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I am here to live out loud.

Earlier this year, I completed neuropsychological testing, referred by my psychiatrist. She wanted more insight about how my mind worked and organised ideas, so I completed the testing. A lot of it was puzzles, some of it was vocabulary, and I had to draw a clock showing a specific time. I failed at that task, drawing the numbers outside the clock face. I lost points.

“You do realise you have ADHD, right? And that’s not a pejorative.”

Unbeknownst to my treating doctor, I had actually been diagnosed by a paediatrician in 2001, aged 11. This was due to my impulsiveness and poor behaviour, as well as my disorganisation. At the time, I had been prescribed dextroamphetamine. I was on it for only a short time as my parents didn’t believe I had ADHD. It made me kind of spacey, but it kept me on track.

As an adult, I couldn’t imagine how I could have ADHD. I thrive in my studies and my work. I finish my assignments early and I get good grades, even in the face of multiple obstacles.

But I do get distracted.

So how do I cope?

I start everything early. If I have 60 days to complete a 4500 word assignment, I divide the number of words by the number of days and become micro-productive. It usually ends up being about 100 words per day and I can finish on time. When I’m in my flow state, I keep writing. That’s how I manage to finish early, most of the time.

So where do I feel it the most?

I am impulsive. I have racing thoughts and ideas. The fact that I took on a masters degree with a full time job was a complete whim, and one that I have managed to stick with.

I fidget. I constantly crack my knuckles, move my legs, and fiddle with my phone.

I am disorganised. As a specialist teacher, I move from classroom to classroom throughout the day. By the end of the day, my coat, instruments, hat, lunchbox, and water bottle are in all different places. This is how I managed to lose a box of LEGO when I was a learning support teacher, at 30 weeks pregnant.

I get distracted a lot. One assignment is usually full of many hours of looking at memes and true crime documentaries, as a side road to actually getting stuff done.

As a teacher, I often hear ADHD used as a pejorative to describe children who are not a ‘good fit’ for the classroom environment. However, I would urge people to give these children time. As an adult, my ADHD is my greatest strength. My impulsivity has forced me to make beneficial decisions for myself. My stubborn commitment to tasks sees me through to the end, though I do get distracted a lot.

Many so called pathologies have huge benefits when they are channelled in the right way. For some, this means medication. For others, it means finding ways to compensate.

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Don’t have much to say but felt like sharing this

Every time someone has a baby “naturally”, I feel such a sense of jealousy and resentment. I don’t mean to, but I can’t help it.

Lately I’ve been thinking differently, though. My birth was such a mess and nothing could have saved it. The illness I had afterwards as a result was the second scariest time in my life. However, since this has happened, I have become more stable, stronger, more resilient, and more aware of myself.

As difficult as it was, I don’t think my son could have been given to me under any different set of circumstances. His story is our story and it binds us together.

Loving him is the easiest thing in the world.

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A semi-colon means there was a pause, you didn’t come to an end

I had always bitten my nails, but in the months leading up to the birth, I made a new friend who told me not to anymore.

“You don’t want your baby to have a Mum with chewed fingernails!”

That statement was enough to make me stop, and I had nicely shaped nails when I went in to give birth. I had photos of my beautiful, naturally grown nails inside the pulse oximeter they’d attached before they induced me. My wrist had reasonably fresh ink, a little crucifix next to a semicolon. It was a reminder that although my life had had some pauses and sad punctuation, there was more to come before there would be a full stop to finish it.

Three days after the birth, I was lying in bed and stroking that very tattoo while I let my brand-new son drain me of my nutrients. That was the day they had finally gotten me out of bed to walk to the shower, but I didn’t shower myself.

The pain of getting out of bed was nothing on labour, but it hurt just the same.

One of my friends told me that first baby labour could often last thirty-six hours and that I was lucky I had only endured around thirteen.

“It could have been so much worse. You could have torn.” She said as she held my baby for the first time. I had initially felt like an absolute goddess for enduring as much labour as I did, but she reminded me I’d only been able to do it with an epidural. I still maintain that induction hormones make the contractions a thousand times worse.

“Yeah, well, the contractions were unbearable. Remember I was induced.”

I had spent my days since birth tethered to the wall by three cannulas; one with anti-biotics for my infection, one with hydration, and one for something I can’t even remember. It made for a very cumbersome trip out of the bed for every feed, but I had no problem ringing the buzzer.

I had finally relinquished some of my control in the name of doing the best for my son.

He had taken to the breast like an absolute champ. He had an excellent and natural latch and I adored having him nuzzled into my chest as he guzzled intently. Despite my train-wreck of a birth, this was one thing I held onto as a measure of my motherhood. I never got bored as he spent his time snoozing, sucking, and swallowing.

Although it all appeared to be going well, my milk was yet to come in. Not surprising, considering I’d lost almost half of my blood in the birthing process. He was sucking a whole lot of colostrum and air, which was beginning to not be enough for his growing body.

The next time he stirred, I started to thread myself free from the cannulas to get him for his next feed. I struggled to pull the bed rail down and my abdomen sent pain all throughout my body. Up until that point, a nurse had been bringing him to me for feeds night and day because I was simply unable to after the birth. As I crawled out of the bed, half bent over, I became overwhelmed by my desire to pee. I rang the bell anxiously, worried that I may wet myself. The nurses had only just removed my catheter that day, so I was still getting used to the sensations of knowing when I needed to go.

A minute passed and I could feel my anxiety welling up, so I rang again.

“Ooh, someone’s a little needy.” I heard one of the nurses say in the hall.

After all, I was just one of many new Mums who needed help.

I rang the bell again, and a small amount of urine trickled down my leg.

“Please!” I whispered.

I shook and moved in my half-standing position, utterly helpless. Still chained to the wall, I either had to pee my pants or wait patiently, but time was running out. As I tried to regain my composure, I noticed small, brown streak coming out of my son’s nappy.

Maybe he hadn’t been hungry at all, I thought.

A nurse pulled the curtain aside brusquely and asked me why I had rang the bell so many times.

“I’m sorry but I really need to pee and I’m attached to the wall.”

She narrowed her eyes, silently pulling the drip machine out of the wall.

I moved as quickly as I could, relieved myself, and returned to my dirty, crying baby. I struggled to undo his nappy as my hand was thick with cannulas.

“He’s hungry too, you know. You need to feed him.”

I could feel tears welling up. I wasn’t one to cry, but I felt so hopeless and alone.

“I know. But I really needed to pee.”

The nurse noticed my tears but carried on aggressively.

“Why are you crying? This is your life for the next eighteen years. Buckle up, princess.”

I was indignant, but she was right. I sobbed, trying to wipe the tears from my eyes, but it was hard with a hand full of needles.

“Come on. You just have the baby blues, this is normal at day three. Don’t ring the bell unless you really need us.”

I gently removed my son from his swaddle and took him back to bed with me, sobbing at my complete failure to meet his needs. This was day two, and I was already failing him.

As the night wore on, I continued to feed, feed, feed, but the more I did, the less he was seeming to enjoy it. His wails were matching my exhaustion, hour after hour. As the clock ticked past midnight, he started to bash his head against my chest. I tried to reassure myself that it was all normal and I refrained from ringing the bell, the nurse’s ire fresh in my mind.

Even though I felt alone, you’re never really alone in a hospital and I could hear the nurse’s rubber Crocs grating against the floor, irritating me so. I worried that if they caught me on my phone, they’d think I was even more of a failure than before. As soon as I knew they were occupied in other rooms, I whipped out my phone and started Googling frantically.

Baby + headbutting + autism, Baby + headbutting + poor + attachment.

These were all threads of thought I had come across in my studies and I was worried that it wasn’t normal. He cried and cried in my arms, though I had long stopped, now just desperate for answers.

I was still cradling him when out of sheer exhaustion, I nodded off. It was somewhat peaceful, until I started to dream. In the dream, a man stood with his head fallen, cradling his own baby against a brick wall. He was rocking his baby, perhaps a little too hard, with a bottle teetering on the edge of his thumb. The baby was wailing. I felt compelled to help him.

In the dream, I edged slowly forwards to this mysterious stranger.

“Sir! Sir! You can’t feed him like that! The latch isn’t right. The bottle isn’t in his mouth.”

I felt my body melting into the perfectly groomed lawn around us. My forearm detached, then my hand, and then my legs caved in beneath me.

He looked up and scoffed.

“Why would I take advice from you? You can’t even feed your own baby. He keeps headbutting you.”

I jerked awake, ashamed that not only could I not feed my son, but I had fallen asleep on the job. As I looked around the room, I noticed that there were plumes of smoke emanating from the corner of the curtain.

No. Surely not?

As I grounded myself, the smoke drifted away. I was safe, for now.

At three am, I took a photo of the both of us when he’d finally cried himself into sleep. I figured I’d need a reminder to show myself in the future what I could get through when I tried – and more important, why I needed to get through.

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Of psychiatry and Pinterest

Before I became a parent, everybody was full of advice about how to be a parent. I wish someone had pulled me aside and warned me to be more selective about the company in my life, especially with new friends.

purple and pink plasma ball

Back when I first became a parent, I admittedly invested too much time into toxic friendships. One in particular stands out as this person was what I would call an armchair psychiatrist. Early on in motherhood, I was struggling with certain relationships in my life and so I sought counsel. This friend offered me the view that some people in my life had narcissistic personality disorder and introduced me to Pinterest and Reddit communities that were full of people whose lives were dominated by narcissistic partners, exes, parents, children, colleagues, and dogs.

I became wrapped up in these communities and after awhile, became convinced that the people I was having trouble with were full blown narcissists.

Reading some of the articles, I realised that just about every human tendency could be labelled as narcissistic. Self-centredness, ambitiousness, the desire to speak highly of oneself, or healthy self-esteem. It was all narcissism, apparently.

The deeper I got into Pinterest, the more I started to think that perhaps I was the narcissist. As time went on, the armchair psychiatrist continually posted and sent me articles about narcissism. I started to feel overwhelmed, but I had no idea how to back out of the friendship. In desperation, I sought out the help of a former colleague who had a knack with people. I considered her an empath and a wise counsel. She told me, kindly, to cut and run.

Since becoming more aware of this subculture of individuals I refer to as armchair psychiatrists, I have noticed it everywhere. I quit Pinterest as a result, as my feed was continually being flooded with narcissist articles and boards as a result of conversations I had with this friend. As a true-crime buff, I noticed that narcissistic personality disorder seemed to be the first diagnosis the armchair psychiatrists would jump to when a person had murdered someone or committed an awful crime.

There are books promoted to audiences that talk about how to deal with narcissists and psychopaths. I see them on my Facebook feed all the time. Realistically, these people only make up a very small portion of the population. They are not people you would meet across multiple contexts in your life, if most of the people you spend time with are average.

The most interesting thing I found about the armchair psychologist subculture is that a lot of the people who claim that everyone is a narcissist have multiple broken relationships in their lives, often with their children. I feel that more could be achieved by working on human relationships and promoting articles about that, rather than marinating in half-truths about narcissism. We are all broken but most of us are not narcissists.

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The first coffee after birth

At the very least, I had shed the skin of not wanting to disclose my birthing story by going to the Mum’s group. Before Soren and while we had been saving for IVF and world travels, Natalie and I had been living on a shoestring budget. As an adult, my love for iced takeaway coffee drinks had evolved a full-blown daily caffeine addiction. Because we were saving our pennies, we limited ourselves to two weekend dine-in coffees and one on every Wednesday morning. We often conversed about what our life would be like after having a baby, full of idealism about bringing the babe along for our mid-week dates. We certainly had high expectations.

After spending my teenage life as an outsider, I had become rather deliberate about surrounding our budding family with good and accepting people. We’d set up house in the inner-city and made a lot of equally coffee-addicted friends with whom we’d become quite familiar. Some were friendly acquaintances, baristas, and some we considered our inner-circle. Our coffee people watched my belly grow in anticipation, getting to know us over our coffee orders.

The first coffee morning after the birth, Natalie sent me into our favourite café to get our usual orders. I clammed up in a way that I couldn’t grasp at the time.

“It’s just two lattes. Don’t order yours on skim milk, I don’t want to end up drinking yours.”

“It’s… It’s too much for me to remember, Natalie. You go in.”

Natalie took the hard line with me, which I needed, but hated it at the time.

“Just go in and order it, you look fine, you’ll be fine!”

I wasn’t really afraid of screwing up the order. This was the first time I’d been seen since the birth. What I was really afraid of was being asked how the birth went. I didn’t want to explain it. I didn’t want pity. I just wanted to lick the wound silently with my takeaway coffee cup at home.

But I relented. I ordered the coffees, and nobody asked so I didn’t tell.

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One step forward, two steps back

A little while after the birth, I decided to take Soren in to see my old co-workers at the job I had grown to miss. I had organised with another co-worker who had been pregnant at the same time as me to visit together.

Despite not having a plan for the birth, I’d attended a birthing class. In it, we’d practised dealing with labour pains by holding ice cubes in our hands. The lady who ran the class was also a pelvic floor physiotherapist who had warned me that if I was to run a temperature after the birth, that I was to go straight to emergency because it could have a recurrence of the infection that prompted our c-section. When she felt inside me, she told me that my pelvic floor was of a gold standard and I was fine to return to running, as long as I didn’t hit it too hard right away.

On the morning of our visit, I could feel myself burning up with pelvic pain, so I cancelled.

I drove straight to emergency, where they felt my belly and asked if it hurt.

“Of course it hurts, that’s why I’m here.”

The doctor came back with bad news.

“It looks as if you’ve got endometritis.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s an infection of the womb.”

I was admitted again.

“Can I still breastfeed?”

“Yeah, and we’ll make sure to get you pumping when he goes home. It’ll keep your supply up.”

I fastened the purple hospital robe around myself and settled into the bed, knowing I was once again in for the long haul. The nurses hooked me up to another cannula full of anti-biotics. The hours passed slowly, except when Natalie would bring Soren up for a feed, then they seemed to pass quickly. When he rested against my chest, he was beginning to smile.

“If you’re just going to sleep, then I may as well go home.”

I was detained for four days in total, but it felt like a lifetime. When Natalie had gone home to get supplies or catch up on work, she recalled that she’d noticed all the little additions I’d made to the home to welcome our new baby. On one of the days I’d been in hospital, she told me that she had gotten angry when the basket I’d filled with bath toys had fallen off the wall.

She wanted me to be home, and I wanted to be home.

After birth, it felt like I was bouncing from one specialist to the next. Because my birth had been such a shitshow I decided to see a psychologist. I had a long-term history of depression and anxiety with obsessive-compulsive tendencies, as well as a genetic predisposition to mental illness. I knew if I didn’t get help now, it would create work for me in the long run because the wheels would eventually come off as the challenges of motherhood set in. I knew that although I wasn’t feeling off now, I had just dealt with a hugely life-changing event that had forced me to face my mortality. If I didn’t address it now, it would come back to bite me later.

May as well deal with it and get it over with now, I had no time for a full-scale breakdown.

If my psyche was game of Ker-Plunk, then resilience and resolve were like a layer of plastic sticks, keeping my marbles together. This arrangement, although thin, was strong enough to get me through regular adversity, which seemed to bear cumulative but tolerable weight. However, when faced with the sudden build-up of the heavy boulders of my own mortality, all of my traumas pushed down. The pile of plastic sticks that had gotten me through comparatively easier stressful days was beginning to buckle.

I thought I was coping just fine. The thrill and joy of my birth – even with its physical trauma – had me riding a swift and hormonal high. This was compounded by the breastfeeding, which was as good for me as it as for him. With every feed, I felt the dizzying drain of my nutrients from me to him. I felt euphoric. Every morning I woke up on a renewed high, ready to tackle life. The only problem was, I’d been told to put my running on hold. Instead, my thoughts raced all day with no outlet, right up until bedtime.

Am I being a good Mum? Is he getting enough milk? Will this single stretch mark go away? What if I lose my mind in these four walls? What if I slip back into the bad habits of my past?

I kept reassuring myself that my son was fine and that I was doing fine, all things considered, but then the doubt would creep back in like a tide going in and out. Like Sylvia Plath, God, I ricocheted between certainties and doubts.

The thoughts would slow down in the evening as I had an extra mind to bounce my ideas off when my wife would crawl into bed with me, feeling the exhaustion for both of us as I continued running on fumes.

I would get a momentary break from the flow of ideas only when my head hit the pillow and I transitioned into early sleep.

That was when the night terrors came back, in the still of the night with nothing to keep me busy. My thoughts had been cooped up long enough and they had nowhere else to go. Like starving birds, they writhed at the confines of their daily cage, wanting to be let out.

The first night it happened, I fell asleep only to wake, desperate for a drink. I slid quietly out of the bed and shuffled out of my blankets to walk towards the bathroom. I scrabbled around for my cup. I thought I must have put it in the bathroom cupboard when I was cleaning the house.

When I pulled it open, my blood ran cold.

Inside the cupboard was a sealed body bag with my hospital number stuck to it. Inside the body bag was my dull and lifeless body, with my dead newborn still attached by his umbilical cord.

I jerked awake, but I was unable to move. Pinned to my bed, I felt cold sweat beading down my forehead.

Was this it?

My heart was beating so hard against the bones inside my chest, that I realised I must actually be alive. It was a dream on steroids, but it felt so real. When I did finally fall back asleep, it was time to feed again.

On these nights, Natalie would pull up a seat on the couch next to me, placating her midnight munchies with peanut butter on rice crackers. I would envy her as she drifted right back into peaceful sleep, clearly able to cope with this birth stuff better than me.

After a week straight of these night terrors, I booked in to see my doctor. I sat across from her and tried to explain, but it all sounded so stupid.

“It’s like a dream but I feel stuck in it. I wake up suddenly thinking I’m dead and then I struggle to get back to sleep because I feel anxious.”

She prescribed me escitalopram and a 10-session mental health plan to “work through my birthing trauma.”

“This is just the baby blues. It goes away in time.”

The very next week, I booked in to see the psychologist who had previously walked me through how to deal with the workplace anxiety that had plagued me years earlier. That particular experience didn’t give me night terrors, but instead caused me to toss and turn all night on high alert, worried that someone might find out I’m gay. I knew all along I could lose my job and that they had done me a favour to hire a gay teacher in a religious school. Back then, I’d lived with daily paranoia of being found out. These feelings had been helped along by the early experiences I’d had of coming out.

It hadn’t been an easy time.

Years earlier, when I came out for the first time, I had been living in Bundaberg. Have you ever been in a place so small that everyone knows one another, but big enough that the connections between them form knotted threads that pull together tightly that you’re always a secret away from hanging yourself? It is a weird purgatory of populace. People always muse about this odd familiarity with small-ish places, they talk about it romantically as if having the whole town’s social network connected by the milkman is a good thing. I am certain that realtors capitalise on such a thing for mid-life crisis folks seeking the simple life, I am certain of it. I can always hear it in my mind:

“Oh, YES, Susan! With a population of 45,000 spread out over a large expanse away from the hustle and bustle, you can be certain that you’ll find a place in THIS community…”

Personally, I find myself amazed at the power people had to find things out. They create twisted narratives that traversed the town quicker than a greased marble rolling down a trap, playing to an audience too afraid to question them, lest they be seen as “outsides”. I realised early on that it was advisable to remain enigmatic if you were to keep your soul in a tight postcode. The only problem I kept running face first into was that everyone thought I was an aloof, anti-social arsehole city slicker and I never fit in. But – I figured I wasn’t going to anyway, what did it matter? I tried to keep a tight persona in that place, to stop the gay within me from spilling out into the city’s rumour mill.  

Rattle. Rattle. Click. Whistle. Whirrrrrrrrr.

“Mornin’!”

My usual barista flashed me a grin as a steady plume of steam emanates from the coffee machine, but she knew my usual wasn’t a hot drink – it was an iced coffee with cream, sprinkles, and most importantly, marshmallows. Hopefully, no less than three and all white ones. There was no point looking at a menu when I knew damn well that I was going to drink the same old thing every time – in keeping with my predictable, city-slicker ways.

“Just the usual, luv?” her chipper face reached me eye to eye and probably a little too close as she placed her hands on the counter, ready to make my drink. Her sweaty, blonde hair was pulled back off her fifty-in-the-shade face and the whole shop smells pleasantly of coffee beans and chocolate sprinkles. Delicious.

“Yup.” I replied, looking forward to the sugar hit. She turned to the ice blender and poured cold drips of coffee into it, whistling merrily as she works on the drink at hand.

There were upsides to life in that small-ish, back-to-front place. All the shop assistants knew my orders and living in a house that was walking distance to a beach had its perks, but you could never avoid people. They talked to any old stranger in the street, and because I was never one for unsolicited conversation, everyone there thought I was anti-social. Perhaps I would have been more social if everything didn’t suck so much. You couldn’t even loiter to deal with the intense boredom, all the shops close at midday on a Saturday and they didn’t open on a Sunday.

 The guts of the city were held together by a messy, yet weirdly specific six degrees of separation. The connections are tight and the run deep. Two girls I go to school with have fathers who have worked together in the sugar cane farming industry since the edge of the 1990s, before the Macarena came out as an A-side cassette, and they were born in the same hospital, on the same day.

Before the womb, baby.

All those kids played for the same hockey team and had the same collection of friends, most of whom had lived in Bundaberg for their entire lives. Their lives were playing out in old Queenslander houses with slightly-peeling-paint, all round the corner from each other. My grade at school was filled with people just like this. Not only were they all best friends, but their younger siblings were similar ages, so they hang out like one big family, calling each other’s parents ‘aunty’ and ‘uncle’ There were clusters of cousins here and there, as well as lineage that went way back. It was a perfect and sentimental upbringing and in many ways I found myself jealous of it. Their entrenched, though artificial siblinghood was something I would never have because I just couldn’t stay fixed in a place without fucking it all up.

Imagine trying to keep a secret in such a tightly-woven net of association, or trying to find an in-road to a myopic crowd that had known each other so well, for so long. Although the people of Bundaberg found all of this endearing and grounding, I knew that these links and ties were enough to hang me in the knot of my biggest secret.

“So how’s school, luv? Still at the Christian college?” the barista asked as she poured the cold coffee mix into a plastic vessel of environmental damage.

“Yeah, I am.” I shifted on the spot, guardedly, breaking eye contact. 

I hated talking about that place and am somewhat embarrassed to be associated with it. Unfortunately, my flat response closed off the conversation and I feel kind of rude. What I really want to say is, ‘I hate it and I’m seriously considering killing myself because I think I’m gay but I can’t figure it out for myself because it’s not allowed, and the internet in this town is too slow to load any means of finding out in the comfort of my home’? It just didn’t go well with a cold beverage, nor would it be softened by the marshmallows. Sometimes, a closed one-liner is all the truth a person can handle over a coffee transaction. 

“All right, well that will be four dollars,” she said dryly, ignoring the rewards card I had held out in my hand.

“Tell your Dad I say hi.” There she was, holding me accountable for my bluntness with her familiarity. I nodded back silently and turned on my Converse heel to walk away, guilt heavy in my heart, though that feeling was like a constant ball and chain.

The fixer-upper was to take me to a smaller, quieter place and directly into a fundamentalist Christian school that still caned students with a ‘Jesus loves you’ paddle in the hope that I would straighten out. After all, there is nothing like religious guilt and corporal punishment to keep a rebellious city gal on the straight and narrow.

“It’ll be a lifestyle change!” both of my parents had said.

“A completely fresh start for all of us! Just don’t tell anyone the real reason why we’re moving. It’s a lifestyle change. A lifestyle change.”

Ah. The endless loop of good family cover-ups.

It wasn’t just all about me, of course. My father’s career benefited from the move, too – selling hearing aids to old people – of which there was no shortage in that little, backwards place – was lucrative business. It was a fucked up idea from the very first moment of piling our shit into Two Men and a Truck, and any opposition was promptly drowned out by the roar of our family vehicle travelling 385km north to this unusual, somewhat faraway place.

When we got there, I gathered that in giving my Big Secret any sort of airtime, the smiles would fade, the looks would become suspicious and the curtains would be drawn in my face. There was a friendly vibe, but one that definitely belonged to an ‘in-crowd’, one to which the homosexuals did not fit. For survival’s sake, I figured it would be best if I didn’t say anything– at least, at that point in time. Lacking life experience, part of me also wondered if I even was gay, or if it was “just a phase.” I wondered if this could be fixed, if I had come out of the factory line with defective parts that needed a careful hand.

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Of Love and IVF

It’s always funny when you hear people trying to quantify motherhood. Everyone always knows who would make the best kind of parent, and who definitely should not procreate. Most people agreed that abusive, negligent people shouldn’t be parents, but a lot of people also feel that some women just weren’t maternal enough.

Despite all the progression that has been made by feminists, there still exists a certain mould that would-be Mums need to fit into.

For instance, if you’re career-driven and well-travelled with a lot of care for your financial status, then you’re considered to be far less maternal than the barefoot-and-pregnant girls who grew up playing house with Barbie dolls – the type of women who married their high-school sweethearts and spent all of their child’s formative years at home, making perfect crafts and perfect home recycling systems for their Instagram feeds. Such people also often seemed to be born with the perfect body for childbearing, bringing their infants into the world effortlessly in expensive private hospitals without a ton of interventions.

If you’re a gay parent, you are definitely seen to be further outside of the Mummy-mould because you have to create a family in a way that some would consider to be scientific and clinical, rather than as an act of physical love, which has been built up as the high-watermark of “normal” motherhood. It’s all about love, after all.

I was definitely never the Barbie-child, and I put off having children in my early 20s because I chased career goals and stability. As an intellectual who didn’t much like hugs, I often feared that people would see me as some kind of rigid, refrigerator parent who couldn’t put my textbooks down long enough to attend to my child.

With all that being said, my son, Soren Harry Forrester Miles, is my entire world. I know that everyone thinks their progeny is the most beautiful thing to ever grace the Earth, but I honestly believe it’s true. He is perfect. Although he is an IVF baby, I didn’t spend years trying or squander tens of thousands to get him. He was a first-time fluke.

“This first cycle is purely diagnostic,” the nurse had explained.

“It’ll give us a better picture of your hormones so we can get closer to success. After all, the embryo grade is BC – it didn’t divide quickly, so it’s unlikely to implant. This is all par for the course.”

I remember asking if that meant it was a poor-quality baby. I meant a baby born with sickness or challenges, but it came out in poor taste.

“Oh, no!” She laughed.

“It just means you won’t get pregnant first go. Your baby will be as bright as any other.”

Thank God.

Like any parent, I wanted my child to have the best chance of a full life. Because I was a worrier by nature, I ruminated about all the things that could go wrong. Even though my child didn’t exist then, I still wanted them to have the best start I could give.

With our low chances in mind, we planned a wedding, I wrote a children’s book, and we both signed up for masters degrees. The night of the embryo transfer, I released my book and sat up all night with pizza and my laptop, filling over a hundred book orders when I was really supposed to be feet up with Valium and a nice, cold glass of water.

The next day, we took a flight to Cairns for a much-needed holiday and to keep our mind off the two week wait. We stayed in a cheap Air BnB and I lay in the backseat of one of my best friend’s 4X4s, inserting vaginal pessaries and taking in the rainforest surroundings.

Ah, the serenity.

Just a few years prior, we had started the whole IVF process. Full of artificial hormones, laid back and had my eggs extracted. Six, in total.

Making an IVF baby was hardly an experience in love.

In the week following this process, my six eggs sat in dishes with donor sperm. I had to call the clinic every day to ask how many embryos were still dividing.

Six…. Then five… then four…. Then three… then two.

Two!

Three thousand nine hundred dollars and we got two embryos, one of which barely made it to freeze. I couldn’t believe it. I was despondent.

Nonetheless, my two ice-ice babies went into the freezer for later, until such a time when I was happier in my job.

While I waited and looked for other jobs, the baby’s nursery was set up in our home, taunting me through the closed door. We moved to a neat new apartment and set it up again in our humble abode, and it became a bleak and constant reminder of our social infertility – the fact that we were being forced to put family life on hold because of our circumstances.

When the day of transfer finally came, I was so ready to be a Mum. The compounded misery of what was realistically only a few short years was finally going to extinguish.

I couldn’t wait.

As I leaned back, floating high on Valium and with my feet in stirrups, I was still somewhat hopeful that it could just work the first time. After all, we had employed the help of a fertility gun who had been in the game since the first IVF babies were being born in Brisbane, in a time when doctors still smoked around tables while they discussed baby-making.

In the days before the transfer, I had been indulging in weekly massages and nightly meditations in the bath. Our chances may have been low, but before the two-week wait was up, I had peed on more than fourteen sticks. The lines got darker with every passing day. They’d told us at the clinic to never pee on a stick because the injectable hormones could give a false positive, but we were clinging to any positives we could.

We’d given it our best shot, and it had worked.

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We’re all going to die.

Before I gave birth, people often asked me about my birthing plan. I thought it was the most absurd, idealistic thing ever.

The only plan I had was that I wasn’t taking anything off the table – including inductions, pain relief, drugs, and epidurals.

The only outcomes I absolutely wanted to avoid were forceps and c-section.

When my waters were broken under gas after a lengthy induction, I had a hunch that it wouldn’t be smooth sailing. After hours of labour, I received an epidural due to the intensity of contractions brought about by induction hormones.

When I developed an infection, the whole thing went tits-up and I almost bled to death under general anaesthetic. I had a c-section and my son was delivered with forceps. As I spent the next week in hospital, I had a lot of time to ponder my own mortality through a somewhat traumatised lens.

There is something about waking up with the after-effects of having breathing tubes down your throat that is incredibly sobering.

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After two days in hospital, I was sleep deprived. I was dealing with the physical effects of a significant blood loss and trying to persevere with breastfeeding. At one stage, I had a bad dream that I couldn’t feed my baby and my limbs were falling off as I melted into the lawn. When I woke up, I felt like the whole room was filling with smoke.

This was the beginning of C-PTSD which was brought about by my birthing process.

Although the birth in and of itself was physically and psychologically traumatic, the part that disturbed me the most was that when our son was born, I had no will in place. So if I had died, nobody would have known what my wishes were.

It had always been on our list of things to do, we had just never done it. Part of the reason was that we felt fit and healthy, but the other part was a sense of dread about considering the end of our lives. As I spoke to more people about this, I realised I wasn’t the only one.

And why is that?

Despite all of our best efforts with our health and personal safety, the human mortality rate stands at 100%.

In other words, we are all going to die.

My son’s birth made me acutely aware of my need to do something about my end-of-life-plan. Although people celebrate birth and my son’s birth was no different, I spent those first few weeks of his life organising my will, making sure my address was up to date with the university that will receive my body for science when I’m done, and deciding who would fulfil my wishes in my absence.

It was depressing – but it was completely necessary.

If you are reading this, I want to encourage you to act now if you haven’t already. Speak to the people who you think should raise your child in the unfortunate event that your child loses both their parents. Organise your will. Get plans in place.

If you need to, get a folder and label it ‘My End-of-life Plan.’ Add your will and instructions to it, and make sure people know where it is.

It would be the worst thing ever if the world lost you – but it would be harder for the people you leave behind, in their grief, to deal with a logistical and organisational mess.

Sometimes it pays to have a plan, even if it seems absurd.

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The only boy in ballet class

When I was pregnant, everybody asked me if we knew what we were having.

Um… a baby?

In all seriousness, for the longest time, I thought Soren was a girl. Even right up until the delivery. Even after seeing clear testicles on an ultrasound still.

A lot of people would say to me, ‘Aw, if you get a girl, you can do ballet lessons! SO cute!”

I loved the idea of baby ballet. The calming music, the listening skills, the flexibility, and the gorgeous outfits.

But – I felt that I could enjoy that with a little boy, too. So when I realised I could sign him up at Queensland Ballet from the ripe old age of one year, I did exactly that. I thought it would just be an easy class with some sing-alongs and a bit of “dancing”, facilitated by the parents.

I thought there’d be time to chat and relax with the other Mums.

When I turned up, the class was full of two-year-olds who could already jump, spin, turn, and follow instructions.

So here I was with my 13kg chunk, jumping like a kangaroo, twirling like a jellyfish, sleeping like a dingle dangle scarecrow… definitely not relaxing or chatting.

It turned out to be a workout for me as much as him! Which was fine, because he absolutely loved every second of it… until he was asked to sit still on his dot.

Because the rest of the students in the class had proper leotards and shoes, I decided to go shopping to get him the outfit so he could look the part. I had to research quite a few shops to find shoes small enough, and when I got there, I noticed that there was floor-to-ceiling displays of everything dance – and everything hyper-girly.

Shoes, bags, outfits, hair accessories… the lot. Then I looked over to the corner. The boys’ section had been relegated to one tiny place in the store.

Unlike the girls’ section, which offered hundreds of products, the boys’ section had just a small offering.

Not one to be discouraged, I dressed Soren up and he started shaking his bum as soon as he was in the outfit.

His joy did plant a thought in my head, though. It is so challenging to be the only one doing something. He is likely to always be the only boy in ballet class. It would be a shame if he ever gave it up, just because it’s not popular with boys.

I wish I had the answers. I just hope and pray that as he gets older, he sees his uniqueness as a strength rather than a weakness. I can only keep on encouraging him and hope he remains true to what he enjoys doing.

That’s all we can hope for our children.

#BoysDanceToo

 

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Always on the outer.

As an adult, I have always had this firm feeling of being on the periphery. It doesn’t matter where I go, I always feel like I’m a bit on the outer. 

Some of this is to do with the fact that I’m gay. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is. Some of it is the fact that I moved schools many times as a kid. I went to two primary schools and four different high schools – which may not seem all that many, but it was enough to make me unsettled. 

When I was 14, my parents moved us from Brisbane to Bundaberg, and then back to Brisbane the year after high school. It was a disruptive move, one that was definitely not made better by the fact that I hadn’t lived there my entire life. 

I felt like a Dorito in a plain packet of chips, which is less fun than it sounds…… 

2004

Have you ever been in a place so small that everyone knows one another, but big enough that the connections between them form knotted threads that pull together so tightly that you’re always a secret away from tying yourself in a trap you can’t get out of? It is a weird purgatory of populace. People always muse about this odd familiarity with small-ish places, they talk about it romantically as if having the whole town’s social network connected by the milkman is a good thing. I am certain that realtors capitalise on such a thing for mid-life crisis folks seeking the simple life, I am certain of it. I can always visualise it in my mind:

“Oh, YES, Susan! With a population of 45,000 spread out over a large expanse away from the hustle and bustle, you can be certain that you’ll find a place in THIS community…”

Personally, I find myself amazed at the power people have to find things out. They create twisted narratives that traverse the town quicker than a greased marble rolling down a trap, playing to an audience too afraid to question them. I realised early on that it was advisable to remain enigmatic if you were to keep your soul in a tight postcode. The only problem I keep running into is that everyone thinks I’m an impersonal city slicker and I never fit in. But – I figure I’m not going to anyway, what did it matter? I keep a tight persona.

Whirrrrrrrrr.

“Mornin’!”

My usual barista flashes me a grin as a steady plume of steam emanates from the coffee machine, but she knows my usual isn’t a hot drink – it is an iced coffee with cream, sprinkles, and most importantly, marshmallows. Hopefully, no less than three and all white ones. There was no point looking at a menu when I knew damn well that I was going to drink the same old thing every time.

“Just the usual, luv?” her chipper face reaches me eye to eye as she places her hands on the counter, ready to make my drink. Her sweaty, blonde hair was off her fifty-in-the-shade face and the whole shop smells pleasantly of coffee beans and chocolate sprinkles. Delicious.

“Yup.” I reply, looking forward to the sugar hit. She turns to the ice blender and pours cold drips of coffee into it, whistling merrily as she works on the drink at hand.

There were upsides to life in this small-ish, back-to-front place. All the shop assistants know my orders and living in a house that was walking distance to a beach had its perks, but you could never avoid people. These ones talk to any old stranger in the street, and because I’m not one for unsolicited conversation, everyone here thinks I’m anti-social. Perhaps I would be more social if I was enjoying myself. You can’t even loiter here to deal with the intense boredom, all the shops close at midday on a Saturday and they don’t open on a Sunday.

The guts of this city are held together by a messy, yet weirdly specific six degrees of separation. The connections are tight and they run deep. Two girls I go to school with have fathers who have worked together in the sugar cane farming industry since the edge of the 1990s, before the Macarena came out as an A-side cassette, and they were born in the same hospital, on the same day.

Before the womb, baby.

All these kids play for the same hockey team and have the same collection of friends, most of whom have lived in Bundaberg for their entire lives. Their lives are playing out in old Queenslander houses with slightly-peeling-paint, all round the corner from each other. My grade at school is filled with people just like this. Not only are they all best friends, but their younger siblings are similar ages, so they hang out like one big family, calling each other’s parents ‘aunty’ and ‘uncle.’ It’s a perfect upbringing and in many ways I find myself jealous of it. Their entrenched, though artificial siblinghood was something I would never have because I just couldn’t stay fixed in a place without messing it all up.

I am an outsider.

Imagine trying to keep a secret in this tightly-woven net of association, or trying to penetrate a crowd that had known each other so well, for so long. Although the people of Bundaberg found all of this endearing and grounding, I knew that these links and ties were enough to hang me in the knot of my biggest secret – the fact that I am a big, fat lesbian.

To be continued. DSCN1302.JPG