Christina Sweeney-Baird - The End of Men

I go through phases. Sometimes I feel determined and ready. I can do this. Send me the needles, shoot me up, strap me down. I will do anything for a baby. Other weeks, the idea of all of those people and objects and wires and things being inside me makes me want to curl myself in a protective hunch. No, my body says. This is not right. Anthony’s more prone to baby-induced broodiness than I am. A friend’s snuffly newborn or his godchild doing something adorable will inevitably lead to an earnest declaration that we should just do it, let’s do it, what have we got to lose? Like tonight.

What do we have to lose? Everything, Anthony , I want to cry each time. Occasionally I’ll convince myself I can do this whole IVF thing but I can’t do it flippantly. For a man so keen on planning, he can be remarkably gung-ho about the impact of IVF and babies or, worse, IVF and no babies, on our lives. I need an acknowledgement of the potential worst-case scenario. I need him to understand how hard it’s going to be for me. Because, as with all things involved in the growing of a human child, it will be the woman in this equation who experiences the negatives. And that assumes it would even work; what if it was for nothing?

‘I need some more time to weigh it up, think about the pros and cons.’

‘Why do you always assume it will go wrong?’

‘I don’t.’

‘You do,’ he says, frustration moving right to the front of his voice and staying put. ‘You talk about the financial cost and the emotional cost and the physical cost as if it’s guaranteed you’re going to be having IVF for the next three years. What if it works first time? What if it’s a success? What if having a baby is completely within our grasp but we just don’t take the chance?’

‘Easy for you to say,’ I mutter.

‘What was that?’ he asks, even though he heard me. Of course he heard me.

‘I said, it’s easy for you to say. You’re not the one who it’s going to happen to.’

‘We’re in this together, Cat. Please, I can’t do this for you. I know it’s unfair but I can’t. Please. Just think about it.’

We settle in to the sofa next to each other to watch something Anthony says is meant to be good and I realise that my heart rate isn’t up. I’m calm. These conversations used to leave me tear stained and weepy but now, the sting has dissipated. What does that mean? That I’ve accepted that we’re going to have just one child? Does it mean I’m happy about it? Can I make this decision for us when the question of children is something that affects him as much as it does me?

The thing is, Anthony is asking me to do something I cannot do. I cannot make a decision on this. A significant part of me hopes, secretly, that it will just happen. If we keep waiting and pushing it off for another month, and another, and another, maybe this month will be the one. I fell pregnant with Theodore after six months of entirely enjoyable regular attempts at baby-making, and just as I was starting to panic there it was. Morning sickness so bad it could have felled a horse. I know it’s been two and a half years of trying with no success. I know that my egg reserve isn’t great and my uterus is a weird shape that makes it less ‘hospitable’ to an embryo (a word so cruel, in the context of fertility, that I wanted to strangle the haughty consultant insulting my anatomy with his tie). I know all of these things and I wish I didn’t. I wish we could be ignorant and hopeful because it might happen. We just don’t know yet.

That night, passing the photos of us on my way up the stairs, I marvel, as I often do after our fertility conversations, at this thing we’ve constructed. A family from the ground up. From the photo of us in our first year together, limbs easily entwined in the College bar, gazing at each other, to the photo of the three of us Phoebe took a few months ago in Battersea park. My dark curls flying in the breeze contrasted with Theodore’s perfect chestnut mop inherited from Anthony.

Later, I’m lying in bed reading. Anthony climbs in after me and I fall into our routine. My book to one side, I pass him his eye mask, light off, my head on his shoulder, my arm on his chest, his hand on my elbow, safe.

‘Anthony,’ I whisper.

‘Yes,’ he replies. I love this about him. He doesn’t say ‘what’ or even ‘hmm’. He says yes to whatever I might want to say.

‘I don’t want to make a decision. I can’t.’ A lump is in my throat. I rarely cry now about our years of infertility. I try to swallow it down because really, you cannot spend every night crying for two years. It’s too depressing for words. ‘What if it happens naturally? I want it to—’

‘Oh Cat,’ Anthony says softly and his voice undoes me. By revealing it, my secret has lost its power. It’s a sad, small, silly hope. And yet, who knows?

‘I understand,’ he says. ‘We’ll give it one more month.’

In that moment, I have never loved my husband more.

November is always busy but this is ridiculous. The area around Gartnavel has never shown its divisions more apparently. The ice-induced falls and chesty coughs of Glasgow’s polished, middle-class West End residents appear in A&E in a flurry of expensive highlights, knowledge of different kinds of antibiotics and clipped accents which make clear they want their parents and grandparents to be seen now. The other side of this tale of two cities is liver cirrhosis, chronic poverty and the unglamorous side effects of a life of smoking.