Baby Trap

by Hodge, Sibel

  ‘Hello again, everyone.’ He smiled at the crowd.

  ‘Hello,’ everyone said with enthusiasm, and one old woman next to me let out a girlish giggle and gave Papa Yogi a coy smile as if she fancied the pants off him.

  ‘OK, let’s start with a breathing mantra,’ he said. ‘Rub your hands together and place them in prayer position with the thumbs pressed into your sternum.’

  I did as I was told, liking the sound of breathing exercises. Nothing too strenuous, just nice relaxing deep breaths. Fab.

  ‘We’re going to take a deep breath and repeat Sat Nam. Long on the Sat and short on the Nam.’ He nodded at everyone to begin.

  A collective deep breath took over the room as they all started chanting, ‘Saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat Nam.’

  ‘And again,’ he said.

  I joined in with everyone, not really knowing what it was supposed to do, and feeling a bit embarrassed, but trying to be open to it. If it got rid of all my stress, who cared if I sounded like an injured sheep.

  ‘Now, we’ll do the warm-up with Sun Salutations.’ Papa Yogi stood up, raising his hands so far behind his head I thought they must be spring loaded, then sweeping them down to the floor and performing a few jumpy press-up type thingies before bouncing back to his feet again. ‘And REPEAT!’ He ordered.

  All the other old biddies were contorting their bodies in positions mine just wouldn’t cooperate with. They were bent in half, feet and hands flat on the floor, foreheads pressed against their knees, and I could only get the tips of my fingertips to my knees. But I wasn’t going to be beaten. Oh, no! If the oldies could do it, I certainly could.

  Now what? I glanced up to see which move they were on next and ouch…crick in my neck!

  ‘And LUNGE…’ he shouted.

  Everyone inhaled in unison and stepped their right leg back. I got confused between my left and right and had to change it a few times before we were onto Plank pose, which seemed a bit easier, if you were a plank.

  A few more laps of the warm up and I was getting more into the swing of things, although I was a bit out of breath, and it reminded me of a TV program I’d watched once about boot camps. I checked out the oldies, who seemed to be breathing perfectly, and they hadn’t even broken into a sweat. I grunted and groaned loudly with exertion, much to the annoyance of the people around me who kept glaring at my sudden outbursts. God, if this was the beginners to intermediate class, I dreaded to think what the advanced one was like.

  ‘And HANDS UP!’ Papa Yogi jumped to a standing position with his arms in the air, then pressed them back in prayer pose. After all the vigorous bouncing around his next words were like music to me. ‘And take a moment to breathe. Nice deep, slow breaths. In and out.’

  Oh, yes, I liked this position. Much less strenuous. I tried my best to ignore all the other heavy breathers around me, which sounded like I was in the middle of a dirty conference call on a sex chat line.

  Then I attempted to keep up as we flew through various poses called Upward Dog, Cat-Cow, and Downward Dog. Why were they obsessed with animals?

  Out of breath, wobbly, and trying to get my body into positions that were just not normal wasn’t exactly what I’d call relaxing, but I decided to persevere. Poppy swore by it. Of course I wouldn’t be able to manage everything in the first class, but if I carried on, I’d be chilled-out and pregnant in no time.

  I found myself in Triangle pose, although I wasn’t entirely sure how I’d got there. My right foot was in front of me, the toes pointing forwards, and my left foot way behind with my toes pointing out to the side so I looked like, yep, you guessed it, a triangle. My right hand was supposed to be on my ankle like the other contortionists but I could only get it to just below my knee. And my left hand was attempting to stay up in the air without dropping off from exhaustion.

  ‘And we’ll move into Half Moon pose,’ Papa Yogi said as I blew the sweaty hair off my forehead to see what he was up to now.

  ‘Slide your right foot forward.’

  Forward? Any more forward and I was going to cut myself in half!

  ‘Now place your right hand on the ground, palms flat, and lift your left leg so it’s parallel to the floor.’

  Well, that was easy for him to say.

  I just managed to touch the floor with the tip of my right hand, trying desperately to support my body weight since my left leg was now quivering in the air somewhere behind me. But then I made the mistake of looking at the person next to me to check if I was doing it right, and that caused me to over-wobble, sending me crashing to the floor. I missed the soft landing of the mat, bashed my nose on the hard laminate flooring, and almost ripped my arm out of its socket in the process.

  ‘Unh!’ I saw stars and the pain in my nose made my eyes stream.

  I rolled on the ground, clutching my nose, partly to make sure it was still in one piece, and partly because if I let it go I knew it would hurt even more.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Papa Yogi stood over me as the rest of the OAPs looked on in astonishment.

  I pulled my hand away from my nose and there was blood. Lots of blood.

  Everyone gasped.

  ‘You’re having a nosebleed,’ Papa Yogi said, pushing my head back and pinching the bridge of my nose hard.

  ‘Ouch!’ I yelped as he squeezed harder. I thought all these yoga people were supposed to be kind and healing. He was more like a Taliban torturer.

  He carried on squeezing for about five minutes as the others huffed and puffed and sighed like I’d ruined all their fun.

  ‘How’s that?’ He finally removed his vice-like pinch.

  I put my head forward and waited for blood drips to appear. Nothing. Phew! Although I couldn’t say the same for my shoulder, which was now throbbing like it had just been amputated. I shrugged it round in its socket and winced.

  ‘Would you like to carry on?’ Papa Yogi asked, although the tone in his voice suggested I should bugger off now before I interrupted even more of their precious time.

  Was he joking? No, I would most definitely not be carrying on. This was hardly the relaxing experience I was hoping for.

  More Pricks

  My temperature hasn’t gone up again so I haven’t ovulated yet. One more go at sex tonight and then that will be enough for this month. How can I make it more stimulating and exciting? Karl was taking longer and longer to get a stiffy. What if one day he couldn’t get it up? Right, thinking cap on. I need to make it more exciting and spontaneous. Even though it’s not spontaneous, at all, because we absolutely have to do it today in a small slot of time between him getting home, dinner, and Amelia coming round. Maybe I should answer the door naked. No, perhaps not. I’m sure our neighbour across the road caught a sneaky peek the last time I did that.

  This was my sixth and final cycle of Clomid, and I couldn’t even bring myself to think about what would happen if it didn’t work.

  My womb is a flower.

  Today is my first acupuncture session, and the thought of being pricked with needles is a teensy bit scary. The way I feel at the moment, I’ve had enough pricks to last me a lifetime!

  But it was one of the suggestions Poppy came up with, so I’d been Googling it like mad. Apparently it was good for promoting the circulation of blood in the pelvic cavity, improving ovarian function, and enhancing follicle production. It could also reduce stress levels, and mine were through the roof.

  As soon as I entered the Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture Centre a pungent smell of incense and herbs hit me, which made it quite comforting somehow.

  ‘I’m here for an acupuncture session,’ I told the tiny Chinese lady behind the counter.

  ‘One minute, please.’ She disappeared behind a curtain and came back with an equally tiny Chinese man who looked a bit like Mr Miyagi from The Karate Kid.

  ‘Follow me, please.’ He took off through a curtain at the side of the counter.

  The back of the shop had been set up for treatments, and there were several rooms wit
h couches and incense burning. He led me to one of the rooms and motioned for me to sit down on a chair next to the couch.

  After asking me for details of my complaint and general health, he took my pulse in three different areas on each wrist and looked at my tongue while nodding to himself.

  A few minutes later, I was up on the couch on my back with needles in my head, neck, legs, and stomach. I looked like that guy out of the Hellraiser films.

  ‘Just relax and lie here until I come back. Then I’ll take these ones out and put some in your back.’

  I thought it would be quite hard to relax with hundreds of needles in you (OK, slight exaggeration, probably twenty-five), but for the first time in ages I felt a calmness wash over me and promptly disappeared into la la land.

  Half an hour later, he woke me up, took out the needles and asked me to turn over so he could do my back.

  When he left, I thought I’d drop off again, but my brain wouldn’t shut up. All I could think about was what we’d do if all the treatments didn’t work. Karl hated the thought of IVF. He thought it was messing around with nature somehow. Growing a baby in a test tube wasn’t his idea of becoming a dad. Hell, it wasn’t exactly the way I saw motherhood, either, and I wasn’t looking forward to the possibility of having to go through even more stressful treatments, but if it meant getting pregnant, what choice did I have?

  Then what if that didn’t work? There were other things we could try. Egg donation, surrogacy, adoption, and I’d checked all of them out on the Internet.

  Egg donation still wouldn’t guarantee a successful outcome, and Karl was worried that we wouldn’t know anything about the mother’s genes. I replayed a conversation in my head that we’d had a while ago…

  ‘What if the baby grew up to be a serial killer?’ he said. ‘The mum could be a complete nutter for all we know.’

  ‘All donors are screened for any health problems and have a psychological evaluation before they’re allowed to donate,’ I said. ‘They won’t let any nutters in.’

  ‘Yes, but how do we know for sure?’

  I shrugged. ‘Do you ever know with your own children what will happen? Who knows what quirks or genes you might pass down to your kids? I mean, look at your cousin Jamie who’s a kleptomaniac.’

  ‘That was a misunderstanding. He’s a diabetic and his blood sugar was really low so he needed to eat some chocolate quickly. That’s the only reason he took it from the shop.’

  ‘What, a hundred times, from shops all over the London area?’ I raised a disbelieving eyebrow.

  ‘Well, stealing a few bars of chocolate isn’t exactly on a par with being a nutter.’

  ‘Adoption is another option,’ I huffed. Although it could take longer than six months to be approved, and then God knows how long to actually find a child. There weren’t enough babies to go around, so we would either have to consider an older child, who would no doubt have a whole host of psychological problems by being separated from its parents, or consider adopting a baby from abroad. The possible complications of adoption were pretty scary.

  ‘What about Graham Beange?’ Karl nodded knowingly at me. ‘He was adopted and murdered his dad. There was a big study done years ago into the amount of killers who’d been adopted at birth.’

  I sighed, feeling miffed that he seemed to be putting obstacles in the way. ‘You’re obsessed with killers!’

  ‘What about Sandra Bridewell a.k.a The Black Widow. She killed three husbands, and she was adopted,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I can understand that sometimes! Sometimes I’d like to kill mine.’ I rolled my eyes at him. ‘Not every child who’s adopted will turn out to be a killer. That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘But my point is, you just don’t know, do you? Most of the children will have lots of social, psychological, and health issues from being abandoned. That won’t be easy to cope with. And I very much doubt we’d be lucky enough to get a baby, which would mean adopting one from abroad, and that brings a whole host of other problems.

  ‘Yes, but what about…’ I wracked my brains, trying to come up with a counter-argument. ‘Madonna! She’s adopted and all her kids seem to be fine. And Angelina and Brad. They adopted loads of kids. If it’s good enough for them, it should be good enough for us,’ I said smugly.

  ‘We need to do some more research on it before we have a proper discussion.’

  ‘There’s surrogacy, too. Your sperm is OK, so you could fertilise another woman, and she could carry our baby.’ I decided to ignore his negativity.

  ‘Oh, wow, you mean I get to have sex with another woman?’ He winked at me. ‘Are there any hot babes that do it?’

  ‘Ha! You wish!’ I raised an eyebrow.

  He paused for a moment, thinking, maybe about hot babes. ‘What about that case in the papers a while ago?’

  ‘What case?’

  ‘A couple made an agreement with a surrogate, and then she decided halfway through the pregnancy that she wanted to keep the child. They’d already handed over five grand in expenses, and then the court ruled that the surrogate could keep the baby and the couple would have to pay her child support!’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake! Anyone would think you didn’t want a baby,’ I snapped.

  His face softened. ‘Of course I do. It’s just that there are a lot of issues to consider if your treatment doesn’t work. And with surrogacy, it’s not like you can choose the perfect woman with the perfect genes to have a baby with. I already have the perfect woman.’ He smiled at me. ‘With surrogacy we’d be dealing with limited options. The baby wouldn’t have your genes, or your feisty spirit.’

  OK, so maybe it was the voice of reason, and maybe it was true. I just didn’t want to think about it.

  ****

  Half an hour later, Mr Miyagi arrived to remove the needles. ‘I’d like you to come once a week. And it would also be beneficial to give you some Chinese herbs to increase your fertility,’ he said.

  ‘OK.’ I followed him back into the shop as he set about mixing various things in individual paper bags. It looked like a concoction of dried bark, leaves, and goat’s poo.

  Ew. I hoped it tasted better than it looked.

  He handed me the bags. ‘Boil these into a tea and drink them twice a day.’

  As soon as I got home I boiled up the compost-looking herbs. The smell as they bubbled away was gross.

  I took one sip and heaved. I tried again and managed to get a little bit down, although it was threatening to come back up pretty quick. Blah! It was like drinking boiled up sumo wrestlers’ jock straps. No wonder you never saw a fat Chinese person if this was what they had to drink.

  I poured the tea down the sink and chucked the rest of the herbs in a kitchen cupboard. Maybe I’d just stick with the acupuncture instead.

  Getting Pregnant is Like Wanting a PlayStation

  I didn’t think about babies for four whole hours today, which must’ve been a record. And that was only because I didn’t turn on the TV to be bombarded with adverts for baby stuff, I didn’t go out of the house to see happy mothers pushing their babies along the street with glowing smiles on their faces, and I didn’t have any clients who had children they wanted to talk about.

  Instead, I scrubbed the house from top to bottom. It was way overdue for a spring clean anyway, and it did actually help to get my mind off things for a while.

  Well, that was until Wicked Stepmother phoned up. Groan. I’m surprised she needs a phone when she’s a witch and could use telepathy or a spell to annoy me instead.

  ‘Ah, Gina,’ she trilled.

  ‘Hello, Lavinia. How are you?’ I tried to sound pleased to hear from her, but wasn’t sure if she was buying it.

  ‘Let me get straight to the point,’ she said in a brusque voice. No change there, then. No “Hello, how are you, Gina? What have you been up to?” Oh, no, the only people Lavinia thought about were herself and her equally selfish daughter. ‘It’s Jayne and Wayne’s wedding anniversary tonight and I wanted to a
sk if you could baby-sit for them. The au pair has suddenly left them in the lurch.’

  The first thing I did was laugh to myself about the Jayne and Wayne reference. Next, I cringed. I didn’t really want to be around any kids at the moment. It sounds strange when you desperately want them yourself, but it’s a constant reminder of your problems. It was bad enough seeing Kerry, who was now showing her beautiful baby bump. And why couldn’t Jayne ask me herself?

  ‘Um...’ I wondered if I could come up with an excuse in one second. Think! ‘OK,’ I replied when my brain-wracking didn’t work. Shit.

  ‘Good. Your father and I are going out for a meal with them,’ she rattled off quickly.

  ‘How nice,’ I muttered, wondering why anyone in their right minds would want Lavinia tagging along on their wedding anniversary celebrations.

  ‘Well, that’s all settled, then. We have a table booked at Rosita’s at eight, so I’ll expect you at their house around seven-fifteen,’ she said, all business-like.

  ‘OK. How’s Dad?’ I asked, and then realized I was listening to the dialling tone.

  I stared at the phone in my hand, not really believing she’d just done that. And not even a mention of how the fertility treatment was going. Still, why should I expect her to be any different? She’d been the same ever since she performed some kind of voodoo and swept my dad under her spell. Why couldn’t I stand up to her?

  ****

  We arrived at Jayne and Wayne’s six-bedroomed mansion on the dot and Lavinia still moaned at us for being late. I walked into their newly refurbished kitchen that was practically as big as the whole downstairs floor area of my house. It gleamed and sparkled with new appliances yet to be used. The place was immaculate, and I knew for a fact Jayne didn’t have either the time or the inclination to get a mop and bucket out. The poor au pair would be worked to death, which was why there always seemed to be a high turnover of them in this household.