on a test. I use this fact as justification for buying another test the following day and beginning the entire process again. And again, every day until my period starts and plunges me and my bin full of discarded wee sticks into fresh despair.

  If only I’d had shares in a pregnancy-test company. Or worked in a chemist and been eligible for a discount.

  Discover One-Step was my favourite but if that wasn’t available, any old thing would do for a fix.

  I found it astonishing that a $20.95 stick had such power to change lives, to be the gatekeeper between two such vastly different states: Not Pregnant and Pregnant. Or, for me, Hell and Heaven.

  The second month after my Clomid dose had been increased—almost a year after we’d begun trying—Jason and I went to Melbourne. I had to go for work and we decided to make a weekend of it.

  On the Saturday night, we had a big boozy dinner with friends and got back to the hotel late and merry. We woke up on the Sunday morning feeling a bit dusty and, as usual, the first thing I did was reach for the ovulation thermometer and shove it grumpily in my mouth.

  It was day nineteen and my temperature still hadn’t spiked. Which meant the Clomid wasn’t working, even at this new higher dose.

  I whipped out the thermometer after two minutes and the result was as predictable as it was disappointing. I sat up in bed and angrily threw the thermometer across the room. It hit the wall and smashed.

  ‘This is BULLSHIT,’ I cried. ‘I haven’t ovulated this month AGAIN. I CAN’T STAND THIS.’

  Jason tried to comfort me but I didn’t want to be comforted. I wanted to be upset.

  ‘I feel like I have this massive marathon to run and I’m not even at the fucking STARTING LINE. I can’t even get to the BEGINNING OF THE RACE and I fucking HATE THIS!’

  I jumped out of bed and stomped into the bathroom, furious at my body and the world.

  I pulled on my sneakers and my sports clothes and stormed down to the gym. The only way I knew to work through my fury was to run.

  After half an hour on the treadmill and another twenty minutes on the stepper, I went back to the room, slightly buzzed with post-exercise endorphins. I was still upset but the intense anguish had passed.

  The endorphins didn’t last and we spent the day driving around with me trying to pick a fight to justify how miserable I felt. The weekend ended with us sitting on the plane home, me crying quietly while looking out the window at the clouds.

  Back to Dr Bob. This time, I was highly emotional and not doing a very good job of holding back the tears.

  ‘It’s not working. It’s. Not. Working. Please can we move on to IVF?’ I pleaded.

  He looked at me compassionately and I could tell he was choosing his words carefully.

  ‘If we did IVF now, it would be an emotional decision, not a medical one.’

  I was crestfallen.

  ‘You’re still only thirty-two. Medically, we have some time, even though I understand emotionally it’s hard for you. Let’s just try Clomid at an increased dose for three more months and if we still have no luck, we’ll look at IVF.’

  I felt defeated but he was right. Jumping into IVF before we’d given Clomid a proper chance was dumb and reckless. And I was trying hard not to be dumb and reckless any more.

  ‘Let’s do a blood test to see where you’re at in your cycle so we can be sure before we start the new dose.’

  I slunk out of there with a new prescription for Clomid and an irrational desire to slap the happy faces of all the pregnant women in the waiting room as I walked past them.

  I jabbed the elevator button to take me up to the pathology collection lab and sat there sullenly, unable even to make small talk while my blood was taken.

  Two days later, I rang for my results and the receptionist put me through to Dr Bob.

  ‘Well, it turns out you did ovulate,’ he announced.

  ‘But I took my temperature up to day nineteen and it never spiked.’

  ‘According to your results, you ovulated on about day twenty or twenty-one. The higher dosage of Clomid should bring that forward to day fourteen or fifteen. Come and see me in four weeks and we’ll go through it.’

  It wasn’t until an hour later that I remembered Melbourne. Hang on. Late night…feeling merry. That was day nineteen. And if I’d ovulated on day twenty or twenty-one, there was a chance…

  Off to the chemist. No, wait. I still had two spare tests in my bathroom drawer at home. I’d begun to store them. Squirrel-like.

  With supreme willpower, I got through the next few hours at work without making an emergency dash to the chemist. By the time I arrived home, it was 7 pm and I just had a few minutes to wee on a stick before friends arrived for dinner.

  One line. Sigh. Bugger. Knew it. Bugger. Sigh.

  I flung the test on the bathroom counter and went to say hi to our friends and try to enjoy the evening.

  After everyone left, I went back into the bathroom to take off my make-up and brush my teeth. Out of habit, I picked up the test to check it One More Time.

  Two lines.

  I sat on the edge of the bath for a few minutes to look at the stick. I held it up to the light to make sure my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me. No, still two lines.

  I didn’t cry. I walked out of the bathroom and into the kitchen to find Jason stacking the dishwasher. I held up the stick. He whooped. We hugged.

  Finally, hopefully, tentatively, we were on our way.

  TOO MANY WOMEN, NOT ENOUGH PATIENCE

  Voicemail to Wendy from me:

  ‘I just had a sub-editor resign because her priest thinks Cosmo is the work of the devil. She’s Christian. She’s a good sub so I tried to talk her out of it. I told her God created sex so what was the problem? She quoted the bible. It went downhill from there. Do you know any subs who ar
e looking for a job and who aren’t morally opposed to stories about being bi-curious? I’m desperate. We’re on deadline. Call me. Lots of love.’

  In my role as Editor-in-Chief of ACP’s young women’s lifestyle magazines, I oversaw a staff of around seventy women, the vast majority of them under thirty. Since I’d begun at Cosmo, I’d gone from being the youngest in the office to the oldest.

  Like most editors, I’d never had any formal training in how to manage staff. Nonetheless, I’d picked up some skills along the way by working with different editors and bosses, and observing some wildly different management styles, both good and bad.

  My aim was to be inclusive, kind, supportive, nurturing and encouraging with my staff while maintaining stability and being realistic. A boss cannot afford to be moody or play favourites. I did have favourites, of course, but I tried not to be obvious about it. Sometimes I succeeded.

  Mainly, I tried to lead by example, although as the only one on my immediate team with a small child, I was never the first one there in the morning or the last one to leave at night. I turned that into an example of sorts, urging everyone to work shorter, but more efficient, hours. ‘Go home!’ I’d say as I headed for the lift at 6 pm. I was adamant, too, that the staff go out in the world and garner experiences they could bring to the magazine. We had to stay in touch with our readers and it was impossible to do that when you spent every waking hour in a building full of magazine people under fluorescent light. And also? I wanted to feel less guilty about going home.

  Early on, I realised that managing a team is a bit like being one of those variety show entertainers who spin plates on sticks. Just when you think you have all the plates spinning, one wobbles and needs your attention. When that one is spinning again, three more will start to wobble and you’ll have to attend to them. And so on until you’re so sick of the bloody plates you want to go Greek and smash them all on the floor.