Going it alone

One Today!

2008-03-23T13:48:00.000-07:00

Special Day.
Can't quite believe it.
Snowed, which was exciting, and the girls loved their presents. Anyone want ideas for birthday gifts, I went through quite a few - just ask.
Special breakfast, lots of toys and playing.
Wore fancy dress for our giant raucus tea party.
twenty people and cumcuber sandwiches.
Eat chocolate brownies and chocolate cake. Twin One tried to steal extra from her sisters plate.
They were impeccably behaved.
They were happy.
I was proud.
One Year Old.
I've even run out of ticker.
Amazing.
One.

Nearly, but not quite...

2008-03-21T12:26:00.000-07:00

One.

Took them to lunch today in a child friendly restaurant. They sat in high chairs gazing around, pulling at the string of their helium filled balloons. And while my mother and I eat, they quietly tucked into scrambled eggs and beans on toast, mesmerised by being out and the noise and the music.
They are very funny. They can both get up stairs now, and fast. Twin Two learned first; Twin one copied a few minutes later and now can overtake her sister, elbowing her out the way.
My nephews third word was ‘moon’ and my nieces was ‘light’. My daughters, more prosaically, say 'mummy' 'bye bye' - and ‘nana’ for banana.
Took the girls to the aquarium, carried them round in Ergo back packs. Entranced by fish. Waved at the sharks in the tank. Eeked a lot.
Separation anxiety starting. They clamber all over me, and cry if I go away for too long. I’m like a climbing frame and an assault course combined.
They are sociable children and wave and smile a lot. They babble away and rear up on their back legs like meer cats. They even do strange yoga holds, standing on their heads with their bums in the air.
They adore music and bounce when I put anything on. They are trying to stand up and Twin Two has begun to cruise.

I’ve been planning their birthday for months. It’s only a few days away and I already have about 160 pounds worth of gifts to give them. Not that they’ll register, but it’s hard not to buy. They are also going to have their first chocolate. My sister-in-law is baking a chocolate cake with chocolate icing. But I really want their first chocolate to come from me, so I spent this week attempting to make biscuits and brownies (I can’t cook). After a major dud batch, I succeeded with Nigella’s brownies, gooey and hot. I’m going to give the babies a little bit each for lunch with a candle stuck in top before their birthday tea party (cucumber and smoked salmon and egg and cress sandwiches in triangles and lots of cakes and hot cross buns).

*********************

Read an interesting book about the fertility business – Everything Conceivable by Liz Mundy. Would recommend it. Frightened me though, as I realised how blithely, how thoughtlessly, I had embraced IVF and ICSI and drugs and other non-natural methods of conception (I had no known fertility problems, only the lack of a man). The book makes it clear where the research is lacking – for example, the impact of the liquid culture on the embryos and the effects of sticking a needle into an egg for ICSI. Even progesterone supplements are apparently correlated with some genital malformations in boy babies.
The book includes a description of ICSI. Did you know the lab technicians don’t just randomly choose the sperm to put in the egg (the thought of that spellbinds me; my childrens' fate in their hands) but then cut off the tail so it is less wiggly and can’t get away. If the sperm gets stuck in the process, they just move onto another one, and another child is born. Makes me somewhat dizzy.
I’m certainly not saying I regret conceiving this way. I cannot ever do that. I adore my children. They are the most wonderful things. But this week I have worried that I may not have done right by them. They exist because of this technology - but have I created problems for them further down the line?
Anyone else ever have these fears?

Mother's Day

2008-03-01T15:24:00.000-08:00

.... well not for another thirty five minutes. But it's as good as for me.

This week, an ex-boyfriend came to visit. We were talking about mother's day. He has two children and he was telling me how he was going to buy a card for his wife and a card for his mother. And I said that possibly the only disadvantage of not having a husband, is that there is no one to send me a mother's day card.

On Friday morning, the post arrived. I was with my brother and Flavia, who is the woman who helps me with the babies (I would say nanny, but that sounds as if she looks after the children while I swan about. In fact, we care for them together). The post arrived, including two large brown envelopes addressed to 'mummy' in coloured pencil. Inside each was a hand made card with a photo of my girls and a handprint done in paint, and a message, 'happy mother's day mummy'.
While I was out last week, visiting a friend who has just had a baby (single, DI) Flavia organised the girls and made the cards.
I was incredibly touched. I felt quite teary. The cards are on my mantle piece now.

Also in the post was another card. When I opened it up it played a tune: "MY MUMMYS THE GREATEST MUM". There was a message, from my father: "What Twin 1 and Twin 2 would have sent you if they had the money. You are doing a great job as a mum."
Felt teary. Feel all emotional when I hear the garish tune.

This evening I received an e-mail from my mother, 'Happy Mother's Day.'

And just now, I went upstairs to cuddle Twin One who was coughing in bed, and I went into my room to root around for a book (Everything Conceivable, about assisted conception) to read in the bath, and on my pillow was a bag with a card saying 'For Sunday' and inside was another Mother's Day card "From Twin One and Twin Two" and a trashy magazine, and a little box of chocolate eggs and a novel and a bottle of cava.
My best friend, the girls' godmother, came to visit us this morning, and must have put it there to surprise me.

*************

Today is March the First and this month my girls will be one year old. I think of them as 'the children' now, not as the babies. It is full on fun in my house (when they are not ill... which Twin One has been for a week). They clamber over me, and cuddle into me, and eek and squeek and babble and stand up everywhere holding onto corners and edges, and Twin One has fallen in love with a stuffed cat and Twin Two began her first cruising this week and smiles so much that people always say to me, that child has such a beautiful smile, she's such a smiley baby. They are very, very heavy. Twin Two is solidly into 12-18 month clothes. She has also started to point at everything and really enjoys handing me things - chewed up bits of toast, for example. They both love houmous - smeared all over their face - and today I gave them their first ever bit of cake - a little crumbled piece of wholefood Carrot (they loved it).

***********************

A poignant moment a few weeks ago. Up to now, I have been the centre of their world. They notice each other more and more and laugh at each other. But their main relationship has been with me.
I was in my bedroom having a rest during their nap. The girls, who sleep in the room next door, woke up and began to babble, blah di blah di blah and eeks... getting up noises. I could imagine them pulling themselves up on the sides of their cots and peering at each other as they chatted. They were having a really good time. There was laughter and conversation.
For the first time, I felt like the outsider. I could feel what it would be like to be them, alone in their bedroom, mummy in the next room, laughing with their sister. I could imagine what it would be like to be a child and to have the adults elsewhere... to feel like it was Them and Us.
I love it when they get on, and I want them to play together and be friends. But it was a strange feeling, and a bit sad because it felt like the first separation.

*************

I don't think there is much else to report here. My life goes on. I think I will not try for another baby. Not because I don't want another baby, but because I am 42 and I am so lucky to have had two lovely children, and the idea of another IVF, or more precisely a failed IVF, is exhausting.
I have a family. I am lucky.

I am still breastfeeding, even though the girls go at my breasts now in a very professional and dedicated way - like milk maids trying to fulfill their daily quota. They pummell and kneed. But still, I think it gives them comfort. And I like the full on cuddles.

As for the half-siblings: two mothers have suggested meeting up now, and still undecided. Maybe. Maybe not.

Ten Months Today

2008-01-23T13:19:00.000-08:00

Ten Months Today. And there are full fledged people in my house. They now play with me. Twin One did peek-a-book with a muslin during dinner, holding it up high above her head like a little theatre curtain, and dropping it down to her own amazement. Twin Two celebrated by going from no crawling to a waddle of ten steps during her naked-play-before-bath. And then her sister tried to up it by pulling herself to standing on the stairs (spurred on by fury that I had removed a half-masticated gas bill envelope from her mouth and put it on a step just out of reach). It's all go here - here in the land where little people actually, and I think this is amazing, actually wave and go 'bye bye' and not any old how, oh no, they do it when someone leaves the room. Together. 'Bye. Bye Bye'. Wave wave wave. It is extraordinary (though not as visceral as the cry of MAMAMAMAMAMUMMMMMY in the middle of the night, that gets my hooves on).

A couple of things I want to say. Where to start? The first is something all parents probably know, and that is that babies get better. I honestly didn't think it could be possible. I was snug in the knowledge that babies were where it was at, and nothing could improve on their immense and sweet and soft vulnerability. But to watch little people emerge day by day, their personalities come out stronger, the big wonky smiles, the bouncing up and down on their bums and clapping to music. It is an ever growing source of wonder.

I have been thinking about having another child. Actually, I've been thinking about it on and off since about a month after they were born. These children delight me. I'd love a huge brood. I think about it, but in a gentle sort of way, a sort of way that makes me think - why not just go along to the clinic and measure my FSHs and see if it would be plausible (though my friend, who is due today, got pregnant with an FSH of 18). I loved being pregnant, and I would love to have the whole experience of babies again (I'm still breastfeeding, but I'm not sure how many more months this can go on for and I am mourning it's loss already, it's so loving and intimate and wonderful). But, on the other hand, I'm 42 now and that's not young, and although I have no known fertility problems, that doesn't mean this time would be as easy as the last. And I'd also have to divide my attention between more children (and they do have half-siblings out there if they want more blood relatives). And, most of all, I feel like I have a family, I feel so incredibly lucky that I ever got pregnant, that at the last post, when the fertility charts begin their decline, I got not one, but two, babies. I feel so lucky and it's hard not to feel I should be content with the number I have (I am certainly content with who I have). Still, it's a little sad, and only a little, to let go of the dream.

I find myself in an unusual position. I have always known that I would certainly want to meet and embrace my children's half-siblings (that is the children born from the same donor but different women). And I am in contact with quite a few mothers. Now, however, one of the mothers wants us to meet up, even though our babies are still just babies. And I find myself hesitating. It's odd. I thought I would be gung-ho and let's embrace this. And instead I wonder whether I should be taking the lead like this, or whether it is something I should let my children decide. I know families where the half-siblings have been introduced since birth and everyone grows up with an awareness of each other, and families where the half-siblings initiate contact of their own accord when they are older. And I am not sure in which group I belong. Anyone still read this blog, and if so, any advice/experience to offer?

Nine Months!

2007-12-23T02:31:00.000-08:00

Wow.
I am the mother of full fledged people.
They crawl - well, one of them does - they investigate and peer and excavate and back up underneath cots and open drawers and make lovely da-da-da noises and kiss me when I say, Kiss, and give me smiles and are soft and lovely.
Nine months!

Happy Christmas and New Year to everyone. May all those who have children, continue to enjoy and love them, and for all those who want children, I hope that 2008 is the year that brings you your dearest wish.

A Post About Breasts

2007-12-04T16:19:00.001-08:00

Yes. I too thought that the breastfeeding posts were over. The babies are over eight months old, and the agony of the first three months, the constant pumping and worrying and inadvertently starving Twin Two and the blocked ducts and the fire in the nipples, all that’s behind me. And I’ve been happily going along, breast feeding still, down to four feeds a day and sometimes supplementing, but still breastfeeding. And now, it looks as if I may be reaching the end.

It’s not that I want to. I would happily go on for months, a year, more even. I love breastfeeding. I love the way the babies are focussed on me, and the way they wave their hands up as they feed, waiting for me to kiss their palms (which they seem to find both funny and reassuring). But in the past few weeks, I’ve noticed them become more and more dissatisfied. Twin Two is often on the left breast – the rubbish left breast, the one that produces about half as much milk as the right – and she cannot stand it any longer. The last week she has rebelled. She begins crying and wriggling the moment we settle down for her pre-bedtime feed. And until recently I’d have said this was one of the favourite parts of her day. She has always loved hunkering down, gently patting my bosom with the palm of her hand, letting her eyes close dreamily, luxuriating in the milk and the warmth of my body. But not any more. Now she takes a few half hearted mouthfuls, turns away, and screams. Twin One still seems happy, but that is because she is more often on my abundant right breast, and also I think she is less hungry in general as she eats huge amounts of food – about half an adult portion three times a day.

I think it is the solids that have done it. The babies have been on solids for nearly three months and they eat a lot. We only breastfeed first thing in the morning, for a short snack at eleven and three – really short, only five minutes, and they take so little I don’t even bother to supplement then – and a night time feed. And it’s not enough to maintain my supply. I know because my body is changing, dramatically. The weight has started to come off, my appetite has decreased, my period began last week, and I now fit into a size smaller clothes (I learned that today when I went to Peacocks, a discount high street chain, to try on some clothes, and all of the ones I’d pulled off the rack were much to big for me). My breasts are also a giveaway. My breasts have always been one of my better features. They were – before pregnancy – a perky 34D and much complemented – even by bra fitters (they stayed up by themselves and were very round and appealing – the one part of my body ex-boyfriends eulogised). During pregnancy they swelled up to the top size in the bravura range – a Large Plus – and then, when the milk came in they became inconceivably big – the biggest bra I could find in Mothercare, around 38 G or H. Massive. If I skipped a feed they were porn-star pneumatic. But not any more. This evening I was undressing for my bath, looked up in the mirror, and realised my breasts had shrunk. I knew they were getting smaller – they now fit in the bottom half of my giant bras, with space in there for an extra pair – but I didn’t realise quite how diminished. They look like small people whispering in a crowd. And they have come through the drama of birth, pregnancy and breast feeding much worn and sagged – like a deflated balloon. They sit lower on my chest. I would fail the pencil test.

I’m not sure how this makes me feel. I think it makes me sad. The babies are growing up. They really are like children now. Heavy and full of exuberant personality. Their babyhood is already largely behind them. I liked the heaviness of my pregnant body, I enjoyed the fat and the excess of feeding myself up to breastfeed two, I quite liked being big and not caring about my clothes and putting on stretched faded pajamas every day with my belly hanging over the top and my massive bosoms stretching and gaping open the buttons of my cardigan. It’s as if I am turning back into an ordinary civilian, the full-on excesses of full-on mother hood are fading away. Soon, I will look like a woman who might or might not have had children, rather than someone whose body is clearly devoted night and day to babies.

Anyway. I haven’t given up feeding them yet. I will keep on going until they stop, or my milk dries up. But I’m not going to pump to increase my supply, and I’m not going to agonise. I did enough of that at the beginning. I feel I’ve done pretty well – eight months breastfeeding twins is good – and I don’t want to end up in a nightmare of constant ‘is it enough?’ and ‘is it working?’. I want to enjoy my daughters.

Children...

2007-12-01T12:50:00.000-08:00

...that's what I seem to have now. Not babies.
Today, for example, Twin 1... crawled.... played pull-the-napkin... and clapped enthusiastically. Twin 2 kissed me and responded to the word 'kiss'. They are both absolutely lovely, gorgeous. They are also very heavy, and long. They are so expressive. They make me laugh. Today, for example, when we played the tugging game, I laughed, and she laughed back. They are incredibly strong. They are impatient and sweet. Twin 2 has gone right off my left breast and if she carries on like this I won't have any milk left(I'm down to four feeds a day and my period has started again... that made me a little sad).
The babies keep changing. It is quite incredible. Now they have their own playroom - or rather half of my living room, they are penned in with a long gate, and the floor is covered in thick soft rugs and toys and I let them roll and skoot around (or in the case of Twin 2, sit elegantly and then lean and lean and lean again until she gets the toys she wants with her oustretched fingertips).
Really, they are something else.

Seven Months

2007-10-23T11:33:00.000-07:00

It sounds so grown up.
I remember when six weeks sounded inconceivably big.
Seven months.
Seven month year olds are obviously people (even though I felt mine were obviously people, even before they were born).
Seven month year olds have a will, which they excercise, and little teeth, and they try and crawl (backwards) and they put up their arms to be lifted and in the morning, when they see me, they smile and smile and smile.
They are also sick.
They have been throwing up and pooing for several days now - after a visit to le grand swimming pool at Le CentrParcs.
It is a measure of the degree to which I have thrown myself into motherhood that rather than, say, taking a clapped out bus down a mountain side in Eritrea, or flying in a beat up old Antanov into a war zone in central Asia, my idea of a really, really fulfilling holiday is getting three hours to myself at the faux turkish spa at CentreParcs.
Total immersion, that's what this motherhood is all about.
In fact, sometimes I worry that I have immersed myself a little too much. And that my children might cotton on that they are now the centre of my life and that I've abandoned all other interests just to coo and stroke them. So I've decided that one day fairly soon - say a year or so away - I will work, just so that they don't know quite how much they mean to me.
I grew up knowing that my parents had another life, and I have always been grateful that they never pushed the burden of their happiness onto us children.
Feeling a bit pooped. Have been pooed on and sicked on today and traipsed around the shops looking for baby shoes and dealt with a crying baby on a bus.
Going to make some pasta with sage sauce, a cup of tea... and go to bed.
I hope all of you out there in blog land passing by are well.
(BTW: I read a novel about a boy leaving home and spent a lot of last night feeling sad about the children growing up and going to university and leaving me with an empty house. I suddenly understand every cliche about empty nest syndrome. I cannot forget the line I read - that children are the centre of their parents lives - while parents are never more than bit part players in the lives of their children).

Getting On

2007-09-18T12:19:00.000-07:00

A very fast update. My babies are nearly six months old. SIX MONTHS OLD. They are very active now… in the last week they’ve sat up unaided. Their hair is coming in and their heads smell divine and today they wore an outfit so gorgous that I felt like exploding with love.

I have a helper, full time, after eight weeks alone. She is very efficient and does things beyond the call of duty. Today, for example, she coloured my much denuded hair. She also brought in some Ukranian cheesecake, which had jelly and strawberries on top. She was the tenth person I interviewed. The others included a middle aged woman who appeared panting at the door in stripy, sweaty clothes, sat down in the chair and began telling me, without pause or prompting, about 1) her endometriosis 2) her divorce and 3) the fact she was able to look for work in London because her children had decided they would rather live with her husband. I also interviewed two quite nice women, but both of them cried on our first meeting - telling me about a recent disastrous break up or their father’s death five years ago. The one I finally hired was very matter of fact, sunny, breezed in and said she would be thrilled to have the job as it was so much less work than her last position (two sets of infant twins in one family).

The babies had their first solids this week. I waited until they were really hungry – waking up a lot in the night – and then slid the food in. They were ravenous, especially twin two, who banged her feet on the highchair footboard and flung back her arms. Sweet Potato; thumbs up. Apples: great grimaces (I had stupidly bought organic British varieties, they were so bitter they stung). Tomorrow we shall try banana with baby rice.

Otherwise, life goes on: baby music, baby yoga, baby cinema and a lot of walking around looking at trees and eating grozleme – Turkish pancakes filled with cheese.

Long Time...

2007-08-28T13:21:00.000-07:00

Here I am at 8.56pm with unaccountably itchy calves, and feeling a little chilly, also full up (fromage frais with sugar and blackberries, tortelloni with tomato sauce) thinking that I would like to mark today and write something and say hello to you all out there, anyone who is still passing by.

Today my babies are five months and five days old, and tonight, for the first time, I put them in separate cots. Up until now they have shared the same cot, sleeping side by side across its width, pushed right up to my four poster bed. But last night, Twin Two rotated ninety degress and woke up Twin One – who sleeps on her tummy with her thumb in her mouth – by kicking her. And this afternoon, during nap time, Twin Two rolled into Twin One, effectively pinning her into the corner of the cot where she likes to wedge herself in sleep. And so, I decided, regretfully, that it was time.

They are right now upstairs, a cot each, still in my room, but a few steps from my bed, under the window. I wonder if they will notice? At the beginning they slept nuzzled up close, and they didn’t move much, but now they rustle and stir at night and sound like real people. Twin Two also thumps like a giant rabbit. She lifts her legs up, so they hit the jungle animal mobile and set it off, and then brings them down, hard, on the mattress.

The next milestone will be weaning. I do not look forward to solids, to the gradual process of moving them off my bosoms. I love breast feeding. The girls are so funny to watch. They are very efficient – they can drain me in less than ten minutes – and as they feed they stretch out their hands and poke each other in the eye, and claw at each other, and pat my breasts. Twin Two likes to pull back every ten seconds or so and crane her head to look at me for a reassuring exchange of smiles, before going back for a feed. Twin One is just frustrated. My milk isn’t bountiful or plentiful enough for her, so she pulls at my nipple and tugs at it, and bites it (her sister, last week, actually tweaked my nipple in her hand). They have also started waking twice in the night – up until now they only woke once at four am and I could get good long stretches, six hours or so, of sleep. I suspect they are hungry, and, again regretfully, that it is time for solid food.

They are growing fast. They are not babies for long. I held Twin One under her arms today and she stood firmly on the floor, supporting her weight, and looked like a child. Their legs are less bandied, more straight when they lie down. They hold their toes in their hands and smile. They play with toys. They try and move towards things that interest them. They get bored. They splash with a mad, exuberant joy in the bath. They smell glorious.

I wanted to write about something else, but my love for the babies spilled over again. I’ll write again in a couple of days. I wanted advice.

Congratulations

2007-08-12T12:23:00.000-07:00

Just logged on to say - hey, anyone passing by, please go and visit Sarah. After so many tries, she has just had a positive test.

Meanwhile, now I'm here, not much to say specifically except that life goes on and the babies continue to grow and thrive. It all happens so fast. Now they roll - into each other, into the side of the bed (Twin One gets her arm caught through the bars and wails). They lift their bottoms in the air and hold their toes. They giggle if I blow into their necks, and beam when I smile at them. Everyday there is something new and marvelous. I am utterly enchanted.

Pig in a Pinafore Dress

2007-07-20T13:50:00.000-07:00

I haven’t wrtten for so long. And it’s not that nothing has happened. It’s that too much has happened, and instead of writing down the minutae every day, I’ve missed things out, and so everything has accumulated and I no longer know where to start.

So here is a round up of my life… now that my babies are nearly four months old…

I have managed alone for five weeks and I still feel an incredible sense of achievement. The babies are sleeping brilliantly. They go to bed around 7.30, get up once at around 4am, and then sleep until 7am, when I wake them for their morning feed. Twin One has even slept through the night, but that made me sad, as I love our intimate moments together in the early morning, the only time when I can feed them separately and hug them to my body and feel the warmth and chunkiness of them, and breathe in their smell (I am addicted to the smell of Twin Two, I inhale it all day, pressing my nose into her head). This week I also managed to get on a bus with the double buggy and go shopping with the babies – again, I waited for the heavenly round of applause, a recognition of my achievement, but there was nothing (apart from in my own head, where it was deafening).

Sometimes I have help. My mother comes for bath time several times a week (I need assistance now, as Twin One is so strong she can push herself out of the bath seat). But my mother has a more laissez faire attitude than I (thus, if the babies poo in the bath, she ignores it and lets them kick away until the water gets cold… and then pretends she has only just seen it: “Oh darling, by the way, there’s a little bit of poo there, hardly anything at all, just the size of a butterfly wing…” My ex used to say that I was like a kitten that hadn’t been taught to wash itself properly, and I can see now where that came from). I, on the other hand, am somewhat fanatical, washing all their creases, changing their clothes when they are sick, and constantly replacing the changing mats for their what-seems-like-continuous nappy off time (they love that so much, waving their little bottoms in the air and shrieking).

The babies become more and more like people every day. Or rather, they were always themselves, but now they are more so. Twin One is incredibly strong: she has already rolled from back to side, to front to back and she is not yet four months. Twin Two can hold herself up during tummy time, wobbling but steadfast (I love putting them side by side on their stomachs and listening to them grunt and struggle with the effort, it is like a joke race: it would take them weeks to reach the other side of the room). They now notice each other: it began suddenly one day when Twin Two started babbling, and Twin One whipped her head round to stare, and now they coo at each other and gurgle in conversation. A few days ago, I was holding Twin One and looking at Twin Two, who was at my feet in a bouncy chair, and I thought: “Why isn’t she looking me in the eye when she smiles?” And then I realised that she was smiling at her sister. They have also begun to play with toys, and that started suddenly too, one day nothing, the next Twin One noticed the wooden bears on a metal bar in front of her Baby Bjorn and began bashing and spinning them. They wring their hands like worried old ladies, and bite their fists, and Twin Two takes her pacifier out of her mouth by the handle and waves it around (she even tried to push it back in again when it came out halfway). And they’ve both finally learned to love the pram, and we go for long walks, and stop in cafes – today we had a Turkish flat bread and a coffee in the east end and I sat and chatted to them and they looked perfectly happy (my mother says, ‘darling I do wish you would talk to them a bit more quietly when we’re out’, but I feel, ‘what does it matter, I talk to them at home, so I’ll talk to them when I’m out, what does it matter if people think I’m odd?’).

Breastfeeding has become easy (although I supplement with formula on the left breast). I feel like a pig in a pinafore dress, a real mammal. I today composed my mammal song to sing to them (“I’m a mammal and I love my young…”). I should really be rootling around with them on the floor and letting them suckle.

I still haven’t lost any more weight and I am still eating enthusiastically. My mother, who is not that critical, did say to me the other day, ‘Darling you have to do something, you look disgusting’. And to be fair, she had a point. I have been wearing, exclusively, the same five black pairs of pajama bottoms for a year. They are either torn, or stained or stretched or ripped. The UK size 16s will not stay up – one pair actually fell down round my ankles while I was holding a baby and didn’t have a free hand to hold them. And my Godmother decided to encourage me to act the other day by photographing my bottom as I bent over to play with a baby – there were several large holes in the seat, as well as spit up trails down the side. So yesterday, urged on by my mother, I bought two new pairs of pajama bottoms and a couple of tops from Gap and felt, momentarily, like a yummy mummy (well… actually I’ve lost my shape and I’ve gone from curvy to rectangular, but I’m sure my figure will come back eventually. At least I was clean).

My babies are magnificent, an absolute joy, the great passion of my life. I love the way they look and smell and sound and feel. I love sleeping on the floor next to them during nap time, and holding them close during feeding time. I love everything about them. They are my great joy, my huge love. They are the most wonderful all absorbing thing. It would have been a tragedy not to have them. My life is full of love, I feel my heart swell in the mornings with love for them. I love them more and more even though it always seems that that could not be possible. And also I worry about them, which everyone says will continue forever. I used to be a risk taker yet now, I stand patiently at traffic lights, even when the straight road is clear to the horizon, and wait for the man to change from red to green - just in case. They are, I tell them everyday, rolling around on the floor with them, my favourites… “Do I love you with all my heart and soul? Oh Yes. I love you more than all the babies in the world, all the babies that came before you and all the babies that come after you, my favourite babies in all of time and space”.

(I think it may be time for me to end this blog).

Hair

2007-07-02T13:24:00.000-07:00

It started last Friday. I ran my fingers through my wet hair, and they came out wound around with clingy strands. The bath was layered with long black hairs. The plug hole was completely blocked by a golf ball wad of hair. The babies are covered in them. They tug at me when they feed and my hair pulls out and gets caught in their hands, like horrible lengths of cheese wire. I even changed Twin One’s nappy the other day and found a hair amongst her poo. Finally, as I had been warned, as I had been told and chose not to believe, my joyful lustrous lush of pregnancy hair growth has come to an end. Finally, it is falling out.

Oh, this is sad. I loved having extra hair. When I was young I had long spirally hair and people would stop and tell me how lovely it was. And as I got older it got shorter, and splitter, and more and more frizzy until, by the time I got pregnant, age and bad haircuts had made it into one gigantic ball of wire. Until, three months gestation, when the hormones fully kicked in and my fingernails started to grow and my hair became shiny and long and thick and curly and people said to me, but my, Katty, your hair looks wonderful and for a brief while I was able to think it would last forever.

And more so, sad, because the hair falling out is another sign of the hormone changes, of my body (besides the paunch) returning back to normal. And it’s sad to say goodbye to this special state. Other than the breast feeding, my body is coming back to me. Indeed, for the first time three days ago, I was startled to find myself thinking about sex. For the first time in ages and ages. Down There has been all about babies, and piles, and pelvic floors, and basically best avoided, but suddenly it’s been given back to me, I remember it has another function (although sadly, of course, I have no one to practice that function with).

Thankfully

2007-06-23T01:22:00.000-07:00

The gloom lasted no longer than two hours. The last few days I have been feeling particularly perky. I like being alone with the babies! Yesterday I managed to bath them both simultaneously and then get them upstairs, zipped into their sleeping bags, for their double-breastfeed with only minimal crying (bouncy chairs are a necessity for this). They have kept to their routine so far, still only waking once in the night, and go down to bed like a dream after their feed. We have been having some lovely play. I thought they would feel shortchanged if there was only me to play with, but they seem happy enough with my unrelenting company. And this morning, Twin Two, gave me so many beams and even started to try and coo for the first time (hers are much more gutteral and throaty than her sister, who has been cooing away for a week now). I feel such an incredible sense of achievement at the end of the day (and the day does have an end: they go to bed, I tidy up, read my novel in the bath with a glass of wine...). I look around waiting to be awarded some kind of trophy: 'Look world! I can do it, contented babies, a tidy house, and there's only one of me.' I still have the option of getting some help, someone who will come along with me to baby yoga and baby music and baby massage and baby swimming and baby cinema (it's not really possible to go alone, as the classes are geared to one on one contact). She'd also help out with housework. But I haven't decided yet. At the moment I'm high on having coped.

Lonely

2007-06-20T13:38:00.000-07:00

I had my first moment of fragility today (not counting the post-birth hospital stay, which was full of them).
Nadine, my 24 hour maternity nurse who has been with me since my girls were five days old, finished her contract this afternoon, got in her car, and drove away.
I am so very sad to see her go. She has done such a wonderful job. My babies, thanks to her non Gina Fordish routine, now sleep from 8pm to 4am, wake for a short feed, and then go back down again until 7am. I think that is fairly miraculous. They also nap throughout the day, at set times. (And babble, though that has nothing to do with her.)
But most of all she has been very good company. There was someone in the house with me at all times. Another adult. We played with the children together, went to the shops together, went to baby yoga and baby massage and baby film showings together. And now there is just me.
When she drove off I felt suddenly sad. She is leaving London for France to start a new life with her husband and suddenly I felt sad that I wasn't going to meet my partner to start a life, where together we would plan children.
I need hardly add that I do not regret anything, that I love and adore my babies, and I am entirely happy that they are here.
But I felt sad. I felt lonely. I danced around the living room holding Twin Two (who was shrieking) and I suddenly realised I wanted to cry.
I didn't though. And then a woman and her little girl came round, and after that my dad visited, and I didn't feel lonely anymore.
I think it sudenly for the first time hit me: what it means to be a single mother. A mother with no adult company. A mother who has no one coming home every evening. Sometimes I feel sad that my life ended up without a partner, when I am a loving person, and would love to be in a relationship.

My father said something nice tonight. He said: "Those girls are lucky to have you. You are an excellent mother." I think he meant it, and I was very grateful.

Plumplings

2007-06-16T13:08:00.000-07:00

My little plumplings are now ten and a half and eleven pounds.
They have shot up from the first percentile to around the sixteenth percentile.
They have round chubby bitable cheeks, and squeezable fat little thighs.
They look like real babies. Not premature babies, not tiny weeny babies, but real babies who are approaching three months old.
Not only that, on June 15th, Twin One got up and started, just like that, to babble.
She coos. She goes 'agoo'. She smiles. She coos and smiles so it sounds like a laugh.
Twin Two smiles too, if given proper attention, and comes out with the occasional, smaller sound.
When they smile madly, over and over again, it makes my heart swell in my chest, like a big balloon.
I thought that I couldn't love them more than the way I loved them when they were born. But I love them now, even more if it is possible.
A few days ago, I rang up my best friend and said, 'having these babies is like being in love. I feel dizzy and happy with love for them.'
And she said, ruefully - because her teenage daughters are causing her a bit of friction as they have reached the age of going out in short dresses and answering back and stomping upstairs and slamming doors- 'I still feel like that even now'.
And I was walking down the road thinking how incredibly lucky it is that I have this source of love in my life, here, every day. These delightful, gorgeous plumplings.

Drama

2007-06-15T14:55:00.000-07:00

A ring on the doorbell. Special delivery. Sign for a letter from the UK goverment body regulating donor conception. I had written to ask them 1) if my daughters have any half siblings in the UK and 2) the type of identifying information they hold on the father, who is an open donor.

Rushed into living room with letter, sat down, tried distractedly to latch on the babies for their ten am feed while opening letter. Opened letter. Read that 1) no half siblings in the UK (but not suprised, US donor, and have already traced several half siblings elsewhere) but also that 2) my donor has not 'reregistered since the change in anonymity laws' and therefore the government body is not holding any identifying information.

What? Re-register, what???? I imported this man's sperm in 2006, a year after the UK laws regarding anonymity were lifted (only willing to be known donors are now allowed). My fertility clinic took ages to import the sperm because the UK regulatory authority demanded a more up to date address for the donor. I spent ages, ages, and I mean ages, making the decision to try and conceive with donor gametes. And the only reason I allowed myself to go ahead - given that I think donor conception is ethically questionable - was by choosing an open donor. In fact, I believe anonymous donation should be banned, because it violaes the rights of the child.

And yet, despite all this, here I was being told my daughters were conceived by anonymous sperm donation.

Sent a bewildered e-mail. Followed it up a few hours later with a bewildered phone call. Only to be told by a nice young lady that awfully sorry, they sent out the wrong form letter, and in fact the donor is identifiable and the UK goverment is holding his name and address which can be released to the girls when they are eighteen years old (if they request it). Today they sent me a letter confirming this - again by special delivery - with a covering note saying 'sorry for the inconvenience caused.'

Inconvenience? More like panic.

What I didn't realise...

2007-06-12T14:04:00.000-07:00

... is that having a baby, two babies, is a lot like falling in love.
I am in love with my children. I lie near them at night - their cot is pulled up alongside my bed - and my heart fills and swells with love.
I hold them and stroke them and tell them they are my beloveds and I love them.
I love the smell of their skin, the softness of their heads.
I miss them when I am not with them, and delight in seeing them when they awaken from their nap.
I love it when they stretch their arms above their heads, and crunkle up their faces and their backs arch up from the matress and they wonkily clench their fists.
When they were tiny weeny babies I said that I was sad they were going to change as I loved their smallness.
Now I love their ten pound chunkiness, their little fattening thighs, their plumping cheeks, which I bite (with my lips pulled over my teeth...).
I love the way Twin One tizzies her head as she homes in on my nipple, and Twin Two gets in close and holds one hand to her eyebrow as if she is concentrating on a puzzle.
I love the way they nustle up against me, and the way their bodies go heavy when they fall asleep in my arms.
I love the way they sink into sleep when I dance with them, and drape over my arms like leopards in a tree.
I love the way they splash in the bath, and their legs splay open when they are on their backs on their changing mats.
I love the way Twin Two cheers up when music comes on, and Twin One breaks into smiles.
I love their coos. I love their coos. I love Twin Ones sweet, sweet voice.
I love, love, love, love, love, love, love my babies.

Sleep Deprivation

2007-06-10T15:00:00.000-07:00

Everyone says, don't they, that in the first few months after birth you won't get any sleep. I was absolutely dreading this as I love bed and am an eight-hours-a-night kind of woman.
The strange thing is that I have found it quite easy surviving on two to three or at most four hours a nights sleep for the past ten weeks. At the beginning everything was a bit of a blur, but after a while you simply adapt.
There are some casualties. My short term memory doesn't seem to exist anymore. I cannot remember any small thing. I have to write everything down. I forget appointments and faces, and which child was on which breast at the last feed. I live in a haze of present. I also live in a strange mental world where dreaming and waking merge. At the very beginning, in the first weeks after the birth, I would drift in and out of sleep and hold conversations in which I would say things like, "Make sure the animals are off the ark". That half dream/half wake state has never really gone away. Images frequently waft into my mind - the oil rigs off the West African coast for example - they drift accross my inner eye like clouds. I think, 'what are they doing here? what is that?' and then they drift off again.
In the last week, this has improved tremendously mainly because my babies have been sleeping from seven pm until three am without a break (I know, AMAZING) before going back to sleep. I am now far more rested than I have been in weeks. And yet the feeling of my mind segueing in and out of sleep even when I am waking, remains.
This evening I had dinner with a friend. I told him that I wished I'd had a vaginal birth, so that I could experience that ship-in-a-bottle feeling. He told me that ships in a bottle get there because the maker pulls up the rigging once they are in. I didn't know that so I said, 'gosh, that's amazing'. And then I said, 'so how do they get the geese in the bottle?' And he said, 'pardon'. And I said, 'the geese, how do they get in the bottle?' He looked really puzzled, and then my mind jolted to, and I realised I'd just been assailled by one of those half asleep, far too tired, exhausted persons' image (though goose in a bottle? where did I get that from?).
I haven't found the sleep deprivation so bad really. Normally, I cannot function without my sleep. But this sleeplessness is sleep with a purpose. I am loosing sleep to feed. At the centre of my exhaustion are my daughters little bodies pressed against mine on my night time sofa, drinking milk. However tired I get, or overwhelmed, they remain still, at the heart of it. My sweet daughters.

Double breast feeding...

2007-06-01T12:35:00.000-07:00

...in John Lewis, Floor Four, Curtains and Blinds.

It can be done!

It had to be done, actually. Going out with two babies is not easy - even when you have a hugely professional and highly proficient maternity nurse along for the ride.

Baby melt down on the bus - had to break the routine and breast feed next to a Polish girl who didn't look too happy. Once we were in John Lewis, I took Twin Two in the Baby Bjorn, while Nadine went off with Twin One to try on bras, and immeadiately she was gone, and I had settled down for a conversation with a middle aged Indian shop assistant about fabric, Twin Two began to sob, and again I had to discreetly whip out my breast and continue the conversation with her suckling. Half an hour later, and so exhausted by all the demands that I still hadn't left soft furnishings, Nadine returned and this time Twin One melted down. A very nice young man - John Lewis really does get top marks for its staff - showed me to a chair in the corner of the spacious floor, where I breast fed and watched wealthy people buy expensive curtains. Then Twin Two started again and Nadine shoved over her chair and, with a delicate balancing act, and me humming the circus theme, dan-dan-dana-dana-dan-dan-dan-dan, I managed to get them both on. I don't think I've ever seen anyone do that in public before. Passers by and shop assistants were very polite, and ignored me. I thought it was quite funny. And quite exhausting. Finally, an hour on the bus - I had to keep my little finger in Twin Ones mouth the whole way to stop her crying - and collapsed at home just in time for their four o'clock feed. All in all, a six hour excursion - and that doesn't count the three hours it took us to get ready - to buy two curtain poles and some black out curtains.

Startle!

2007-05-27T13:32:00.000-07:00

My favourite baby reflex: The Startle...
Clap your hands and the babies throw back their arms with their little fingers star fished.
Even cuter in tandem.
It's just like meer cats rearing up on their hind legs on the savannah.

Everything and Nothing

2007-05-23T14:36:00.000-07:00

NIPPLES: Mine are sore. I now walk around with my hands cupped [protectively over my breasts. My babies, and in paricular Twin One with her tiny little mouth, gnaw on the end of them instead of latching. It is quite, quite unpleasant. I am conscious of my breasts wherever I go, and particularly if I am late with a feed, and they swell up and the nipples feel as if they are being poked with hot needles.
My breasts are completely desexualised. They are just milk machines. And they have lost their looks: my right one, the better milk producer, is now several cup sizes bigger than the left.

NAMES: Today I went along to the town hall and registered my babies births. They are two months old (and I am two weeks late in registering them) and I sat in the taxi on the way there skimming through my 'baby names from around the world' book. I have not been able to decide on a middle name. They have first names, but only by default (I'm so used to the provisional ones that they have stuck). Twin One has a name I had never heard of until a few months ago, but only because it is a Spanish version of the name I really wanted but could not use because it so upset my god-daughter (the name I wanted is the name of my god-daughters sister). I also gave the girls my parents names, but I still want a third name that is either hebrew or arabic and I simply can't think of anything for twin two. Luckily, I can go back anytime in the next year and for a small fee add an extra name.

BABY LOVE: is upon me, even though the babies can be rather contrary. I'm not sure why, but perhaps it is because they are growing now and gaining weight (they now each weigh the same as a large single newborn) and they have started to smile, and when they lie on their backs with their nappies off they kick their little legs. And they have chubby upper thighs, and they have such strong and distinct characters. Twin One is alert and angry and very strong willed, twin two is quieter, more of an observer. Last week, my (former) antenatal class came round for tea, and we laid the babies out on the carpet in a line to kick and I put Twin Two alongside the other bruiser babies, and she turned to look at them with a sweet expression and kicked her little baby-grow clad legs in the air, and I felt as if she was out with the big boys and holding her own. Also sweet is Twin One at four in the morning. I have taken her into my bed (or rather a mattress on the floor) a couple of times, so I can breastfeed her lying down when her raging early morning hunger comes upon her. But she does not seem to sleep and I wake up to find her dark eyes a few inches from my own, starting at me quizzically, while her legs pummell the air, and her arms startle backwards - all the while accompanied by the most incredible grunting and snuffling noise, like a farmyard of pigs rooting around for hidden treats.

MYTHS ABOUT BREASTFEEDING: It helps you loose weight. HA! Not if you consume half litre tubs of chocolate ice cream and bars of Green and Blacks each day. Unbelievably, I have actually gained seven pounds since I left hospital.

AND NOW: tired, waiting for the next feed (around midnight), paying hugely overdue bills. But I am happy. I love my babies. I am a mummy, at last.

Mixed

2007-05-18T14:34:00.000-07:00

*The most frightening thing to happen to me today was this:
I was walking along the street, pushing the babies in their double buggy. I'd been to the shop and bought a pineapple and some tomatoes and they were piled on top of the buggy hood along with two baby bjorn carriers (which are light weight). A strong gust of wind came down the street. I was not, at that moment, holding onto the buggy handle. And suddenly the buggy TIPPED BACKWARDS, crashed backwards, phuuuump, so that the canvas at the back of the pram, where the babies heads are, was against the hard, concrete, killer pavement.
I couldn't even walk forwards to look and see if they were alright. Nadine (the maternity nurse) went forward for me, being very sensible, and she said, they are quite alright. Twin One was crying and she took her out and said look she is ok, and Twin Two was asleep, though I was worried she was concussed. I was so shocked. It seems that they did not crack the back of their baby skulls against the pavement, but only because they are little and the straps held them in. It was terrifying and I now hate the pram (which is called an out 'n about double nipper). I want to get something else, something more sturdy.
I couldn't even push the pram home, I felt weepy. I came home and held twin two very tight, while twin one wept in Nadine's arms. It was horrible. horrible and scary. I said to Nadine, I can't deal with this, this worry, if this is what it is like. And she said, briskly, well you'll have too now that you are a mother. And she is right.

*Less shockingly upsetting, but a constant worry and source of distress, is the breastfeeding. About two weeks ago I began getting terrible blocked ducts. They lasted one agonising week, and I've noticed that the milk supply in that breast appears to have dramatically reduced. Twin Two is always on that breast, and although she is pooing and weeing normally, and gaining weight, she is also always very sleepy. And it seemed to me today that I have in fact been starving her. That she hasn't been getting nearly enough food. And I can't bear it that I have let her down. I decided to simply supplement with formula, but today I was told that if I did this my milk would dwindle and dry up. The alternative is to build up my supply by demand feeding and yet, if I demand feed, I will destroy the rudiments of routine I have. And while it is fine to have no routine with a single baby, having no routine with two babies and as a single mother is... exhausting. So I simply can't decide what to do.
The most frustrating part of it all is that there seems to be no one way/right way of doing things and so EVERYONE, and I mean everyone, EVERYONE, has advice to offer, and all the advice is different and frankly you could go mad trying to follow it all.

*I love the babies so much. I love them so much. I love them, I love them, I love them, I love them. I worry that they don't love me, or that I have failed them. I worry that one is more active than the other. I worry that I will be forced to give up breastfeeding early and that if that goes I will miss the great pleasure of their close little bodies and their burrowing little heads.

Overall then, rather wrought. I love my babies, but rather wrought.

Ow!

2007-05-09T13:55:00.000-07:00

Milk Ducts...
Never gave them a thought until I breastfed. Now I can't help thinking about them all the time. My left breast keeps on getting blocked. It begins as a hard lump and then spreads into a rigidshield accross a third of my breast. Sometimes there is a pea shaped lump, sometimes it feels as big as the palm of my hand.
When the baby latches onto my nipple - it is always the left nipple - it feels like someone is inserting burning hot needles right through the hole where the milk comes out. It feels as if the baby has little rodent teeth which are gnawing through the skin, into the tenderest, rawest part. I inhale sharply, I moan, I bite my hand, I think about biting the pillow, I consider rocking back and forth but then try and relax because if I am tense the baby can tell.
There's an art to getting the baby on with swollen ducts. The art is not to let them nibble their way on board. It is to let them lie there, a bit fractious, crying, and when their mouth is wide open in a wail of absolute distress, push their little head forward and let them embrace a huge gulp of the breast. That way the pain is diminished.
The way to get rid of the pain - usually, as I haven't had much luck the last 24 hours - is to massage the lump or lumps while breast feeding, or have a hot bath and massage. That and pumping and more and more sucking. This is all a bit unfair on Twin Two, my bigger baby, the better sucker. It is only when I put her little fiesty sister with her tiny O shaped mouth on my left breast that the ducts block, because she doesn't latch quite right and doesn't suck quite properly. And so poor Twin Two (and yes, she does have a name...), poor twin two is always on the left breast now trying to suck out the bockage, and the left breast is a bit of a dud breast, it produces far less milk than the right breast, and so I feel guilty, as if I am short changing her. She is a Special Forces Baby, sent in specially to cure her wounded mother, and I have thought of setting up a a bank account to pay her for the times she has sucked my breasts to softness. Although now her sucking has resulted in a blocked duct on the nipple itself, a little milk blister, one more little focal point of agony.
The pain gets worse as a feed approaches and the breasts engorge with milk. It must get trapped in there, with all the blocked ducts, it gets hot and the needle sharp pains descend. I wake up moaning. About a week ago, in the middle of the night, I actually told Nadine (the maternity nurse) 'please, just give them formula for this feed', and she said when she heard that she knew it must really hurt. It is amazing that more people don't talk about this, really. It is amazing people put up with this.

Motherhood...
... feels like some strange sub-culture... and now I'm a member. There are mothers everywhere... mothers stop and talk to each other in doctor's surgeries and on the streets. We talk about prams, and breast feeding and admire each others babies. I have become a bit of a baby fanatic. They are all so lovely and plump and big... or at least big compared to mine. Today I hosted my antenatal group for lunch and there were babies everywhere, it was baby crazy, babies on sheepskin rugs, and in the special electric swing I've just bought and and on laps and in baby bjorn carriers... sometimes wriggling or smiling or gurgling. Mine were so tiny in comparison, sitting happily in their bouncy chairs.

Six week check up...
this week. The doctor was a very attractive young woman who had never ever met someone who had done IVF before, which I found incredible. I asked her for lots of blood tests and told her I had a pile. She said she would look at it, but I refused. I am fed up with people peering at my nether regions. The babies check was far more satisfying. MY BABIES ARE FINE. Well done girls. They are now seven and a half and eight pounds, which is brilliant. They are in the 1-2 percentile for their age, but that's without factoring in their prematurity and the fact that they are twins. They are normal baby sized and have chubby cheeks, and little folds developing on their legs, and the start of a double chin. They had a BCG shot, and wailed. I felt so awful. Poor little things.

And the best for last: I am sure, absolutely sure, that Twin Two smiled at me. Really! It wasn't a windy smile. I was looking her in the face, bouncing her in the chair, making cooing noises and suddenly out of nowhere she looked me right in the eyes and gave me a beam. It was miraculous. (I sent texts to lots of people to tell them the news. But yes, I did feel a moments sadness, that I did not have a partner who would find the smile as wonderful, as momentous, as meaningful, as I).

This is not a moan

2007-04-30T13:34:00.000-07:00

I have to preface this post with that statement, because I don't want anyone to think I am being ungrateful. But today I did feel wistful, sad even , and perhaps if I had let myself I might have had a gentle, melancholy weep.

Today, one of my exes (there are only two that really count) came to visit me. He has twenty eight days holiday a year and he took off one of those days from work to come and see me, even though he has obligations elsewhere and lives a long train journey from my home.

This ex, for anyone who has followed this blog, was the ex who turned up at the wedding last year. The ex who I was hoping to have children with before he slept with someone else and accidentally got her pregnant (and then being honourable, married her). I haven't seen this ex properly for five years. We met once two years ago, and once in passing at the wedding, but I always bore ... not bad feelings exactly... but sadness and a sense of being let down... as we had planned to start trying for a baby in the month that he mistakenly knocked up the woman who was to become his wife.

This man is an extremely nice man, a good man, one of the loveliest, and his faults are the result of weakness rather than anything malign.

What made me wistful was seeing him with the babies. He was so sweet with my daughters. He held them in his arms so naturally. He looked at them with a gentle, softened face. We went out to lunch and he pushed the double pushchair along the street, and in the restaurant, when the little one sqwarked, he picked her up and held her in his arms while I eat my vegeburger and then we did a little swap so he had time to eat his meal. When we came back to the house, he held one of the babies again, in the crook of his arm, and suddenly I felt what it would be like to have a partner, someone who loved me and loved the girls, someone for whom my daughters are as much a miracle as they are to me. It moved me seeing him with the children... and it is sad to think that no one will ever be moved by the sight or the thought of me carrying their son or daughter.

I do not often let myself think about what I am missing because I do not have a partner. And I try not to dwell too much on what the girls are missing because they do not have a father. And I am glad I do not think about it, because when I do, like today, I do feel sad. Not catastrophically sad. Not miserable. Not depressed. Just sad.

My ex stayed an extra hour and we eat a litre of Ben and Jerry's ice cream and some fancy grapes he'd bought me, and drank some tea, and then he left.
And since he has gone I really have been feeling rather fragile and rather sad.

A Proud Parent

2007-04-27T13:14:00.000-07:00

*Breast feeding is divine. But I do sometimes feel as if I have two very small rodents hanging from my nipples, like go-go dancers tassles, gnawing repeatedly with their teeth to gain purchase.

*This is what two babies breastfeeding simultaneously look like from the mother's point of view:

*I have been sounding rhapsodic about breast feeding. And it is true, I love my babies absolutely, and I love looking at their little faces and little hands burrowing into my breasts. But I don't want anyone to think that means everything is easy. Twin Two, the Sister of Squiff, seems to be developing either colic or reflux. She cries after every feed. The other night, at three am, I told the maternity nurse, Nadine: "If I don't get some sleep I'm going to crack". I don't remember anything after that until I woke at 9am. Yet apparently I got up at dawn, sat on the sofa, fed the babies, and had a conversation, before returning to bed. My memory is utterly f***** and has been since the birth. I do not even remember what I have done earlier in the day, or the time of the last feed, or whether the babies have been given a top up or not. My mind is utterly empty from lack of sleep.

*The colic/reflux is horrible to watch. The poor baby wails and wails and brings up wind and farts and moans for hours. We have now given her a dummy and that seems to help a bit, but she still makes terrible groaning and snorting noises at night.

*This afternoon I went to buy some garbage bags. The shop assistant said, 'you're looking tired'. I said, 'yes. two babies at home. no sleep' and he said, 'and one on the way' and nodded at my... paunch. I cannot get over the indignity of this, my small, round, pregnant-looking belly.
And among other indignities: Last night I went to bed in an old bra, with dollops of cream smeared around my nipples (they have been sucked so hard I think a layer of colour has worn away) and two cold cabbage leaves stuffed inside the cups.
Glamorous.

*According to Nadine, my little tiny baby, Twin One, today did the biggest poo she has ever seen in her fourteen year career.
I feel oddly proud.

*I am considering trying for another baby. I didn't know this would happen to me, but I love babies. I thought babies would be boring, and only become interesting at toddlerhood. But my they are interesting and sweet and warm and characterful, even if there is something a little like aliens or elves or characters from Lord of the Rings about them.

Heavenly Breast

2007-04-22T13:26:00.000-07:00

*These babies just love breastfeeding. And as my camera isn't working, I point my cell phone at them while they are hanging off my ever growing boobs (I am now L+ in the Bravura Range...).

All day, every day, for hours on end this is the view I have. Except, often the view is of two little heads nibbling away simultaneously. The other night, I dreamed that a young boy was on the beach sucking at my neck - and woke up to find a little baby gnawing at my nipple.

Breast feeding is a delight. It is the time I feel closest to the babies. Sometimes I feel as if all they see when they see me are my breasts. I peer in their faces and say 'Hello Babies', but it's not my face they are after.

Sometimes it is impossible for me to comfort them when they are crying, because the minute they smell the breast milk on me they go mental.... and start head butting my chest in their eagerness to get my nipple in their mouths.

If I am feeding one while lying on my side, drops of milk from the higher, unoccupied breast will leak down onto her.

After every feed I pump. I attach myself to a little machine, cannily hidden in a portable ruck sack, and pump. It is not a pleasant feeling.

My little A is such a superb sucker that she feels about four times stronger than the highest setting on the pump.

Last week, I went along to a breast feeding clinic. Lots of women sitting in a circle with babies attached to their chest, some with blood-gnawed nipples. I was worried that my little one wasn't latching on well - she has been confused by the bottle. But I was told she was doing fine, doing wonderfully. I was so absurdly proud, sitting there with the two of them latched on. My nipples are sore, but they are not decimated.

*My body is not yet back to normal. My stomach still has a big numb patch where the nerves were cut and still feels rather tender. I think that the scar was sewn up a little too tight as I have a small overhang -as well as a small pregnant shaped belly above it which won't go away. I am not sure what to make of this as I have always had a flat, smooth stomach. My breasts are not as perky as they used to be as well. They used to be round and firm and stay up entirely by themselves. However, after a long feed they become soft and giving to the touch and sag rather lower on my chest.

*Last night was... difficult. It was S - my maternity nurses - 24 hours off, and the babies did not stop crying. In the end I got two hours sleep. The rest of the time was spent either holding or feeding babies. My nipples were thoroughly sore by four am - I felt as if little mice were constantly attached to them, working away with nibbling bites. My parents came round this afternoon to hold the babies for a while, to give me some relief.

I find I am in a constant dilemma - the pull between demand feeding and giving the babies as much milk and cuddles as they want (which is my instinct - all I want to do is hold them) and trying to get them into some kind of routine, so that I can sleep at night (which means feeding them on a schedule - flexible, but a schedule nonetheless).

*My local cinema has a fabulous mother and baby day once a week. Last Thursday, there were about ten of us in there for a showing of Blood Diamonds. The babies slept through the violence, the gun shots, the RPG's exploding into buildings, the massacres, the rat tat tats, the helicopter blades, the screaming. Every so often there would be a loud fart, or a burp and a mother would say, oh dear, and creep outside to change a diaper. I am going to go every week from now on. It is brilliant.

I also went to the park. It was a bright day and I wheeled the pushchair under a tree. I had bought an egg mayonaise roll from my local cafe. I couldn't quite bring myself to sit down on the grass - that felt like tempting fate, I knew it would make the babies cry - so I stood up next to the pushchair to eat. It was my approximation of being someone who is able to easily get out of the house.

*Twins attract attention. But I do not understand why they do not attract more. I feel that everyone should be stopping me and saying - but my, what wonderous creatures. Far more black women than white women stop and smile and ask questions. I have my theories about this (partly to do with the high number of twins in Nigeria, and other parts of west Africa). Quite a few people have said, I was a twin, and told me how close they are to their sibling.

* It took me no time at all to settle into post natal squalor. Half the time I don't even bother to put on a top or a bra while in the house - I just wear a cardigan, without buttons, which I pull open to give the babies easy access. I only wear pajama bottoms, which I also go out in. My poor, ever tolerant maternity nurse. When we went to the cinema, I sat up at the end of the film... lifted one of the babies up in the air and stretched... and suddenly heard her hushed, insistent...KATTY! I looked down and realised that my entire left breast was sticking out of the slit cut into my special breast feeding top.

I am also, fairly often, covered in posit. And my pajama bottoms - stretched by over use in pregnancy - slide down under my small pregnancy like bump, creating an unaesthetic overhang, while the hems scrape along the floor.

*A lot of people have said to me how content I seem. And they are right. I am content. I am right where I want to be - where I have wanted to be for years and years and years.

i want to write...

2007-04-21T15:20:00.000-07:00

but how to when late at night...one windy, crying baby comforting herself at my breast...other whimpering upstairs... typing with one hand.... wrong, right hand (am left handed).... yet another cup of undrunk tea cooling by my feet (managed first cup of tea at 7pm... first food...piece of toast...at 4pm....).
i love my babies but they are full on work on maternity nurses night off...

top baby news: i unilaterally cut back massivly on formula.... and on mainly breast milk, babies gained half a pound each this week... also lots of incipient windy smiles...pre-cursor of real thing...

will write when babies give me time off... but for now, please go and visit richard at the end of my line who is now the proud father of much loved and much fought for twin boys....

Aaaargh

2007-04-12T15:43:00.000-07:00

*Still supplementing breast milk with formula feed, which I hate doing. Have started to pump manically in desperate urge to stimulate more breast milk - but not sure if it is working. It is a great pity because breast feeding is where it is at, my friends. Breast feeding is all about having forty minutes of totally focussed baby time ... lots of little cheek strokes and satisfied gulps and warm nestly bodies. Particularly satisfying is early morning feeds - lying on my side while a baby lies along my length and suckles away.
Babies, babies, we love you.

*Finally have a push chair - a bright red double nipper. It has a handy little net viewing window at the back and a see through plastic viewing window at the top. This means I can admire the babies as I walk along - as I did today for the first time. My gosh, those babies feel vulnerable in the push chair. All I could think of was savaging rotweilers leaping into the little exposed tents where they were sleeping. The twins are each in a separate compartment - nonetheless they both manage to coordinate their sleeping positions - lying on their backs, heads facing the same way and their arms thrown up in equal abandon.

*I have a picture I wanted to post of the big baby suckling at my breast... she is dwarfed by the size of it. I love watching her drink... she begins all tense, and then she cups my breast as if it is a giant, magic gourd, and as the feed goes on, and she grows more and more satisfied she gradually flops over onto her back, until she finally delatches with her arms thrown above her head and her little legs splayed.
Babies babies we love you.

*I have been given lots of presents in the last few days including, unfortunately, a heap more of bright pink tiny baby clothes. 'unfortunately', because they have now begun to grow out of the tiny baby clothes. I am ambivalent about this... a stage has passed, has gone. Already they no longer cry like premature babies - no more gnah gnah gnah - and I fear I shall miss their little sizedness. The bigger twin (she does have a name) now fits into a pair of 0-3 months trousers, which she has been wearing today with a cardigan knitted by my mother. They spend much of the day asleep on a sheepskin rug.
I love looking at them. They are adorable (have I said that?).

*Nice ex-boyfriend called me and asked if he could come round for a coffee and to view the babies. Said yes. Found I was pleased to hear from him.
However, ex-fiance's new wife was in a newspaper this week. She is, annoyingly, radiantly beautiful (as well as clever). More annoyingly, infuriatingly, irritatingly is that my ex was referred to in the article as the "adoring husband". Grrrrr.

*I love my babies. My babies are lovely. I know that all babies are lovely and I'd have loved whatever baby I had been given. But I really do love my babies. They are so soft and tiny and engaging. And because they are young, they haven't had time to hate me... yet.

*During my pregnancy I gained 44 pounds. I weighed myself a week or so after giving birth - and as a result of the cesaerean (and not having much to eat in the hospital other than pret a manger sandwiches) I lost 26 pounds. I can't believe my bump was so heavy. I was basically carrying the equivalent of a load of Sainsbury's shopping, or a large piece of business-class carry on luggage, inside my uterus.

Ridiculously Cute

2007-04-07T12:26:00.000-07:00

Introducing: Peter, the Potato Farmer and Yentl the Yeshiva Scholar.
AKA Monstrous One and Squiff O'Reilly
Or, finally, some really lovely Latin Names that don't suit them quite as well.
Twins, twins, twins, twins, lovely twins.

Milestones

2007-04-06T08:43:00.000-07:00

1. Lay in bath today and could see 1) my pubic hair and 2) my cesaerean scar. First time I have been able to see that part of my body without a mirror for months and months.

2. My babies slept through the night. Well, not quite through the night. They woke up every three hours to feed, and I had to breast feed and bottle feed and change diapers and what have you. But instead of crying and wailing for hours and hours, red in the face, going crazy, they actually slept and in turn I slept and the day feels peaceful and unlike any other. Right now they are upstairs in the cot in my bedroom, swaddled in soft cotton sheets, lying with their heads touching. They look incredibly peaceful, incredibly sweet.

Twins are the best. I feel sorry for everyone who doesn't have twins. All the mothers in the maternity ward with singletons, and I kept thinking, what's the point of having just one? Two are so much better. They wail together and move together, they are a multitude of joy, they are the most wonderful soft and glorious things.

I have read over my entry from yesterday and it is quite tedious and really quite unclear. It is also unfinished. But, rather than force you to read through another detailed further -eight-days of incarcaration story, I'm going to give a shortened account of my hospital stay. And this is how it goes:

On Sunday, more doctors crowded round my bed and told me that the babies needed to have tubes stuck up their noses, so they could be fed nasally - formula, directly into their stomach. I was not happy about this - who would be? - and I had to fight back tears as the tubes were woven down their little, tiny nostrils. Twin One wailed and screamed- went so mental - that she was taken out of the room so as not to distress me. The nurses insisted that the girls did not feel anything when the formula went down the drip but I did not, and do not, believe it.

Soon after, I was moved to another ward: transitional care. This ward was small - only four beds - and stifling hot. I was put on a three hour, round the clock schedule. I had to get up every three hours and change, breast feed and then 'top up' the babies with formula via the nasal tubes. This took approximately two and half hours, which meant I had to start the whole cycle again with only a thirty minute break. I was still very confused from the cesaerean, and not mobile, and by now exhausted as the babies did not sleep at night, just cried and cried. I remember that I began to find it harder and harder to follow instructions. I'd stagger around in the night trying to do what I had been told, searching out the midwives, who had to tell me the same thing over and over again as I could not retain any information. By about Wednesday I could no longer see straight I was so exhausted. I was having about one hours sleep a night. Thankfully, that morning, another midwife came into the ward, saw me weaving half-blind to the toilet, said, you look terrible, and told me to lie down. She then fed the babies while I was sleeping. Thus refreshed I started the cycle again. But by then I was so absolutely tired and confused - I had no idea why I was feeding the babies nasally when the breast feeding seemed to be going so well - that one of the midwifes actually asked my mother if I had mental health issues as I was finding it so difficult to understand what anyone was saying, or to figure out why I was in the hospital at all. Why did I have to give top ups? Why were they so insistant I use formula milk? Why were they saying on one hand that the breast feeding was going wonderfully and then asking me to feed the babies from a little screw top glass jar on the other? Maybe someone explained it to me, but I couldn't retain information. My mother, to her credit, said have you considered she might be exhausted from having no sleep and receiving constant contradictory advice? After that at night the staff nurses did try and help more, and I even had some sleep, lasting up to four hours.

I was not the only mother suffering in this way. Another twin mum wept every day for hours, she was so bewildered and so confused, hated the hospital so much and didn't know what was going on. Another fey woman began weeping in the night and me and the twin mum in the next bed crept over to her and the woman said she couldn't stand it any more, she was weak and tired and she felt that no one cared for her, and all she wanted to do was go home and have her husband look after her so she in turn could look after the baby. This woman later joined me in a small rebellion against the night nurse who insisted on giving us blood thinning injections four days after I understood they were meant to have ceased (it later turned out that we were being given them because the doctor had forgotten to write in a message stopping the prescription in our medical notes).

This confusion lasted days and days. I truly did not understand why I was in the hospital. Finally, after a week, I began to piece together that Twin One has low blood sugar levels and I was topping up to increase these levels. The hospital was trying to help me establish a take home feeding pattern that would ensure that the levels would stay elevated in the coming weeks. Up to that point I genuinely thought that I was in some strange corner of the NHS which had been taken over by the breastfeeding police. What was even odder, was how adamant I was that I wanted to breast feed exclusively. I didn't know I felt that strongly about it. But I do love breastfeeding and the feel of those little heads against my body and stroking their little tiny hands with their splayed out star fish fingers. Twin One is particularly sweet when she breast feeds. She opens her mouth wide, squiffs up her face, and then shakes her little head burrows down and deep towards my nipple taking large gulping mouthfuls. In addition to the glucose problems, Twin Two developed mild jaundice and had to lie on a little flat glowing blue light for twelve hours, and the light glowed through her tiny baby suit and the coiled wire trailed down through her legs and it was altogether distressing.

The reason that the hospital was so very confusing was that every nurse gave different advice. So with each twelve hour shift the nurse in charge, who also became the nurse in charge of me, would offer different directives. Some would tell me to mix feed, others to alternate feed, others to start timing my three hours from the end of the feed, others from the beginning. One told me I could go home, another that I could not. One told me I wasn't producing enough milk, another that this was rubbish and that the woman who had told me this should be disciplined. On and on until I thought I was going mad. I suppose most women in this situation would have a clear headed partner to help steer them through, but I did not. So in the end I relied on my best friend to negotiate the conversations. And I asked her, is this a nightmare? Am I imagining it? I felt excatly as if I had been kidnapped by imbeciles. I began to ask not, what do I do to get my babies better, but what do I do to get out of here. I finally found one senior staff nurse who said to me, I understand why you are so confused, the truth is we are meant to give uniform advice on this ward, but we do not. And some of the older nurses reluctant to adapt to the new ways and their priority is simply to have a peaceful night, so rather than help you they will give you advice that will make the baby sleep on their shift. My best friend assured me that the situation was nuts. Mind bendingly nuts. And that however tired I was, it was all enough to drive anyone mad.

To make matters worse, the hospital is in an old building, and as the temperature outside rose, so did the temperature inside. I began to sweat - as did everyone else in the room. I asked if we could open windows but was treated as if I was a very selfish person ("babies need it to be warm otherwise it's bad for them. So it doesn't matter if you are hot"). Then another nurse admitted that the windows had been sealed close after a patient had lept to her death. The central heating was on full, but after much questioning I established that it was on until April first, when it automatically switched off. The nurses put a fan by their station. I begged for a fan, and after initially being told it was bad for the babies, was given one. But then another midwife, not realising it was my fan (I had put it outside the curtains while I was breast pumping) gave it to another patient, and I had to lie sweltering in my corner watching this newcomer direct cold air onto her body - while my body exploded into an orgy of appalling heat-exacerbated hives.

Oh yes, the hives. They did not go down after the birth. Instead they inflamed into a nightmare of itching. And I couldn't get anyone to do anything about it. Finally, I flagged down a doctor who looked at my torn feet and said, that's disgusting, before prescribing me more anti-histamines and blissfully cold aqueous fluid. I was also given an appointment with the the consultant dermatologist. However, I couldn't find anyone who could tell me where or at what time the appointment was, so I missed it.

Finally, last Monday, after agreeing to alternate bottle and breast feeds, twin ones blood sugar levels stabilised and I was allowed to go home. Freed from prison. Liberated from the incarcaration. My best friend drove me home, and in the car through London's West End, I felt as if I had arrived from abroad after a long long journey. Everything outside seemed new and different, a far off world.

Being home has been so much better. The girls sleep properly now, long naps between feeds. My maternity nurse helps me at night to change and swaddle, and passes the babies to me so I can put them to my breast. I feel much much calmer. Twin One is now putting on weight, although Twin Two has stopped gaining and I have to switch from exclusive breast feeding to part formula. But it is not the end of the world, not a disaster, and today I fed them in the garden so they could feel the sun, and afterwards I pumped for five minutes and collected 30 mil to store in the fridge and right now I am nodding off at the computer, my eyes are closing, heavy, tired... time for a nap, for bed.

Two weeks on

2007-04-05T15:05:00.000-07:00

I wanted to post a picture of my two daughters. It is possibly one of the cutest pictures you will ever see. It is so cute that my cousin, who is a professional photographer, sent it around to a few of his friends. In this picture the two girls are lying against my maternity nurse with their arms around each other. There is no doubt about it: the twins take comfort in each others prescence. They nustle up close, and they like it best when they are jammed together head to head, just as they were for so many months in my womb. They even take it in turns to cry: one reaches a crescendo, begins to die out and just when you think it's the end, the other picks up the wail. Not much sleep for very many nights.

My daughters were born on the morning of March 23rd, and after that I spent eleven days incarcarated by the NHS. I say incarcarated because I genuinely thought I had been taken prisoner by an insane unit of the national health service. I did not understand why I was there, and I did not know how to get out. I thought they were only keeping me in to establish a breast feeding pattern, and I did not understand why the NHS suddenly had so much power - and so much money to waste on valuable bed space.

So: to begin at the beginning. It's all a bit hazy now as I couldn't keep a diary in the hospital and I was so very out of it so much of the time, so confused and hazy and not sure what was happening. But I do more or less remember the beginning. Arriving at the hospital at 7am, itching and with diahrrhea, being sent down to a ward and having my pubic hair dry shaved, and then talking to a doctor who told me that the consultant who was meant to be performing the c-section was ill and she was going to be doing it instead. I did not know who she was, and she seemed so young, but she assured me she was experienced and really I had no choice - either I delayed for another few days or I went ahead, so nervously, I agreed to go ahead.

Down the lift, in a hositpal gown, to the basement. But this time, instead of turning right to the antenatal clinic, going straight ahead through double doors, to an antechamber where about eight or nine people in green scrubs shook my hand and then onwards to a large, brightly lit room full of odd bits of machinery. It wasn't like an operating theatre on the television: it was less neat, less tightly packed, there was no bed that was the central focus. It was more like a spare room, with corners and lots of people milling around. In fact, I assumed it was some kind of pre-chamber. I was told to climb up onto a bed and hunch over by the consultant anaesthetist. My best friend was with me, also in scrubs, and I started shaking. I felt very cold. I am not a cowardly person, and although I feel fear it is only with good reason (gun fire, thieves). But I was shaking and trembling, and I said to the anaesthetist: I hope you don't mind, but I am going to have to babble my way though this. And he said OK, and as I hunched my back over and a needle was inserted into my spinal column (incorrectly: he had to do it twice) my mind suddenly flooded with pictures of a tukl - a Sudanese mud and thatch hut - and the image of a woman giving birth inside and it seemed the opposite of the chemical, antiseptic, alien-abduction birth I was about to embark upon, and then all I could think of were images from Sudan: a river I crossed once at the dead of night in a canoe, a bodygaurd swimming alongside, smiling up at me from the dark water; a drunk minder shooting at geese with his AK47 and I focussed on that, and then I felt the anaesthetic flood through my body and the doctor said can you feel that, and I said yes, and he said, what does it feel like, and I said, well this is going to sound inappropriate but it feels just as if I have seen a very, very beautiful man walking down the street. And they laughed. But that is what it felt like: desire, warm and spreading from my back down my thighs.

I can't really tell you the sequence of events except that I was suddenly and inelegantly tipped backwards onto the table I was sitting on and people were all around me, fixing in drips and injections and arranging a huge piece of plastic green sheeting, attaching it to my upper chest and then draping it over my body like a tent. I remember thinking how odd it was that we weren't going to be wheeled somewhere more discrete, instead here I was in this this big factory of a white room, being rummaged around and rolled about. The plastic sheeting was less like a curtain, and more like something found in the corner of the school playground. I felt like we were playing at tents, as my best friend crouched at my left shoulder. The anaesthetist said, can you feel that, and sprayed a cold mist on my upper chest. I said yes. He sprayed further down, and I said yes again. Then he said, can you feel that? And I said, I don't think so, maybe. And he said, if you said maybe then the answer is no, because what I did was rather disgusting. So I decided to think of something else.

I could not see any of the people in the room. They were all obliterated behind the tent. My best friend and I just chatted. I focussed on her as strange things were done to my numb underside. I did hear the doctors exclaim when they saw the large rash of hives on my upper thighs: they thought I was allergic to the anaesthetic, but then they remembered I'd said I'd had hives, and also that I'd asked that they did not adminster intravenous morphine because I understood that this exacerbated hives. The doctors moved around behind the screen and I felt nothing, nothing. Whatever they were doing was not being done to me, and I said to my best friend, how did we get from that day in the school playing fields when we walked around in the snow to this... and she laughed... and then there was a pull, and someone exclaiming, here comes the first baby, and there was a lifting sensation, or if not a sensation the awareness of something being raised out, and then a wail, and someone laughed and said do you know the sex and I said yes it's a girl and there was a lot of joking it's a girl it's a boy but it was a girl, and the wail moved accross the room and to a recussitaire - apparently because I couldn't see anything - and then after what seemed ages, a nurse came over holding the baby and she held her by my left eye and I looked at her and her eyes were closed and then she opened one of her eyes and she looked at me.

I did not cry. It was all too incredibly improbable and strange to cry. The baby was taken away and then the doctors called, here comes the other one and another cry and after a while another baby was presented to me, and then my best friend wanted to see what was going on and looked around the tent, and watched with fascination the sight of my bowels and other internal organs laying on my stomach, until the anaesthetist told her to stop looking because it was putting the surgeon off her stride. And it all felt very very unreal. I couldn't quite believe any of it.

At the end, after the stitching (and the insertion of a couple of anal pessaries) I was rolled onto a trolley and pushed out of the giant white room into a recovery room. I was still numb from the waist down and somewhat confused, but it was a quiet room and the babies were wheeled in and there was an efficient African nurse moving around and she said to me, would you like to breast feed the babies, and I said, yes please, and she handed then to me, and I put one on each breast, and after reading all these stories about how hard it is too breast feed and all the problems and difficulties both babies moved their little mouths towards my nipples and started suckling.

My parents were allowed to visit me in the recovery room, but I didn't want them to see me: the epidural had one strange side-effect. It made me shiver and shake, and I did not want to worry them. I learned later that the injection switches off the bodies ability to regulate temperature. I was freezing, my jaw was clattering, my teeth were banging together, my hands were trembling. I wanted to wait until I had calmed down. After about half an hour, the babies were put together in a large piece of tupperware on wheels and then I was wheeled up to the recovery ward by a disinterested and unkind man, who kept on bumping the trolley into walls, and banging it into lift doors. Once wheeled into place, I lay there with my babies next to me, and really I don't remember that much of the next few hours. I was rather confused. The doctors forgot to give me the oral morphine, I know that much, even though I wasn't in that much pain, but after four hours or so someone remembered and I was given a dose that put me into a benign haze.

I probably had visitors. But I was confused and tired and I had just had abdominal surgery. I can tell you that night fell, and that at sometime in the night, I was woken up by a doctor telling me that I had to give my daughters a supplementary formula feed. I did not understand what he was talking about. All I knew was that I wanted to breast feed my babies. I did not know why they wanted me to give them powdered milk. I couldn't take anything in. My mind was still addled with drugs, my body was drained, I'd just produced two daughters. I did not understand the reason. I could not comprehend it. I argued and argued, and I was told it was necessary for reasons I could not fully understand and in the end my daughters were taken away to sit with the nurses and given a feed from a sipping cup of formula for reasons I did not understand and could not understand, though I had a vague sense that the medical staff were annoyed at me for arguing and answering back.

The next day: visitors, babies breast feeding. I know that I was still tired and found it hard to stay awake. I had quite a few conversations where I babbled out what I was dreaming - something about the arc, about animals, about midgets about the size of doors. I also remember thinking that a cesaearean was no easy option. I was weak and uncomfrotable. My stomach was no longer firm, and my insides felt as if they were sloshing about. I could barely get out of bed, although on the second day I was encouraged to do so, and limped along to the shower. There was quite a bit of bleeding, and I also learned that I had bled quite copiously during the operation (and in the next few days became quite anaemic). There is a distinctive cesaerean shuffle: a slow limp towards the toilet, the shush shush of slippers on slippery floor, a hand held out to steady a frail body against a wall. I could not imagine ever being able to walk again. I wished I had had a natural birth, more so because I was unable to properly deal with the babies in the tupperware container next to me. I could not get out of bed to lift them to me, and yet they were left next to the bed for me to do just that. I could not even haul myself upright to breast feed them both at the same time and had to ask for help.

My memory is still a bit uncertain. But I do know that two days after the c-section someone came to me and said, we're going to send you upstairs for a few days to give you some more time to recover. There are lots of nurses up there who will be able to help you and give you the attention that you need to breastfeed. And I thought they were just being kind and said thank you. That evening I was moved. Someone wheeled the babies out, but I was left to walk along a corridor to a lift and up to the next floor. I did most of the walk supported by the wall. It hurt and I shuffled, but I made it to a dark strange small ward, a bit like a cave, only to be told there were no beds and I 'd have to reverse and go back down to another ward. There I was given a bed, and met by two horrible midwives. They told my parents they had to go as visiting time was over, but at the same time said they were too busy to give me any help with my crying babies. My mother tried to ask one of them a question but she was blanked. In the end my parents walked the babies up and down the ward, while I tried to ease myself into the new bed. The midwife came and shouted at all of us and then sent them away. Again, another strange night. I was still in pain, still found it difficult to move, but I was expected to look after, change and feed two crying babies. The alert button next to my bed didn't work, so if I needed help I had to get out of bed and limp down the corridor to the nurses quarters. The babies cried for much of the night, and I heard one of the midwifes complain that "that woman has spoiled those babies. Her parents were picking them up," even though my daughters were then only around 50 hours old. Later in the night I was woken up by the midwife again and told that the babies had to have more formula. I still did not understand why, and I tried to argue against them. The midwife, who was Nigerian, said: I understand you were difficult about this yesterday so I'm telling you, either you let me give the babies formula or we are taking them away to the special care unit to feed them by intravenous drip. After the feed, the babies screamed and the midwives finally got so fed up with the noise that they put the babies in bed with me for a double breast feed, tucked them in tightly on either side and (against all hospital regulations) propped me up so I could sleep with tem in bed wuth me. They both stopped crying immedieatly. I woke up immensely happy: it is a joy to open your eyes and realise that in the nook of each arm is a little person, breathing softly, snuggled and curled up.

*****

Enough for now. It is midnight. My daughters are sleeping and I should take advantage of this lull to also go to sleep. Their next feed is at two o'clock. Last night, they cried for six hours non stop. I'll continue soon - I know this is long, but it is really for my own benefit so I remember what happened. The experience was so very, very bizarre.

I want to say one last thing. I love my daughters. They have soft skin and the snuggle again me, their legs pulled up into a foetal position. They look like laurel and hardy and although I have given them beautiful romantic Latin names, I think of them more as snuffles o'mewl and monstrous baby. They are very tiny: born at five and six pounds, they lost around ten per cent of their body weight, which means the littler one was coming in at four pounds something. Tiny and wee, and absolutely lovely. I love their squiffy faces, and their tiny little hands and their soft soft skin. They are genuinely better than kittens.

My last night....

2007-03-22T16:03:00.000-07:00

As a woman without children.
My last night not being a mother (hopefully, touch wood etc etc).

This is how I spent the day:
Itching. Taxi to Acupuncturist.
She looked at me. She said, they're not coming are they?
I said, no.
She said we won't try and induce. We'll just try and relax you and reduce the itching.
Was punctured all over the place and then placed in a sort of Thunderbirds-are-go wooden take-off position.
Left acupuncturist.
Broke out in a massive rash of hives all down my thigh.

Met friend for breakfast in trendy north London cafe.
Eat baked beans and scrambled eggs.
Scratched.
Listened to gossip.
Heaved shopping trolley down street.
Bought a lamp shade, baby nappies, another soft toy and some chocolate for post birth.
Had a cup of sweet tea in my favourite cafe.
Came home.
Napped.
Parents came to visit.
Did little chores for me.
Had another nap.
Best friend turned up. She brought an evening meal from an Italian Delicattassen: cheese and bread and lemon tart.
Then we packed, and cleared up the house, and organised baby clothes and she took lots of photographs of me looking like a truculent adolescent holding a strangely patterned beach ball in my lap.
Itched madly.
We looked up skin complaints on the internet and discovered that this is definitely hives and that, horrifyingly,
hives are exacerbated by codeine and possibly by epidurals.
Brother and sister in law came to visit.
Wished me luck. Kissed me good night.

Best friend has gone to bed.
I am in my bedroom feeling....
oh my gosh, can't even think straight...
Worried about twin two.
Not even able to contemplate tomorrow.
About to have my last anti-histimine of the night...
and then....
and then...
at 6.20am.
It's off to the hospital.
To. Meet. My. Babies.

T-Minus 2 days

2007-03-21T16:27:00.000-07:00

Wednesday. Last hospital appointment before the Big Day. Lot of mini-contractions on the tracing machine. I could feel them in my upper uterus, and it was hard to breathe through them, but they did not hurt. Just play acting contractions, not real, pull-open-the-cervic contractions.

At 10.30 sat in chair and watched appalling BBC One Telly (I am amazed at how rubbish television is, not having one at home to stare at all day). Was still there at 3.30 - when I was
told the consultant couldn't make it for our appointment after all. Tired and cranky and worst of all, ripping apart skin. Huge welts on inner thigh like little hives. Have no idea where they are coming from. Don't think cholestasis as my bile acids have halved from previous rate thanks to drugs. Eventually, another doctor was found and though kind, and patient, was distracted and mumbled his way through my questions, did his best, couldn't think of anything extra I could do with the itching and left after I signed consent forms (do I know that c-sections can cause blood loss, bowel rupture etc etc). Waited in pharmacy for half an hour. By then skin flayed. Caught taxi to reflexology, in renewed attempt to get babies to dive out through my vagina. Went out to dinner with father and had to ask waitress to give me a glass of ice which I then held luxuriously in my hands (dripping, cool, wonderful). My father tried to persuade me to leave my old ladies trolley behind at his house (it is not exactly stylish) but I will not be parted from it, and so the restaurant staff kindly parked it in their clothes cupboard.

Have new panic now. Realised that I will be immobilised after birth for at least 24 hours and will not have a partner to hand me the babies, change nappies, respond to the cries. The midwives can give me guidance on how to care for the babies, but they can't be my on-call handmaidens. Rang my two birth partners to see if they can do emergency stand by, and also the maternity nurse, who is due to start work on Wednesday. She doesn't think she can come early, so have started a belated last minute panicked search for a doula on line. Any ideas from anyone out there most most welcome - particulary any single mums who have found themselves alone in the hospital after a c-section.

My gosh. It is getting so close now. I am slightly... panicked. Twin one has flipped onto her back and has been kicking me under the ribs all day. Twin two continues to be virtually immobile and I continue to worry about her. There is so much to worry about. I cannot believe this is happening. I am at some deep, deep level... freaked.

All these months...

2007-03-20T16:51:00.000-07:00

without even one tiny stretchmark...
and then...
measuring 47 weeks...
they have started.
They are wicked little things.
Very small, very red, little raised lines on my lower stomach.
And THEY ITCH LIKE F****
I have tried burning them off me in a hot bath.
Today I was so desperate I even attacked them with a comb.
This evening I poured, literally stood upright and poured, a bottle of calomine lotion over them.
Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.
I've cut my nails back but I can't cut them back far enough.
Last night I caved in and took an anti-histimine.
The cholesostasis itching is also back: arse, thighs, wrists.
Itching, itching. It doesn't sound like the worst possible side effect of pregnancy.
But believe me, it is not pleasant.
Anyway. Not long to go now.
Only a few more days.
I am hoping that the itching will make me relieved that the babies are arriving.
I wanted to mentally feel, it's time for them to come out.
So far, up until now, I've been happy to have them safely tucked away inside me.
Now I can just begin imagining the hospital stay.
Vaguely see the moment when they are lifted out of me.
And worry constantly whether they will be alright.

Ho Hum

2007-03-19T16:39:00.000-07:00

More of the same. Hospital early am. Trace, fine. Bloods, fine. Consultant, in scrubs, out of doing c-sections. Could see that I was still undecided and finally asked if I wanted her advice. I said, yes please. She said, given that you have choliostasis and given that twin one has lost fluid in the amniotic sac I would say go for a c-section. She said I could do it on wednesday or friday. I opted for friday, not because i want them to come naturally before then (in all truth, I do not) but because I said I'd like time to prepare the house and just rest and be ready. So friday it is, and the doctor I saw last week (the one I wanted to be my friend) will perform the procedure. Felt a great relief at the decision. I spent the next few hours wandering around the west end very slowly, eating sandwiches, visiting internet cafes, reading trashy magazines, and feeling constant braxton hicks and kicks. the babies just won't keep still. or it could be that now they are bigger, i can feel them all the time.

Late in the afternoon I went to see 'the science of sleep'. it is a sweet film starring the kind of man i would very likely fall in love with, someone who is so bound up in his own imagination that dream and reality blur. he reminded me of my ex to be honest (sometimes I used to lean over him when he was sleep talking and ask him questions and try and direct his dreams... once he peed down the back of a radiator in a bed and breakfast while sleep walking). the two protaganists had a very imaginative and very particular inner life, and that reminded me of our relationship and made me very sad. I was determined not to cry in the cinema (a massively pregnant woman with an old ladies trolley sitting alone in the fourth row weeping? I think not) so I had to hurry to the toilets after the film and lock myself in a cubicle. Then i leant against the wall and wept. I wasn't even sure why I was weeping. Because the love in the story felt so far away from my life? because I feel I have given up love? because my life was once all about love and romance and now it isn't? because I loved my ex so much and yet he chose to have children with someone else? It wasn't a chronic sadness, I know it will pass, I know that another kind of love is coming, and after about twenty minutes I felt better and pulled my trolley to an italian restaurant where i cheered myself up with a big plate of pasta - and then some friends called and asked me out to another dinner, so i caught the bus there and felt ok, particularly as they all wanted a tentative touch of my belly (it's so hard! it feels like a football! etc).

Tomorrow is 37 weeks. Over average for twins. But more importantly, technically no longer premature.

A Decision?

2007-03-17T03:41:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure if I have made a decision yet. Although it is likely that I have, and that I am just running round in circles only to return eventually, and after a lot of wasted energy, to my starting point.

Back to the hospital again yesterday, and met a lovely, lovely consultant. She is very pretty and I want to be her friend: spiky dark hair and an easy laugh. She went through everything very carefully, step by step. She obviously couldn't tell me what to do - it really is up to me at this point as there are advantages and disadvantages to both situations - but she did give me as much information as she could. She also said she would book me in for a cesaerean next Friday and would give me over the weekend to finalise it. She also explained that with a natural birth with twins -induced or not - I'd be lucky to even get on my hands and knees. She said the monitors would be on from the start, which would render me immobile. So, for now, I am booked in for next Friday, and going back twice next week for checks and traces. She didn't seem to think it was likely that the babies would come before then. I do know what she means. They do seem rather... comfortable, snuggled in, even if their mother isn't.

I am still exhausted. I left the hospital but I could barely make it up the road again. It has become really quite difficult to move. I feel drained. In the end, I gave up and simply caught a taxi to my first ever acupuncture session - my effort to needle the babies out of me. The acupuncturist was an interesting woman, a midwife at my local hospital half the week, an acupuncturist the other half. I have no idea if sticking those needles in worked (it certainly hurt a bit on my swollen, water-puffed left hand side) but I loved sitting on the bed and having a quiet doze. I had a few braxton hicks while I was there, very tight. She said, as did the midwife at the hospital, that the pain I had felt on the train was probably my pelvis opening up, which was why it was one off and lasted so long.

And then I came home and fell asleep for several hours. I felt pale and not well, but also in some ways better: the contracting, groaning cause of pain had become more regular. I had a bath and I could see a different sort of contraction: actually view the shape of my uterus when my skin tightened. And even though I was up around ten times in the night to pee and four times in the night with my stomach, I didn't itch as much and I felt more in control in my body. I have no idea whether that was the acupuncture or just the bliss of having as much sleep as I could, but I definitely, definitely felt better.

Still worrying about the babies health. Haven't heard back from the half-siblings mum about the chromosomal problem found in the embryo of another woman who used the same donor - have seen that the donor I used is no longer being sold by the bank. Is this because he has been withdrawn???? I do not know. I do not trust them to tell me. I suppose there is not much I can do about it now, anyway.

As for my cousin: I am annoyed with her for putting the strength of a good story above my privacy... but she has been otherwise very supportive of this pregnancy, ringing me up to find out how I am and offering practical help. I hope that she has stopped telling people now. I think she may have as I have noticed that she has stopped calling me so much, and I think she may feel a little embarrased.

Come on babies. Time to come out!

Advice Wanted

2007-03-15T16:52:00.000-07:00

Lying in bed itching and hoping someone out there will give me some advice on cesaerean versus induction for twins. I have until Friday next week, and then the twins must come out. I can choose the mode in which they exit my body. My choice at the moment is vaginal birth if spontaneous, c-section otherwise. But some people, like my sister in law, think I should go for an induction. The doctors can't really give me guidance, I can do either, and so this major decision is up to me. And I'm not sure how to make it. I need to leave the house at 9am and be at the hospital at ten to draw up a birth plan with the doctor. Anyone out there able to give me insight and guidance? Anyone out there able to tell me about the recovery period from a cesaerean? Or give me insight into induction with twins?

Very tired again. Seven and a half hours in the hospital: bloods, consultant meeting, and two scans. Two because there was a problem in the first one with the blood flow down the umbilical cord. Ended up having a second scan in the fetal medicine unit with a professor, two women who were showing him how to use a new ultrasound machine, two rather good looking and very well dressed consultants, and a midwife. The professor said he couldn't see the reverse flow but did say I had less amniotic fluid around twin one, which I haven't heard before. He couldn't advise me on induction or cesaerean either, pointing out quite fairly, when I said that induction with twins sounded highly unpleasant, that birth was in general highly unpleasant. The babies, incidentally, are still growing well: around 5.7 and 6.2 pounds respectivly, the equivalent of small singletons of a similar gestation.

Coming back on the train had my first pains. Not sure what they were. I wondered if they were constipation pains, but they were in my uterus, low down, and combined with tightening like a braxton hicks. Lasted ages and ages and ages, and my walk slowed to a crawl. Passers by made comments like, 'you shouldn't be out on your own love'. I had to get off the tube early and haul my way slowly up the stairs. Several women - women are so much more polite and concerned than men - asked me if I was OK. But most impressively a girl of around fourteen in a school uniform, and thick hair in a wild cloud of a pony tail and an anorak lent accross the handrail dividing the stairs and said, 'would you like some help?' I wanted to follow her home and congratulate her mother. Finally reached the surface, and caught a taxi the rest of the way. Managed to disapate the pains in a hot oatmeal bath. False Labour?

A point of annoyance: I was waiting for the consultant this morning and saw a woman I know who is also expecting twins. We were talking and she mentioned she was 46. Then she asked me if I had used donor eggs. I have a rule that I do not ask people whether they used donor gametes unless I am willing to disclose that I used donor gametes. I assumed she would share this rule. So I said to the woman: 'No I used my own eggs, but I did use donor sperm.' She then replied quite proudly, 'my husband and I used our own sperm and our own eggs, we were really lucky'. I thought that was quite bad form, and it made me quite cross.

Mind you, everything makes me cross. I am also cross with my cousin. I was at a party recently and a woman I do not know came reeling up to me drunk and said in front of a group of people, ' T (my cousin) says you chose the father of your child from a book!!!!!' I couldn't work out what was more annoying: the fact that despite telling my cousin I was trying to keep my use of donor sperm within family and close friends, she was telling strangers, or the fact that she had elaborated with a mythical 'book'. And it's not a one off: A few days ago, the young man who has been clearing my cellar, and who also works for my cousin, mentioned 'the book'. I feel as if my cousin has told everyone. When I very mildy raised it with her, she said: "If someone asks me, I cannot lie", which I thought was bollocks: She went on 200 internet dates and said she was never going to tell her boyfriend about it, so obviously none of us mentioned it either. Where were her principles then? Also it's my story, not hers, to disseminate. I'm so cross that I've decided not to make her a godmother (she doesn't know I was even considering it). Is this too mean of me?

And finally. A Thursday night humiliation. I went out to dinner this evening with my family, to a very trendy restaurant in the east end beloved of the likes of Gwynneth Paltrow and Gilbert and George (or so says the publicity). I got dressed and put on my black velvet coat from Whistles, which has been hanging in the hall. We were going to go there on the bus, but I was worried about cramps again so my brother and my sister in law picked me up in a taxi. In the taxi I realised that a great big Tom Cat had entered my house, sprayed the hall... and sprayed all over my coat. It stunk. When we arrived at the restaurant, my sister in law seized my coat from me and asked the maitre d' for a bin liner. He looked a bit suprised... and disgusted... and we folded up the coat and tied it inside the bin liner and left it in the cloakroom. I was going to put it near the umbrella stand but he said I better not in case someone mistook it for rubbish and threw it out. Having left my cat pee stained coat behind, I waddled into the restaurant, the world's largest woman, covered in a sprinking of fine anti-itch oatmeal, and felt, truly truly squalid.

Thirty Six Weeks Plus One: Anxious and Confused

2007-03-14T05:20:00.000-07:00

It was never in my plan to get so far. I knew that 36 weeks is average for twins, and that fifty per cent of women deliver before that time. But I never imagined that I would actually reach the average. And yet here I am, 36w1d, farcically, clown-like, big, with no real sign that the babies are going to come out. My belly must be stretched to capacity by now. I can't imagine that there is any more space in there. It juts agressively forward and every little twitch the babies make, I can feel. My uterus now measures 47 weeks.

My mental state, and my physical state, are all over the place. I know that I have no more than eight days left before the babies come out. I can't quite believe it, and I welcome the reprieve. But I am tossed about - sometimes wracked with anxiety and physical discomfort, sometimes perfectly ok. Monday, for example, was fraught. The good thing was that it was the last day of the builders, so I am now free of men ringing on the doorbell at 8.30am and traipsing through the house in big boots. But the doctors appointment was in many ways frustrating. I arrived at exactly the time I was told to arrive, very early, so that the blood tests would be back in time for me to see the consultant who was going to go through a detailed birth plan with me. However, the mid wife greeted me with a: "You're Early. Wait there", and disappeared to find polystyrene cups for patient tea. I didn't get my bloods taken until after nine -which meant they didn't return back until after one, which meant the consultant had already gone home. My liver enzymes levels were falling (though are still high) so no immediate action was taken, and I was told I could leave. But it meant I was dismissed without the birth plan and also without getting the consultants advice on starting a course of acupuncture to try and stimulate labour before the cesaerean deadline. I was told to go and make another appointment with the consultnat for Thursday and went downstairs to book it, only to discover that she is not in on Thursdays. I also had intermittent flurries of worries about the babies, especially twin B who is so very, very quiet and I think makes a very wierd fluttering movement that I once thought was hiccups but now fear is something else. There wasn't really anyone to ask on Monday as the unit was under-staffed and a (very nice) student midwife was given the job of monitoring me, and the monitor kept on sliding off the precipice of my belly.

Along with this anxiety, I have been terrified by more news that the US sperm bank I used has been lying to clients. I contacted the mother of my girls' half-sister in the states, and she told me she had also had problems with the bank. She said her daughter is healthy, as is another little girl born from the same donor (he is clearly a girl producing kind of a man) but that another baby has just been found with a genetic abnormality in utero. It's not clear if this comes from the maternal or the paternal side. I grew terrified about this, and about whether or not the donor really is an open donor (the sperm bank has been evasive). The woman today sent me a picture of her daughter to reassure me that at least her child had arrived well. It was strange to see my daughters half-sister: a serious, broad-faced, pale child, so very unlike me. I'm very curious to know where lies the donor and where lies the mother. But I guess we'll know more when the girls are born. By Monday night I was in such a worry, so terrified about the girls' health and the veracity of the donor, that I could barely sleep. And it was compounded by this bloody itching, which starts at night. My bathroom floor is covered in splashes of calomine lotion - I was so desperate I tore off the lid with my teeth and then tipped the bottle down my stomach and over my body. And my dreams are torturous, complicated. Also, I have become easily exhausted - so much so that yesterday in John Lewis with my dad - my last department store trip to prepare the house before the babies birth - I actually slumped to the floor in Men's Shoes, sliding down the wall, and a lovely shop assistant fetched me a glass of cold water. The end of pregnancy is by no means terrible, but it is draining.

And yet, and yet... I am more scared by the idea of the babies actually arriving. I cannot even begin to imagine birth, or babies being in this world. I just pray for them to be healthy, and that I will like them and they will like me....

Feeling Better

2007-03-09T03:58:00.000-08:00

Last night I had a plate of spaghetti. Then I went to bed, after another oatmeal bath. And for the first time in ages, I did not have cramping, I did not itch and I did not have diarrhea. It was heavenly. I only got up a few times to wee, and when I did, I got back to sleep relatively quickly. I slept about seven hours. I woke up and the sky was blue. The Russian builders were downstairs picking up my possessions in mutilated hands (one was in the army; I think he must have been blown up) and wondering over them ("What is this? It is a munitions shell? Why does she have this") and we had an incomprehensible conversation about long range Russian aircraft in Siberia ("The pilots not live long. There is a lot of Atom there, you know what I mean???? The planes tank in air"). It was quite exhausting, but I have always been charmed by Russians. Particularly ones who wear little 1960s astronaut zip up suits and have gold teeth. Thus cheered, and by the fact that my front door was being painted, the hole in the ceiling had been plastered, and the insurance company delivered my replacement computer before 10am, I went and eat a cheese sandwich WITHOUT PAIN in my local cafe. It is such a relief not to feel ill. I am now off to make war with the local council.
My babies weigh a ton, and are constantly squirming. I feel absolutely top heavy and entirely stretched.

A plan....

2007-03-07T13:19:00.000-08:00

*Off to the early monitoring unit first thing this morning for another trace. All rather agonising as I had very bad, cramping diarrhea. The midwife strapped on three bands to monitor the twins heartbeat and any contractions and after seeing the regular spikes indicating movement in my abdomen seemed concerned that I was in early labour. I tried to explain that it was agonising pains in my stomach and I was desperate to go to the toilet. I don't think she believed me. I held out for fifteen minutes and then finally had to rip off the monitors, pad out of the ward at a trot and then explode onto the toilet. I came back to a cross looking midwife. She really tried to be nice about it - and said fifteen minutes was probably enough - but I noticed that when I leaned over for my steroid shot, I was given a very agressive puncture into my arse...

And then, my consultant turned up. She was great, and thorough. She noticed I hadn't been given the right drugs yesterday ('noticed': I said I wasn't taking the anti-histimines as the oatmeal baths worked just as well, and she said, what anti-histimines? and then realised I hadn't been given the right medication). I asked what exactly were the effects of OC, and she explained it was associated with still birth. It is very much an either/or condition: it doesn't seem to have any other potential effects on babies, physical or mental. She then explained that in fifteen years she has never seen a woman who has OC and is diagnosed and then monitored closely, loose her baby in a still birth. She said she had only seen that happen when the condition was left unmonitored. I then said that if that was the case I was glad I had asked for a second opinion, and explained that the doctor last week had not picked up on it, and had not even mentioned the OC in my notes, even though I had complained about itching, had been tested for the condition and had already had one irregular blood test back. I said I wasn't saying that to complain, but
I was quite confident challenging doctors, while I expected many other patients coming into the clinic would simply follow what they were told.

Finally, I said that I really wanted to discuss a birth plan, as I could deliver any day. And we came up with a loose arrangement. If I go into spontaneous labour, I will have a vaginal birth. She said my babies were a good weight and in a good position and there was a high chance I would have a straightforward delivery and be able to recover faster However, if my enzyme levels continue to rise, or I go beyond 37 weeks and action has to be taken, I should probably have a cesaerean, as induction tends to be very long. I felt much better about that as well. At least I know what to do, and who to refer to, if I do go into labour anytime from now. I don't have to go back until Monday when I have more blood tests, traces and a further consultant meeting.

*And now in other news. This is really exciting for me, and not for anyone of you. But it made me happy yesterday.
There is an actor I think is funny and handsome. My sister and law and I sometimes talk about him and how lovely he is. About a month ago, I was standing on a street corner and he walked by. I texted to my s-in-l... 'you'll never guess, I have seen the man who could have been my husband walking down the street.'
Last night, I was in the hospital signing in to a multiples evening. I was trying to fill in the slips at reception, when the receptionist turned to the person next to me (who I hadn't even noticed) and said, 'is this your wife?'. The man said no, sounding slightly horrified, and laughed. Without looking up, I said, 'unfortunately not', and the man laughed again. Then I said ruefully, 'maybe in another life'.
After about thirty seconds, I did look up. And guess what... it was the beautiful actor!
His wife came along later and they were very affectionate with each other. I'm a bit in awe of her as she is not only lovely to look at but clever and extremely funny: I have admired her for ages.
My brother (who also likes them) says I should just go back to next months meeting with a pillow stuffed up my jumper.

*And finally, yet another bit of showbiz gossip. Ladies and Gentlemen. You may not know it, but you may have seen me on a cinema screen near you in an OSCAR WINNING FILM. Admittedly, I was only on for one second, as a drab extra (I was corralled into it by the producer: I'd gone to the set for another reason and she said they'd run out of extras and would I mind standing in for the day). Only my father and two friends have spotted me so far. And that was with very precise, you must look here, at this exact time, at this part of the screen...instructions.
But still!

Not so paranoid

2007-03-06T08:53:00.000-08:00

I went back to the hospital this morning for the results of the tests and some monitoring at the early something unit. They didn't know what to do with me at first, so put me on a trace and took some more blood. One of them even asked why I was there and I said to get the blood results. After a few minutes she came back and said that it seemed I did indeed have obstetric choliastoisis. I wasn't expecting that. I kept on thinking the numbers must be wrong. The midwife went to track down a doctor to work out what to do next, and I lay on a bed chatting to another admitted woman (pre-eclasmpsia) and rather a sweet student nurse - a 23 year old Lebanese boy. After a few hours the doctor came, and offered me pills for the itching and also steroids to help mature the babies lungs in case they have to come out early. The idea of taking drugs made me rather nervous so I asked to speak to a consultant. We all faffed around for a while - I'm not even sure who my consultant is - but eventually someone was tracked down, and after several cups of tea and an egg and cress sandwich I talked to a lovely, calm knowledgable woman.

It seems that OC is fairly rare, and very itchy and can be very damaging to the babies - it is associated with still birth. 'Treatment' is really monitoring, and working out a balance between the risk of the babies being inside and the risk of taking them out when they are not properly done. I would really like to keep them in for another week if possible - 36 weeks seems creditable and their lungs should be developed by then. I agreed to take the steroid shot, just in case, and then I began itching again (on my nose!) and asked for the itching pills just in case. The doctor said the risk of a vaginal birth turning to a cesaeraean at my age is around 50 per cent. She also said she agreed with my decision to have a cesaerian if there is talk of the babies coming early (rather than being induced). I have to go back tomorrow for another trace, more bloods, a talk with my consultant, another (the last) steroid shot and a doppler to check the blood flow to the babies is OK (apparently this is what can be affected by OC). I will probably have to go in everyday from now until birth for tracing and bloods. If the bloods change I will have to have the babies out immeadiately. If they stay stable I will be encouraged to deliver sometime between 36-37 weeks. I will not be allowed beyond 37 weeks (not that I was expecting to get that far anyway).

I lelt at 3.30 feeling reassured. I'd been there six hours and I was so impressed by the care and attention (particularly the tea and biscuits...). That really is a good, thorough hospital. It was one of those, proud of the National Health moments, money well spent, don't let the governent cut back any further etc. I went to PC world to choose a new computer, sat in the hospital canteen and eat a revolting dish of boiled potatoes covered in a floury cheese mush, and now I'm about to go to the hospital's first multiple night.

I am so glad I rang the hospital and asked for checks last week. I am so glad I didn't listen to the doctor and rang back for a second opinion. I am hopeful that now the situation is being monitored and it will be under control.

The twins are nearly here!

Coming to 35 weeks...

2007-03-05T12:39:00.000-08:00

First of all, thank you so much for your kind comments. Secondly, Maverick Mama has had her nearly 11 pound, overdue, baby boy - at home, in view of the full moon. Go and send congratulations...

I am back in the internet cafe, at night, plastic container of tea beside me, two very annoying boys behind me talking and swearing very loudly. I am exhausted. The end of pregnancy is not as hard as I had been warned but it is quite wearing. The bump is discrete, but very large, and heavy. I can feel a head in my pelvis (can this be true?) and I am constantly kicked in a strange way that feels like a caught thread pulled through a bit of material. I am also insomniaced and having epic, unsettling dreams.

On Saturday afternoon I called my GP friend about the itching and the diarrhea and she suggested I call the hospital. I talked to a lovely midwife who looked at my blood results and told me to come in for monitoring that evening, and to bring an overnight bag. So that is what I did. My sister in law offered to come with me, but I said no. It was like the day I did IVF: some things are best faced alone.

I went up to the labour ward and was shown to a birthing room, and then laid down on a flat, wide bed and strapped up with monitors to check the babies and my contractions (which I didn't think I was having).

The babies were still doing well. Little regular heartbeats at 130 and 135 bpm. There was also a lot of fetal movement (quite a bit of which I couldn't feel) and, apparently, very mild contractions, which I assume were Braxton Hicks. Because of the contractions (about once every twenty minutes) the doctor suggested I stay on the monitor for an hour and a half. They also redid my bloods: my liver results from the second Friday blood test showed a slight rise, though it's not clear if that elevated level was there before pregnancy. There was a little blood and a little protein in my urine, but apparently not enough to worry about.

As I lay there I could hear the woman next door groaning and crying in labour. She was groaning deeply, pushing groans, abandoned groans, as abandoned as sex. The noise came through the walls and made me feel rather scared. At the same time I thought of my two ex boyfriends and cursed them for letting me end up in this situation, for not being there for me, for letting me do this alone. At one point my eyes filled with tears. Self Pity.

At 8.30 the consultant swept into the room with his three person team of doctors and nurses. He is the most senior doctor I have seen this pregnancy. He asked me who my regular consultant was (I said I didn't have one, I just saw whoever was available) and he said, 'I see you want a vaginal birth' and I said, it wasn't so much that I wanted one, as that a doctor had seen both babies were head down and said to me: "So, you'll have a vaginal birth then?", and I'd said, 'OK'. He said it was impossible to tell what was causing the itching as all the tests weren't back yet, but he didn't think it was choliostasis. He said the babies were doing well, and advised that I come back on Tuesday to see to a doctor and go through all my results which should be in by then. The team then swept out the room, leaving me to have the first internal since my eggs were retrieved nearly nine months ago. Gosh, it was unpleasant. I'd forgotten how horrible it is to have an ice cream scoop stuffed up your vagina. I made a terrible fuss. I said to the nurse, 'would you mind very much if I swore', and she said 'go ahead.' so I said: 'fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck' very loudly, and it distracted me and made me feel better, as it always does (she didn't look very impressed, though). My cervix was, thankfully, closed, so I was allowed to go home.

To relieve the itching I have since started having oatmeal baths. I blend the oatmeal in a coffee grinder. It really does reduce the itching and also leaves your skin silky smooth so I would reccomend it, to anyone. So that's it for now. Still diarrhea (I have been to the toilet more times in the past three days then I did in the entire second trimester of pregnancy) and still itching, still stressed and waddling, but feeling better that someone is watching over me. And also very impressed by the thoroughness of the doctors. I think they stuff all the junior doctors down on the antenatal clinic, which is something of a relief (maybe they won't be in charge of my birth...).

As for the birth itself. I talked to another twin mum today who had her babies at my hospital. She said what I have already decided: If there is any talk of inductio, go for a cesaerian. She said that once the doctors begin an induction the pregnancy becomes so medicalised that the babies may as well be lifted out of you. I hope to corner a doctor tomorrow and ask someone to give me a clearer idea of the pros and cons of a cesearean/vaginal birth with twins. What I do know, is that if I go for a vaginal birth, I have a 35 per cent chance of ending up on the operating table anyway.

It's hard to believe that this pregnancy is coming to an end. Hard to believe actually doesn't do it justice. I don't believe it. I feel uncomfortable, sure, but what do you expect with around 10 pounds of baby and eight pounds of placenta and amniotic fluid in my very large and distended stomach. It is frustrating being incapacitated. I can't shut the window in my bedroom, for example, which was left open by the painter this evening, because the lifting and pushing action strains my belly. And I can't shift a box to get at the DVDs below, which I would very much like to put on a shelf. Also, and most embarrasingly ('Darling, are you aware you are making a noise,' my mother said in the car back from Ikea this afternoon).,I have started to make very large groans in public. UUUUHHHH, UGGGGGHHHH, URRRRRRGGGHHH.

Whatever happens, not long to go. Term for twins is 36-37 weeks. Tomorrow, I will be 35.

Catching up

2007-03-03T04:38:00.000-08:00

I have been away from computers for so long... My stolen compaq will be replaced by the insurance company, but not for a little while, and I'm still waiting for my land line to be connected to broadband. hopefully I will be able to communicate with ease again by next week... It would be lovely if I was able to browse from home by the time the babies arrive.

It's been a stressful week. It began with my bath emptying into the kitchen (the previous owners had ommitted to mention a leak...), my mobile phone being thrown out with the rubbish - and ended with a series of worried visits to the hospital.

My itching has not stopped - if anything, it has intensified, and I woke up this morning with tear marks from my thumb tips to my wrist where I had been scratching in my sleep. On Tuesday, I finally relented and called the hospital midwife who suggested I come in to do the blood tests for choliosis of pregnancy. This is a condition of the liver which can be very damaging to the babies in utero, and seems to be treated with monitoring and early delivery.

I did the tests and then waited for the results on Thursday, after my 34 week scan (babies doing well: 5.2 pounds and 4.6 pounds and constant growth, both head down). Unfortunately, my antenatal appointmen was with a junior and not very engaged doctor. She told me that at least one test was abnormal, advised me to do another, got distracted by a phone call, dismissed me without giving me the blood test forms (I had to go back to remind her) and then, when I asked how I'd get the results, said I should just wait for my next routine check up in two weeks. This seemed ridiculous for a potentially threatening disease, so I called again yesterday and spoke to the midwife. She went to get a second opinion for me, and this time the doctor said I had to monitor the babies movements over the weekend and then go in on Monday to the early monitoring unit. Hopefully all the blood tests will be back by then, including bile, which is the clincher. Meanwhile, I am itching like crazy, drawing blood, despite cutting my nails as far back as I can, and now I have diahrrhea as well.

And in other news:

*I really like my new house! The kitchen is bright, my living room looks lovely, the babies' room is coming along and I have washed all their tiny weeny clothes and put them away in my new dresser with changing table on top. The area is also fantastic: this internet cafe is only five minutes from my house and I'm here with a lovely plastic container of tea, and in a moment will pull my old ladies trolley down to the Italian deli for some tortelloni. The workmen have also nearly finished and I think the house should be completely in order by the end of next week - just before I turn 36 weeks.

*I have become very nervous about birth, particularly after having dinner with a friend - a doctor who once did an internship at the hospital where I will be having my babies. "Whatever you do," she said. "Don't have twins vaginally". There was much description of blood and ripping and episiotomies over the fish pie. I felt rather panicked. I am also very worried about the babies. Not just their health, but how I will cope with them. I'm going to be having babies, very, very soon! I find it difficult to believe. And if I find this end of pregnancy stressful, how stressful am I going to find mothering??

No computer

2007-02-24T03:53:00.000-08:00

I wanted to write earlier, but... my computer was stolen, presumably by the builders still in my house. This really is depressing as all my work is on that computer.. and of course I haven't backed it up since July.

So now I am in an internet cafe. And there are people sitting opposite me chatting. And as you can tell by my tone, I am not in a very good mood... again.

It's not been so bad, really. It could have been much worse. The house is coming along slowly. I have hired two men to help me unpack, but it is a very slow process. We have put up some of the pictures. And some of the blinds (although they were all cut too short, and so the light floods in around the edges in the nursery).

Also, pregnancy at 33/34 weeks with twins, is not quite as easy as earlier on. My ankles are perpetually swollen, and hurt by the end of the day, my breathing is laboured, and it feels as if a baby's head is lodged behind my pubic hair. I waddle very, very slowly. And I wake up groaning and tearing at my skin with my fingernails... everything itches.

But I don't want the babies to come out yet, please. At least thirty six weeks. Another two and a half weeks and then they'll be ready, and hopefully my house will be ready. And in fact, it could be much much worse. There have been good things too. The house is growing on me. It is bright and light. There are cats in the garden who press their noses up against my kitchen window. The ceilings are high. I am a two minute walk from the pound shops, and lots of cheap Turkish cafes and a bagel shop and a place selling tea and egg mayonnaise rolls and I have a couple of lovely neighbours from my antenatal class - one of whom brought me lemon cake this week, as apparently I was so deeply appreciative when she made it for our class once (I love food).

(The two women in the internet cafe opposite me are composing a letter to a man who is begging forgiveness. Will it be given? A lot of self-righteous mumbling in a heavy French accent: "Ok. But don't ask me to fuck you. You understand?") The storm of romantic love and passionate life! So much energy expended. I have two friends constantly on the phone these days, negotiating the break down of their relationships. I am being sympathetic, but mainly by staying very quiet. It seems like so much ... exertion .. over nothing. So much up and down. Though of course it is not nothing. At the time, it feels like everything. And when I was in the heart of it, I was the most dramatic of all...).

I hope that loosing the computer (which had been left in my new bedroom for safe keeping by one of my brother's friends) guarantees a wonderful birth and a wonderful life for my girls. If there is going to be cosmic weighing up, debit and credit, perhaps this means that I get healthy babies to term (and of course, if the thief repents and leaves the computer in its bag on my doorstep, or it miraculously turns up, that will not detract from the good luck coming the way of the babies. One has to be careful when being superstitious).

Anyway. Got go go back home and begin unpacking some more. And thrilled to see in the days I was away from the computer that Lut C has had a positive test, and Thalia's pregnancy is still going strong.

Phew!

2007-02-19T14:09:00.000-08:00

Thank god that is over.
Thank god.
That was the most stressful day I have had for... months. Absolutely months.
Thank god it is over!

My parents came round about two in the afternoon. I was hidden in my room agonised with stress. I'd just had an arguement with the chief mover.
My parents did something unbelievably kind. My mother sat on the floor and massaged my swollen feet while my father massaged my shoulders!
Then they helped me clear and pack the room. I am not sure why we were doing it, and not the movers, but it helped.

They left, and I managed somehow to get through the movers dismantling the four poster bed. I had told the man about one hundred times the order in which to take apart the poles because last time it was dismantled it was done in a different order and the joints twisted and I had to pay UK 100 to have it fixed. He said yes, he'd done it lots of times before. Only for me to go in the bedroom and find he was not there, and another mover had done it in exactly the way guaranteed to break it.

I heard the chief builder ask his workers four times if 'downstairs' was cleared. They kept shouting up yes. After half an hour, I went downstairs to check and found 1) a sofa 2) a painting 3) a huge mirror 4) a table 5) several packed boxes 6) a load of candlesticks and 7) nothing in the garden removed at all.
I felt like crying I was so stressed by the whole thing.

They left my horse behind in the living room, balanced on its fairground iron pole. The man said he couldn't carry it without breaking it

I had to buy fifty pounds worth of boxes because the man hadn't brought enough with him (and he was meant to provide packing materials).

At six o'clock they drove off to my new house and I followed half an hour later.

And then things got better.

The new house looked so much cleaner and brighter after all the work my brother has put into it.
The yellow in the kitchen looks great.
The cellar, thanks to my father's ingenious design, is now a storage space and is holding one third of my possessions.

OK. The movers put most of the things in the wrong rooms and didn't bother to label the boxes.
But at least most of my possessions are now there, in the new house. Even if I am going to have to crawl around to find them.

My brother made me a cup of tea. I sat down. I tried not to think about anything. In the end I gave the movers one hundred pounds more. I am not sure why I did this. But I did. I just felt so relieved to see the back of them.

In fact I felt so relieved that instead of coming home to my single matress on the floor of an empty room in an otherwise empty house...
I went out to dinner with four pregnant women and their partners to a Thai restaurant.

And now I am in my old house on the single matress and I'm going to go to sleep and sleep for I hope nine hours and when I wake up, if I am lucky, my ankles will have deflated.

So. Phase one of the move over.
I am so relieved.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGGGGGH

2007-02-19T05:35:00.000-08:00

Don't Move House.
Don't Move House.
Right now I am sitting in my room, in my four poster bed, typing with swollen hands, with great F****** huge swollen feet, unbelievably, unbelievably, unbelivevably stressed.
The removal men are F*********** incompetent. The first thing one of them did (and he's clearly never lifted a box before in his life) was pick up my grandmothers rocking chair by its back strut.
My grandmother had that chair for fifty years. She died last year. It was the one item I asked for in rememberance. That rocking chair was shipped from the US. It arrived unscathed.
But the bloke lifted it up by what any moron could see was the weakest point on the chair, and the strut snapped, and broke.
Then I went downstairs and discovered 'Norman' - the chief movers niece's boyfriend - had packed thirty bottles of wine on their side in a flimsy cardboard box secured by one tiny piece of F******** tape. I am deeply impractical but I used to have to make up boxes when I was younger for a warehouse job and even I know you don't make up a box like that, or pack wine like that.
I had to go scouring around the house to find proper containers (in the end I used recycling bins) so they could repack. The man who had to lift the box into the van refused to remove their flimsy box anyway as it was 1) too heavy and 2) too unsafe.
My dad came round. He mocked me for the rubbish way I had taped up boxes. It wasn't me. It was them.
Then the guy in charge told me that he could not move my one hundred year old horse without breaking it (even though he told me he could when he gave me the quote).
He said he could not move my plaster cast saints without chipping them (even though he told me he could when he gave me the quote).
They are packing glass paintings in thin bubble wrap. But every other time I've moved the paintings have been packed in cardboard and taped together on either side, so that the glass doesn't shatter.
And to make it worse... the chief mover now claims that his quote was based on the assumption that I'd have done most of the packing ahead of time (???????) which is why he hadn't bought the right boxes.
So he has asked me to pay for new boxes (even though he is meant to provide packing materials) and he has asked for me to give him more money.
And the money he has asked for is exactly what it would have cost me to have the job done by a professional removal firm.
Also my brother rang me up from the other end, watching the men maneouvere the kitchen table into the house, and said 'they don't inspire confidence do they!'
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO
I hate them. I hate myself. I hate moving. .
And then, about an hour ago, one of the more benign movers asked me why I was moving (because this house is nicer than the one I am going to) and I want to hide away now, and not leave, and I'm going to keep one blanketand one towel and one matress and just sleep on the floor here tonight, because I don't want to leave.
And when I get to the other end, I have to unpack it all.
Moan. Agony. Frustration. Irritation. Horror.
I truly am not enjoying this.
Not mature. Not calm. And not happy.

Extended Family

2007-02-18T09:27:00.000-08:00

I am sorry for the last gloomy post. I haven’t really been gloomy, just tense. And frustrated. It is very hard to pack a house and organise a move with swollen feet and worrying pulling sensations in your lower abdonmen when you haul a box across the floor. I don’t actually have to do much. I am paying some men an extortionate amount of money to do it for me tomorrow. But still, it is making me tense.

Anyway. It hasn’t been a bleak week. On Monday I was in a toy shop and I bumped into my sister in law and my 16 month old niece. And even though she can only speak around 15 words (“MOOOON”, “LAAAAHT”, “DOWN”, “DADDY”) she gave a huge smile, pointed at me and… said my name. I was thrilled. The next day I saw her again, and she grabbed my finger and then just sat there in her stroller stroking it absent-mindedly. She didn’t let go, even as her mother was pushing her away. And then, today, my cousin came round to help me shift boxes, and my mother and her friend dropped by with a picnic lunch and after eating, my cousin massaged my feet – which are really very swollen, I’ve never had thick ankles before – and also made me a thermos flask of freshly squeezed apple and celery juice.

I also had some really pleasing news. I used a US donor to conceive, an open donor, and I have already found a match on the Donor Sibling Registry. I e-mailed the mother last year and she told me she had a healthy, happy child, who was then a few months old. Now, she has written again, and said that she has been contacted by a woman who is also pregnant by the same donor. So (caveat, caveat, all being well, please may the babies be OK), we are going to start an e-mail group so we can communicate and share details and stories, and my little girls will have two half-siblings around their own age, hopefully to meet and play with in the future, and help them work out who they are and where they come from. I am very committed to this: it seems to me that I have to give the babies every bit of family I can, as I have denied them a father from the start (though hopefully they will be able to find him when they turn eighteen).

(Incidentally, there has been a debate about this on the DSR boards recently: some people think the choice of whether or not to meet/know half siblings should be left to the children. But I am of the school: we don’t get to choose our relatives, and these half children are their relatives, whether they like it or not. They don’t have to like them, they don’t have to be friends with them. But I would like the girls to grow up knowing that there is a wider, albeit unconventional, family out there, to which they belong and with whom they are, at the very least, on photograph swapping and name-knowing terms).

So, despite the house move (tomorrow), the ex-dreams (which Thalia rightly pointed out, seem to stand as a symbol for general loss, rather than for dashed romantic dreams), a worrying health scare in my family (which has turned out, thankfully, OK), an extremely difficult situation with my parents (causing me and my brother a great deal of stress) and, oh, the fact that I'M GOING TO GIVE BIRTH IN A MONTH, I am, actually, absolutely fine.

Sadness

2007-02-16T23:30:00.000-08:00

I went to see a bleak, very strongly recommended Turkish film about a deteriorating relationship. It featured a man, blanking and then leaving a woman. For reasons that are beyond me - Power? Control? – he then decided to try and get her back. At the end of the film, after she has capitulated, she wakes up after a happy dream, smiling for the first time. And the minute he sees that smile, he freezes over and instead of responding says how he has to leave or he will miss his plane. His little act of murder does not look from the outside like a crime. But I know just how she feels, and just why her face crumpled.

Good on her, though. She only went through it once. I went through this twenty times with my ex, on a constant cycle of rejection.

I write this now as it is 7am and I have woken up from yet another ex dream. In this dream my ex was very friendly, and wanted to help me move house. He gave the impression that he wanted me back. I accepted his help, although I noticed that it seemed contingent on him moving some of his own stuff. During the move, I could hear the wheels of his suitcase rolling up behind me. I assumed he would stop and talk. But instead, he ignored me, and walked on by in silence.

I woke up feeling desolate. I am moving house on Monday. Everything is right about this move, in terms of babies. I need to move. This new house is perfectly located. I can walk everywhere: to shops, parks, baby and toddler clubs, my sister in laws. I already know people there. I am lucky to be moving into the house. It is the right thing to do.

And yet, the house does not feel like me. When I sit at my desk now, looking out the window at the church and hearing early morning birdsong…. when I walk down the steps and into my quiet, tree-filled street ... I feel as if this house is like me, as if I have chosen something that is an extension of myself.

I am incredibly grateful to be having these twins. I do not regret the decision at all. But there is also a part of me that didn't think my life would be like this... that had imagined and hoped that I would share my life with someone I loved, and would have children with someone I loved, someone who was in turn a loving father, someone who would want to build a life with me, not here in England, but elsewhere. I am incredibly, incredibly lucky that I became pregnant, I am incredibly lucky to have got so far in this pregnancy. This may not have been my preferred route to my end goal, but I am lucky. I know it. And yet there is a part of me that is still sad. And perhaps leaving this house, which if I had a partner I probably wouldn't need to do (I'd have someone to help me get the pram up and down the front steps for one thing) is a symbol of that? I feel as if, after years of living exactly the life I wanted, I have had to make compromises. And I've never had to do that before.

I'm not sure why this sadness has resurfaced now. But perhaps it is because I have been happily coasting for months, not really thinking what this pregnancy is about: babies and an overhaul of life. And now I am coming to the end. I feel as if I am loosing myself, even though for the last few years I was desperate to loose myself in this way. I do not regret my decision at all. It is definitely the right thing to do (for me, I’m still not convinced it’s the best for the children). But it is scary, what I have given up. Someone copied me in on an e-mail yesterday about one of our former colleagues, and while everyone else chipped in with funny comments and anecdotes, I felt as if I was looking at that world through the wrong end of a telescope. I had nothing to say.

Better go and start packing.

Babies, Update

2007-02-16T14:18:00.000-08:00

I have to write something. And yet, I can’t write anything. Not even a simple update. It’s just like the indecision which seized me this week over paint for the new house (UK 80 pounds spent on blue, red and yellow tester tins, only to finally get so exasperated after five days of dabbing patches on the wall, that I decided to go with white). I want to write something, even if it is only to wave and say, ‘Hello Blogworld, I’m still here, and I haven’t had my babies yet, in case you were wondering’. But every time I try, I tie myself in knots.

Okay. Let’s start with a simple baby update. I had my 32 week scan on Thursday. The babies are growing normally and constantly: 4 pounds and 4.3 pounds respectively, which is absolutely fine - even though the second twin is bigger than the first twin which will make pushing that little bit harder. They are still head down and despite the sonographer’s incredulity (“They let you have a vaginal birth with multiples in this hospital!!!!! Really!!!!”) it looks as if a natural – though not drug free birth – is very likely. Also saw the midwife who said that 1) I am measuring 38 weeks (so hopefully I have room to stretch more) and 2) that I have gained 38 pounds in 32 weeks. Phenomenal.

As for me: Ankles swollen for first time tonight (sock indents on lower legs). Incredibly tired, but can still manage shopping if I bring along my old-lady-bag-on-wheels. No longer hungry, but greedy (current craving: herrings and sour cream). And psychologically, not quite able to believe that in around four weeks I am due to give birth to two babies. Cannot imagine giving birth and cannot imagine life after birth. The end of the pregnancy is approaching, and it is scary.

I’m not going to write anything more. I simply can’t do it. But meanwhile, does anyone know why The Thin Pink Line is now password protected? And what about Calliope? When I click on her link I get last years blog. Are they both OK?

A Taste of Things to Come

2007-02-11T14:17:00.000-08:00

Today was the hospital visit. My birth partners and I joined around 20 pregnant women and their partners to tour around the mysterious first, third, and fourth floors (the antenatal appointments are in the basement).

Our guide was a very fast speaking, matter of fact midwife who spent much of the time blaming Tony Blair for cutbacks and insisting quite adamantly that she wouldn’t be advising anyone getting down on their knees on the floor to deliver, because frankly, she wasn’t getting down there with them, and nor would most of the other midwifes, and if she had, her kneecaps would be worn away after thirty years, and anyway 'the floor isn’t clean enough, and if you want a clean one you’re going to have to go private….'

The obstetrics wing is in an old Victorian building. It reminds me of my secondary school. The stairwells look as if they ought to smell of linseed oil, and the wards have a waft of school dinners about them. I had a look at a menu left on a hospital table. Anyone fancy ‘soya bolognaise’ or ‘custard sauce’? I thought not.

The delivery rooms are tiny. I am not sure how the seven medical staff (required for a twin birth) and my birth partners are all meant to fit in there. I meanwhile, will be given star position on a very much centre stage bed on which I will lie screaming trying to push babies out into the world on my back… my sexual organs exposed and stretched thanks to very widely placed stirrups.
It was steaming hot, and I was left feeling rather nervous.

But there was one glorious highlight. We were upstairs on the recovery ward and I saw one of the women from my antenatal class. She had just given birth! She came running over in her pajamas, with her much deflated belly, and said “I’ve got a baby!” The little boy was in a cot by her bed and was beautiful. Her husband looked soft and stunned. She was ebullient. She said that antenatal classes are in no way anything like birth, in that very knowing way that mothers always have (a sort of, ha! You don’t know what you’re in for!). I felt quite teary eyed looking at the little boy. He was so tiny.
I thought: I’m going to have TWO of those.

Now back at home, and entertaining the babies by listening to Dan Zanes. I’m trying to establish an in utero favourite….

Beautiful

2007-02-08T05:24:00.001-08:00

Rose blearily from bed, wandered into study, sat down at computer, looked out window and saw.... this... Very lovely.

It's just stopped snowing now, and my brother has warned me that the pavements have turned to slush and I shouldn't really go out. Which is a pity as I have no food in the house apart from a packet of dried lentils.

I have recovered, mostly, from my momentary revival of crush, and my intensely sexual dreams have now been replaced by crashing nightmares in which multiple aliens try and take over the world (....) and determined serial killers attempt to top me.

Had my final ante-natal class last night which was good but not nearly as good as the one on Saturday. That one I simply can't get over. We were shown a photograph of a woman giving birth. She was on her hands and knees, her anus stretched wide, her piles pushed out, and there, an inch below, as if someone had stuck a novelty cork into a bottle, was a very alert baby's face, with open, startled eyes, sticking out from her vagina, staring up towards the ceiling.

It was the most amazing picture I think I have ever seen. And what's more amazing is that pictures like these are not mainstream. I have never seen anything like it. Never seen a baby emerge so wholly and complete from another person. And yet it is a miracle. Why don't we see these pictures everyday? Why don't we see them from early on in secondary school? Why are they not mainstreamed as the most miraculous event on earth? I don't have an answer, but the image will stay with me for a very long time.

Unbecoming

2007-02-05T02:36:00.001-08:00

There can be few sights less becoming than a 40+, massively pregnant lady, stuffing her face with Indian food while at the same time… can it be?.... flirting with a man ten years younger than her.

Yet, that is what I did last night.

Honestly, I don’t know what came over me.

I went out to dinner with a man on whom I used to have a crippling crush. It was really a very big crush: big enough that it dominated my life for about a year and I was convinced that I wanted to marry him. He also had a crush on me, but had a girlfriend, and nothing concrete ever happened, until it nearly did, at which point it stopped.

But he has now split up from his girlfriend. And yesterday we went out to dinner, and there I was skipping along, in so far as a woman gestating two, three pound babies can skip, and I swear, I wasn’t doing it on purpose, flirting.

The truth about deciding to go it alone, is that the door on relationships really does slam shut, very loudly, and it’s unlikely to open again for at least another four years. And at that point I don’t think anyone will want me. Least of all young men, who at the minimum will want a woman who is capable of bearing children.

But for one evening I allowed myself to forget this. And so… clearly… did my body. Because – and here comes the embarrassing bit – I woke up in the night confused, and thinking I was having contractions… only to discover…I’d had an orgasm in my sleep.

Scan Eleven

2007-02-01T15:20:00.000-08:00

Today I had the eleventh scan of my pregnancy… and I asked my father if he’d like to come along. I thought it might give him a chance to bond with his grand-daughters. Also, he’s never been to a scan before, I don’t think they were much in use when my brother and I were born.

My father arrived very early at the hospital, half an hour before me, and was sitting patiently in the waiting room with the massive women (Thursday is Twins Day), reading the Wall Street Journal. The appointment was only twenty minutes late and we were led down a long corridor by the sonographer. She dimmed the lights and I rolled down my trousers. In preparation, I had actually exfoliated my bikini line as far back as I could - using wax strips and guided by my reflection - so I could spare my father any dreadful, embarrassing, inappropriate, glimpse of his daughter's pubic hair.

Unfortunately, the scan was rather a disappointment. The babies are so big now – around three pounds each – that the screen only shows little bits of them. And it’s not clear what those bits are. A long fuzzy white line (a femur?), a perfect circle (‘a head’, said my father hopefully. But no, it was the cross section of an abdomen), another cross section, this time of a head, but looking more like an abstract shape.

I asked the woman if she would mind trying to get some profiles so my father could get a glimpse of the girls. But Twin One is head down, facing my back (the heaving I keep feeling over my belly button is her bottom swelling up and down, as well as little kicking heels), while Twin Two, also head down, is on her side, facing Twin One, and kicking her, presumably in the arse. Twin One’s head is lying on top of Twin Twos head – I just can’t work out the geometry in there – and the upshot of all this is that it was impossible to get a picture. My father looked a bit swizzed, but at least the measurements were all great: the babies weigh right along the fiftieth percentile, and they are more or less the same size.

Afterwards, I had a brief doctor’s appointment. The doctor said that if the babies stay in this position, and continue growing along these lines, she would recommend I have a vaginal birth – which is what I want (I say ‘want’ in the loosest possible use of that word. It seems to me the best thing to do as the recovery time will be so much faster, but at the same time, I am not looking forward to the pain). She said that I would probably need an epidural (I think so they have easy access to an anaesthetic if I have to have an emergency caesarean). I asked if I could please kneel or stand up or move around during the birth. She looked less happy about this – mainly because I will be wired up with two monitors (one round my waist and one up my vagina) and with an epidural in my spine and I suspect an IV. But she said I could probably kneel, on the floor or on the bed, if I get an amenable midwife. She also warned me that there would be a lot of people in the room – two doctors, two paediatricians and two midwives as well as the anaesthetist, and my two birth partners. Most of these people are going to be staring at my poor, battered vagina. I might allow one student in as well: my sister in law said why not, as I won’t give a f*** who is there once I am in labour.

I learned something new in my antenatal class yesterday. These days, if you go to birthing classes, it’s all about yogic out breathing, great Gregorian ummmmmms, which are fairly satisfying to do, but also tend to make me breathless. In real life, I’ve noticed that when I want to control my breathing I tend to make little panting noises. Apparently these little pants – as seen on vintage TV shows – were what my mother’s generation were taught to do when giving birth (my father told me today that it is also how cat’s give birth – and when he was driving my labouring mother to the hospital to deliver me – he kept shouting, ‘Breathe like the cat! Breathe like the cat!’). But now this is out of fashion, I am not sure on what grounds. I am going to forewarn my birth partners that I might prefer to pant or yowl rather than uuuummm. Though I suspect what I will be doing most of all is swearing.

Strange Things?

2007-01-31T08:45:00.000-08:00

I’ve been tagged by InDueTime, which is a thrill. But it’s a strange topic: ‘Six weird things about me’. I say 'strange' because I’ve been thinking about weirdness a lot of late. I was brought up to believe different was better. Thus the kinds of words my mother used as compliments were: so unusual, and original, and unique and different. I must have absorbed this because I spent my entire childhood feeling odd. And I was quite odd, I think because my singularity was never checked. Thus, I have photographs of myself going to an inner-London state primary school wearing a tutu and wellington boots, or going on a school outing in my pajamas and a dressing gown. Not surprisingly, this didn’t make me many friends, and I spent years yearning after the ‘beautiful girls’ who lived on the nearby estate and had jeans and jewellery and invited each other to glamorous cake-filled birthday parties.

At some point, when I was around twenty, I decided I was pretending to be odd and that I’d stop. It was then I discovered that when I stopped thinking about being odd, and really tried hard to be normal, I continued to be treated as if I were odd. It didn’t help when I moved abroad: people just assumed that whatever I did was the norm in my home country, so I had no social pressure to change. Throughout my thirties, up to today, people continued to call me ‘eccentric’. In the last week, for example, a male friend said, ‘there’s no one quite like you’, my friend’s husband called me ‘eccentric’, while an ex-colleaugue referred to me as ‘batty katty’. Even my cousin describes me as ‘mad cousin Katty’. Not that I think eccentric is necessarily bad: my father is eccentric in a good way. That is, my father does exactly what he wants. As what he wants is free from the dictates of fashion, he tends to indulge in quite strange pastimes. But to me this is a good thing: he is single-minded in pursuit of his goals and sure of his own tastes. And if being in control of your own happiness, and trying to shape your own destiny, looks like eccentricity from the outside, well, frankly, who cares?

The reason I’ve been thinking about all this now is because I’ve chosen an unconventional way to have children (and not my first choice, babies, although that doesn’t mean you won’t be my first choice as people). I am desperate for them to be as normal as possible. Or at least, feel normal. I don’t want them to feel like freaks. Which means –given that I’m not going to lie about their origins - that I am determined that they meet as many DI children as they can, including half siblings, and are surrounded by people who do not treat their origins as strange. And most importantly, and I still have to work on this, most importantly, I have to treat the whole matter myself as if it is ordinary, OK, nothing exceptional. Which is one reason I am grateful to my best friend: because however many doubts I throw at her in my bleaker moments, she remains resolutely convinced I am doing the best thing under the circumstances and I know when she is godmother, and if they come crying to her, she will be able to reassure them and make them feel they are ok, even if they are railing against me and against the world.

So. Six unusual things about me. Or maybe seven. Let’s see:
1. People sometimes find the way I interact odd. I ask too many questions, and I can be very blunt. Also if I get bored I find it very hard to focus. Sometimes at dinner parties I get up in the middle of the second course and go to sleep on the sofa. I have tried to stop myself doing this, but it’s a battle.
2. I have never styled my hair. To keep it out of my eyes, I tie it back with a shoelace. Unfortunately, last year a hack hairdresser in Manhattan cut my hair short when I asked for a trim and I still feel like Samson – all my strength has gone, and much of my character.
3. I am often called brave, but in fact there have been times when I simply did not want to look like a chicken, which is not the same thing at all.
4. I haven’t had sex for five years. I’ve asked male friends for an explanation and they either act gratifyingly baffled or say that I am intimidating or that for years I was so hooked on my ex it was difficult to approach me. Also that I am ‘challenging’, which makes me feel like a horse, and I believe is a euphemism for ‘difficult’.
5. Between the ages of 11 and 14, I wanted to be an astronaut so badly that I cried.
6. I have never owned a television, and I have only had a TV in my house once (for two years, and that was because it came with my job).
7. I’m having twins! By the sperm of a man I have never met! A masturbating student from North America! Come On! How weird is that!!!!!*

Now, who shall I tag? Let’s see if Rockmama-in-waiting will join in, also RockMother, Namaste, Sarah Solitaire, and Maverick Mama. Please leave a note when you’ve posted your answers: Six or seven weird or unusual facts about you.

*I know, given what I said above, I’m not meant to mention this, but.. still… it is odd.

Completion

2007-01-30T12:58:00.000-08:00

So, this afternoon I was given the keys to my new house by the estate agent. I went there at four o’clock and spent a good one hour trudging around in horror. The previous owners (who were very nice) had a thing about beige and mushroom, it’s enough to send anyones heart plummeting. I am just going to paint everything very white and then whack all the pictures and objects I’ve got onto the walls. Hopefully that will make a difference.

I found being in the house quite hard. Not just exhaustion at the idea of moving, but the sadness of leaving my house (which I can move back to, as I am only renting it out). I truly love the house I am in now, and the best thing about it, besides the fact it is early Victorian and beautifully proportioned, is the light: there are windows everywhere and each window has a view – onto a church, onto overgrown gardens, onto a leafy cul de sac. I am moving to a much more conventional street, with cars. And even though I know it is the sensible thing to do – no steps up to the front door, two minutes walk from all the shops, a dense concentration of mothers with babies – part of me is sad to be leaving what feels like myself behind. It is as if I am about to cram myself into a smaller space and live in an area and in a lifestyle which has never really appealed to me. I know it is the most sensible thing for me to do now – but I have never previously done sensible, and not doing sensible has always worked for me. My previous houses, over the last decade, have included a small, tatty bunglaow on the edge of a slum area and adjacent swamp, which I loved because of the smell of woodsmoke, the sound of church choirs on a Sunday, and the Christmas bell tinkle of thousands of frogs at night (admittedly, I ended up being horribly burgled in this house by men with machetes, so it did have it’s downside). It is going to take a great deal of courage and strength to shake myself out of London middle class life after two or three years and try and forge the life that I think that I will still want: a life on another, hotter continent, where the children can run around in the garden, and there is bird song, and cicada cries and everything is somewhat wilder and less predictable.

Anyway. That sadness is there, but I think I am doing the sensible thing and, more importantly, the best thing for my babies (doesn’t everyone say the first two years matter most? And this way they will be surrounded by people who love them, their grandparents and aunties and uncles and cousins and second cousins and great aunts and great uncles and godparents). And to give my new house credit: I’d been in there for just a few minutes when a woman over the road dropped by with her toddler to say if I wanted anything to just knock on her door.

It’s been an odd day anyway. I’m thirty weeks now and my bump is so very heavy. Today, I couldn’t go more than ten minutes without Braxton Hicks, including in my back, and I had to do phew phew phew panting. I got a lot of sympathetic looks from new mothers, which I appreciated. I have also been exhausted and had to go back to bed this morning and nap the time away. And my eating habits have gone crazy: after months of eating healthy organic food, and gorging on fruit, tonight I snapped and had a chocolate brownie, two glass jars of chocolate dessert and a bar of chocolate. Very good they were too, and in my defense, I bought them all at a health food shop. So, high in calories and caffeine, but at least the ingredients were additive free.

(By the way, anyone know about the danger of fresh paint to babies? I read somewhere that you shouldn't put a baby in a newly painted room for at least six weeks!!?? Is this true? I was going to go organic paints but this is 1) very expensive and 2) they are an off white cream which makes me feel automatically gloomy).

A Hospital Visit, and a Difficult Situation

2007-01-29T14:06:00.000-08:00

*The Hospital, this morning, for a thyroid evaluation. A long wait and then two delightful consultants. Everything is absolutely fine, as far as anyone can tell. I am now the size of a woman with a singleton at term.
I asked the doctor, “Out of curiousity, when should I start preparing for birth?” And he said, “Well…term for twins is 37 weeks, but realistically you should be prepared anytime from now as they often come early. You need to be vigilant for signs of labour”. I told him I was moving house in a few weeks and he said: “Don’t lift anything, not even a pot plant.” So I guess packing will be something of a challenge.
Staggered out of hospital in leaden exhaustion, and made my way home, though not before eating a delicious pizza and ordering a framed picture of Babar in a balloon for the nursery. I have long intended to buy this poster for my nephew, but in truth imagining the feel of those handkerchiefs clasped in the wet trunk-holes makes me a bit queasy…

*The Difficult Situation – concerning God-Parents.
Over the weekend I went out to lunch with Claire, who is one of my oldest friends. I have known her for twenty six years, and we have a relationship which was forged aged fifteen, during our respective first loves (hers: a decent floppy haired sixth former, to whom she lost her virginity; mine: a pointless playwrite, 10 years older than me, who had nicotine stained finger tips, and cultivated the look of a tortured romantic).
Claire is a successful actress, and she is used to having people accommodate her needs. I’d sum up our fundamental difference in character thus: When she goes to a therapist, she goes for reassurance, and to be told she is OK. She does not like to be challenged; If I were to go to a therapist I would want to be deconstructed, and given insights about myself, even if they were not flattering.
For a long time, both Claire and I desperately wanted children and then when we were in our mid-thirties she was caught up in a whirlwind romance with a text-book Italian, lots of my darlings, and fast cars with the roof down and you are so beautiful and fantastic sex. And the upshot was she accidentally fell pregnant within three months, and had a lovely little girl. Unfortunately the man then turned nasty and the relationship quickly fell apart.
Just before the relationship ended, Claire decided to have her daughter christened and chose four god-parents. I am Claire’s oldest friend, and she is one of the few people who knew how much I yearned to have a child. And yet when she chose the god-parents she chose four people she had known for a relatively short time. One woman she had only known for two years. I was upset, and suprised, by this, but said nothing. And I wasn’t the only person to be surprised. At the christening, Claire and I were talking and her sister came up and said, ‘Hi Katty, you must be one of the godparents?’ which was very awkward. Then another of her friends said to Claire, while I was standing there, 'So Katty must be a god-parent? What about the others?' which was again embarrassing. The most humiliating part was the ceremony itself, which was held away from the main marquee and was god-parents only. I wasn’t even invited to attend.
I never said anything to Claire, but I was really hurt. I was also puzzled. I couldn’t work out why she hadn’t chosen me. The people she did choose didn’t seem to be her real friends. I’d never even heard her mention one of them. I wondered if Claire simply didn’t think I was attractive enough or glamorous enough or rich enough for her daughter (which are not the values I'd use to select a godparent). I felt like she thought I somehow wasn’t up to the mark, even though we have known each other for years, gone on holiday together, wept down the phone to each other. For about two years I struggled with my friendship with Claire, and although she didn’t know it, the whole incident changed the way I thought about her. For one thing, although I still try and be a sympathetic friend when her relationships flounder, I am now far more inclined to see the man’s point of view, having felt first hand what it is like to be slighted by her.
A year after the christening, Claire had fallen out with three of the four god-parents. It was partly because they were bound up with her ex and she was in an ugly custody battle, but the result was her daughter had only one godparent left. Rather sweetly, I thought, her new fiance late last year turned to Claire when I was there and said, 'But why don’t you ask Katty to be a godmother?' Claire sat there very silently and said nothing.
So that’s the background. Now come back to this Saturday afternoon, in a restaurant. Claire is crying because she is devastated by the break up of her latest relationship. She has made an effort and driven across town to see me, because I am so big. She has been supportive about this pregnancy from the start, telling me how excited she is and buying me baby presents and calling me up. And then, just before the desert was served, she looks up at me and says: “So Katty. Am I going to be a godparent?”
I was absolutely stunned. I was so taken aback. I simply couldn’t believe she’d asked. It is quite a cheeky thing to ask someone anyway – I certainly would never do it – but given our history, I simply couldn’t believe it. I hummed a bit, but really a great big part of me dragged against saying yes. Instead, I said the truth, that my best friend (who she knows) will be god-parent to both of them, and I haven’t thought further than that. She then talked about the ins and outs of choosing godparents ('it’s good to have a male role model if a father isn’t around, even if you don't choose me it's good to have someone wealthy so you’ll get good gifts….'). She also said, 'you could do what I did and have a non-conventional ceremony, you know, we lit candles'. But I didn't know. I wasn't at the actual ceremony.
I want my children to have godparents. They don’t have half a family so I want them to have as many loving people in their lives as I can round up. Obviously my best friend is going to be the Uber God Parent. But I haven’t chosen anyone else. In a different world Claire would have been an obvious choice, but I still feel resentment that she did not choose me for her daughter. And although I am normally frank and very direct, Claire neither invites nor embraces the truth (she is also depressed at the moment, and would interpret any discussion as a confrontation).
So, I’m not really sure what I’m saying here… apart from: "Well, Blog Land... What do you think about this?"

Random

2007-01-26T15:00:00.000-08:00

Good Things
*This evening, I staggered out onto Oxford street with my shopping and hailed a taxi. The driver pulled up and I was about to climb in when he said he was sorry but he had stopped for a group of girls who were just in front of me. I apologised to them, and shuffled away, hauling my plastic bags and barely able to focus, I was so exhausted. And then one of the girls came running after me and said, ‘Please take the taxi, we’ll wait for the next one.’ I was so grateful as I had been having quite a lot of Braxton Hicks, including one or two in my back.

Irritating Things
*Because I was so tired I left a bag of delicious Marks and Spencers shopping on the pavement. I didn’t leave much behind – it’s only the satsuma’s and the blueberries that I shall miss – but I was looking forward to whipping them up into a smoothie tomorrow morning….

Upsetting Things
*Along with the fatigue, the ex-fiance dreams have returned. With a vengeance. Last night was the very worst yet. Really upsetting. It hung over me all day. This time my ex sort-of-came-back-to-me, sort-of-intimated-he-wanted-me, but all the time he was distant, and all the time I was yearning towards him. Then, after lying in bed with me naked, he said he didn’t love me anymore, he loved his wife... and left. He left without even saying goodbye. The predominant feeling was, as usual, rejection.
But why now? Why am I having these dreams now? Is it because I am alone, and do not have a man to share this with (and at some level perhaps feel there wasn’t a man who wanted to share this with me)? Or is it something more mundane, like the fact my father has a new girlfriend which makes me fear for my mother’s feelings (even though they are divorced) or - unconsciously - worry that he will be around less (even though he has always found time for me)? I really don’t know, but my ex is back in my dreams. And I do not want him there. In fact, the dream dragged through so much of the day that I ended up collapsed on a display sofa in British Home Stories having a small cry. Also had a cry in the café of Mamas and Papas and got a bit teary in the nursery section of John Lewis.
I hope this is just the return of the volatile, hormone induced feelings that were stirred up in the first trimester.

Physical Things
*Apart from the fatigue and the heightened emotions, my bump is getting very heavy. I think the babies are somewhere between two and a half and three pounds each now – so culminatively, they probably weigh 5-6 pounds, and that doesn’t include the extra placenta. My bump sticks out, and is very tight, but feels as if it needs some kind of support to hold it up. It appears to lag behind when I turn. It can’t take exertion and tends to cramp up more. And yet, this bump should – all being well – double in weight before I give birth...

Phew....

2007-01-24T04:26:00.000-08:00

Oh. I feel so much better.
I told the tenants no. I said that I couldn't sign a lease until I was in the new house.
They needed me to sign this afternoon.
I told the estate agent that once I had moved in mid-February, any new tenants could move in, but I couldn't commit before that.
Oh. I feel so much better. A huge weight has lifted from me.
If the worst happens, if I deliver prematurely, I will still have this house to come home to at night. I will still be able to sleep in my own bed. The idea of having to live out of a suitcase, of not being settled, while my girls cry in a hospital incubator... was making me rock back and forth with anxiety.
Phew. Phew. Phew. Phew.
A financially stupid decision, perhaps. But stress wise, the right one.

Anxious, heart pounding, eyes flicking from side to side....

2007-01-23T22:48:00.000-08:00

This anxiety is terrible. I haven’t had anything like it before. It is teeth grinding, can’t-sit-still-in-a-seat bad. Right now, for example, it is 6am and I’ve been awake for an hour, jolted awake with my mind running. I feel on edge and slightly sick.

Went out to dinner last night and for the first time in a very long time, didn’t enjoy myself. My friend – who is only a month behind me with a singleton – was in that lovely, laid back, enjoying pregnancy state but I was chattering in an extremely anxious way, blowing my nose constantly (OK that’s the end of a very bad cold, not an anxiety symptom... and to my embarassment the waitress in the very posh restaurant actually came and removed my emergency roll of toilet paper from the table and replaced it with an artfully fanned array of napkins … ). I listened to my friend but couldn’t communicate with her. And everything she said made me worse (she is my age, and yet her downs risk factor was one in over ten thousand. Mine was one in a thousand for each baby. I thought that was low risk. Maybe it’s not? Maybe there is something wrong with my babies…?)

I can’t quite locate the source of this anxiety, but I know it is focused on my house move. I think that my nesting instinct – which feels like a desire to burrow down – is being thwarted by the knowledge of a massive overhaul in the very near future. I’m also incredibly concerned that at 32 and a half weeks - which is how pregnant I’ll be on the day I move - I will only be three and a half weeks away from my due date. Yet at a time when I should be relaxing and settling in, I will be uprooting and going to a strange new house.

I am scared of being marooned – letting out this house (I’m meant to sign the contract with the prospective tenants tomorrow) and then having the babies early and being forced to move while they are in a premature unit. I’m also scared that something terrible will happen, and that I will sink into a bleak and terrible depression and have to be bleak and terribly depressed in a new and alien house which I will have moved into specifically to have babies.

I could say no to these tenants, wait for new ones, and not sign any contract until I am well established in the other house, and have safely given birth. But the problem with that plan is that I could really do with the money, and also the tenants seem good – not students, not young and they love my home. And also, if I sign them up now, I won't have to deal with estate agents, and it will be one more thing ticked off my list.

Right now, I want a husband: to reassure me, to pick up the slack, to make the decision, to try and have everything in hand (and to carry my shopping: I got Braxton Hicks in Sainsbury’s last night, hauling around the organic juice and baked potatoes). I normally rely on my best friend. But she is falling into a period of depression, and although she would not let me down, I know she is struggling. Last week, for example, she said she was feeling too low to come to the ante-natal class and although she came in the end, as I knew she would, and although she at least pretended to enjoy it, this is one time in my life when I really need her to be there. And the fact that it is hard for her is shaking my confidence. And if this sounds selfish, it is. Pregnancy is a selfish state, and right now, I don’t have the mental energy to focus fully on other peoples problems. Even the problems of those I love.

29 weeks: Frenzied Nesting?

2007-01-23T07:33:00.000-08:00

A day of mad organisation. Frenzy. Except it all went on inside my head. The only sign of movement was stemming the nose bleeds, typing away furiously and making phone calls. Ruling the world from my desk. Transferring gas bills and internet connections and phone lines and ordering paint and getting quotes and negotiating with the tenants and blah di blah di blah.

The most heartening thing to happen was perhaps my reaction to the nosebleed. I woke up with blood all over my hand. My first thought was not: BLOOD!!! MISCARRIAGE (which is pretty remarkable given that I STILL check loo roll at 29 weeks). I think I knew that there was no way the blood from… down there… could make the journey to my hand. In fact I even had a little experiment: I tried to reach down in front of the mirror, over the bump, from a standing position, to see if I could touch my palm flat between my legs. The answer was a farcical ‘no.’

Maneouvering this bump around is like driving a lorry: ungainly and unwieldy. I keep getting caught in the shower. The water runs too hot and I try and turn sideways to avoid the stream but the bump won’t move, it stays in the flood. And the other day I was waiting in a queue for a Starbucks hot chocolate and the man in front of me turned around with a horrid look… and I thought, what! what!, before I realised he felt I was standing far too close, when in fact, I had left a normal space between us but my stomach still managed to reach out and poke him in the buttocks…

I did think this morning how much I have enjoyed being pregnant and how said I am that I will never be pregnant again. Obviously not REALLY sad. I’m blessed to be having babies, and so lucky to be having two. But you know what I mean. I enjoy pregnancy (unlike my poor friend, 20 weeks pregnant with twins, still vomiting blood, who told me yesterday that if she had known pregnancy would be this bad she might never have gone through with it – and this from a former infertile who thought she might never be able to carry her husband’s child).

So do I actually have anything to say? Anything of interest? I think not. Thus, I shall have another bath, frame my Babar in a Balloon poster for the nursery and then work up an appetite for an expensive dinner out with another pregnant friend…

Not Zen

2007-01-22T10:47:00.000-08:00

It’s not that I’ve got nothing to say. Or even that I’ve got nothing interesting to say. It’s that I’ve become muddled and panicked and confused and I no longer know what I want to say.

That ticker, on the right, for example, is beginning to annoy me. It confidently and chirply tells me I’ve got lots of days to go. As does my official due date – April 10^th. But the fact is: I don’t. The doctors at my hospital will get the babies out of me by 38 weeks if they haven’t come naturally, counting that as overdue. Average for twins is between 36-37 weeks. This means my real due date (and so far I have been pretty much average throughout this pregnancy) is sometime between March 13-20. Which really isn’t very far away. No sirree. That is not far away at all. That is at the most eight weeks away. And fifty per cent of twins come before that date. My gosh my gosh my gosh. These babies could be here soon. Anytime after 34 weeks. That’s five weeks away. My gosh. My gosh. It’s beginning to sink in.

And I don’t suppose this sinking in would matter, if I could just settle into my house, set up my nursery and enjoy a settled slide towards birth. But oh no. I have to move house. I HAVE TO MOVE HOUSE! What was I thinking of? I am going to move house at 32.5 weeks. My gosh, this is cutting it fine. My gosh. And the new lodgers want to be in to my current house by March 1^st. And I like them, but my gosh what if I have the babies early and I’m marooned between two house and…

My gosh. There’s so much to BUY so much to DO. Environmentally friendly paint – what the f***, it never occurred to me the normal stuff might be toxic and I shouldn’t get it for the babies room – and lampshades and light fittings and blinds and… I ordered the single buggy two days ago, and I’ve got to order the slings… but what about the double buggy, which one and oh my gosh there’s another five hundred pounds of purchases in my John Lewis ‘Your Shopping Basket’, full of a cot, and a mattress and a baby monitor and a chest of drawers and… what’s this?... a door knob with a space ship on it and a cushion with a star (chosen from the boys selection at John Lewis because I have always loved the sky at night and been captured by the romance of space travel and the solitude of stars)….

And doesn’t the dust from sanding get everywhere? And will I like the new house, when I so much love this house (I Love my house, there is nothing wrong with it all, nothing at all wrong with it, only that it’s not within walking distance of my brother’s family and it’s not so child friendly – a couple of people have been shot round here in the past few months – and anyway I can always come back). And this house is so much me, people see it and say this house is YOU it looks like you, and even now I can look out the window at night and it’s so quiet, only the church and the common beyond and I’m right in the middle of town. And I’m moving to an ordinary street with traffic and…

Oh my gosh I used donor sperm and I’m worried about what that means, and WILL THE BABIES BE HEALTHY and do I have enough male role models for the babies and how can I make sure they meet other DI children so they don’t feel like oddities (which is odd in itself, all my life I’ve been an odd one out, the strange one, the eccentric one, and here I am resolutely trying to make my children feel as non-freakish as possible). And please may they be healthy, please may they see and hear and speak and feel and have use of their limbs, and... oh dear... what lies ahead? and….

You get the picture.

28 Weeks Pregnant

2007-01-16T15:58:00.000-08:00

*First of all, thank you so much to everyone who delurked below. I really appreciate it… It is good to know who you are.

*I am now 28 weeks pregnant. This is significant because 1) if the babies are born now they will have a very high chance of survival and 2) because I realised that I could quite possibly deliver in six weeks, as it is common for twins to arrive at 34 weeks (and even if I carry to term that's only nine weeks away). This is terrifying. My life will change forever. I will be a mummy. I am… astounded and panicked and so hoping that the girls will be OK. Time is suddenly going way too fast. I have far too much to do, and the more I have to do the less physically capable I am of doing it.
Here is a picture of me at 28 weeks. Getting bigger. Carrying quite low. This is the Trimester when the bump is meant to grow. I wonder how much bigger it can actually get?

*Symptoms at 28 weeks: Fatigue is back, as is a strange insomnia - I am not uncomfortable at night, I do not have backache, I do not need to get up to pee, and yet I like awake for hours, unable to sleep, my mind racing about nothing in particular. Then the day passes slowly, as I take my exhausted, staggering steps around London’s streets, occasionally exhaling heavily in little pants like a very old person and sometimes clutching my stomach as it tightens with a Braxton Hicks.
The babies have started moving all over the place. I was on the tube today, reading Heat (National Enquirer with more pictures) and particularly admiring a photo of the boyfriend of a woman called Jessica who was caught lying on his back on the beach with a hard on showing through his swimming trunks (it made me nostalgic for erections). Anyway… I was taking all this in, when the babies went crazy, they were rippling across my stomach and kicking and I actually jumped when Twin One kicked against my hand. I can feel hard bits under my skin but I’m not sure what they are… feet? A bottom? The curve of a back? A skull?

*And now, here’s a bit of advice for any twin-mums-to-be out there: Consider visiting your local mother and babies twins club. I have just been to mine, which was held in a community hall very near my new house. The organisers were incredibly welcoming, made me a cup of tea, and introduced me to the other mums. I got to try out all the pushchairs with the babies inside. The identical babies were particularly sweet; the very new babies all looked rather squished, but of course I said they were beautiful (as I hope the mothers will in turn say to me).
I was relieved that the club exists, but at the same time there was a part of me that watched aghast… the sheer tedium of sitting on a plastic mat with a cup of tea singing ‘the wheels of the bus go round and round’. But, as my sister in law pointed out, ‘Soon this will be the highlight of your week.’

*And finally, anyone doing IVF might be interested in a BBC Panorama programme which was broadcast yesterday. It was about unscrupulous fertility clinics here in the UK (Britain in big on trying to regulate this sector, but does so rather ineffectually) and the programme focussed on the most successful – in terms of statistics – clinic, which is also the clinic accused of the most violations by the regulatory body, the HFEA.
In truth, I felt Panorama overplayed it all a bit, but the thrust of the case against the clinic appeared to be that 1) the man in charge massages figures (by sending his harder cases to a sister clinic) 2) that he occasionally reccomends IVF to people who do not need it 3) that he pushes an expensive, unproven and possibly dangerous diagnostic treatment and 4) that he isn't good at providing HFEA with the necessary paperwork.
There was a small, mean part of me that didn't mind the clinic being targetted (even though I didn't think it was entirely fair), the same part that is offended that the director refuses to treat single women.
Anyway. In case anyone thinks this sounds interesting, here is the link to the programme.

Lurkers????

2007-01-14T14:40:00.000-08:00

What's this? Did I miss De-Lurkers week? Oh go on, if there are any lurkers there please come out and say hello. I will be thrilled. It is my birthday this week, so it will be like an early birthday present....

My Girls

2007-01-12T13:20:00.000-08:00

*I went for a 27 week scan (they are going to be around every two weeks from now on) with my mother. I brought my mother along because I am trying to be a better daughter, and my cousin made me feel guilty that my mother wasn’t going to be my birth partner (although that would really be a crazy idea – I can’t give birth AND argue with my mother at the same time). She sat very quietly at the end of the couch trying, like me, to make sense of all the geometric shapes appearing on the screen, and then suddenly a head appeared, a proper profile… and then another. It was quite amazing and my mother said she felt teary eyed.
Both babies are still head down. If they can stay that way a vaginal birth is very possible… And I would like a vaginal birth, if only because the recovery time is meant to be so much faster. One of the babies is facing inwards, which is probably why I can’t feel her kick: her blows are towards my back. The baby on the right, however, is now giving real thumps. It is very disconcerting, proper bangs against the palm of my hand. I can feel one movement right up above my belly button and at the same time something going on behind my pubic area.
Anyway. Here are their profiles at 27 weeks, weighing around two pounds each, an absolutely average weight for babies at this age (it is only at 32 weeks that twins start falling behind).

*I really admire women who work through pregnancy. I am fine as long as I get at least nine hours sleep and rest all day. But yesterday, I had to get by on six hours and I was falling asleep everywhere, including in a demonstration feeding chair in John Lewis' extremely busy nursery department (for TWENTY MINUTES. And how kind of the staff… they didn’t move me on, even though I was slumped right in the middle of their showroom display set, next to the public walkway, surrounded by plastic bags and probably drooling).

*And in Celebrity News: This week my pregnancy was announced in the gossip column of a newspaper in a country where I used to live and work. A friend sent me a copy of the page which included my picture, funny text (and a bit about there being no news on the father yet…).

*Finally… any advice? Spent all morning with my mother in a baby shop tring out double buggies. This really was bewildering. We looked at the Jane Twin Two – which is very, very long: it is, as my mother says, like trying to drive a car from the back seat, and the Nipper, which is very wide. Both are suitable from birth. I am now more inclined to get a single and a sling and just carry the babies around like that for the first few months (alternating who gets to be close to my body). I may even try out two slings at the same time. * Is this a realistic idea, or is it better to have a buggy from the start? And what is more convenient if I don’t have a car: A side by side, or one in front of the other?

(I don’t want anyone to think – especially The Fates - that these shopping trips mean that I think everything is going to be alright, that the babies will be fine, that I have nothing to worry about. I still have those worries, but I also have to be prepared…)

*If you want to see something ridiculous… enlarge the picture on this which I pilfered from the comments section on Plan Z’s blog.

Giggling

2007-01-10T15:35:00.000-08:00

I have just been to my first ante-natal class on the top floor of a rambling Victorian house with eight couples. We all sat on cushions on the floor. My birth partners – my sister in law and my best friend - came with me.

I had no idea what to expect. Everyone else was further along than me – 32 weeks and above, but then they aren’t expecting to deliver until 40 weeks, and I want to be prepared from 33 weeks. They were also younger and, it goes without saying, partnered.

We went round the room introducing ourselves, and one poor woman started weeping because she said she was so scared about giving birth. Her placid, round faced, very sweet husband patted her as she explained that she cried every day from fear. When it was my turn I said that I was dreading being vulnerable in front of my two birth partners, and my sister-in-law said that while she was excited, she had no idea if I’d let them help me, and she assumed that their function was to be my whipping post. I was rather shocked by this, but it rang true and my best friend lent across and said, ‘I’m glad she said that and not me.’

After that we did breathing excercises. They are the standard yoga breathing excercises: sit on the floor breathe in and then exhale on an 'ooommm'. We do these in my regular yoga classes and normally I find the sound of the hum very beautiful – like monks performing a Gregorian chant. But this time round it was utterly discordant, and the teacher in particular made this strange guttural ranging sound. And I got the giggles. I really didn’t want to get the giggles. I didn’t want to be childish and ruin it for everyone, but I couldn’t help it. I tried everything. I kept my eyes shut. I tried to hold my mouth shut, I tried to blow my nose. But after a minute, I set off my best friend, and then by chain reaction she set off my sister in law and of course the sound of the other two laughing made the whole thing even worse. I began shaking, and then a woman over the room started laughing, and I had to breathe very deeply to make myself stop. But actually it was fun, and it made me pleased I had chosen them both as my birth partners.

Then my sister in law gave me a great massage and I made lots of 'ummm' noises just like I was meant to, to prove that I wasn’t going to only use her as a whipping post.

The instructor showed us some very old pictures of a cervix dilating, which culminated in an unlikely soft-porn type drawing of a pretty, naked woman just after birth, squatting on her haunches, nursing a baby still attached to its umbilical cord which disappeared into her vagina. The teacher said babies often come out looking a bit funny, and my best friend said that she remembered her husbands face when her first daughter emerged (not overwhelming joy, but horror), while my sister in law said my brother thought my nephew looked like a bloody hamburger. Nonetheless my birth partners both seem quite keen to go down the end of the bed and have a look at the babies coming out. I have been giving it some thought, asking people who have witnessed birth if forever more when they talk to their partner all they can see is her vagina staring in their face, and most people say, no, that isn’t true, and the very fact of birth oblitates the memory of all the hair and genitals and gore.

I’ve got to say that an enema is sounding more and more appealing, particularly after the instructor warned us: “You will poo. ”

The Third Trimester

2007-01-08T16:30:00.000-08:00

*According to ‘Your Pregnancy Week by Week’ today, at 27 weeks, I enter the third trimester. My babies should be around 1 kilogram each. They are certainly becoming more active. I went to see Praire Home Companion this evening (far too whimsical for my liking) and they went crazy for about fifteen minutes, really sharp kicks in my abdomen. In fact, I had to move down the row, so that when I jumped in surprise I didn’t irritate the person behind me (I had already moved once before, because my super-sensitive pregnancy nose could not stand the potent smell of dandruff-scalp coming from the man in front of me).

*I certainly feel more pregnant. I notice that I spend a lot of the day just lying on my side, or gently ambling around my house, cleaning up, or packing for the move. I can’t walk nearly as far as I used to, and if I go too fast my abdomen becomes very tight and I have to stop and have a cup of tea. I think these might be Braxton Hicks contractions. But the truth is, I enjoy being pregnant. I feel as if I am where I am meant to be, when for the past few years I’ve felt more as if I’ve been (metaphorically) clearing up my desk, instead of sitting down and writing the paper. I also feel as if my life is back on track, even if I still have fears about where I am heading.

* I over-ruled my parents superstition about buying baby clothes before birth (practical reasons: the babies could come anytime from 32 weeks and I have to move house in the next month). And while I don’t want to tempt fate, I don’t think the health of my children depends on whether or not I purchase a multi-coloured onesie.
So, here is a picture of just one outfit.
I have a matching one in orange as well.
Very Cute.
I also bought a remarkably kitsch bright pink changing mat covered in hundreds of tiny kittens...

Vile

2007-01-05T15:20:00.000-08:00

I have become a horrible person.
It started around two weeks ago, about the time I started to slow down. I had this realisation that I had to move house and get everything ready for the babies, combined with an awareness that at six months it was suddenly getting less than comfortable to move, and that I was tiring more easily.
I am now foul.
I am foul tempered.
My mother bought me lovely receiving blankets for the babies tonight and I was ungracious and horrible about it. I don’t understand why.
My brother is helping me organise my house move and yet I have been interfering and short tempered.
It’s just that I have this urge suddenly to get everything done. I’m nearly 27 weeks. It’s not unusual for twins to come at 32 weeks. They could be here in less than six weeks (though I do hope it’s longer). There’s so much to do. I feel overwhelmed by it all and ill equipped (even though I am getting huge amounts of help.)
I’ve started to read the birth section of the baby book and it’s becoming more and more real. I am starting ante-natal classes next week. At scans now they estimate the weight of the babies, they don’t just measure in millimetres or inches.
I am ungrateful and horrible.
I suspect that this is not abnormal, but I hate myself for it.

Good Things: I bought a very long pregnancy cushion at John Lewis. Oh it’s lovely. You can wrap yourself around it and sleep at night fully supported.
Other Good Things: I had my ex boyfriends brother staying with me for a few days (not ex-fiance, wedding ex) and when I had to see him off in a taxi to the airport at 3.00 am a passing cat wandered into my house and stayed for about half an hour, sniffing, nudging, butting up against bits of furniture, before eventually I helped shove him back out the window into the fallen leaves and the night.

Other effects of mid-pregnancy: I don’t look blooming anymore. I look a bit haggard and overweight. I have to stop a lot when I walk. An awful lot of people ask me if I am alright. There is no bounce in my step, partly because too much movement makes my stomach tighten and I have to walk very, very slowly (though the last two days I have still managed several miles, albeit with a lot of rests along the way).

Wandering mind: I have always been able to sit and listen for hours to my friends (or even strangers) telling me about the ins and outs of their love affairs. But not any longer. I have suddenly lost interest. There just seems to be such a lot of storm and tempest over…. nothing. I have become brutal. I want to say… look the man’s a tosser. Just get on with it. I have forgotten what it is like to be in love.
I have also become dull. I can’t focus. I can’t see ahead.
Today I worried about the babies having disabilities.

I would like to be reassured that some kind of resurgence of stress like this is not completely abnormal.
I don’t want to be such a horrible person.

New Year's Day

2007-01-01T04:15:00.000-08:00

*These are my New Year's Good Wishes to anyone passing by..... For all those wanting to get pregnant, I hope that this year is the year that brings you happiness and joy. And for all those who are already pregnant, I hope the babies are healthy, happy and blessed.

*New Year's Resolutions. Oddly, None. I normally have a list. In fact, for a while, my two friends and I would sit down and draw up lists for each other. That we would work harder, or embark on a new project or commit ourselves to new relationships or try and get pregnant. I think that those lists were quite helpful, as they were a way of outlining where we wanted to go. So, for example, my list has included for the last few years the resolution that if I didn't meet someone soon I would try and get pregnant by myself.
This year, however, I don't have anything I want to achieve, or at least nothing I can specifically work towards. Instead, I fervently hope that my babies are happy and healthy and well. That is my desire, my wish, though ultimately whether or not that comes to pass is out of my hands. I hope that I can cope as a mother, and that I do a good job, but it's hard to resolve specifics. All health related resolutions seem pointless: I don't smoke, I've had three alcoholic drinks in the past six months (all over Christmas), my level of excercise is determined by my bulk. My life seems now to be more ruled by biology than will.
So rather than a resolution, perhaps I have a direction. Please may my babies be healthy and happy and well. Please may I be able to care for them. And please may I have the strength in the future - however far away that may be - to realign my life and ultimately, if I still want to, emigrate for a few years with the children to the country that I love.

* Gosh, it's a lovely blue day. Cold. Been outside raking leaves and uncovering daffodil shoots. Spent new years eve at my brothers... very quiet, food, a midnight toast and then a taxi home. I brought along my friend whose panicked fiance has just called off their engagement. I think she is too good for him; he has gone into a mad spin of terror. He seems to be terrified of her cultural background and keeps on whittering away about how he is only comfortable in England and wants to be English. No one is very clear what he means, I suspect least of all himself. I don't think it is racism; I think he has been seized by fear of the unknown and her home country has become a metaphor for that.
My friend is born again. I am an atheist. Nonetheless this morning, before she left, she asked if she could spend a minute praying over me. I said yes as she seemed quite insistent, and had just been crying (and I've had a lot of born agains working for me in the past, who used to pray in the bedroom or kneel in front of my poster of Santa Lucia or sprinkle holy water over my evening meal). It was quite a lovely prayer and she wished me blessings in my pregnancy. She gets a lot of strength from her faith, but I still don't believe (and as I wrote that, I lifted up my eyes and looked at the beautiful Victorian church outside my window).

Changes

2006-12-27T05:58:00.000-08:00

The biggest change in the last week has been the striking realisation that I am now on the home stretch of pregnancy. It’s not an intellectual awareness – even though I am 25 weeks, and around 50 per cent of twin pregnancies don’t go beyond 36 weeks – it’s physical. At first I thought the groans when I got up and sat down were just down to my poor bruised coxccyx. But now I realise that it is more. Bending over, putting on socks, getting out of bed, turning over at night, all require a great deal of effort, and an accompanying 'urggggghhhh'. It's partly that my stomach is simply getting in the way. Last night, I was trying to kneel in an empty bath and wash myself…down there. It never occurred to me that this could be problematic, until I soaped my hands, leant forward... and realised I COULDN’T REACH. At first I was baffled. I tried scrabbling around a bit (which wasn’t fun, everything feels different as well, in ways perhaps it’s best not to describe) but I couldn’t do it. It was so ridiculous, I started laughing. In the end I made do, rather inelegantly, with a shower head.

I also look big. I look very, very pregnant. In the last week I have been asked routinely if the baby is due any day now. People are shooting up to offer me their seats on buses. It seems inconceivable that I could grow any bigger, so I went on Google image and searched ‘twins, 34 weeks’ … and was aghast. Twin pregnancies are huge, they are freakishly gigantic, these women look like they have great fat diving boards sticking out of their stomachs… they are as wide as they are high. It is monstrous. It is also going to be me.

This week I also realised that I’m GOING TO HAVE TWINS. OK. I know I knew this all along. But I suddenly felt it on Christmas day with a terrified clarity (“What the f*********, I’m going to have TWINS!!!!!"). I think it came about partly from watching my brother and his wife spend all day shepherding their toddler son and daughter around the presents. I have no idea how I am going to cope. I have arranged help, I have done all I can, but the truth is, I have no real idea what I am letting myself in for.

I had two slightly sadder moments this holiday. We have lovely, large family Christmases: delicious food, lots of noise, we all like each other. But strangely, for once I was the only single person there (apart from my parents, who are divorced). My cousins had partners, my brother was with his family, my god-mothers children had boyfriends, my uncle was there with his girlfriend and his ex-wife. And although being alone did not make me feel unhappy, it did make me feel wistful.

What I found harder to deal with were the questions about the donor. My cousin came over and said, “you must worry all the time about the donor and who he is. You must worry all the time that you will always look at your children and think – where does that feature come from, and who is their daddy?” She then told me that she had just discovered that one of her relatives is a sperm donor. He is mentally unwell, not very nice and rather maladjusted. She said to me: “He could be the father of your children! How would you know! No one would want him as a donor!”. And although I explained that I had used US sperm partly because there is more information provided about the donor, it also jolted back to me in sharp, sharp relief, the fact that I know three men who have donated sperm here in the UK and they are all either mentally ill/very unattractive, or weird (I think this was less the case fifteen or twenty years ago when most donors were medical students). This did not make me feel comfortable, and opened the terrors that I have kept so well closed for the past nine weeks or so. I spent the last hours of Christmas day sitting very quietly in an arm chair, feeling both sad and nervous.
If anyone reading this has had a DI/DE child and knows what I am going through, I would much appreciate your comments, and to hear how you deal/dealt with these feelings.

I hope you all had a lovely holiday. Demeter's was certainly memorable...

Post Number 151

2006-12-23T00:09:00.000-08:00

Its early in the morning and I’m up. It seems that insominia hits around week 22. I’ve been awake for hours, and I’ve now resigned myself and come downstairs for a cup of tea… waiting for the paper to be delivered.
I bought a pile cushion to take the weight off my coxccyx (as advised by Melissa below – thanks!) and limped around the shops this week, at one point pitifully overtaken by a couple in their eighties. The man had a walking stick. It was like being in the Star Trek episode where one life-form lives at a significantly faster pace than the other… so fast that humans seem like statues from their perspective. Several people came up and asked if I was going into labour.
So, not much to say. Doctors appointment this week uneventful. Heartbeats still there. Iron low, but not too low. Babies back to thumping, particularly when immersed in hot bathwater. A phenomenal weight gain… 28 pounds in 24 weeks. This has to be some kind of record. But both the doctor and the midwife told me not to worry. The only person who disagrees is my father who keeps telling me I’m a ‘funny shape’. Yes, dad, I say, I’m pregnant.

Good News/Bad News

2006-12-18T14:03:00.000-08:00

The very good news is that my babies are alive and seem well. The bad news is that I have a bag of frozen peas stuck down the back of my trousers and it takes me two minutes to get from sitting to standing.

On Saturday evening the phone rang and I went downstairs in the semi-darkness carrying three half empty mugs of cold tea. About half way down, I slipped on a book (a 1943 pilot’s navigation guide), my feet shot forward and I flew through the air landing right at the bottom, rigid and hard, on my coxcyx.
It was agonising.

I don’t remember what happened next because I was so shocked. I know that I was still holding the mugs. I know that I started wailing. I know that I staggered half wailing to the living room, and on the way dropped the mugs (because I found them later) and that there were pools of old tea on the floor and splashes up the wall. I know I lay down on my day bed in the dark and wailed and wailed. My coxcyx throbbed and my body was stiff. But mainly I thought: ‘Where is my husband, why isn’t he here to rub my back and ask me how I am and rush back outside and clear up the mess?’

After I finished wailing, I called NHS direct. The midwife said I should go to the emergency room at the nearest hospital to get the babies checked (she also said, ‘Fell down the stairs?’ very cautiously, and asked polite but probing questions to find out if I had been pushed). But I thought that was over cautious. So she agreed instead to ask a doctor to call me back. After an hour a kind young woman rang and went through a list of questions (‘Are you bleeding? Are you leaking fluid? Are the babies moving?’) and I said in truth I felt like a woman who had fallen downstairs, and was in pain, but it didn’t feel baby related, and I didn’t really see what going to the emergency room would achieve.

And then I went to a party. I think in retrospect my body was frozen and couldn’t register pain. The next day, despite feeling sore, I had a party at my house and was absolutely fine… as long as I stood up.

But today… today I was in agony. I couldn’t sleep: every time I turned in bed pain shot through my lower back. And the babies didn’t seem very active. Twin One in particular didn’t seem to move a twitch, while Twin 2 moved but in a very quiet muted sort of way, more like a stitch than far off punches.

And then my colleague came to pick me up and it took me ages to get into the car, and every jolt and bump felt like a skewer through my coxcyx. And I couldn’t sit down while we were working. And so finally, 36 hours after falling, I made an appointment at the hospital to see a doctor.

He was great. The NHS was great. He was very matter of fact and said it might take months for the pain to go away. He wheeled in an antiquated ultrasound machine, squirted gloop on my (now very hairy…) stomach and searched for the heartbeats. Both twins were alive, and they were moving. They were also both head down and kicking each other, which is why I couldn’t feel them (they aren’t kicking out into my belly). I was relieved: I had this fear that Twin One had banged her head on the edge of my pelvis and knocked herself out (and forgotten how to breathe – which is silly, as of course they’re not breathing but receiving blood-born oxygen through the umbilical cord).

I was very relieved and tried to go for a walk afterwards (I normally walk a couple of miles a day). But I could only manage a quarter of a mile, with little tiny granny steps, and that took me over an hour. It hurt a lot. Several people stopped me on the street and asked if I was alright.
It annoyed me that I looked as if I was walking feebly because I was pregnant, but in fact the pregnancy is no problem at all. It’s my BLOODY ARSE.

Anyway:
Bad Things:
*I now have thyroid related constipation, compounded by pregnancy, plus piles and with the new addition of being unable to sit down on a toilet seat without getting a spasm of pain. I shall never poo again.
*The honeymoon is over. My period of freedom, of easy movement, of marching along with my bump is now done. I am reduced to a feeble wobble, with a pack of frozen food stuff down my pants.
Good Things:
The babies live and are well.
At least I got a holiday in Spain before I fell.

Hello

2006-12-15T03:41:00.000-08:00

I've been in Spain with my father, on a 'eat as much as I can' and 'travel before I'm too big to walk comfortably' city break. Sparkling weather. Here we are, my girls and I... after a delicious latte, fresh orange juice and a croissant, and about to stagger over to a tapas bar. That's a lot of stomach, you might think, but actually the girls are suprisingly quiet. I just get the odd thump or so, especially after I've eaten, or if I go to the cinema, or if I immerse myself in a (not too) hot bath. However, the movements are definitely getting stronger: it now feels like there is something/s deep in there shifting furniture, bumping the wardrobe up against the wall, shunting the sofa into the corner.

On our first night in

Spain

my father and I were eating a bowl of bean soup (protein...) and I said something about the babies, and he said, ‘It’s brave what you’re doing’.
I was quite amazed. I didn’t know that my father thought in those terms. Brave in what way, exactly? Brave to take such a risk on an unknown donor (that seems to me the real bravery, but it’s not so much bravery as desperation)? Anyway, I was rather touched.
Also, it turns out, that my father (whose memory has not been the same since he was hospitalised this summer) had forgotten I’d asked him not to tell everyone – strangers, what have you – that I’d used a donor to conceive. A lot of people do know, but I am selective about sharing the information. It turns out he has been telling a lot of people (“I didn’t know what else to say when they asked about your boyfriend,” he said).
I obviously didn’t get angry. What would be the point? He didn’t do it on purpose. And there is a part of me that is a pleased that he is so free to tell: it shows that he really isn't ashamed that I'm doing this. That means a lot to me.

And in other pregnancy related news: I think I am in what the books refer to as the 'honeymoon period' (though I understand this is pretty short for twins). I am, however, obsessed by my bowels, particularly since developing the indignity of a ... pile. My best friend asked me about 'movement' recently and I went into a long rambling drone about how long it was since I'd gone to the toilet, and the ammount of prunes I was eating. After I'd finished there was a pause, and then she said: 'Actually, I meant the babies'.

Happy Christmas

2006-12-10T08:32:00.000-08:00

Jingle Cats
Jingle Bells Video (REALVIDEO)

Scan: 22w2d

2006-12-07T10:40:00.000-08:00

I went in for a scan today. The NHS wanted to measure my cervix. They seem to do this all the time with twins, as a way of being forewarned about premature delivery (the shorter the cervix, the more likely prematurity). I thought I was going to get a bit of wanding, and that’s it, so I went in took off my tights and knickers, put apart my knees and waited for the unceremonious prodding. However the sonographer said that as I hadn’t had my 20 week scan at their hospital she wanted to do it again. I pointed out that the man who did my scan is meant to be the best in the world, and that the consultant at her hospital was the one who had told me that (and she’d gone there herself, for all three of her pregnancies). But the sonographer seemed to want to go ahead anyway, so I had another forty minute anomaly scan. And happily the results all turned out normal again. And the two girls are still two girls. And they weigh around 1.1 pounds each.

Unfortunately, as I had prepared for a wanding, instead of being decorously covered - a skirt rolled down and a t-shirt up to expose my stomach - I had to go through the whole process with my dress round my waist and only a strip of paper towel for modesty. Also the sonographer (who was a nice lady) got the gloop everywhere, she was dolloping it on, and I ended up with huge stains around the bottom of my newly washed dress. It looked as if a crowd of toddlers had come up and wiped their noses on my hem.

At the end of the scan I asked the sonographer a question. Ladies. All ladies. Pay Attention. I found the answer very disturbing. I have noticed over the last week that my… sexual organs… the whole lot down there… feel different. I don’t know if they look different as I don’t have the heart to peer. I can’t look straight down because of my bump and there is absolutely no way I am going to pile on the indignities by staring spread-legged into the mirror. So it’s just a feeling. Everything feels somehow heavier, bigger, more swollen, rounder. It is very odd and I have found no reference to this in any book. So today, I asked the sonographer if she knew what was going on. And of course, I should have guessed the answer: The culmulative weight of two babies, two placentas and two sacs of amniotic fluid weighing on my pelvic floor, causing it to sink and buckle. “You have to do pelvic floor excercises WHENEVER YOU CAN," the sonographer said. "Especially with twins. You have to do them all the time. Because if you don’t, you’ll be OK before you give birth… but after you give birth…..” And her voice trailed off in a grim, unspoken warning.

So Ladies. Any ladies. Even ladies reading this who aren't thinking of conceiving for a while yet. All of you. Start Squeezing Now. Because I can tell you, it is really, really disconcerting to have this feeling that your lovely, neat lady-parts are being pushed out of shape by the babies (and I thought it was just the drooping, green-veined, brown-nippled breasts that I had to worry about). The sonographer gave a dark sort of chuckle as I left and said, ‘The indignities are just beginning.’

I went to a nearby café and tried to put her comment out of my mind with three mince pies and a nice cup of tea.

Up and Down

2006-12-05T15:22:00.000-08:00

Not much to say really. Except my bottom is really getting voluminous – just eat a bar of Green and Blacks chocolate, and a bowl of fish dumplings in soup and before that a vegetarian burger, and a cup of hot chocolate and still managed to fit in Casino Royale at the cinema (babies didn’t like the noise… began kicking around when the soundtrack started).

Casino Royale is an odd sort of a film – had to shut my eyes in some of the violence - and Daniel Craig’s lips drove me crazy, they are set in a perpetual Angelina-Jolie-like pout. Also his lady friend is rather skinny and dull; I prefer the purring voluptuous types. Wasn’t entirely clear what was going on some of the time, and the poker game lost me. Also, I was perplexed by rebels in eastern Uganda playing a pin ball machine (what kind of rebels are going to haul one of those into the bush? It’s hardly mobile). Nonetheless, I quite enjoyed the film. And there was something oddly satisfying in Daniel Craig being tortured naked, a sort of ‘right-o boys, now it’s YOUR turn to be sexually exploited in a sadistic, homo-erotic scene for the camera.’

As for the up and down bit: On Sunday two friends called me in tears because of the appalling behaviour of their fiancés: One woman is being blanked, the other is being denied the chance to have a baby (and she has just turned 40). Not being denied in a ‘I’m not going to have a child, so if you want one, you should leave’ kind of way. Oh no. That would be far too easy. Being denied in a ‘I’m not going to try this month, but maybe next month’ sort of a way (and next month never comes). I suddenly remembered the hell of being in a bad relationship. Also I realised that, despite the bouts of loneliness, I am essentially happy and in the place I want to be. Not the best possible place I would have wished for myself, but still the right place.

The downswing came today when ex number 2 wrote to me (not ex-fiance, nice-man ex) and described the birth of his baby girl in rather sweet detail, and how he’d helped out and made his exhausted wife tea in bed, which made me feel a bit sad. It was that which drove me out of the house and to the cinema, in an effort to shake off the gloom.

Meanwhile, Mel has posted a meme and invited anyone to answer. So here are my replies. Don't wait to be tagged: just steal the questions and post if you have played.

Things I learned this year
1. A lot about donor conception and fertility treatments
2. Loneliness doesn’t go away, but it is bearable if you are persuing your dream.

People I met
1. The ladies in my infertility support group. Who else could I talk to about egg retrievals and injectables?
2. Blogworld… and all of you therin.

Things I don't want to take with me into 2007
1. Loneliness
2. Pointless hankering after exes

Things I want to hold close as I pass into 2007
1. My pregnancy
2. The sense that I am doing the right thing.

Things I'm looking forward to in 2007
1. My babies (and please may they be healthy)
2. Being a mother.

Things that were life changing in 2006
1. Making the decision to go it alone….
2. … and getting pregnant

Things you hope to accomplish by the end of 2007
1. Enjoy motherhood…
2. … and adjust to my new life.

Growing: Inside and Out

2006-12-01T06:22:00.000-08:00

I started off around this size, and looked more or less like this when the twins were seven weeks old. Here is one of them floating in my uterus at 6w6d.

Here I am at 13 weeks pregnant (Katty Wears: Father's coat, Sister in Law's jumper, pajamas, model's own). And here is a miraculous 3D picture of the twins from around the same time: 12w1d.

And this is my belly at 19w3d, just a few days before this picture of one of the twins was taken at my twenty week scan. There are two of those inside that bump, weighing nearly a pound each.

And finally, here I am this morning at 21w3d. Weight seems to be going on everywhere. And I feel really stretched.

Defensive

2006-11-30T16:20:00.000-08:00

I know the ticker isn't very stylish. But you know what? I'll probably never be pregnant again, and I want one, even though, were it my own design it would be a straight line with a little marker on it, maybe two tiny stars. Or two black cats strolling through some short green grass. Or perhaps a little astronaut bouncing slowly along the surface of the moon...

Anyone know how/where I can move the ticker in the template page so it is flush left accross the top of the blog entries, above the latest date but below the title box?

Base Comments

2006-11-28T07:45:00.000-08:00

*The most exciting thing to happen to me and my girls this week was a 48 hour stomach bug, caught from my brother’s family after a rather rich pumpkin ‘soup’. This involved projectile vomiting and then profoundly bad constipation, I mean profound, I mean, I didn’t know it could get this bad. It resulted in me practicing antenatal yoga birthing moves – including one on hands and knees which involves ‘opening up your pelvis’ - in an attempt to deliver… a poo. I don’t think it worked, but it did amuse me, and it was one of those moments when I was really quite glad I didn’t have a husband standing outside the bathroom door. In the end the problem was resolved, spectacularly, with half a packet of dried apricots and two litres of water. But really, this pregnancy related constipation is something else.

*The dreams have now randomised, but continue to be vivid. The sex dreams are really very… startling. They have no bearing on anything at all, including my common or garden desires. The other night I was seduced by a 20 year old born-again, devout, Kenyan housegirl, sitting in very clean, well-pressed second-hand clothes on a wooden bench, clutching a Bible. Despite appearances – when she got me home, she was ever so raunchy. So raunchy that I actually had to … shunt her body politely aside during some of her more enthusiastic moves.
Woke up feeling extremely suprised.

*Someone in my antenatal yoga class who has had a child already, said that her pelvic floor muscles were destroyed by her first birth. Another woman, also expecing her second child, nodded in sympathetic agreement. The first woman said it was horrible, horrific, and looked genuinely pained. The rest of us first timers sat there in quiet terror imagining what it was exactly that she was talking about.

*For anyone contemplating having a child alone: I do not regret this so far, but loneliness can still strike. The other day I woke up feeling absolutely fine, picked up the Guardian from the doormat, went downstairs to read it over a cup of tea, and flicked to a story in the family section in which readers had been invited to contribute examples of daily lovingness. The examples were very simple. A woman describing a man standing in his cycling clothes preparing a meal when she came home from work. Small, ordinary acts of caring. All of a sudden, just like that, I found that I was crying. I cried for two hours. I felt so very sad that I didn’t have someone to share that everyday intimacy. It struck again two days later. Again, I was feeling happy and well, I’d gone for a long walk, stopped off and eat houmous while looking at people shopping in pound stores through the plate glass window, got home, lay down on my sofa, and was suffused by sadness – and tears - that there was no one to look up to and smile at, no one to lean over and touch my stomach and feel that the babies were theirs as well, no one, when I was unwell, to make me a cup of tea (though I did persuade my mother to come round with some home made soup, which was very kind of her).

20w1d Scan: Surprised

2006-11-22T08:28:00.000-08:00

I had my 20 week anomaly scan this morning. This is the big scan. If I were to have one scan during my pregnancy this would be it. The scan where they visually check that everything is OK. Some of the things they visually check for I could not have tested with bloods, like spina bifada. So I was nervous.
I had the scan at the very grand private clinic, overseen by the sonographer who my NHS doctor described as the 'best in the world.' I'd asked her if she'd mind if I went private for this scan and she said: 'No. That's where I went for my three babies'.
So. First thing this morning... a bus... mayhem on the tubes... a Starbucks hot chocolate.... my best friend in the waiting room.
Ushered into a small room. The sonographer who did most of the work was a business-like young woman with a hard-to-follow accent. But soon after I'd rolled back all my maternity panels, and had some jelly squirted on, the Professor came in, with his beguiling hairy arms.
He ranged the mouse up and down my belly. Those babies are really long now. My uterus measures about 24 weeks. He ranged it down from my pubic bone and up below my ribs. The babies were lying head to toe.
I said: "I had an ultrasound at 16 weeks at my NHS hospital and the sonographer said the one on the right was a boy. But he couldn't see the one on the left. Could you please tell me the sex?"
The professor prodded around a bit and said, "That's definitely a girl."
I was very suprised and very pleased.
Then he said: "Who told you the one on the right was a boy? That's not a boy. It's definitely a girl."
He zoomed in to her underside, her little splayed thighs and vulva.
It looked like quite a big vulva to me.
I said: "Are you sure it's a girl and not a hermaphrodite".
He said, "She's not a hermaphrodite, she's a girl".
I stared at the image on the screen.
I was absolutely amazed. I had expected two boys, and then, if I was lucky, a boy and a girl.
But two girls.
Two girls!!!!!
I've always always wanted boys.
Two girls!!!!!
What am I going to do with them?
I've only thought up boys names.
And then I realised:
Girls mean all those sparkling shoes, and sequinned stiff dresses in baby Monsoon. It means adorable coloured jumpers.
They don't have to be girly-girls. They can be tough. I can teach them self defense and how to shoot (my best friend pointed out, I don't know how to do either of those things... but I can learn).
I have spent the last month agonising over whether or not to circumcise my boys. And now I don't have to worry about it at all.
Girls.
Gosh!

The Professor said everything looked normal and left after about five minutes. I said to the other doctor, 'Do you think he's right?' And she said, 'Who do you trust more?' And it has to be him. Not just him, but his equipment: There was a sign pinned outside the room where I had the 16 week scan asking patients to donate money towards a new ultrasound machine.

The woman doctor continued with the measurements. The babies are measuring the same - they are measured in weight now rather than height - 12 ounces each. They are measuring right on for dates. She said that they are each the same weight as a singleton should be at that age, which is good. The placentas are on the front of my uterus, against my belly, which is why I can't feel much movement - they are certainly moving in there - both of them - kicking and shimmying away, head to toe, they must be kicking each other in the head, divided by the thin little amniotic wall. The two placenta's - which were low-lying before (which is not great: if they are too low then you have to have a casearean) have now moved up and are high in the uterus.
Then I had to be wanded to check the length of my cervic. This is important because a short cervic is an indicator of premature labour. Mine was 'very long'. It was odd being wanded by this woman. The fertility clinic wanders go up and under and don't look; this one had a bit of a peer when she pushed it in, and I felt rather ungroomed and hairy and was convinced she had an expression of distate on her face (she was very clean and nicely presented).
All in all, there was, from both scans, absolutely nothing, for me to worry about.
(This left me rather uneasy, with a big hole where the worrying should be... I kept thinking... surely I'm meant to be worrying about something?).

As I was pulling on my tights, the doctor said to me, 'do you know how much you weigh now?' And I said, I have no idea. And she said, it doesn't really matter. And I said, I wouldn't mind knowing anyway. And got on the scales.
I was so shocked by the number that I thought the scales were wrong.
A few days before egg collection I was 62 kilos, which is about 136 pounds.
I am now 70 kilos. SEVENTY KILOS. ELEVEN STONE. ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY FOUR POUNDS.
This does not seem possible.
The doctor was rather diapproving and said that was much too much weight gain and I shouldn't have put on more than five kilos.
So I am going to cut back a bit.
(which has made me a bit rueful: Yesterday I had a feast at a delicious restaurant ending with a chocolate soufle with cream and chocolate sauce, the day before chocolate pudding with creamy warm custard).
But as worries go, weight is not a bad one.

Despite the food warning, celebrated in a vegetarian restaurant with scrambled eggs on toast and mushrooms with my best friend, who gave me a pack of 3D cat and kitten playing cards as a present.

I am amazed that everything seems to be alright, and astounded that I am having two girls.

Random Thoughts at 19w6d

2006-11-20T15:43:00.000-08:00

*One of the very best things about being pregnant – apart from longing to be pregnant for so many years and finally getting here - is the sense of not having to do anything, and yet doing something, all at the same time.
It is just like the pleasure of a long journey.
The first time I moved abroad I did so with very little preparation and a great deal of anxiety.
I panicked and faffed. I even threw up on the eve of departure.
But then came that glorious moment of reprieve: the journey itself.
Once I was through the ticket barrier at Heathrow, and until I landed, I was in this wonderful, suspended state where everything was out of my hands.
All I could do was surrender myself, and hope for the best.
All I could do was sit there, wait for the destination, and know that there was no choice left but to deal with what was delivered.

*My male friends are particularly intrigued by this pregnancy. Not how I became pregnant, but the very fact that I am pregnant. They – along with teenage girls - are the ones who ask if they can touch my bump. One man was so distracted from a conversation – his eyes kept glancing over to where my hand was rubbing my stomach – that another said: “She’ll let you feel it if you ask.” He said, ‘Can I?’ leaned forward and made little circles with his hand on my belly. To my mortification, I blushed. I have only ever blushed about four times in my life, but I could feel the heat searing up my face, and I couldn’t look him in the eyes for the next fifteen minutes.
I used to have a crush on him. It must have been a residue from that.

*Insomnia. I can get to sleep alright. It’s just that I wake up for three or four hours in the middle of the night. What makes it all the more unbearable is that inevitably my mind wanders to sex. If I had a partner I would be accosting him every night, and then apologising to the babies for squashing them with uterine contractions.

*Chivalry. I know a lot of people complain that manners are deteriorating and people never offer up seats on public transport. But I’ve had people popping up all over the place. This morning on the tube a young woman and an elderly man vied to give me their seat (I refused because… I don’t know... I genuinely felt alright? …. but I was very grateful).
African men – visiting students clutching books on how to improve their chess game - have particularly good manners. Young people are the worst: sullen and disinterested.

*Burping. Never before in my life. But now, after every meal, like an old person.

*I feel I am being too optimistic, and that things are going too well.
I do still have very many fears, particularly about the babies health and denying them a father.
I also worry what I will feel when I see the donor in them. I get confused when people ask me what the father looks like (I really don’t know. I don’t have a photograph, only a description).
I haven’t told everyone I used a sperm bank. I usually say: I’m doing this alone, and the father won’t be involved. But I have told quite a few people, and I know they have told other people, and the further those people are from me, the more likely they are to tell, and the wider the news will spread. That makes me apprehensive, but at the same time, strangely relieved. I feel far more comfortable in the company of those who know the truth. I am not suited to this half secret. It cuts me off from the world, and I don’t admire myself for it. I admire people who are entirely open about their choices. Also, I need to be able to defend my decision 100 per cent. Otherwise my children will sense my ambivalence and that will affect the way they feel about themselves.
I suspect I am working my way towards confident disclosure.

*Twenty week anomaly scan coming up.
The Big One.
Nervous.

Pregnancy Symptoms Number one hundred and whatever

2006-11-17T03:50:00.000-08:00

*Well... I've never seen a pregnant woman with a nose bleed. Until I looked in the mirror this morning and saw a little dried red moustache. The internet assures me this is normal. I guess it's the corrollary of the bleeding gums.

*Meg has mentioned the mental mush that accompanies pregnancy. She is absolutely right. My mind has gone squishy. Unless the task is immediately to do with either 1) food (getting it and eating it) or 2) baby related (buying a house, arranging for a maternity nurse, googling nose bleeds) I am incapable of concentrating.
I normally read about four novels a week. Since I became pregnant I have gone down to... maybe four novels in four and a half months. And I limp my way through them. I can barely focus. I bought myself a Stephen King in Woolworths hoping that I would be pulled along by easy prose and good story telling ... and that has been like wading my way through a tiresome swamp. Nothing rivets or captures me. TV would probably do it. But I haven't had a TV for years and years. And if I got one now, it would be my downfall.

*Dreams: Unsubtle in-yer-face anxieties continue. This time I was looking at a photograph album of my children and trying to work out which features came from me and which from the donor. One of the children - who was beautiful - was also mixed race, and I remembered that the woman in the cubicle next to me during the egg collection was black.
Anyone else who had IVF worry that there was a transfer in the petri dish? Anyone else feel like whipping off to the DNA laboratory just to check the babies are really yours? It seems like such an easy, possible mistake to make.
(I read one fertilty book that said this is an uncommon occurance and lists only three examples. In all cases the babies were black and the parents were white. Surely, the parents were alerted by this obvious sign that there had been a mix up? I wonder how many egg switches go unnoticed.... I realise this is the equivalent of the baby-swap in the hospital nursery. But then, I also have to worry about that).

*Beautiful men: Admire those lovely boots. But, of course, it is Howard Moon who has stolen my heart...

Not Sure...

2006-11-15T15:07:00.000-08:00

But I think I felt a movement today.

I was with my father in a waiting room at a hospital, and I had my hands on my stomach, quite low down (as I am feeling strettcccchhhedddd) and suddenly, against my left hand, I felt a little jump from the inside. I’d felt something similar about two days ago on my right. Every so often I also feel funny little pops and twitches. Not sure. But maybe?

*An Amazon parcel arrived today with a CD of Klezmer music and a CD of Lilly Allen, who is far too young for me, but makes me want to bop around. I played them both in the kitchen while eating scrambled eggs on toast. I thought the babies might like the noise. I am worried my single life is too quiet for them.

Something else the pregnancy books don't make entirely clear...

2006-11-13T23:23:00.000-08:00

*Bleeding gums.
Ok. They mention it. In passing.
What they do not say is that you will brush your teeth and wonder if you forgot to rinse in water and mistakenly swilled a huge cup of coffee or a glass of cranberry juice.
There will be blood all over the sink. There will be blood on your dressing gown.
You will look in the mirror and think: 'I cannot go out. If I smile at someone they will be terrified.'
You will feel as if you are in a Halloween special.

I mentioned this to my sister-in-law and she said, oh yes, the bleeding gums.
She told me that, when pregnant, she used to brush her teeth and then run out of the bathroom with a bloody smile and a blood spattered chin doing a ghoulish cackle to terrify my brother (something those of you lucky enough to have a partner can also try at home).

*Meanwhile, I seem to have found a normal maternity nurse. She is in her thirties. She has ten years experience. She does not believe in the Gina Ford manuals, but does believe in routine, and demand breast feeding for the first ten days or so, to get the milk flowing. And she is available from my due date (which has been adjusted two weeks back by the doctor for week 38 - March 28th I think).

*Part of me feels that this is too much good fortune in one week. I found a house, I found a maternity nurse, I feel generally fine. I am not used to this kind of run of good luck. I haven't had it for a while. For a long time, years even, I felt even as I struggled that I was in a run of bad luck. I am worried that if I am too optimistic there will be some kind of cosmic pay back. My fears are now centered on the 20 week scan, eight days away. Please may my babies be ok.

Mr Internet...

2006-11-13T02:41:00.000-08:00

tells me that vivid dreams/nightmares during pregnancy are normal.
But last night was truly horrible.
Having now moved away from rejection-by-ex dreams, it has become a free for all inside my head.
Last night after hurting my parents terribly, and loosing my chance for love with a fifty year old woman because I was being a procrastinating man, I then picked a card from a fortune tellers spread hand and read the most horrible prediction about my babies (it included the word 'generation'... so clearly the maternity nurses prophesy has had some resonance).
I woke up with my heart pounding, and had to go back to sleep with the light on.

Well!

2006-11-10T15:49:00.000-08:00

*Today, I sat at my desk and using e-mail and telephone.... bought a house.
Really.
It happened that fast

Monday, I saw the house. I put in an offer for the asking price that afternoon. I then raised the offer incrementally. It went to sealed bid. I spent 24 hours trying to work out what would be the most/least I could offer and still get the house. And it seems I was lucky/my calculations were right: My bid was, fractionally, the highest. The current owners want to move out by early next year, so I can be in at least a month or two before the babies are born.

So what did I get for all this money?

I bought a three bedroomed house with a garden a ten minute walk from my brother and his family. It is a three minute walk from the shops, and a ten minute walk from the nearest mother and baby club, and very close to two parks. My brother and his wife generously suggested I move near them. Everyone I spoke to who is single/with twins said that the most important thing to avoid is isolation, and the best support is family.

And so ... I bought the house.

*In other exciting news: Borat is worth seeing for the naked male wrestling scene. And I have discovered that at four months pregnant it is very, very hard to put on tights. This evening it took me ten minutes, and I had to sit on the toilet seat to rest during the struggle... the great unravelling of hose.

The Ex-Dreams...

2006-11-10T04:24:00.000-08:00

have stopped!
I woke up this morning after a house-buying anxiety dream, and realised that ever since the really horrible dream about my ex spurning me the night after his phone call, I haven't had one since. After 15 weeks straight of dreams featuring him rejecting me, they have gone! Isn't that strange? And to be cured by his phone call. I can't work out why.
In a way the dreams helped, as they made me feel so rejected and miserable that I really didn't want to speak to him when he called in real life. And in a way, the dreams were so vivid, that the phone call has taken on the memory of a dream, and I can't really tell one from the other. It's faded. I haven't been thinking about it. It's gone.
Isn't that odd.
Any theories?

Sealed bids….

2006-11-09T11:15:00.000-08:00

Are no fun.

I am trying to buy a house close to my brother, which I can move into before the birth. Easy you might think… except that this is a sellers market, and even though I offered the full asking price, it has now gone to sealed bid. I do not like sealed bids, and I do not know how to operate in the world of sealed bids, and I am torn between what I can afford and disliking the cheek of the whole process, the whole voting in the dark, the whole tactically trying to outmaneouve each other, the whole risk of paying well above the odds (or offering well below what others are paying, simply out of pique). I really want this house as it is perfect for me: ten minutes walk from my brothers house and in the heart of babyville, right next to a baby and toddlers club. And the sellers need to move out two months before my due date. I put in the bid tomorrow … and hear by the evening. So wish me luck.

Meanwhile, I have been out and about in the world, coming out about my pregnancy. It’s not that hard to come out about: my maternity pants are already stretched right over my bump and I have a large hump on the front of my body. I’ve noticed that the skin around my belly button is now all shiny as if it is being stretched to capacity, and this is only just the beginning: 18w2d.

I have been reluctant to tell my former colleagues that I am pregnant, partly because there are such a lot of them and my professional and personal life intertwine, and we are not an uninquisitive bunch, and news will travel fast, across continents even, once its out. And this will be good gossip for a couple of days. But I either came out, or I stayed in my house, hiding. So I decided that Wednesday would be the big day.

I began with lunch with an ex-colleague. She is older than me, and she said she was thrilled. She is gay and has a partner as well as an adopted son (she knows the biological parents, as does the child). I did not tell her I used a sperm donor, which is lucky as it turns out as she is quite censorious about children not having the opportunity to grow up knowing their father, or at least knowing who their father is. It’s strange: she was someone I expected to be less censorious, not more.

In the early evening, I moved on to a group of younger ex-colleagues in a smoky bar. They didn’t notice at first, but when one did, the rest did. They were stunned. But they were incredibly supportive. I didn’t tell them I used DS: I just said that I’d decided to get pregnant as time was running out and the father would not be involved at any stage and that I wasn’t willing to talk about it any further. They said things like I’m so impressed, and well done, and that’s great, and one woman locked me in conversation for half an hour as it turned out she has been considering having a child with a gay (male) couple.

Among the women was this woman who I have been dreading confronting. I admire her and like her, but she is a gossip and she is also both very competitive and fairly insecure... and this manifests itself in putting me down. She did make a few off-colour comments. She said, ‘You want to move to babyville? you’ll be a mummy and before you know it you’ll be in the suburbs, ha ha ha’. I said, ‘well as I understand it, single mums can be isolated so I’m trying to plan against that’, and all the others said, ‘oh yes, good idea’, and that was the end of that. Then, I heard her having an extraordinary conversation with another of the women about the pain of childbirth, particularly twin childbirth (she doesn’t have children herself), something like it being doubly painful. I said well I understand that it isn’t twice as painful, because you are already fully dilated by the time the second one comes out, and again the conversation turned back to more positive comments, and one of the women produced her camera and began photographing my stomach so she could send it to one of our friends overseas.

Dinner that evening was with a different group of ex-colleagues. They are all young men – or at least all younger than me – and we were part of a very close knit community for three years, meeting up two or three times a week for dinner. They noticed immeadiately and although they asked some questions about the father, they didn’t push it. They did, however, ask a few times if they could touch my stomach and as the evening wore on spent considerable time comparing the tautness of my belly with the beer belly of our rather rotund friend. One of the men said he thought pregnant women were sexy, which cheered me up no end.

Finally, today, I told one man – another ex-colleague/friend – the whole truth over lunch. But only because he told me three months ago that his new baby was born from egg donation. It turns out that I was the first person he had told, because I was the first to have asked, and I felt I owed him the truth. He hasn't even told his parents yet, and the child is over a year old.

It’s all been exhausting and exhilarating ... but also quite worrying: I wasn’t ready to come out yet. I wanted to wait until the twenty week anomaly scan, because of course I am anxious about that. But the truth is, word was getting out, and people I hadn’t told were ringing me up to congratulate me.

I have a theory that the generation below me – thirty and under – and the generation of my mothers age and above – sixty and over – are more liberal about this whole DS mularky. I’m not sure why that is, but I suspect for the younger ones it’s more normal, while the older ones seem to have a different perspective, perhaps a clearer view about what’s important, and in particular not living with regrets? I don’t know, but it is quite interesting. I know other women who have conceived with DI have been surprised at the positive reaction of the older generation, even people in their eighties.

Time to stop. I am going to spend the evening agonising about the sealed bid… and listening to the new Madeline Peyroux…

I left a message...

2006-11-07T03:32:00.000-08:00

... on her phone saying that I wouldn't be able to hire her. And you know what, I felt really guilty. I felt like I'd tricked her into telling me her deep seated views about DI and single women - and then decided not to employ her on that basis (thought to be fair, I had reservations beforehand). At the same time, there is NO way I can have someone looking after my babies who thinks they are cursed for generations to come. No WAY.

The agencies have run out of other available nurses. I interviewed one really nice woman this morning - the best so far - but she is not free until three weeks after I'm due. Haven't heard back about the house offer either.

However, I did fix my boiler all by myself after downloading the manual from the internet. I think I deserve a prize for this.

The Uber-Biscuit

2006-11-06T11:56:00.000-08:00

I’ve not been doing much and at the same time I’ve been making major decisions. For example, today I walked into a house… and bought it! Or at least, I made an offer. More on this another time. But for now… for now I have to talk about the Quest for a Maternity Nurse.

My father has very kindly offered to pay for me to have a maternity nurse for eight weeks after the birth. To give you an idea of what this kindness means: a maternity nurse charges £1000 pounds a week – that’s about US$1800. For that money, you get six days a week, 24 hour live in care… someone who will (hopefully) teach you how to double breast feed, and also put the babies into a routine. They don’t do any housework though, which is a pity….

Anyway. Getting a maternity nurse is not easy. First of all, I called a local twins club for recommendations. I quickly realised I had wandered into the wrong demographic: the wives of very wealthy bankers. The mothers said things like: “Oh Nanny Dot was a wonder… we couldn’t have lived without her… one of the family.” I rang every single one of the nurses on the list – every one was taken. It turns out that mothers-to-be book maternity nurses when they are only four weeks pregnant. Some even book maternity nurses when they start trying for a baby. Clearly these are not worried former infertiles.

In the end I joined several agencies. I was told bluntly that I had left it very late (16 weeks) and that there weren’t that many women on the books. I had some bizarre - and I found borderline offensive - conversations (“You might like to hire a Phillipina. They often agree to do housework, unlike the nannies") and then I started ringing around.

The first woman I talked to scared the socks off me. “You Vill Be having your baby at 37 weeks by caesarean section.” (Not a question, a statement).”

I said, hesitantly, “Well yes, but you know, I rather hoped that maybe, I could try and deliver the baby vaginally and keep them in their for as long as possible”.

To which she replied: “Tvins ALWAYS come early. I zink you will find you will have a caeasarian”. She was against breast feeding if it got in the way of the routine. It felt as if she wanted to run the babies like an army camp.

The next woman was also very, very regimental. She took pride in her routine, which was inflexible. She also charged £1600 for a six day week. I baulked.

Next up was young and sensible and only moderately bossy. Like most maternity nurses she prefers to sleep with the babies (“But”, I said weakly, “I might want to keep them in the room… you know… I might feel a bit funny going to all that effort to have them, and then handing them over to someone else...”). But in general, that one went alright, even though she wasn't available on the dates I wanted.

And then today. Today took the Uber-Biscuit.

There is one particular woman, lets call her Jane, who has been calling me up, chasing up to see if I am interested in using her services. The reason is proximity: not many people who hire maternity nurses live in my part of London, and she happens to live nearby; it would be really very convenient for her.

Jane talks a lot, and she talks very fast, and she peppers her conversation with darlings and loves (which is fine) and today she told me about her working hours and about breastfeeding and though I began to drift, because the speed and monologue was so relentless, I did hear her say she needed Sunday off to go to church.

I said: So what church do you go to?
And she said: I go to the (something like Zenith of Our Sacred Lord).
I said: “Ah. You’re born again? A Pentecostal church?”
She said, cautiously: “Yes”.
And I said: “Now. I don’t want to ask very personal questions. But if your faith is very important to you, I think you need to consider how you would feel working for a single mother. Because obviously I am having children out of wedlock.”

And then she explained the following.

She explained the personal reasons that led up to her not having children yet, and how she had considered having children by herself ‘with IVF’ if she was still single in her mid-thirties.
By ‘IVF’, I think she meant ‘IVF with donor sperm’.
She explained that when she reached 31 she had decided to seek guidance from the Lord. And one day a scriptural passage had come to her from the Holy Spirit…
“Now,” she said, “Don’t take offence, but of course… and this only applies to single mothers who actually plan to have children by themselves… not single mothers who find themselves in this position by accident…. But the scriptures said to me... if you have children in this way ... then those children will be cursed for ten generations.”

There was a little pause as I took this in.

I am really very tolerant of other peoples spiritual views. I’ve had born again Christians work for me before, even born again Christians who spent every Sunday praying for me to be saved in church.

But I do think that this is of a different order.

I said, very politely, “I’m not sure I share those views.”
And then: “And of course, I had IVF.”

She was not phased in the least, and the conversation continued for another fifteen minutes, during which I gave her advice on the best IVF clinics in London (if she decides to go ahead with the procedure with her husband-to-be) and ended with an agreement that I would ring her back tomorrow to say whether I wanted her services or not.

But the thing is - even if maternity nurses are hard to find - I really don’t want someone looking after my babies who thinks they are cursed for generations to come, who interprets every bout of colic as a punishment from God … and who will spend every moment alone with them offering up prayers to break the curse, and save their souls.

CONGRATULATIONS!

2006-11-01T07:35:00.000-08:00

Today I got my all time favourite congratulatory message.* The text was from Jackie, who worked for me for six years when I lived elsewhere. She was my ‘housekeeper’. Her adopted fourteen year old daughter, Sandra, also worked with me for a while (when Jackie was unjustly incarcarated in a maximum security prison).

In this country, it’s considered a great tragedy not to have children. And Jackie is very religious. She went to a miracle church and was famous locally for having ten years of baldness cured by prayer. The fact that I had taken her to the doctor who diagnosed ringworm, and gave her anti-fungal cream to fix it, didn’t phase her (“But Katty,” she said. “God gave me you and you gave me the doctor and the doctor gave me the medicine. So it all comes back to God”).

Here is the text, which arrived in capital letters:

“CONGRATS KATTY AT LAST GOD HAS ANSWERED MY PRAYER FOR THE LONG AWAITED MIRACLE. AM VERY EXCITED DON’T KNOW WHETHER EVEN COCKROACHES WILL ENTER MY MOUTH AT NIGHT BECAUSE OF LAUGHING, FOR MY MOUTH WILL BE OPEN. I CANT WAIT TO SEE MY GRANDCHILDREN. I WISH I HAD WINGS I WOULD FLY OVER 2 COME AND CARRY THEM ON MY BACK.
KATTY WHO IS THE LUCKY MAN, FOR I WANT (EX FIANCE) TO KNOW THAT U WERE NOT BARREN BUT VERY STRONG WOMAN WHO NEEDED THE RIGHT PERSON LOVING AND CARING. HOPE HE IS EXACTLY THAT. AM SO HAPPY HAVE NO WORDS.”

I never realised that for all this time she thought my ex left me because I couldn’t give him children, rather than that I left him because he didn’t want to give me children. I am quite amazed. I wonder how many other people thought the same? I sent her a text back explaining I would be a single mother.

After that message, I got another from one of her biological daughters ("Congs! and thank God 2 help u thrgh") and from Sandra, who always refers to me as her mother ("Mummy DU U REMEMBER DA MESSAGE I SENT U IN FEB IT SAID MAY DA LORD GRANT YO WHAT YO HEART DESIRES MOST. INDEED GOD HAS GRANTED U KIDS LOVE, I WISH YOU ALL DA BEST!")

I am extremely touched.

*Actually, it's my second. My first was from my father, posted to me just after I told him I'd had a positive pregnancy test: "My Darling. I am SO happy for you. Love Dad."

Infertiles and Fertiles

2006-10-31T13:09:00.000-08:00

Earlier this year I joined an infertility support group. We met once a week, ostensibly to learn techniques to cope with infertility, but the real benefit was the group support. There were twelve of us and we got on very well, and so at the end of the formal meetings, we decided we would continue getting together once a month. We met for the first time in my house… but then, four of us did IVF, and three of us were successful. Since then another woman has become pregnant (on her fourth IVF) and today I heard yet another member has had a positive test.

So what do we do with the group? Two people have dropped out, which means that half of the remaining members are now pregnant. There is a plan to meet again in a weeks time, but I am not sure that I feel comfortable going along to a group which is principally about support for people struggling to conceive. In fact, I have not been to one meeting since I became pregnant. For one thing, I was out to dinner recently with two women from the group – one of whom has just had yet another IVF cycle cancelled because of poor response – and I could tell she found it very, very hard being there with me. She kept on rushing outside for a cigarette and at one point she went to the toilet (after the other woman said to me: ‘Show us your bump!’) and I was worried she had gone to cry. She also told me that she found the last meeting very difficult, because of the pregnant women, and at the meeting before that I know another woman was dreading coming along for the same reason.

I wrote an e-mail about this today, suggesting that perhaps those of us past three months, shouldn’t come along (this was something I thought we had originally agreed, to allow for those with recurrant miscarriage problems). I made the suggestion because I know that I would struggle in this situation. I would find it very hard not to be jealous. Before I became pregnant there were two worlds: the world of those who were pregnant and had children, and the world of those who were/did not. It seemed like an absolute divide: golden on one side, dark on the other. Now I realise that the struggle isn’t over with pregnancy. There are new worries and concerns, particularly if you have been trying for some time, or are older. There are the fears of a chemical pregnancy, no heartbeat at six weeks, miscarriage, abnormal nuchal fold results, the risks of CVS and amniocentisis, the fear of the twenty week anomaly scan… and then every other strange feeling and discomfort… throwing up, constipation, spots, itching, rashes, stretching pains, vivid dreams and in my case – as a single woman – loneliness and anxiety over using donor sperm. But I know very, very well that if I were still trying to get pregnant, all these would sound like pointless moans, and that an infertility support group is not the best place to discuss them. (For the last four years, every time my best friend has called up to talk about divorce, bankruptcy, loneliness, hating work I have brushed her concerns aside with, “Yes, But You Have Children,” which from my point of view felt like everything, but from hers, did not).

As for the group. People are divided. Some women don’t mind the pregnant women being there, but some are anxious. I feel that if even one person is uncomfortable, we shouldn’t go. At the same time, one woman who has been successful says she doesn't want to appear to be abandoning those still in the struggle, as she had this experience with an earlier support group and she felt like the mums-to-be didn't want anything to do with her.

We do seem to be slowly reaching a consensus. It looks like we will have two meetings: a support group for those still dealing with infertility, and then a social evening in a restaurant with lots of food, for anyone – pregnant or not - who wants to come along. Meanwhile, the pregnant women are going out for a meal this week.

Aftermath

2006-10-30T09:48:00.000-08:00

The night after the phone call, I went to bed and had the most disturbing dream featuring the ex-fiance yet. The dream was about a wedding, and my ex and his wife were the guests of honour. She was aloof and beautiful, with long brown curly hair that reached to the middle of her back. He kept on touching her, displaying ownership. The dream went on and on and on; it seemed to last as long as a real wedding.

Suprisingly, on Sunday morning, I wasn't as upset as I could have been. Maybe it is because the phone call had already taken on the quality of a dream. These dreams about my ex are so vivid, it's hard to distinguish the feeling of what happened in real life, from the feelings of rejection each night in the dreams. And the phone call happened in frozen time: I was so shocked, I didn't really take it in, I didn't fully absorb it, so even now I cannot fully remember exactly what was said. It has the same intense quality as the moments when thieves broke into my house by smashing down the back door.

I didn't want to let the phone call disrupt me, so I made myself get up and go to ante-natal yoga, and I'm glad I did. It was an excellent class, although at the end, when she told us to lie in the recovery position and breathe in golden air and breathe out tension, I felt like I was breathing out a river of foul, black sludge from every pore, right from the depths of me, and it was all the torment of my ex, and what he represents. I also cried, quietly. I was glad I was facing the wall.

Then this morning, another strange ex-thing happened. I had to go back to the hospital and while I was waiting in the antenatal clinic, I bumped into someone my ex and I knew from university, who is still my exes friend, and with whom he is still in contact. It's hard to explain how rare this is, but in the seventeen years since I left university I've bumped into him only twice. This man is very nice, very sweet. I always liked him, even though I know he thinks my ex is the love lorn one, and that I rejected him.

Bless this man and his very pregnant wife.... they didn't ask me any difficult questions. They didn't ask ONE THING about the father. And they didn't ask ONE THING about my ex. And they didn't tell me one thing about my ex either, even though I know they are all in the loop about his wedding and his new life and babies. I was really, really grateful to them for that. I have really come to appreciate discretion and tact over the last few months. Which is sobering, because while I am very good at keeping secrets, I am known for asking direct and sometimes impertinant questions.

The events of the past two days have brought home to me what it means to be a single mother. In particular, two events, which have built on the feelings that were brought up by the phone call. The first, was when I left yoga yesterday and fell into step with a lovely uncoordinated woman from the class, very very big, about to give birth. As we were walking, her boyfriend came up behind us on a bicycle. I am so dense, so out of touch with normal relationships, that I couldn't work out what he was doing there. Then he said to her: 'What do you want to do? Go to lunch? Go for a walk in a park?' And just then and there I saw what it could be like to have a pregnancy with someone who cared about the baby as much as you, who was invested in the pregnancy. And I felt sad. The second shock of realisation came at the hospital today, when my old university friend offered to get his wife a glass of water, and then came back with one for me as well. I know it's a small thing, but I did think, 'I normally get my own water!' It also made me a little sad.

Anyway. None of this means I regret my decision to have children alone, or regret the twins who are growing inside me now. Absolutley not. But just because a decision is right, doesn't mean it's always easy.

And now for the Good News: The doctor today told me everything is looking remarkably normal. He said I looked very well, the rash I've developed has nothing to do with pregnancy, and that the babies are measuring exactly right.

Disturbing

2006-10-28T13:50:00.000-07:00

My ex-fiance just called me. I haven’t seen him for four years, and I haven’t heard from him since an e-mail in April last year (which I did not respond to). Why did he call? I do not know.

I was downstairs lying on my back reading a pregnancy book. The phone rang. The phone rarely rings: most people use my mobile. I went to answer it, expecting my mother. It was a crackly long distance phone call. A man’s voice said ‘Katty’. I walked towards the table carrying the phone and placed it on the wooden surface. The voice said: ‘Katty, it’s me. X.’ I turned around carrying the phone and sat on my red sofa. I said, ‘Oh. Hello’, in a deadened voice. He said (I can’t quite remember the order): ‘How are you? What are you doing. Are you living in London?’ I said 'yes.' He said, ‘You left Y, you’re not in Z, you’re in London?’ And I said, very neutrally, ‘I really don’t want to talk’. I heard the crackle of the phone as a rush in the background, and imagined the sound of the sea, and cicadas, the sound of a tropical night. He said, ‘why not?’ And I said, something like ‘you know why not’, and then he said ‘why’, and I began explaining and then changed tack and said, in what I hoped was a warm voice, ‘I have nothing against you, I wish you well, I hope everything is going very well for you, but I haven't got anything to say to you. ’. He said again, ‘But what are you doing, are you living in London? Full time?’ I repeated, after a long, dead pause: ‘I have no bad feelings, I wish you well, but I really don’t have anything to say to you’. He sounded a bit crestfallen and sad. He said, ‘Oh’. Maybe he said something like ‘I thought it would be alright now’. But I didn’t say anything else, and in the end it must have been clear I was serious, because I said ‘Goodbye X’ quite firmly and he said 'Goodbye' and I put the phone down.

My heart was beating very fast. It began not very fast and then went faster and faster. I do not know why he called me, but I do not trust him or myself. I do not want to be friends with him. I loved him with all my heart and wanted to marry him.

What was our conversation going to be like?

Him: “Yes, I’m happily married to a woman routinely described as beautiful and wonderful, I have a prestigious job, I’m living in a wonderful country, and all those things I used to mock you for having… the high social standing, the ridiculous social life… I’ve got them all now. And oh yes by the way, last month I had my second child, I love her madly, and I’ve got a son I’m crazy about. And life is wonderful. What about you?”

And I answer, what? “ Oh hello. I never met anyone else after you, apart from the man who left me because I was ambivalent about him, largelybecause you said you wanted me back (but then went off with someone else). I am pregnant, but with the sperm of a masturbating, anonymous student. I have given up a career that I love so I could get pregnant and I’m about to surrender my career for the next two years, and live in London, which as you know I've never really liked."

I couldn’t bear him saying,’ Oh no’. As if it was a sad thing. I couldn’t bear hearing him have pity in his voice. Why is he even calling? I don’t trust him. I don’t want anything to do with him. Even if he’s married, I’m not safe. Something goes wrong in his marriage, he is absolutely capable of saying to me, but of course you’re the love of my life, and pursuing me and using me to unnerve and unsettle his wife, in the same way he used his occasional affairs to unnerve and unsettle me.

I’ve mentioned before that I keep dreaming about my ex. I dream about this man at least every other night, often every night. We were together for years and years. Every night in my fucking dreams he hurts me. He rejects me or chooses someone else. EVERY FUCKING NIGHT. And I wake up upset, but it doesn’t linger into the day and sometimes in the day I think about it and I wonder: I wonder if he actually does ever think about me. Because my assumption is that he does. And I wonder if he misses me, because I feel, and this is a cruel thing to say, but I feel he married his wife partly – but not only - because she is wealthy and well connected and enabled him to have a life style he could not otherwise have had. And I wonder if he thinks of me still.

And then, about three days ago, I had a breakthrough. I thought: ‘You know, for so long, I’ve just assumed he still thinks about me. But he probably hardly ever does. I probably barely pass into his mind.’ And it was rather a wonderful letting go… because it wasn’t my letting go of my dream of him, it was my letting go of the idea that he still thought of me.

And then he calls, out of the blue.

And in case any of this sounds paranoid or crazy you have to know that I was with this man for twelve years and even at the end it dragged on for a year more, and the pattern was he would push me as far as he could, and I would leave, and then he would woo me back, and it would start with a phone call, or an e-mail…. And I would always, always go back to him because I loved him so much. Until six years ago when he pushed me too far and I didn’t go back, and he kept persuing me, until the time he met and married someone else. And didn’t even tell me until the day after the wedding. Didn’t even have the decency to tell me he was getting married. The woman he was with for twelve years. Even though two months earlier he had written to me and said he still imagined we would end up together. (“I didn’t know how to tell you,” he said in his post-wedding e-mail, “and by the way we’re expecting a baby”). I left him because I wanted children, and he was dragging his feet, and was unable to commit to me.

I can tell you this much from a distance of six years. I loved this man with all my heart. And at some point, maybe at the beginning, he felt the same way too. And I don’t trust him. And I don’t want now to speak to the person with whom I longed to have children, when I’m here partly because of him, partly because of him not letting me go, partly because of all this that I am here at 40, single, and inseminated with a stranger’s sperm.

Please, please, please understand that I am not ungrateful. I am grateful. I am so very grateful that I had the courage to go ahead with this alone, that I have a supportive and loving family and friends, and that I succeeded with IVF, and that I am now pregnant with twins. Dear God, may they be healthy and happy and may I do a good job as a parent. I wanted children more than I wanted him, and I do not regret my decision at all.

But I don’t want to talk to him now. I don’t have anything to say. I don’t know how that makes me appear to him. Maybe he thinks, 'oh, she hasn’t got over me yet', whatever he thinks… what does it matter? What do I want to chat about? What do I have to gain? This man was someone I loved absolutely but he was never, never, never my friend. He never looked out for me and he never cared for me, even if he was passionate about me. I do not trust him even a little bit. And he still has enough power over me to make attempting a friendship a risk.

With the Midwife

2006-10-26T10:44:00.000-07:00

Sixteen week midwife appointment. Last time I went, six weeks ago, I was hardly showing at all. I could even fit into my size 12 wrap dress. Now, I staggered in with my stretchy pregno-trousers and my giant purple top. And looked around me aghast at all the women in the third trimester: really, these ladies are HUGE!

The midwife was young and sweet. There was a work experience girl, hoping to go to medical school, sitting in the corner, watching. The mid-wife asked if I had any problems, and I thought about it and ummed and ahhhed a bit and then realised that… despite the fact I moan and groan and hold my stomach and my bra cuts into my breasts and I’m getting a rash … despite all that, I didn’t have anything to complain about at all. I feel absolutely fine. I did ask about the falling over and I was told that it was a combination of my balance being out and my joints loosening, and that was that. Blood pressure – the lower end of normal. A trace of protein in my urine (not sure why). And then the Doppler. I’d never seen a Doppler before. It is very tiny and hand held and she prodded it on my stomach and then the room filled with a great fast thumping sound. Two heartbeats, one on either side of my belly button, and my own whooshing, slower and heavier. The midwife didn’t weigh me – she said that the hospital didn’t believe in weighing anymore (of course, I later celebrated this with a selection of sandwiches). Then she told me I had to stop carrying my bag around (it is so heavy, I can barely lift it). And that was that: next appointment with a doctor in four weeks time.

Meanwhile, my anxiety has somewhat calmed down. It took several days, and at its pitch it was agonising, but I talked to quite a few people, including two kind DI mothers, who said that my fears and worries were absolutely normal. I found out a lot more about the controversy surrounding the sperm bank I used, which also somewhat put my mind to rest. I also realised that all pregnant woman worry about the health of their child at some point and my fears were really those same fears framed in a different way. And today, I just felt the anxiety recede, and I noticed normal things about the day and instead of feeling horribly nervous, I felt pregnant, with a bump. I am sure the anxiety will be back though: one of the woman I spoke to said hers started in pregnancy and hasn’t ever really gone away even though her daughter is now five years old. It’s just part of being a parent, she said.

Sixteen Week Ultrasound, Coming Out, Extravagance and Odd People

2006-10-24T16:18:00.000-07:00

SIXTEEN WEEK ULTRASOUND: I had a sixteen week ultrasound today, and I brought my mother along so she could have a look at the babies.
Before we started, I lay back and rolled down the waistband of my skirt. I said: “I’m awfully sorry, but the pregnancy seems to have covered me in a coating of wayward hair.” My mother put on her glasses, leaned forward, peered at my stomach with its growing thatch, and said: “That’s Disgusting!” Other than that she was very well behaved and very quiet. Which was good of her given that the images were rubbish. The pictures didn’t look like babies, they looked like strange blobs. I could see why they had a big sign up in the waiting room asking patients if they’d like to donate towards a new ultrasound machine.
I wasn’t very sure why I was having the scan, and I told the doctor, and he said it was to determine whether they shared the same placenta. Which I also thought was odd as that was determined at the week seven scan and it’s all over my ante-natal notes. But hey, I’m not complaining. They have heartbeats! They are alive! They are, apparently, measuring normally.
The doctor said, do you know what sex they are? And I said, No. And he said, Do you want to know, and I said, well, why not? So he said, That one there is a boy. And then he looked at the other one, the one on my left, and he said, I can’t tell what that one is yet. And so I am in the odd position of only knowing the sex of one. Either I have boy/boy twins (in which case they have a 20 per cent chance of being identical) or I have boy/girl twins. I will find out at 20 weeks
The midwife said everything was absolutely normal. I am glad my mother heard her say it otherwise I would have forgotten in a minute. I also asked the midwife if it was ok that I’d gained 11 pounds in 16 weeks. I said it in front of my mother who is appalled by my weight gain (she gained seven and a half pounds while pregnant, and has made a few comments about my size). The midwife said, “We don’t even care about weight any more. Eat what you want. Everything is fine.”
I left the clinic and went to a nearby department store which has very plush sofas. You can, if you are a liberty-taker like myself, sink into them in the pretence of testing them out, and then stare out of the window onto the busy main street and make phone calls. I called my brother and my best friend to tell them I knew the sex of one of the babies. They said, “What is it?”. I said, “A boy!” And they said “A Boy!” as if it was the most amazing thing in the world. Which I thought was funny because I know they would have said the same thing, in exactly the same way, if the baby was a girl.

COMING OUT: Sixteen weeks, but I am still not very open about this pregnancy. I think part of it is my ambivalence about telling a certain group of people I used DS. These are former colleagues who, for cultural reasons, I fear may not approve. One of these colleagues is visiting London and tonight we went out for a meal. We haven’t seen each other for about six months. I walked into the restaurant and he looked at me and said, you look different. He said it in a funny, knowing sort of way. And I said, different, how. And he said, you know, different. And I said you mean fatter, don’t you? And he said, yes, fat there, and he glanced down at my stomach. I thought at that point there was little point in continuing the pretence so I said, yes I’m pregnant. Bless him, he didn’t ask me any intrusive questions, apart from whether he knew the father. To which I answered truthfully, no… without adding, “And nor do I!”

EXTRAVAGANCES:
1. I walked two miles, eat three kinds of sandwiches, and concluded the evening with an amazing chocolate cake in a candlelit restaurant.
2. I bought myself maternity clothes, including my first pair of trousers in fifteen years.
3. I went to a fancy shop in Mayfair and had my expanding breasts measured. They are now 34F. The label said, ‘Beautiful Big Cups’.
I have fantastically large knockers.

ODD PEOPLE: A mad Congolese man on the train in a light blue tracksuit swayed towards me. I smiled at him. He said something about two babies, and pointed at my stomach. Then he squatted down next to me and stayed there for two stops.

Fear

2006-10-23T05:55:00.000-07:00

I wish, I wish, I wish, I didn’t have to worry about the donor. But I do. Who is he? Does he have terrible health problems? Will the child inherit these health problems? Has the sperm bank lied about the donor so that they can sell him? How can I ever know?

The panic comes in waves, sometimes it ebbs, sometimes it flows. Today it is flowing, it is getting dangerously close to the banks, it looks like it wants to spill over, I’m just about holding it back, but I am scared. Who on earth is this man? Who is he?

Why am I so particularly scared?

It is because I have been reading negative stories about the bank I used.

It is a well known bank – or at least fairly well known - accredited with all the major agencies in the US. But there are currently (I have discovered) several law suits against it, taken out by DI parents because of the terrible genetic problems their children have inherited. Or in one case, because the bank misled the parents about the donor (the parents met the donor, and were appalled).

So, does it matter? Of course it matters. Of course it matters. I know that every child carries a risk of not being well, having undiagnosed genetic problems. I know this.

I rarely meet men I am attracted to, and attraction, in my view, counts for so much. And I selected a donor on paper with out so much as a photograph. Is he a truthful person? And can I really trust the bank to vet him, when cash is at stake.

Who is this man?

I do not like my donor already. I known he did not donate altruistically. I suspect he donated because… because he wanted extra money at college. He has the decency to be an open donor – or at least, so he says. But still… but still…. But still. I am scared.

I suspect that for every DI child born with learning problems or with physical disabilities, there is a tendency for the parents to blame those problems on the unknown, unseen factor… the donor. This may sometimes be the case, and it may sometimes not be the case. It may just be bad lack.

I mourn, though, the children of the man I wanted to have children with. I mourn that he will not be in my children. I am sure that I will love these children, because I know myself, but I am scared that I will be tied for thirty years to a life of worry, to children who (and I’m not even thinking now about the resentment they might hold against me) have terrible problems. I am worried that I will be jealous of my brother and his happy two parent family and his healthy lovely babies. I am worried, and I am scared.

This could - in a round-about, panicked, fear-induced way - lead into a discussion about whether donors who give their gametes altruistically – paid expenses, rather than commercial fees - are more likely to tell the truth about their backgrounds. I suppose they could equally be meglamaniacs – determined to spread their seed. Or, in the case of the UK, where donors are now paid £15 expenses (US25), simply be drawn from a demographic where U£15 seems like a significant amount of money.

There’s nothing that can be said about all this. But I am absolutely terrified.

Actually, there is something to be said. I’ve buried it away at the bottom of the post, but if this were a news story it would be at the top.

I contacted a woman who had a child by the same donor I have used. I asked her if there were any genetic problems I should be looking out for. Her son is very young, and as she said, who knows what could show up in the future. But for now she said, the child is bright and happy and healthy.

She has not written since (although she has no reason to) and I am now scared she does not want to contact me again because she doesn’t want to burden a double-pregnant woman with terrible news.

Anyway. I am. As you can tell. Frightened.

Things about being pregnant No.2

2006-10-19T13:12:00.000-07:00

Fashion Sense: Alright, I never had much fashion sense to begin with. But pregnancy has really finished off whatever I had. Today, I finally got out the front door at 1pm (I actually managed to get up at 8 - the first time in weeks - had breakfast and then made the mistake of lying down on the couch. I woke up two hours later). I was about half way down the street when I realised I was wearing (in a bid to be comfortable): A pair of never-before-worn trainers picked from a cut price sports shop in New York seven years ago; bright pink furry socks (normally worn in bed at night, for that extra cosy feeling) taken from a bargain bin at British Home Stores; black pajama bottoms (oh so comfortable, and surely no one can tell, even though they have a satin stripe down the side); a fluffy pink cardigan a size too small... and to crown it all a bright orange coat. The orange coat is actually rather lovely. But it clashed with everything else.

Concentration: This goes completely in pregnancy (unless you are shopping for maternity clothes). I finally made it to the library around 3pm (via an egg mayonaise sandwich, and a kitkat -much of which smeared on my pajama bottoms when I dunked it in my mug of tea). I was incredibly proud of myself even though I had planned to get there at 9.30. However, I was too lazy to carry my computer to the library and when I unpacked all my notes I discovered that I had left the key ones at home. Thus, I forced myself to read through some old notes (that took an hour) and then left the library. Even that little bit of work exhausted me.

Sense of Smell: This will become actute, but only for horrible smells. Bus journeys will become unendurable. The man sitting next to you who had one too many beers last night will make you feel nauseous. You will be assailled by the faint sense of dog poo. You will wonder where on earth that smell of old cigars and dirty laundary is coming from. Instead of being moved by the lonely old ladies and gentlemen taking their tea with shaking hands in the Cafe Revive in the Marks and Spencers Marble Arch (not a place anyone should ever go) you will instead smell the cloud of stale urine wafting from their clothes. Particulary disgusting is perfume and incense. I could not stomach a Hindu temple at the moment, and when I passed a hippy stand in an organic market the other day I nearly passed out from the stench of sandlewood and jasmine.

The Bump: I don't know about other peoples bumps, but mine is not symetrical. I have taken to lining my toes up with the edges of paving stones and then judging the line my stomach makes against the concrete. The left side of my bumps juts out about a centimetre more than the right. Why? Is there a bigger baby over there? Two babies pushed over into one side? A breech baby? Nothing to do with babies? I don't know.

And in other pregnancy news: I went to antenatal yoga yesterday for the first time. I am only 15 weeks pregnant (15w2d to be exact) but I am the same size as the women with singletons who are 20 weeks. It was very low impact and quite fun. There were a lot of trumpeting farts during the stretching excercises (not from me) but no one made a murmer of complaint, or giggled. I think we all knew it could just as easily have been us. The most exciting part was when we had to breathe in and then breathe out making a very loud long note. The room sounded like a French monastary filled with Gregorian Chant. It was rather beautiful and it it is meant to help in birth. I tried to use the method this morning during... I realise this image is slightly disturbing... pregnancy-induced-constipation. I don't know if it made a difference, but it amused me. OHHHHHM.

What happens when you are pregnant

2006-10-17T03:31:00.000-07:00

1. Falling Over: This is a really weird side-effect of pregnancy, that I didn’t think was meant to start until the third trimester. Twice in the last week, I have toppled over on the street. The first time I was carrying my shopping through Piccadilly Circus. It was night, and I was passing a very crowded junction, with about 30 people waiting to cross the road. My ankles suddenly gave way, they turned to liquid, and I toppled forward onto my hands and knees. There was a very loud collective 'OOOH' from the nearby crowd, and a handsome man asked me if I was alright. I said very brusquely, yes (I think I was a bit shocked) and then walked on to the bus stop. I felt quite tearful, and also angry. I kept thinking: “Where’s my husband? He should have been carrying my shopping.”
Last night, again, I decided to walk the two miles to the cinema (to see the History Boys). I was confidently crossing the road and toppled forward in exactly the same way again, ripping a hole in my new Mothercare tights (extra space for the expanding stomach). I stumbled about four times on the way back as well and now have to walk very carefully thinking: 'Ankles. Stay Firm'. However, on an upside, two foxes ran across my path,with great bushy tails, looking very skittery and nervous as if they knew they shouldn’t be out in a public place.
2. Dreams: These are becoming slightly problematic. Every other night, and sometimes every night, since I conceived (and the egg retrieval was thirteen weeks today) I have dreamed of my ex-fiance. These dreams are all part of the same theme, the same pattern. My ex began by showing me around his new life, always distant, always slightly out of reach, always leaving me with a feeling of rejection. Then he started to get more audacious: he began flirting with me, leading me on, but then still rejecting me. I knew every time it was going to happen, but I still fell for it. One night I think he may have even seduced me (that bit was faded over) and I woke up in the bed to find he had left a pile of photographs behind of both me and his wife. He then relocated to the country I consider my second home, and put up a notice on a message board to hire a nanny for his children. And last night I spent hours getting ready to meet him for a date which I knew would end in disaster.
Each time, I wake up feeling horribly rejected, and also very sad. Sometimes I weep. It is very debilitating. I suppose I am just working through what I have lost (love) and what I have chosen (children over a relationship). I suppose there is a part of me that thinks it is unjust that he has everything (love, children, a satisfying job and a lifestyle equivalent to the one I once had) while I have had to make many compromises to get my hearts desire.
I am of course, very grateful, to have got this far, very, very, very, very grateful. But these are not the circumstances I would have hoped for myself five years ago.

And on another subject:
Pregnancy has diverted my mind from the ethics of DI. But I find that I am still very much not convinced that DI/DE is an ethical business. I know that not all DI children feel bereft. And that those who do feel particularly bereft are those who found out about their biological heritage late in life, or have anonymous donors they are unable to trace, but still. Do I think I am doing the right thing? The right thing for me? Yes. The right thing for the children? I am not completely convinced.