Talking it over

So DH and I went to see his parents yesterday, and on the way back in the car we had a good talk. As I suspected, he didn't notice that I spent most of that concert on Friday evening crying. I did try to hide it from him at the time, as it could have got very messy and public if he had noticed while we were there in the middle of a crowd, and he really wouldn't have known how to handle it. And like I said, there were no big shuddering sobs - just silent tears coursing down my cheeks and a damp patch growing on the front of my shirt - and my husband isn't the most observant person ever.

Anyway, he said he thought it hadn't affected him so badly because he doesn't know as much as I do about the whole process and so when I told him we couldn't do it this month, he just thought, "Oh well, we'll do it next month." His only concern was whether there was something wrong with me and whether this cyst was normal, so when I said the nurse wasn't worried about that, he didn't worry either.

I said it was a little bit like psyching yourself up for a very important exam, preparing yourself as well as you could, getting your nerves in check as best you could, only to turn up at the exam hall and find that the exam isn't happening for another month. I'd been dreading some of the physical stuff I was going to have to go through, hoping for success and fearing failure, and all the hopes and fears of the last few weeks had been dashed in five minutes, to leave me still hanging on and building up the same dreads, hopes and fears - along with a couple of new ones.

It made me realise that there were things that can go wrong with this process that I hadn't even thought about, and it made me think of the 90% chance of failure (at my age) rather than the 10% chance of success - and also that our cancelled cycle this time doesn't even fall within that 90% failure rate, because we failed before it even started.

I told him if we can't have children, I'm sure our life together will still be happy, but there will be a grieving process for the life we had hoped for - a readjustment of our plans for the future and of our hopes and expectations, and there will be times when we'll just feel sad that we don't have the thing we most wanted. Life without children can be good, but it's very different from life with children, and whenever we've talked about our plans for the future, they've had children in them. We'll have to go through a process of putting our dreams aside and creating new ones.

He said he didn't think it was time to think about that yet. He still has hope that we're going to succeed, and although he realises that there are going to be many difficulties and disappointments and a whole lot more tears along the way, he's definitely not ready to give up on the whole thing.

I've told him before, and I said it again last night - he's all I need. If I have nothing else but still have him, it's more than I hoped for just three years ago when I was resigned to being single and alone for the rest of my life. But he's not all I want. I want to see him being a daddy, because I've seen how my nephews and nieces and my friends' children adore him, and I know what a fantastic daddy he'll be. And I want to be a mummy - I've wanted it all my life. And as he said, what happened this week was a setback and not the end. It could still happen, and we're not giving up yet.