Baby makes three!

Bridget Jackson has everything she could ask for. She loves her job as a primary school teacher, she has a caring mum, a doting husband and an amazing group of friends. However, the one thing Bridget doesn’t have and can’t have is a baby. Seven years on and together with her husband Rory, they are still riding the infertility roller-coaster.

There are sex toys, handcuffs (Rory is a policeman after all!), Basques that cut off your circulation and an unfortunate incident with a bottle of Viagra. As Christmas time arrives, and still no baby, their relationship stretches causing them to take a drastic decision that breaks Bridget’s heart.

Will there be a happy ending for Bridget and Rory this Christmas?

I’m afraid I’m not going to give that one away! You need to read the book yourself.

However…..

If you know me, you’ll know Bridget’s story is based on my personal infertility journey. Did I try the Basque technique? Yes, I did. I also own a pair of pink fluffy handcuffs. The Viagra, that’s for book dramatization only, but I’ll admit…. I considered it!

Bridget is one of my favourite book characters, not just because she’s loud, brash and totally inappropriate, but also because underneath she’s just a young woman who wants to be loved and to love. Writing her made me sit back and think about what David and myself went through and just how gruelling the infertility journey was.

Admittedly, our journey took less than a year but still, there was laughter, tears and a lot of failed pregnancy tests, but it made us both we are today.

This is our story….

We’ve all had those embarrassing lessons at school, haven’t we? The ones that teach us ‘how babies are made.’  I remember gasping in horror and thinking to myself, there’s no way my mum and dad would have done that. I much preferred the version where a stork flew over and dropped me off in someone’s garden.

No sooner have we accepted the facts of life; we reach the age where we get taught  ‘how not to make a baby.’ Condoms, contraceptive pills, diaphragms and the withdrawal method (yes, people think this will work). It’s a minefield of information.

However, no-one. Absolutely no-one prepared me for what to do if I COULDN’T get pregnant.

At the tender age of eleven I got what my mum called my first monthly curse. She proudly packed me off to school with my period bag of bulky sanitary towels, spare knickers and a pack of paracetamol, and over the next few years all the schoolgirls scuttled together in corners to offer support as another female joined the period club. To be honest, apart from some mild stomach aches and the dreaded unprepared moments that always arrive when you’re wearing something light coloured and tight (and we resort to stuffing half a toilet roll into our knickers until we get home), then I have to say, mine didn’t give me much trouble.

As we got older, the female conversation clubs turned towards sex. One of my friends had a copy of the book ‘Forever’ by Judy Blume. Well, if any teenager had any doubt about what happened between the covers, after reading this book your questions were well and truly answered; from first crushes to contraceptives, first sex, orgasms and break-ups, it was all included in great detail. We highlighted the best parts, made notes, wrote our thoughts in the side columns and added sticky notes for the next lucky reader before passing the bible on. It’s a huge pity for GCSE English Literature that our exam papers were on ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’.

If the class of ‘91 had been asked to study Judy Blume’s Forever, all the females would have come away with straight A*’s.

However, that book set me up for boys, sex and contraceptives. I knew it all…. Or so I thought.

I started dating my husband, David, aged twenty-one. We moved in together aged twenty-three, got married aged twenty-eight and after my GP took me off the pill because of my Richter scale blood pressure aged thirty-one, we decided (well, I decided), now’s the time to have a baby.

A lot happened in that first year of trying for a baby. We lost my lovely mum very suddenly to cancer; my dad had already been diagnosed with a life limiting illness and despite our attempts through all of this to become ‘three’, it just wasn’t happening.

After a very tearful visit to my GP, we were referred to our local fertility clinic. I remember sitting in the waiting room wondering how I’d arrived here. My body was doing what it should, or so I thought, and no-one had taught me to question it and worse still, no-one in my peer group was going through the same thing.

Our first visit prepared us for the road ahead. Lots of leaflets, appointments, things to research. There was so much information for a task, that, should, in reality, be very simple. Have sex, get pregnant, right? NO!

On our second visit we had to undergo tests. For myself this meant lots of blood being taken and an awful camera examination of my female innards which involved two Nurofen, a pair of stirrups, a gynaecologist with a miners lamp strapped to his head and a hell of a lot of discomfort.

My husband, the fearless man he is, was given a private room, a pile of glossy magazines, a box of fluffy tissues and a specimen pot. He was rewarded with a cup of tea and a biscuit for his bravery.

A week later, sat with the fertility consultant, my ordeal confirmed what I’d been dreading. I didn’t ovulate. No egg, no baby.

How did I not know this? I walked around like a zombie for days after. There were prams everywhere I looked. Pregnant women, babies, toddlers, white blankets with little yellow ducklings…. I felt isolated, alone and cut off from this magic circle of baby making. Women my age were talking about getting pregnant, being pregnant, getting pregnant again…. Trying not to get pregnant…. Where was the group of women that couldn’t get pregnant?

All of a sudden, words and phrases entered my life that I’d never heard of before. Chlomid drugs, day twenty-one progesterone levels, Hysterosalpingograms, ovulation kits, basal body temperatures. We had diary planners (no sweety, you can’t go to that football match tonight, sex is planned). We had pillows to go under my bum, jacking my back end up like a car having its wheel changed. Indents from my feet replaced photographs above the bed and my arms looked like a dart board from all the fertility tests.

The drugs gave me hot sweats, my head was life a sieve, but still we trooped along. Sex, sex, sex, sex, sex. Missionary (think gravity), no movement after, your legs up against the wall while you try to picture those little sperm swimming towards their goal. Folic acid, berries, grapefruit, tuna, tight underpants, loose underpants, temperature check. More sex, extra pillows, sexy knickers, a Basque, pink handcuffs….

We were KNACKERED! – I remember David coming home from work one night, rubbing his stiff neck. He asked me not to jump on it.

As for pregnancy tests, I could have filled a land-mine. I went to different stores just because I was so embarrassed at the amount I bought. Boots, Asda, Tesco. I even drove to Morrisons once, a good four miles away, just because no-one knew me there. I’d hide them all over the house and secretly do them in the bathroom. I’d do the test, put the lid back on, wash my hands, fix the towels on the radiator, wash down the bath and once all my diversion tactics were up, I’d look at the test.

One line. Always that one sad lonely line. And I’d always cry and turn my mums picture towards the wall, because she’d left me, just as I needed her.

Months in and still no sign of the drugs working. For the first time, I started to question if it would ever happen for us. Would this be our life together? Always living in hope? Always being disappointed?

On a visit to the fertility clinic one afternoon, a young woman came rushing out of the consultation room with a huge smile of her face and a tiny black and white picture in her hands. Her mum ran over to her, hugged her and called her ‘my clever girl’. She was pregnant, and as mother and daughter they rejoiced together.

I broke my heart that day in that waiting room. My fertility drugs had failed again, and my mum wasn’t around. How can some people have everything, and others have nothing? I can honestly say, that was one of the saddest days in my life. Regardless, we persevered with our diary planners, cancelling plans to go out so we could stick to the dates and times, taking annual leave for hospital tests and recording my basal temperature every day.

Early spring 2007, I woke up one morning and felt different. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why, I just felt…. weird. I asked for a blood test, but the progesterone levels were still too low. We’d tried for a baby and done everything by the book that month, but the drugs still hadn’t worked. Regardless, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that something had changed. The night coincided with my mum’s first heavenly birthday.

Feeling the need to be there for each other as just David and Louise, we bought a bottle of wine, got pissed, had normal sex on the sofa and woke up with a stinking hangover.

Another week in and I still felt weird. I asked for another blood test and lo and behold! We had a high progesterone level result. I had ovulated. It turned out I had a thirty-five-day cycle, not a twenty-eight day cycle, so all that baby trying mid-month had been for nothing. We should have been baby making in week three. Unfortunately, we’d only done the deed once in week three (the drunk sofa sex), so a pregnancy was unlikely, but still I was delighted. My body was now working as it should do. Maybe, just maybe in our future, we had a chance.

Two weeks later we went to Windermere for the weekend. A chance to celebrate the drugs working and a chance to recuperate before the next month of ‘baby trying’ began. I packed shed loads of tampons, spare knickers and of course, my fertility drugs in readiness for the next month.

Wednesday my due date came and went, Thursday, Friday. I put it down to stress. Sunday morning in a gorgeous hotel room I woke up with a pair of boobs that rivalled Dolly Parton’s and as painful as if they’d done a round with Mike Tyson.

I squeezed them into my little bra while David put his head in his hands and groaned ‘You’re pregnant’.

‘I can’t be…. We only did it once.’  Regardless, David frowned at every sip of wine I had and spent the remainder of the weekend encouraging me to do a pregnancy test.

Monday evening and back in Wigan, David went to Asda and picked up a pregnancy test. The first one someone else had bought for me. It felt strange, knowing he was waiting for the result. Normally they were a secret, something to be ashamed of because I was simply trying to fill the craving need for it to be positive. Reluctantly, I disappeared upstairs, did the test, put the lid back on, washed my hands, fixed the towels on the radiator, washed down the bath and once all my diversion tactics were up, I looked at the test.

Fast-forward to Saturday 6th October 2007 at 1:07 pm and our beautiful, perfect little boy, Thomas William Beioley was born. I can’t describe the wonder, the joy of holding him in my arms. Yes, I missed my mum terribly that day, but to think he was conceived on her birthday brought us all a lot of comfort.

There’s not a day goes by where I don’t look at Tom and think wow! I made that.

Now aged seventeen, Tom doesn’t get it. He exists, and he doesn’t question how he arrived here, but for me, he’s the most beautiful, perfect, cheeky, cocky, irritating, lazy kid to walk this earth, but he's my world.

*

I wrote my character, Bridget, in Mistletoe and Hope, to share my story with a wish that it would help others going through a similar situation. It’s a whirlwind of emotions regardless of if you’re on fertility drugs or undergoing IVF.

It’s a time where you can feel very alone and very isolated, especially if you’re surrounded by people who are not comfortable talking about it.

So many conversations take place about making a baby, or how NOT to make a baby, but no-one prepared me for what you went through if you COULDN’T make a baby.

I’m also aware that for some couples, trying or tried in the past, a success story for whatever reason isn’t meant to be, but when you’ve ridden that train, you gain a set of life-skills that no-one can take away from you. Compassion, empathy, understanding, thoughtfulness and a unique insight into deep emotion.

I take my hat off to you.

With Love,

Louise x