The Fence-Painting Fortnight of Destiny: A memoir

by Meshel Laurie

  Adrian never wanted to discuss it, even as the years drifted by without a pregnancy. I started to suspect it was because he was hoping it wouldn’t happen, but as he refused to be drawn on the subject, I had no way of knowing for sure. So the years ticked by and the screaming of my empty uterus grew so loud it overwhelmed me at times, but I knew I couldn’t mention it at home. I remember sitting on a plane once, completely exhausted from another work trip to Melbourne, waiting endlessly for the rest of the passengers to board and hoping the random next to me didn’t touch or talk to me. I was looking out the window at the tarmac, thinking about nothing, when I heard a little girl say ‘Mummy’ in that way they do when they’re caught somewhere between curiosity and fear. I never even saw the child, but suddenly I was crying, uncontrollably, into the window well. ‘I don’t think anyone’s ever going to call me Mummy,’ I thought to myself for the first time ever, and it hurt in the way things do when you know you’ve known them for ages.

  We applied for international adoption at one point. Well, I applied and Adrian signed where I told him to. It seemed like an incredible long shot. It would take at least five years, if we passed all the evaluation tests, could afford the ongoing costs of paperwork and travel, and the agreement between our state and the country in question wasn’t broken in the meantime.

  The Australian government closed its Ethiopian Adoption Program in June 2012, devastating hundreds of couples who’d already waited years for their applications to meander through the system. They were back at square one, which was exactly the scenario I was terrified of when we applied, although I understand the necessity for the government to ensure they aren’t dealing in trafficked children. There are enormous profits to be made from selling children stolen from developing countries to First World couples who’ll pay any amount of money to fulfil their dream of parenthood. It’s such a profoundly emotive issue that the harsh realities of why it’s all so difficult are sometimes hard to accept and seem very unfair. Lots of things seem unfair to the foetally challenged.

  Like most women who want to be mums, but aren’t for whatever reason, I found myself judging the fitness of other parents, and lamenting the unfairness of their ability to breed. I’ll never forget sitting in the waiting room of some kind of scanning facility, and watching a woman pour Coke into her toddler’s bottle. ‘It’s the only thing she’ll drink,’ she explained to her questioning friend. What sort of God would inflict her upon a child and leave me barren?

  If it wasn’t God’s fault, then maybe it was the government’s. Without the single-mother’s pension, women like her would have given up babies like that to nice women like me. Yes, I did a lot of thinking about who deserved babies around that time. I knew I did, for sure, but I was a pretty harsh judge when it came to everyone else. I was conveniently ignoring the dharma in all of this.

  Oh I was putting a lot of thought into the lovely Buddhist home I’d be bringing a child into, and how lucky a person would be to be rescued from a Third World orphanage and raised in my lovely home by a fantastic Buddhist like me— until Adrian and I attended a two-day seminar as part of turning our expression of interest in international adoption into a formal application.

  It was a massive eye-opener for me. Over those two days, we watched videos, and listened to grown-up adopted people speak, some of whom were well adjusted and all for it, while others were not. We heard every kind of horror story, from kids with intense behavioural problems, to parents deciding it ‘wasn’t working’ and sending children back. It was all very harrowing, and when I fled to the toilet for a cry at one point, I ran into three other women doing the same. For me, personally, the hardest part was hearing that so many of these babies were given up for adoption because their mothers could not afford to feed them. That absolutely killed me. The pain of looking into a future without motherhood was intense, but I couldn’t imagine the pain of walking away from a child you loved because you couldn’t afford to feed it. I felt like a vulture.

  The amounts of money being discussed in that room— $30,000 for a Thai baby, $50,000 for a Chinese baby—were obviously significant, and as I looked around the room at the faces of people begging for the opportunity to spend it, I couldn’t help but think how many mums could keep their babies if that cash was funnelled elsewhere.

  That was the point at which the dharma kicked in and I knew the way forward for me. I believed (and still do) that if I was unable to conceive, it was ultimately a karmic debt I owed somewhere along the line, and there was nothing for it but to find a way to create some good karma from my miserable situation. I knew that channelling some money and energy into children’s causes was a positive course of action, and it gave me a lot of comfort.

  I understand there are still kids in the world in desperate need of families to love them; I have friends who’ve successfully adopted from overseas, and I’ve met people who grew up in austere orphanages who’d have given anything for a family of their own. I’m not saying international adoption is wrong, but for me, I decided I wanted my money to go in a different direction, so that’s what I did.

  We hadn’t tried IVF at this stage.

  Although brief, our conversations had taught me that Adrian was less than enthusiastic about the idea of IVF, but I decided I couldn’t really put motherhood behind me until I’d given it a go. I remember very clearly what my thoughts were when he resisted, because it was the first time I kicked him out.

  I had two weeks off from work, and I sent him to a motel with his Xbox and a carton of beer to have a think about things. I painted the front fence, which I’d been waiting for him to do for six months, and as I painted I thought about where I was at.

  I remember thinking that I wanted to have a baby more than anything. I recognised and accepted the fact that Adrian did not. I felt pragmatically that my chances of finding someone else to have a baby with at 35 were slim, so I decided to push him into it, because I believed he owed it to me.

  I figured that if we were successful, he’d either get into it and we’d be a happy family, or he wouldn’t and he’d have to go, but either way, I’d be a mum. If we were unsuccessful, and I was committed to trying only once, then I would be right there where I was, doting on my dogs, sleeping in on the weekends and taking the odd nice holiday. It wasn’t such a bad life, but I wasn’t going to let Adrian stop me from giving motherhood a go.

  Yes, there was some very deep meditation during the painting of that fence!

  So I dragged Adrian through every arduous step of IVF. On one memorable occasion, I burst into the local pathology place with a small jar, in a brown paper bag, containing his sperm sample. I’d driven like the clappers with it tucked under my armpit. I knew that the benefits of keeping it warm were probably an old wives’ tale, but I wasn’t taking any chances. So, although breathless, I tried to act casual as I arrived with my delicate cargo, only to be greeted by a stunned pathology nurse who shrieked, ‘Oh my God—you’re the girl from Rove!’ so loudly that it echoed around the shopping plaza. I swear everyone within a kilometre radius turned around to look, probably expecting to see Corinne or Carrie.

  ‘Not anymore,’ I said, now with two reasons to feel self-conscious, ‘I just need to drop this in.’

  She embarked on a pantomime of discretion when she realised what is was, but continued to ask questions about Rove as we both filled in the paperwork.

  The many and varied tests painted a positive picture in terms of IVF, according to our specialist, who said there was very little chance of our conceiving naturally, but that our chances with IVF were excellent. So there we were, scarcely six months after that fence-painting fortnight of destiny, pushing through our second IVF cycle, which produced a modest, but acceptable, six eggs.

  So once they’ve harvested the eggs, they take them to the lab for analysis and fertilisation. That night, they phoned to say that only four of the eggs were any good; the following day they phoned to say that only two were successfully fertilised. I was nervous about our
rate of attrition, and felt very protective over those two surviving embryos, so when the doctor asked how many I wanted implanted, I said to go ahead with both. I knew Adrian wasn’t keen on the idea of twins, but I also knew there was no way he’d go through IVF again, so it was in for a penny, in for a pound time, and there I was in the bright, white room with the three lovely men impregnating me.

  Two very long weeks later I was back in my doctor’s office looking at a monitor to see if those little babies were still in there. All of a sudden, in that soupy, grey ultrasound image, we saw a little flashing light. On, off, on, off. ‘That’s it,’ he said quietly, biting his bottom lip and manoeuvring his wand for a better look. ‘It’s implanted my dear, you are pregnant.’

  ‘What about the other one?’ I asked, holding my breath.

  ‘Oh, did we put two in?’

  He manoeuvred that wand around a bit more and sure enough, there was another little flashing light, just as bright as the first, blinking away somewhere deep inside my body. ‘There he is,’ he said. ‘It looks like you’re having twins.’

  We put on a brilliant pregnancy between the three of us, although we weren’t mollycoddled through it by any means. My father had a massive heart attack when I was eight weeks in, after which Adrian and I made a mad dash from Brisbane to Toowoomba, facing the very real possibility he’d be dead by the time we got there. He wasn’t, but we were certainly advised by the doctor to say anything we’d hate to have left unsaid. In a display I don’t think any of us expected or quite knew what to do with, I was absolutely hysterical at the sight of him lying almost lifeless on the intensive care bed. I told him I was having twins and begged him not to die. (Every now and then he pretends he doesn’t remember and makes me retell him that story. I suppose it had been a long time since I’d shown him any love at all, so it’s no wonder he likes to make me relive it.)

  He pulled through that terrible day, and had triple-bypass surgery two weeks later. The night before his surgery he asked the surgeon, completely seriously, if he could ‘check out’ that night, have a Chinese feed with the family, and be back in the morning for his op. The surgeon, who was Egyptian by birth, was terribly troubled because he thought he was misunderstanding the conversation. He was more troubled when we assured him he’d heard correctly.

  Two weeks after Pop’s op, at the exciting twelve-week mark of my pregnancy when you’re supposed to be able to tell people the happy news, Adrian fell over in a gutter, blind drunk, and snapped his ankle. It was a tricky break, needed surgery, became infected, blah, blah, blah, ended up taking twelve months to heal, during which he lived in the rumpus room under the house, which seemed to suit the distance developing in our relationship.

  As my pregnancy went on, I attended appointments and scans alone. I slept alone and made plans alone. No photos of my belly, no one else talking to it, rubbing it or waiting to feel it move. No pillow talk about names. Not much talking at all really. No kisses for mum.

  It was the happiest time of my life, but also the loneliest.

  By the time I added the usual and unusual work bullshit into the equation, every man in my life was crumbling at the precise moment of my one and only pregnancy, leaving me to soldier on alone, and pick up even more of their slack. I was terrifically pissed off, and still am to be honest.

  Finally I met my babies, on 20 November 2009. It was all very sudden because I’d developed pre-eclampsia, which is some kind of high blood pressure/hypertension thing (surprise, surprise!). They gave me something to drop my blood pressure quickly and warned me that I might feel ‘spaced out’ during the caesarean. Oh God, I was off my face. Adrian was sitting next to my head, refusing to look over the sheet at the babies being born, and I was worrying about him freaking out—so, in my extremely stoned state, I started talking to him about one of his favourite shows, Ice Road Truckers.

  On and on I went about those guys who drive big trucks over the frozen lakes of Canada, recalling dramatic bits he’d loved at the time, asking him questions I knew the answers to, thinking I was doing a brilliant job of keeping him calm and relaxed. He thought I was having a psychotic episode and was more terrified than ever, particularly as I occasionally broke into spirited chants of Om Mani padme hum.

  I was aware of the chatter of the doctors and nurses, but not paying any attention, so I was taken completely by surprise when I heard a baby crying. Adrian’s eyes looked past me and grew to three times their normal size, his jaw dropped and his face went white. I followed his eye-line until I saw someone covered from head to toe in blue, holding aloft in their gloved hands a naked, squirming, screaming little creature, covered in gunk and turning purple with rage.

  That was my lady baby, Dali.

  I was trying to focus on what they were saying, but just too stoned, when I heard another one.

  Up went little Louie, into the air, squawking even louder than his sister.

  Before I knew it, one of them was lying on my chest, and the other one was in Adrian’s arms. They were wrapped up tightly, and looked like caterpillars with weird humanoid faces. I couldn’t make my arms do what I wanted them to do, and was terrified the baby would roll right off me and onto the floor, so I asked the nurse to grab it, and promptly fell fast asleep.

  No photos of the birth, no kisses, or ‘well done’ for Mum.

  The babies spent three weeks in the Special Care Nursery at Redcliffe Hospital, which was a fantastic opportunity for me to learn how to care for them. I spent many nights sitting up there, in between their cribs, chatting away with the two or three midwives on duty. I never slept of course. They needed to be fed every two hours, and then every three. It took me an hour and a half to change and feed them both, so it was a pretty tight turn-around. I only remember it fondly now, and often wish I could be back there, in that peaceful nursery, in the middle of the night, between my two tiny babies.

  I was back at work ten days after they were born, but only for a week, because I hadn’t saved enough, and then I was on my Christmas holidays. I was the only member of my original radio team left standing by January 2010, and had been joined just before the babies were born by Tim Blackwell, who, I have to say, has turned out to be nothing short of my good luck charm.

  MTM & HH

  I was definitely rewarded for my struggles with the arrival of Tim Blackwell in 2009. He’d worked with Hughesy and Kate in Melbourne, so I knew he was a good operator.

  For the first time since I left Melbourne, I was working with someone from my world, who thought like me, had the same work ethic as me, and understood how to do the job we were being paid to do, and how to do it really well. Finally I was working with someone, and not around someone.

  I knew that with Tim I had a very real chance of scoring a job back in Melbourne. We both knew we needed a third though, and we embarked upon a painful six-month search to find him. (It was always going to be a ‘him’. There are no good girls left in radio, remember? You’re hardly going to waste two on one show!)

  The search was painful because it meant having to work with someone new almost every week. Most of them weren’t even contenders, but mates filling in to help us out. Wil Anderson did a few days here and there, Jason Dundas did a few, as did James Kerley. Even UK comedian Mark Watson did a week while he was in town for shows, but eventually they were all off again, back to their lives in Sydney, Melbourne and London.

  Jonathan Brown, captain of the Brisbane Lions, was our most constant companion, bless him, but unfortunately, like most talented, smart, motivated, hardworking people, Brownie already had a great job. Mind you, given the injuries he sustained in the following couple of seasons, perhaps he should’ve stuck with us—Tim and I hardly ever need work-related surgery, unlike Brownie who goes under the knife with about as much trepidation as most of us feel on a visit to the post office. He was hit by a car not long ago, and without a word of a lie, he walked away, but the car needed to be towed. He’s a hard bastard, and would make a great broadcaster if he ever gives up
slamming himself against other hard bastards for a living.

  We had a few rugby league boys through too. Obviously they’re not famous for their witty repartee, but Sam Thaiday, captain of the Brisbane Broncos, is one of the smartest, funniest people I’ve ever met, and a joy to be around. Big Sammy was also quite happily employed of course, so was only able to help us out from time to time.

  We had a few newsreaders through, and lots of colourful local identities banging down the door, but Tim and I knew we were onto a good thing, as long as we didn’t blow it by teaming up with the wrong person. Terrible radio teammates can be very difficult to get rid of! In my own mind, I was adamant that no one firmly rooted in Brisbane would get the job. The last thing I needed was to be tied up with someone who’d scream ‘Queenslander!’ in the face of an opportunity to move down south, so the weeks turned into months, until even our footy-playing friends had to get back to their own jobs, and we were really running out of options.

  Tim and I wanted someone great, but everyone great had a job, and no one with a job in Melbourne or Sydney would leave it to move to Brisbane, for exactly the same reason I was desperate to leave—it had the capacity to be a career-ending move. More than one great person seriously considered it, but just couldn’t commit to it in the end, and I couldn’t blame them.

  We caught Lehmo in a slim window of unemployment, but by the time the suits mulled it over, the window closed and he’d been offered a job in Melbourne. Dave Thornton had all but accepted the post, until management hatched a plan whereby he’d start training with the Brisbane Broncos to help him appear ‘more manly’ to the market. Bye-bye Dave.