Overwhelmed

I had a mini-meltdown last night - I think I managed to hide it from DH when he made me cry on Sunday, but there was no hiding this one.

I just feel so overwhelmed with uncertainty at the moment.

The biggest question, of course, is will we ever be parents? And that question subdivides into questions like will my FSH be right next month, or the month after? When will our next IVF actually happen? Will I even get the chance to go ahead with IVF at this clinic?

And those questions lead into the question of my brother's visit from the US with his family at the beginning of next month - will we have to fit our treatment round it? Will we be able to go on the seaside family holiday, or will we need to stay in London for daily appointments at the clinic? This matters to me, because I love my American family and don't see them nearly often enough.

And if it doesn't happen next month, will the following month be better? Will I still have a job? Whether I'm made redundant or not, I know we'll cope, but it's the strain of going for two weeks (and counting) having been told I'm at risk of redundancy but having been given no idea of what the firm's proposals are or what the probability is of losing my job that makes it impossible to plan anything. I've obviously managed to put a positive spin on this to my family, because the only comment I got from US SIL was delight at what an exciting time this is for me, but I don't feel excited right now - as I said to DH, at the moment I just feel utterly defeated.

If I do keep my job, will it be changed beyond recognition, so that I'm no longer doing the work that I enjoy?

If I don't keep my job, will I be able to earn enough to make the necessary contribution to the household pot by working freelance? And how am I going to build up the freelance work?

And whether I keep my job or not, the situations that I'm thinking of only make sense if I'm going to get pregnant. As I said to DH last night, if I don't get pregnant, all I am is an unemployed woman who can't have children (or a woman in a job she hates who can't have children, because even if I keep my job, everything is changing, and not in a good way).

And then there are the day-to-day uncertainties - is the course I'm teaching this week going to be the last course ever on this programme that I designed, wrote, and built up from nothing? If so, how much work do I put into updating it, knowing it's never going to be used again?

I discovered yesterday that a colleague had gone behind my back to do something which was the complete opposite of what we had agreed - do I confront him, or does it ultimately not matter because we're both going to lose our jobs anyway?

Even my country seems to be conspiring to keep me in a state of nervous uncertainty, with no parliament formed several days after the general election and the increasing likelihood that an unelected minority is going to ignore the will of the people and seize power, just because they can. And because they'll need the support of the Scottish and Welsh nationalists to form any sort of majority, and because England is solidly Tory and has no devolved parliament, you can bet that any Lib-Lab coalition is going to be better for Scotland and Wales than it is for England. And what worries me about an unstable government is the risk of increased inflation, with the result that our savings won't stretch as far as they would in a stable economy.

So I melted down, and DH held me while I cried, and we talked about the fact that if IVF #1 had worked, I would now be in the situation that my sister is in, and how hard I find that thought, and how hard it is to be kept in limbo over the work situation, and how worried I am that we'll never have children. We talked about the IVF, and I now know that he's not just doing this for me, and I know exactly how much it means to him - that article helped, as he used it as a sort of jumping-off point to compare his thoughts and feelings with the guy who wrote the article.

I don't feel much better today, because all of the uncertainty still remains, and I feel that there's not a single area of my life at the moment which is under my control. But I do know that I'm incredibly lucky to be married to this wonderful, loving man, and I know that whatever happens, we're in it together.