6.7 Fertility

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. See right for more information.

Maybe we wanted to do something to mark our ‘newness’. Maybe we were fed up with being pariahs, with people thinking there was something wrong with us or saying that we were ‘selfish’. Whatever the reasons, we dived head-first into our quest, or rather I did and Frog followed behind without saying much.

    First stop the doctor, where Frog was discovered to have a low sperm count. This was not unexpected given his age and not unusual given the polluted environment we all lived in. He was advised to wear boxer shorts rather than tight underpants, which he did with much protest.

    Of course, a crucial step on the road to conceiving is to actually go about making a baby, which as you will know by now was something I had always struggled with.

    The way I saw it, we had four faculties – body, mind, emotions and spirit – and I could only make love with one at a time. To put them together was too terrifying. What if something went wrong? Where would I be then? I couldn’t possibly risk everything, not even for Frog. Especially not with Frog.

    So we muddled on.
   
Meanwhile I plunged into researching fertility - exploring self-help, what complementary therapies could do, and the pros and cons of conventional medical intervention. Hey, I thought as I pinged off yet another email requesting information or staggered back from the library with yet another load of books, what if I were to write about this? There was nothing around that actually dealt with the subject the way I wanted it dealt with.
    At the time I was freelancing for a publisher in Dorset which specialised in what were called ‘mind, body, spirit’ books and I was working on a series which dealt with the whole range of possible treatments – conventional and unconventional – for chronic diseases such as migraine, arthritis, asthma, back pain, diabetes and irritable bowel syndrome. Would they be interested in a volume on fertility?
    I put together an introduction, a chapter and a synopsis and sent them to the publisher, and yes they were very interested, but wanted to call the book ‘Infertility’ as that fitted better into the series than ‘Fertility’. I didn’t want to call the book ‘Infertility’ as I didn’t want people to think that was what I was suffering from. I wasn’t infertile, I was just old. But I could see the publisher’s point. So ‘Infertility’ the book became. They paid me a chunk of money, which was more than welcome, and I started writing.
 
During my researches I came across a charity (since disbanded) that specialised in helping people suffering from infertility, mainly by prescribing mega-doses of supplements. We went through their testing process which discovered that we were both suffering from too much heavy metal in our systems and deficiencies in certain vitamins and minerals. Again, this was unsurprising. It was simply a case of working out our specific needs.
    They also recommended that we be tested for sexually transmitted diseases which – given our history with Sam – we did. It was a horrible process and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. Thankfully, we came out clear.
    So we bought a bucket-load of supplements (which didn’t come cheaply) and embarked on our journey towards reproductive health.
    At Frog’s next test, his sperm count had risen dramatically, so something was working, and we began to feel excited. Or, at least, I did.
 
Then about six months into our quest I missed a period and, when I did a pregnancy test, the magic second blue line appeared. I could hardly believe it.
    Presuming that our supplement prescriptions would need to be changed, I rang the charity in high excitement.
    ‘Oh no,’ they said. ‘You weren’t supposed to be trying for a baby while taking the supplements.’
    ‘You never said anything about that,’ I snapped back.
    Well, they hadn’t. I knew I would have remembered if they had. I was nothing if not thorough in everything, and especially in this. I was furious.
    They ignored me and said instead, 'You’ve risked either having a miscarriage or something being very wrong with the baby.’

To be continued . . . 

6.6 Extensions

This an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments with links, see right.

As with everything, Frog and I were polar opposites. Frog wanted a cave and I wanted an eyrie. We engaged Miles, a friend who worked as both a designer and builder, to come up with a plan.
 
We didn’t want to move as we loved everything about our house – which Frog had so cleverly found when following one of his whims.
    It was part of the village of Silverton where Frog had lived with his girlfriend for three years before we’d met, so when we moved in everybody already knew all about us. We weren’t locals – you had to have lived in Devon for several generations to be a local – but we were next on the ladder. And everybody certainly made us feel welcome, not least our lovely neighbour, Claire, and her family.
    But we weren’t in the village, we were a mile and half outside it, a thirty-minute walk across the fields, and that suited us both.
    Frog’s main criterion for a dwelling was somewhere he could play music outside and not disturb anyone, and he could certainly do that here.
    Mine was to be somewhere away from people, as people messed with my head. We had two near neighbours – the farm where Claire and her family lived and a newly converted barn where another family now lived – but both were far enough away for my brainwaves not to be disturbed by their brainwaves. Both houses were slightly below us and hidden by trees so we had 360-degree views of nothing but countryside, and the peace and space made me feel as if I was flying.
    On the other hand we were only ten miles from Exeter so Frog could indulge his love of shopping and get to work and I could check in with the main publisher I worked for.
    Where else would we find somewhere like that?
 
Miles produced a daring scheme to connect the current house with the extension by means of a conservatory, to build into the eaves for my study and dig down under part of the garden to create a semi-underground music (and general detritus) room for Frog.
    We engaged Miles as project manager and builder, and work started.
 
Meanwhile, Frog and I started to ponder the subject of children. We’d reached our early forties so time was running out. Would we regret it if we remained childless?
    Frog’s motives for not wanting children were simple. He was the middle child of three with a brother, Simon, who was five years younger than him. Not only did he have to share a bedroom with Simon for a while, but he had to look out for him much of the time. This was, I’m sure, difficult, as Simon had a mad and wilful streak which led him to do dangerous or stupid things just for the hell of it.
    ‘Never again,’ Frog would say.
    Mine were complicated.
    For some reason, even though I’d imagined myself married, I’d never imagined myself with children. This was just one of the many ways I didn’t feel like a normal woman, another being my height, and the reason it was such an enormous relief to meet Frog and find someone who related to the real me deep deep down.
    Being the eldest of five children, all born within six and a half years, I found myself, or took it upon myself, or had it thrust upon me, to be cast in the role of their minder and I took my role very seriously. I could remember often longing to be able to take part in the games as an equal instead of having to keep the peace all the time and make sure no one was getting into trouble.
    One cousin later told me a shocking story. He remembered us all being on holiday at a Norwegian seaside village and we children were playing on the beach with a load of cousins. The adults left the beach and, when one of them queried whether the children would be all right on their own, someone said, ‘Oh, they’ll be fine. Belinda will look after them.’
    It made me feel sick even to think about that and, as I said to the cousin at the time, it was obviously the reason why I’d been avoiding responsibility ever since.
    I’d struggled desperately when Brindle was a puppy, feeling that I had no nurturing left to give to any other young creature.
    On another level, Frog and I had known from the very start that our relationship wouldn’t be easy. Because it went so deep, we knew that it would pull every last kink and shadow out of us. We knew that we would need every ounce of our energy simply to deal with each other. We wouldn’t have anything spare for children.
    And on yet another level, I’d been concerned about the environment since my early teens and now thirty years later, that pain had only increased. Did the world really need more human beings?
 
In spite of all that however, we decided to embark on that perilous quest: trying for a child.

Click here for the next instalment 

6.5 Work etc

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more, see right.

In spite of Sam’s words, I felt that whatever strength I had arose from Sam’s kindness to me, from her holding her hand out to me on the night I first met her. She’d shown me that I’d not so much lost Frog as gained a friend.
    All through her relationship with Frog she’d only wanted to help. I knew that both from what I saw of her and from what Frog had said.
    ‘I didn’t have anyone else to talk to,’ he said. ‘I knew we needed help and I didn’t know where else to find it.’
    I supposed that was a problem for men. They didn’t have friends they could talk to about emotional problems. They turned to women for that.
    What’s more, Sam had an AIDS test before she and Frog started having sex together. That meant a lot to me because I knew how difficult and frightening it must have been.
    Nor had either of them told anybody about their relationship before Frog told me.
    And once he did tell me, he was kind to me – more so than he had been before.
    So my strength – such as it was - came from him too.

In some ways, Sam was uncertain of her sexual identity. She’d had a fling with another woman at some time in her past but hadn’t pursued it. As a child she’d shadowed her father rather than her mother, learning practical jobs from him. She and Frog, for instance, had worked on her car together. She didn’t model herself on the female role, such as the one I’d been brought up on – where your life was centred on being beautiful for men and being a ‘wife’.
    Sam’s way of being was a revelation to me and I saw how much of a doormat I’d been. I resolved never to be a doormat again.

As well as being academic, Sam was creative - she painted and she wrote – and this awoke creativity in me. The Bohemian life had always held such attraction for me – it was so romantic - and secretly, deep down, I’d always wanted to be an artist of some kind myself. That was another of the parts of me that I’d buried because I knew it was unacceptable to my conventional parents. I now started to un-bury it.
    I followed up my small book on the folklore of Dartmoor with a bigger book on macabre stories from Devon as a whole. I was to take the photographs for the book as well as writing the copy, and I had a wonderful time travelling all over the county in my little Mini, researching the stories with my camera and notebook.

I was learning to love Devon. The people were kind – kinder than they were in London and the Home Counties – and their lives didn’t revolve around careers and money. Barter was the order of the day, and communities were tight. I met many people when I was out walking with Brindle (our labrador/springer cross), both other walkers and people in cars. It was perfectly normal – indeed, expected - to stop your car and chat if you passed someone in the lanes whether they were walking or driving and whether you knew them or not, and you never passed a person on the footpaths with saying at least hello.
    Rural Devon at the time was a strange mixture of farmers and artists and I began to feel that I fitted right in, something I’d only ever done before in Australia.
    Lindeman Island in Australia had been my golden time and I still hankered after it.
    ‘It wasn’t real life,’ said Frog, ‘but it showed you what life could be like.’
    I thought that was a valid assessment.

Meanwhile, even bigger changes were happening in Frog’s life.
    He’d finally fallen out with the university. They’d always objected to his erratic timekeeping, his refusal to wear a technician's white coat and his general uncontrollability. He objected to the hierarchy – the old-fashioned distinction between academics and technicians - and the stuffy people.
    A new regulation that every piece of electrical equipment had to be tested every year was the final straw. The university decided – much against Frog’s wishes – that he was the person to carry out this task. It was mind-numbingly boring (I helped him with it once, but never again) and it took over from the parts of the job he loved such as coaxing aged equipment back to life and inventing new set-ups for experiments.
    Eventually, by more or less mutual agreement, he left.
    He was now self-employed, repairing instruments one day a week for a music shop in Exeter and combining this with other jobs both regular and one-off.
    To start with, he was completely lost, having been salaried almost without a break since leaving school twenty-five years earlier. Luckily, with my self-employed experience I was able to help him structure his days and list tasks and goals.
    That was to set a pattern. With his dyslexic brain he worked by instinct (or whim). He both appreciated my lists and sabotaged them by adding new items like ‘Smile’ or ‘Have fun’ - to my lists as well as the ones I'd drawn up for him.
    So it was good for me too!
    I never let him leave on errands without something written on a piece of paper even if he was only going out to do one thing as he was more than liable to forget it or be distracted. Sometimes he even forgot the piece of paper. Drat. Sometimes, I even sympathised with the uni. I called him ‘flibbertigibbet brain’. He called me ‘daft’.
    He did willingly consult me on spellings however, using me as a walking dictionary and often ringing me from work to find out how a word was spelt.
    The university tried to replace Frog but no one came close to his genius with ailing technology and his deep historical knowledge of the department’s equipment, and in the end they invited him back. He agreed to two days a week, freelance – an unheard-of concession at the university.

At DevonAir, the local independent radio station, he was now doing two programmes a week: a rock programme, and a ‘Frog Prog’ where he played whatever he wanted - pop, rock, classical, folk, country, jazz, words. I kept encouraging him to try and take the ‘Frog Prog’ further and apply to national radio, but he was afraid of being curtailed and he didn’t have the necessary killer instinct. He was ambitious about his life – he wanted to make the most of it – but he wasn’t ambitious in a conventional sense, in the sense of status, money and so on.
    DevonAir was taken over by London’s Capital Radio and one Saturday night the head of DevonAir was entertaining the head of Capital.
    ‘You must listen to this,’ he said, turning on a ‘Frog Prog’. ‘No one else is doing anything like it.’
    Frog was playing some particularly obscure and gruesome track – jazz, I think.
    ‘I’m not surprised,’ said the head of Capital.
    So Frog lost his jobs at DevonAir too.

He carried on doing the ‘Frog Prog’ on the university radio however, and also managed to persuade the  'Guild' (the student union) to pay him for all the technical work he did for the student station. Previously, when he was working full time in the science department, this had been done in the university’s time and was another of their bones of contention with him.
   It was ironic that he now had life his way in both areas.
   He was lucky like that.

With two of us working from home, we needed more space. I needed a study and Frog needed a music room, somewhere to store his enormous and ever-growing collections of vintage hi-fi and records, not to mention his tools and machines.
    We began to think about expanding – in more ways than one.

Click here for the next instalment

6.4 'Your Newness'

This is part of an autobiographical series. For more information, see right.



I raced through the kitchen, Frog thundering down the stairs behind me.
    ‘Come back,’ he shouted. ‘Come back. Don’t you dare run away from me.’
    It was the middle of the night and Frog was on the rampage again.
    I was heading for the downstairs bathroom where I hoped to slam the door behind me, lock it and collapse to the floor.
    Unfortunately I didn’t make it. Frog caught up with me and stood in the bathroom doorway blocking my exit.
    ‘Why do you shut me out?’ he boomed, his voice echoing round the tiled room ‘What do I do wrong? Why can’t I do anything right?’

It was the same old stuff, the same old pattern. Frog had wanted sex, I’d frozen. He’d gone into what I called his ‘victim mode’, droning on for hours and hours and hours about how hard-done-by he was. I’d lain beside him in bed, blocking my ears because I knew that by now that there was absolutely nothing I could do to stop him, that anything I said simply made him worse. And then, in the darkness, he’d caught sight of me with hands over my ears and switched to angry mode and I’d fled, knowing it wasn’t safe for us to be together any more as I might get angry too and then we might kill each other.
    

‘Don’t block your ears,’ he shouted as I cringed backwards trying to edge the bathroom door between him and me. ‘Listen to me. React.’
    All at once, something new filled my being. I thought I'd exhausted every option for dealing with these situations, but suddenly I saw a way out. I stood tall, facing Frog. I looked him in the eyes.
    ‘Just stop,’ I said.
    I wasn’t shouting. I wasn’t even raising my voice. But I was speaking firmly, with every ounce of my determination. For that moment, I had total faith in myself and what I was doing.
    Frog stopped instantly and looked at me, astonished.

We weren’t conscious of being different after our years with Pat, but we knew that we now had some strategies for dealing with our emotions and with each other - even though we still needed lots of practice. Equally importantly, we now had hope.

My fortieth birthday arrived and Frog gave me a card with a magical picture on the front of a woman in a cloak bending over a crystal ball with a solar eclipse behind her. Inside he wrote ‘Tiz said life begins at 40. Happy new life’.

On my forty-first birthday he gave me a card of a castle perched on the edge of a torrential waterfall. Inside he’d written ‘Happy birthday, Your Newness’ (‘Your Newness’ being a quotation from the Beatles’ film Yellow Submarine, one of his favourites).

We still saw Sam occasionally, but always together. She gave me a card too, in which she’d written:

I just wanted to write a note to you. . . . I dunno . . . just to say that I have been thinking of you a great deal and to say that I admire your strength. You are a very rare person.
    Also that I think we can learn much from each other and it would be good if we didn’t lose contact. I hope to get to know you better.
    I love you both.

I didn’t know what Sam could learn from me but I did know that I’d learnt a great deal from her.

Click here for the next instalment 

6.3 Dreams and Whispers

This is part of an autobiographical series. See right for more about it and a link to the full list of instalments.



‘Close your eyes and relax every part of your body,’ said Pat.
    She then went through each part of my body in turn suggesting that it was now warm and soft, much as we did in yoga, except that Pat concentrated on unusual parts such as my stomach and I realised how much tension I carried there. She was speaking very softly and I could only just hear her.
    I wasn’t frightened as I knew now, after our practice session the previous week, that hypnosis didn’t involve loss of control. It was almost the opposite. I was more in control because I was steering from a different part of myself, a deeper part. And my initial trust of Pat had only deepened over the two years that Frog and I had been seeing her.
    In the practice session I’d sat in my usual armchair. Now I was on a futon on the floor of Pat’s room, on my back, covered in a light blanket.
    As before, she asked me to count down in my head from one hundred and to tell her when the numbers disappeared. This they did very quickly as my usual brain took a back seat and I found myself in a world of shadows and fleeting glimpses as if I was halfway between sleep and being awake.
    That was as far as we'd gone in the first session, but this time she carried on.
    ‘You’re walking down some stairs,’ she said. ‘Tell me what you see.’

Frog and I had scuttled back to Devon after the visit to my parents, as ever relieved to be home. We had continued seeing Pat separately.
    Over the months that I'd been seeing her, we’d discussed my migraines, which were plaguing me more and more, and my eating disorders – which twisted and turned and changed their form but never quite went away, even though they were better than they’d been in my teens and early twenties.
    She knew about Brian in London and the terrifying black hole I’d fallen into after he’d taken my virginity and vanished, as well as the impression I’d had at the time of a black shutter crashing down on my life.
    I’d told her about my sexual encounters as a teenager, gropings in the dark which had disgusted me.
    We’d discussed my upbringing, how sex was strictly forbidden before marriage but not encouraged after it as women weren’t supposed to enjoy sex.
    She knew of course about my parents and their condemnation of Frog.
    But did all this explain my struggles, my inability to love him properly?
    She wondered if there was something much earlier going on, perhaps even some form of childhood sexual abuse.
    But I couldn’t remember anything, except for a strange recollection of being fetched from school by unfamiliar people and then left at the side of the road.
    Or was it a dream?
    She’d given me a book to read called When You and Your Mother Can’t Be Friends which took the reader back to their childhood at different ages. From the age of four onwards, for the whole of the rest of the book, I found myself weeping uncontrollably.
    Had something happened at around that time?
    She’d suggested hypnotherapy as a way to uncover hidden memories – and deal with them.

I didn’t answer Pat immediately as I was concentrating on the stairs I was walking down. I knew them well. As I came to the familiar right-angled turn by a window Pat spoke again.
    ‘Where are you now?’ she asked.
    ‘I’m in our old house,’ I said, finding it hard to speak, not because I didn’t want to but because my muscles were so relaxed. ‘Coming down the stairs.’
    Our ‘old house’ was where we lived until I was six.
    ‘How old are you?’
   ‘I’m four,’ I said.
   I don’t know how I knew that. It simply arrived in my head.
    ‘What are you wearing?’
    ‘A red-checked tartan skirt with straps,’ I said.
    Again, I knew that instantly and had a vivid picture in my head of the skirt. I'd never come across the skirt before in my memory.
    ‘What’s happening?’ she asked.
    ‘Someone’s coming out of the kitchen,’ I said. ‘A man.’
    I remembered every room in the old house, and often travelled through them in my mind. The kitchen door was almost opposite the bottom of the stairs.
    ‘And?’ said Pat.
    ‘He’s got a grey apron on,’ I said. ‘The whole of his middle is a grey blur.’
    ‘Do you know him?’ asked Pat.
    ‘I don’t think so,’ I said.
    Then I screamed.
    I was falling into the black hole again and this time it was even more frightening than it had been in London as I had no protection, nothing outside me to fall back on.
    My stomach was rising through my body.

    ‘Help! I’m going to be sick,’ I yelled.
    ‘Count back up to a hundred,’ Pat commanded. ‘Now.’
    It was like making my way up from the bottom of the ocean.

Even though we persevered with the hypnotherapy, we never went quite so deep again. It wasn’t deliberate on my part to avoid anything but I suppose that somewhere inside I was too afraid. And nor did Pat ever ask me about that incident again.
    I felt that it was a pity we hadn’t persevered but I guessed that Pat had had to stop the session as you couldn’t have someone vomiting when half paralysed and lying on their back. It would have been too dangerous.
    I desperately wanted to pull my weeds up by the root but perhaps some weeds were not yet ready to be removed.
    I had no idea what that whole session had been about.

Pat led me into hypnosis slightly differently each time. Usually we started with stairs. Sometimes I went through a mysterious door. Sometimes she asked me to imagine a beautiful safe space, such as sitting under a tree. Sometimes I found a helper – an angelic being who accompanied in my adventures and kept me safe.

    We explored different aspects of my life and worked out strategies for dealing with difficulties, reprogramming my mental and emotional processes.

    I went back into past lives, including past lives with Frog, to see what I could learn from them.
    I did a lot of crying, with the tears trickling into my ears and me unable to do anything about them.
    The sessions ended with light, with Pat suggesting I imagined being filled and surrounded with it.

However vivid my experiences under hypnosis, most of them dissipated like dreams soon after I woke, and Frog who was also having hypnosis found the same happened with him, so we couldn’t really talk about what we were doing, although we tried.
    We did ask Pat about having hypnosis together, but somehow we never did.

It always took me several minutes to be able to move after I’d come back from a session and opened my eyes. 
    One day – nearly a year perhaps into the hypnotherapy – it took me more than a few minutes. I lay, scarcely able to breathe, for what felt like hours. It was frightening. I felt as if I'd never be able to move again.
    At last I was able to wiggle my fingers.
    ‘I feel like I’ve been on a very long journey,’ I whispered.
    ‘You have,’ said Pat.

Click here for the next instalment