Goodbye sand dunes!

With the arrival of every new calendar year comes that gaping sense of hope and possibilities, yet when you are in the midst of an infertility situation that no one (except an ever loving partner) see any chance of success, optimism is normally measured out in small doses.

This year is still in its infancy, yet so far it seems to be about endings.

Lifeslurper has a new home, the old run-down Camp Wobbles is no longer and the most enduring love of my life has gone. Both events coincided, as if to make what was always going to be a painful transition just that bit more straight forward.

I admit to feeling seduced by the promise of a new year; with it bringing new strength and resolve. So I struggle to recall what I was thinking this time last year. Our first IVF cycle straddled two years, with the business end all happening in the new year. We were hopeful, bright-eyed and keen to finally commence a long delayed journey into ART. Before the January was over our cycle had been extinguished without a whimper. My follicles, had failed to launch. It was a set back from which we got up and dusted ourselves off very quickly. There was no hint as to the difficulties ahead. Three more cycles and by August we where battered and tired, but still with an urgent sense of the need to continue.

The first fertility clinic disappointed. One fertility specialist failed us miserably. My body grew weary; with my back threatening to quit and my lungs occupied by whooping cough for a very long and uncertain six weeks. The resulting recovery time seemed like the perfect opportunity to sneak in that laparoscopy that should have been recommended by the first fertility specialist. Procedure performed, the setback of infection was a nuisance, albeit short-lived.

It was well and truly time to put 2008 to rest, and look to a new year with new focus and new enthusiasm.

By accident of circumstance there was the coincidence that the long slated relocation of Camp Wobbles would need to happen in early January.  This the move we had already invested something like 18 months of emotions into. I remember the cold Saturday morning in July 2007 when Wobbles took me out for coffee and grimly launched into an “I’ve got something I want to tell you” conversation. How my heart sank! Any discussion starting off in such a manner could not have a happy ending, could it? It seems work had put sudden pressure on Wobbles to relocate almost three hours to the east, to a location that had once been my own dreamland. How ironic!

Wobbles was worried that I would not want to move from the town to which I had moved solely to be with him. Truth is, I would have followed him to the gates of Hell. Later, I almost did venture that far with a quick detour past the back blocks of Hades during a long excursion faltering through four IVF cycles, three fertility clinics, and three fertility specialists. The Powers that employ The Wobbles wanted him in the new location pronto! Hasty plans where made for us to travel on weekends to scout for future locations for New  Wobbles/Lifeslurper Compound. Interstate born Wobbles would need be re-acclimatized to this new town; a new location to him, but mercifully closer to a capital city for this culture loving man. After travel, many lost weekends, and a deposit cheque paid on a house in the new town – the Powers that even now still employ Wobbles had a change of plans. There were to be many more of these over the ensuing year and a half. We went into a holding pattern that was to become a familiar way of existing.

Infertility and vague other future plans are not a happy blend. Was there time or point to renovating a mostly all-original current Camp Wobbles? Just how long could two people and a haughty cat exist without a functioning kitchen? Would overcrowding prove to be a hazard to mental or physical health? Would the powers that employ Wobbles once again have a change of mind, or was the relocation option permanently closed? Would the property market continue to crash in a way, that would ultimately prove both of our individual investments would prove to be disastrous? Was there enough time for me to reinstate my long-lost career and raise some bad-needed much extra funds in between regular eight hour round trips to the fertility clinic? Could I ever learn to be flexible? Could we afford to take funds needed for ART and channel them into some basic house fix-ups and raise our living standards substantially? Would we ever have a choice in anything ever again. Had we lost control over our lives?

The emotional turmoil at times became unbearable.

It was a limbo that mirrored the ART/infertility combo perfectly. Every issue began to be about planning for events that may or may not happen. Funds that might or might not be necessary for these events that may or may not happen. While all the time trying to have a normal life where living is attempted around constant consideration of that one gimormous elephant in the room.

For the next year and a half Wobbles would direct my thoughts to the promise of our “new” life, as if to suggest that once we went elsewhere everything would be different. There was the hope that our housing would improve, but how were we to know?

Camp Wobbles always seemed transitory. I could never allow myself to feel settled, within the house or the town. I felt like a visitor passing through. All sorts of circumstances made me isolated from the community and from life itself. The house sat high upon a hill facing a high wall of sand dunes. Sometimes the sand dunes seemed like a great wall threatening to entomb me. Other times they felt protective, bravely keeping us safe, away from the big ocean and huge winds beating up against their outer side. My own inability to live in the moment had again robbed me of unknown enjoyment of my surroundings. Camp Wobbles afterall had been my first home with the man who loves me. It was my first home as a couple. But it wasn’t really our home. It was the house where I crash-landed into Wobbles’ life and quiet existence.

I had always been highly dubious of this new location equals new start idea. I have had many ‘new’ starts in my life. Enough to have long ago dispensed with that naïve hope that a relocation is a cure to all ills. How does that old saying go; wherever you go, there you are? I basked in a childhood firmly spent in the one location, safe in the knowledge that my father had spent all of his days in that one location, having bought the family farm from his father before him, who in turn had bought from the generation before him. My future dreams never involved travel, no way! My plans where for the early purchase of my own home and an adult life spent in the one location. I had no greater desire. Countless towns and states later, I stopped counting after my twenty-third move since the age of 18.

With eyes firmly on a future fleetingly placed before us, we picked our first fertility clinic in our possible future new home town. Dutifully we were prepared to travel the almost three hours to keep all our ‘new’ life needs in the new town. Fertility clinic at our door and Wobbles’ work up on the hill, what more could we need? Before our fertility venture had fully started, the Powers had called the whole thing off. There was no real indication when or if the whole venture would be reconsidered.

Lifeslurper has never been so good with working life’s uncertainties. Way back in my early schooling, the newly graduated to Grade One Lifeslurper was known to have asked my mother; ‘What will happen when I am in Grade Six?’ an early sign of a life time of advanced worries.

Tired of every conversation beginning with ‘If/when we move…..’, ‘If/when we do another cycle’, ‘If/when we have the funds’…..we started to make plans to slowly prepare for a geographic move in  the forlon hope that this might make the whole darn thing real. Better that than risk a re-run of the original plan that would have involved a major dash to be relocated once the Powers said “JUMP!”

As I had all but abandoned the house I lived in (and owned) to move – I say “move” as in load up the computer, a few clothes, some personal items, and lotsa books – to be with Wobbles, he was well forewarned that I had rather a large mental “hump” in regards to moving house. No promise of improved living conditions, salubrious surroundings can any longer coax me into any healthy thoughts about moving house. The packing started months ago. Illness interrupted, so Wobbles picked up (my) slack. Packing would continue until we could see what kind of condition Camp Wobbles would emerge in after years of being buried under layers of joint crowding and thousands of books.

Sometime in December 2008 the Powers sent actual written confirmation; “yes Wobbles, you will be moving on.”

Planning moved into top gear, or at least as frantic as a Lifeslurper/Wobbles combo can muster. Speculation was rife; “sell?”, “sell, and make a profit?“ or the more feared and generally accepted; “sell at a loss?” As the property market continued to plummet, Wobbles’ hope that this much maligned beaten up little property would make for a prime rental property. By the time it was finally advertised, traffic moving slowly past to have a “butcher’s” (Aussie slang for “look”) was rising up to a dull roar. Wobbles suddenly had himself an investment property on which he could complete repairs and claim them on his taxation returns. First, it meant having to complete a range of low-level home-repairs. Try finding a handyman days before Christmas, and like us you will run the risk of landing a fussy know-it-all who is a bit strong on the nose, and have no choice but to complete paint works yourself. My most enduring end memory of Camp Wobbles is the toxic illness causing vomiting, rashes, headache and a wheeze that sent me to stay at my mother’s after inhaling too many paint fumes. Presumably my recently battered lungs were not up to chemical overload.

It is strange how seemingly endless delays and uncertainty leads poor planners to run out of time.

Moving day was Monday. On the Friday before, the condition of Bovary, my “loverley” 19 year old black and white cat with a cute pink nose, big green eyes, and three legs deteriorated rapidly. In only a matter of days things had changed. It was obvious the event I had most dreaded for the last 18 years was upon us. I sat up with him most of Friday night, willing him to not make it through the night, and to not have to make that morning journey to the vet’s rooms. Alas, with his usual determination that had seen him through many a situation, Bove made it through the night.

He would not survive the morning.

He will be the subject of many blog posts to come, but for the time being I can not write about the man who was indeed, the first love of my life.

I cherished every moment I had with Bovary the best I could. Our relationship would survive the years, but my sense of fear and dread would never leave my time with him. The eighteen years from when we first met had rushed by, and in moments he was gone. Two more days, one final push, near exhaustion, hundreds of book boxes, one long hot drive, twelve hours of removalists and Camp Wobbles was gone as well.

Suddenly, here we are.

Removed from all that was familiar. Both of us having experienced our first move to another town within a relationship. The world feels so strange, despite the fact that moving house is so familiar and this town is very familar. Infertility, well it will never seem familar. It is perhaps best described as unwelcome.

One week on, I still feel completely out of step, rearranged, and as usual, without energy. Wobbles went into his new office the next day.

My old familiar sand dunes are still a living breathing thing, but they are elsewhere.

Bovary has drawn his last breath, so he too is elsewhere.

Me? I am not too sure of anything other than death, moving house and infertility.

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