Inviting trouble

The pill makes me totes emosh and spotty. My coil was painful, and humiliating – if one could be said to feel such an emotion post-childbirth. I got knocked up twice – in my twenties- without much trying between contraceptives, and now -in my thirties-  I use an app to keep track of my mood swings. Though I know myself so well as for it to be almost pointless. Two weeks before I’m due my boobs start to ping, engorge and finally take on a personality of their own – larger than life but touchy, in that they won’t be. Two days and counting and my mood crashes, and I bark at anyone who crosses me, before howling myself to sleep. It’s not pretty. Nor what comes after. A day before and my tits subside, I smell like a newborn’s head – familiar – earthy. And then I bleed. Right when my app tells me. So I trust it – that and my own intimate awareness of my internal functionings as to the days it’s not safe to muck around, or take any unnecessary chances. But last month I sailed close to the wind – Tom had been away, and when he came back, we both threw caution to it.

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I miss my babies – the good bits, which are all that remains of the dead-eyed sleep torture of their brutal early years, along with their gathering tweenage storm. Having a baby now would throw an almighty spanner in ten years hard graft, but from mid-cycle onwards, once I knew there was the tiniest chance, I nurtured the idea of another one – the unique self-care, the routine, the podgy fingers and breastmilk lipo, even the hollow vagina, and the pee when you sneeze – all five years of physical exhaustion and torment and joy. I gave it some serious thought. But my birthday, for all my age’s encroaching infertility, got in the way, and I drank and all that, and two days earlier than expected, a clump of matter heralded the approach of an almighty period I suspect was something more. A clear out from the depths of existence. I hadn’t wanted it enough.

I felt wobbly after. Something had crystallised in my mind. I’m not very good at adulting – the soul-crushing routine and fakery of office life. Being honest isn’t what’s required. Nor, it seems, much, is getting things done. Politicking is what gets you places and it’s never been my forte. Having a baby allows you some respite from all that- to bury my head in the sandpit of childhood once more.

I want to get back to a time when shit was real – when doing things mattered; when achievement was slow and steady, not sudden, meteoric, and often, seemingly, unfair. I’m not evolved for offices. My buttocks ache from chair sitting. My wrists click and my eyeballs ping from screen surfing. I feel I’m getting old, but my days are spent wishing them away as I grind through the treadmill of yet more semi-pointless tasks, and faux niceties. It’s a subsistence that makes one incautious. Something has to give and perhaps it’s my sense. I was never so happy as when I was pregnant with my daughter, back when Tom’s job seemed secure and my son was not yet labelled as anything other than gorgeous. 

But, when I watched The secret lives of five-year-olds this week, I ended up in tears that I couldn’t remember my daughter at that age. By then, I was too busy trying to escape my son’s tantrums – and catch up on what I’d missed out on in the meantime. Now it feels as though I missed some magical stage in order to be paid a pittance to go nowhere in an office full of people I no longer speak to. 

This week, in another one, I spent three hours wrangling to attend my children’s Christmas concert this week in a ridiculous charade where the kids aren’t actully all that bothered if I go. But the principle, that I should be able to work from home, so I can duck out and make up the time, took longer to negotiate than it would have to sit through several lipsed renditions of Hosanna in Excelsious, with a fair few Ding Dongs thrown in for good measure. 

Yesterday, I wept again when another working mum (from school, not my office) who’d obviously not had so much trouble escaping for the occasion sent me a picture of my daughter getting a certificate in assembly, while I was at my desk; and again when my daughter brought it to me to look at in the morning – now hungover after work Christmas drinks where I’d received a ticking off from my bosses’ boss for not taking part in Secret Santa – and she said she didn’t care I wasn’t there but her distance said otherwise. I feel defeated. After all my hard work, I feel I might want out. Office life is sometimes no life at all. 

But it’s not that I feel this world can even provide much of one for a third baby in a just about more than just about managing family, in an overcrowded, overpriced city, in an overcrowded  undervaluing jobs’ market – what a fucking world this is! That’s why we’re trying to escape it, as best we can, as soon as we can. 

But in the meantime, what about me, and my aging hormones? And so the cycle begins again, and for a time at least, I have choices I mightn’t if my period had not passed as planned. But then, does any of us really choose anything? And thus, I let myself off the hook.