Inexplicably Missing

This Monday is the day after Mother's day. I didn't particularly think about mother's day a great deal yesterday. But I think at a subconscious level it must have been churning away as I have had a big emotional crash last night and today...  and then today I suddenly find myself thinking "what if we did another round of IVF..."  We have a lot going on! This coming weekend, Facco and I are moving out of our house in the suburbs up to a house in the mountaintops, it's about an hour drive out from the city centre & 650m above sea level. It's absolutely beautiful up there in a rainforest-y setting, with extremely cute Pademelon wallabies potentially visiting our yard... We will still be commuting to our same jobs so not all that much will change realistically, just a nice new house with a longer commute.  Over the weekend though, we started to do more packing up, and as we dis-assembled our furniture and took art off the walls, it felt as though we ar...

I had a dream where I was driving somewhere and then I totally forgot where I was going. I tried to call my friend who I was meant to be meeting with in the dream, except my phone dialled an overseas phone number by mistake. Because of this, the phone sort of stopped working.  I was relying on the phone for navigation, and while it was fussing around trying to dial the number, in my confusion, I had driven into a massive body of water. Really far into it. To my left there was an endless grey wall. To my right, still, lifeless grey water stretching as far as I could see. Above, a vast grey sky. The phone no longer had reception. It seemed that there was no way back and no point going forward or outward as no destination could be seen. I was standing at this point in the water, and the water near the wall was shallow, I looked down at my feet, and saw that there was something underneath and started scratching at it. The surface was soft and flaky. Kind of a rubbery substance. It ...

I have been thinking about my mum a lot lately. This week will mark 4 years since she died. I can’t honestly say that my relationship with my mum was the most straightforward. There have been some very toxic times in my life that are due to our relationship, some of which I am not sure I have fully forgiven and forgotten.  But lately I have found myself leaving the difficult aspects of our relationship to the side, and yearning to talk with mum, to hear her thoughts. What has come to me lately are wonderful memories of how it felt as a child in our relationship. We were incredibly, intensely close. I used to come home from school and absolutely relish talking to her about my day, I swear each day I talked with mum for hours. I’d hang around in the kitchen while she cooked dinner, chatting away. After dinner we’d continue to chat. Together we’d dissect every little thing that was going on in my world. We’d interpret my friends’ behaviours and all the silly bitc...

It seems to me that the happy-ending story that is so often "out there" about infertility is this: "Here is a couple who struggled and struggled to have kids, and then, finally, they had a baby. The end"... I think something about this story feels like a lack of honouring of the losses felt along the way for infertile couples. I know life goes on, and I know it does no one any good at all to get stuck in grief or pain. But surely there is some kind of transition for people to adjust from infertility to parenthood? Maybe there is a certain loss that is always felt? Transitioning to parenthood seems like it would be a hard process following infertility battles, and different somehow from a "normal fertility" transition to parenthood which I am sure would be hard enough (and I think is spoken about a lot). Something about the "...and then they had a baby" part of the story seems a bit dismissive about the infertility dramas, or gives a message of-...