Natalie Willis is a 31 year old Policy Officer from Canberra. She is also my beautiful brave cousin.
She has written a post on her experiences below.
I have a bright yellow folder. It’s the expandable kind with a zipper.
Sometimes it sits on the kitchen bench. Sometimes it lies beside my bed, in my back pack, or my car. Wherever I go, the yellow folder follows.
Inside the folder are doctor’s reports, ultrasounds, blood test results, prescriptions, bills and receipts, and diagrams of stretches my physios think I do every day.
A couple of months ago I took the yellow folder to see my Endometriosis specialist. I have had constant pelvic pain for over a year now. Constant yet ever-changing; stabbing, pulling, aching, shooting, nagging, crawling pain. I had my second surgery due to Endo in late 2014, but laparoscopic excision and a cocktail of drugs have not given me even one day free of pain.
So I went to see my specialist.
I walked into his office with my folder and sat on the appropriate chair.
My first thought on entering his room was:
“Thank God he has comfortable chairs with nice padding”.
Just the thought of sitting on cold, hard, wooden chairs in waiting areas fills me with dread and anxiety akin to what I feel on my way to have fillings at the dentist. Chairs are the enemy of chronic pelvic pain.
I explained that I was not feeling as well as I’d hoped. And so ensued a lengthy discussion about my options. There aren’t many – and none of them easy or with guaranteed or even likely results.
And as will inevitably happen when you are 30 years old sitting in front of your gynaecologist, he says: “are you thinking about having children soon?”.
Despite knowing full well that this question was coming, I was still unprepared. I spluttered something like: “not just yet but probably soon-ish”. He showed me charts and graphs that all screamed the same story at me: “YOU’RE RUNNING OUT OF TIME!”
I tried to placate him by asking if there was something I could do to get the ball rolling, and he handed me lists of fertility tests for me and my partner. I put the pieces of paper in the yellow folder.
I left feeling validated but despondent. Validated that my pain is real. Despondent that once again my questions yielded more questions rather than answers. While I don’t feel like I’m ready to be a mother, it’s always been that thing that I’ll get around to someday when the time is right. Now I have a piece of paper that could either give us a big green light, or cast a shadow on that future hope. Or once again present me with more unanswered questions.
How do you know you’re ready to be a parent? I always thought I’d just ‘know’. That seems to be what happens to other people. This intrinsic yearning just seems to happen for them. They become obsessed by it. It consumes them. So I just figured if I waited long enough it would suddenly wash over me. Maybe I’d be on a bus, or watching a movie. Maybe one of the myriad of other people in my life having babies would inspire that reaction.
But it hasn’t come. I’m still sort of… indifferent. It’s a ‘someday I probably will’ kind of thought. The trouble is, ‘someday’ is on the doorstep, knocking loudly and calling my name.
If you are a Gilmore Girls fan you might remember a moment where Anna says to Luke “There is no good time to be a parent, you just are one.” Television reinforces what I hear from my friends; parenthood is inconvenient. It's smelly and dirty. It takes sacrifice and compromise. It's hard work. Maybe it's my appreciation for these facts that is creating this apprehension within me.
I look at most parents of young children, and they look tired. Draped in chewable jewellery and saliva. Parenthood is also a fashion choice, it seems. This thought leads me to another – that in some ways I am already a parent. But not to a child. I am the mother of a demanding, cantankerous, nasty disease. It takes my all my energy to attend to its needs. I take it to doctors and therapists. I try to figure out if it has dietary requirements and attend to its nausea and bowel issues. I accommodate its moods. And it demands fashion choices of its own. Lycra features heavily. Jeans and belts are not part of its wardrobe. If it can't stretch over a belly that looks pregnant despite being potentially barren, then it just simply isn't an option. This disease is a child that just wants to run around naked.
I am the mother of a beast. I'm slowly learning how to tend to it, and even to see the blessings it brings me. Maybe I'm more prepared to be a real mother than I know; and maybe one day I'll know for sure. But for now those pieces of paper rest silently in the yellow folder, waiting for me to be ready to know the answer.
No comments:
Post a Comment