Saying Goodbye

I would really like to support this campaign, but I'm not sure I'm up to it.
http://www.sayinggoodbye.org/

Every time they tweet (@SayingGoodbyeUK) asking for retweets and support I feel a pang of guilt and scroll on. I have retweeted them once, but my twitter account is associated (indirectly) with my real me and my work officially still don't (and mustn't) know about my pregnancies and I'm not sure which friends know either.

I'm still worried about losing my job. Recently a colleague was promoted over me. He fucked it up and quit before he could be fired, and now I am left with cleaning up the mess. I'm pushing hard to be given the promotion, but they are coming up with every flimsy excuse they can and I don't want to give them a millimetre. It's worse because this is the second time this has happened in two years, but last time I was too broken from the first miscarriage to fight. If I give up now I can kiss my career goodbye.

I'm also struggling with a lot of people asking me if I have kids. I must finally be looking at that age. I don't want to have to answer questions sometimes, particularly not from acquaintances or strangers.

So I'm holding back from supporting this campaign. I want to help, but I don't think I'm up to doing anything in my own name. I wish I could think of something I could do anonymously.

Fed up

Ok, I'm drunk. I'm drunk because I have been "schmoozing" all night on behalf of a sexist company that treats me like shit. If I was prepared to drunk dial my boss I would say:
"either you value me much as [colleague who was just fired and who I vastly out perform] or you don't. If you do, pay me his salary and give me his promotion. If not, well, what the fuck am I doing." Me and my stupid standards and ethics. This is not a meritocracy, this is a sexist shithole.

Street Harassment

Ok, this isn't really related to the main themes of this blog, but I don't want to post under my real name as I don't want loved ones to worry unnecessarily.

Last night, while I was out jogging a car pulled over in front of me.  A man hopped out and asked me for directions.  While I was pulling up a map on my phone (he wasn't far from his destination, but it was a little hard to explain), he said:

Are you sure you need to lose weight?

I replied that I jog mostly for fun.  He went on:

Because you have a great arse.  Can I touch it?

Which he proceeded to  do, without waiting for a reply and forcing me to step away.  I tried to draw attention to the map and he pointed out that he had a huge erection. 

I said I had to get going because I had a long way left to jog, and took off, despite his protests that I stay.  He had clearly not paid any attention to the directions, because he caught up with me again a few blocks later (I'm trying not to think about what took him so long) and I pointed him down the street he needed without stopping.  He had already gotten out of his car again.

He turned down the right street this time and I changed my route a little so that I would be nowhere near his intended destination.  I haven't felt this disempowered for a long time (since the security guard for my office building was harassing me). I hate feeling this way, and part of me regrets not being more confrontational, but I genuinely feared for how he would react to that.  I just wanted to get out of there as fast as I could.  At least the adrenaline meant I managed a fairly fast pace.

A tweet to make my heart stop

***Trigger warning: Brace yourself if you have had a miscarriage!  You may not want to read this one.***



When I read this tweet from @newscientist I think my heart may have stopped: 

Are otherwise viable pregnancies being terminated due to miscarriage misdiagnoses? http://bit.ly/oYUqvY

I had surgery for my first miscarriage.  My first thought on reading that tweet was "Oh God, did I kill my baby?????"

I have felt so guilty about my miscarriages, racking my brains to remember something I may have done wrong.  Did I have that night out before of after I conceived?  Did I take any medications I should have avoided? Did I drink too much coffee?  And now I could add to the list, did I give up on my baby?  Did I terminate it?


I'm pretty sure I didn't do anything wrong at all.  I'm pretty sure that if I had  had a cup of coffee, it wouldn't have changed things anyway.  And now having read the full article, I know I wasn't part of the group they are talking about.  But I really think the tweet should have been worded more sensitively.  The headline of the article was fine, why not just have used that?  Miscarriage can be a horribly emotive subject, and I don't think it is too much for people to take a bit of care when discussing it.

For the record, the link is to this article :
Improve miscarriage guidelines to prevent misdiagnosis

This only applies to a small subset women who are diagnosed with miscarriage.  They have small gestational sacs that did not appear to contain an embryo and that did not show measurable growth over a 7-10 day period.  The size of of the sacs is used as part of a miscarriage diagnosis as small sacs may not show measurable growth over that time period (larger/later ones grow more visibly).  How small the cutoff size should be is the subject of the article. 

This did not apple to me; my baby was clearly visible on the scans but small (measured about 7 weeks at 10 weeks) not developing with no heart beat.  There will be a few women who were at or close this criterion who will have had surgery.  I hope they never see this, or at least that they have someone nearby to support them when they do.

Another step along the path

It has been nearly ten months since my second miscarriage, and almost 6 months since the investigations in the cause of the miscarriages came up with nothing. After a particularly painful period last week, I made an appointment and saw my GP today.  There's not much to be done about the period pain (since all the options involve some sort of contraceptive), but she has referred us for fertility testing, and apparently we will be eligible for IVF on the NHS.

I'm feeling really conflicted now.  Mostly I feel like crying.  I still feel like a massive failure.  I'm also scared.  We are finally moving beyond the realms of "normal" and what is covered by the pregnancy books (at least this gives me something new to research).

Part of me is horrified by the idea of IVF.  This really surprises me, as I had always thought IVF was a really great medical advancement.  As a teenager, my mother was the vice principal at my school for a couple of years, and so I was on the wrong end of teasing on that account.  One of the things they used to say was that she was a lesbian.  (I didn't see why this should be an insult, but I knew that in the small country town in which we lived it was about the worst thing that could be said. I knew one guy who was hospitalised after he was assaulted by a group of kids based on rumours that he was gay).  Once I replied to my tormentors "but what about me?"  And they claimed that I was a test-tube baby.  This took me greatly by surprised, as I had never (and still haven't) thought of that being as bad thing, but they clearly thought that was the most hurtful thing they could say at the time.  Luckily for me, the group of kids took off at that point, and left me alone in my slack-jawed silence.  The point here is that I have always had an intrinsic positive emotional response to IVF, so I am really surprised that my immediate reaction this morning wasn't simply relief at there being a way forward.

Right now, it all just seems like too much effort.  I don't even really know what is involved, and maybe I will feel better when I do.  I have never thought that I would be hung up on the idea of a "natural" process, although based on my ongoing feelings of failure, maybe I have been.  In the depths of my grief, I have told myself that I would do whatever it took.  My head is still telling me that this is an option worth investigating, it is just taking a while for my heart to get on board.

I have been given surprisingly little information (none, at this stage).  I've been given an appointment for a blood test, and my husband has to make an appointment for some testing too.  Maybe we will find out more then.  This process is so slow, as it was when they were investigating my miscarriage.  It was weeks between the GP visit and the specialist appointment, with no information.  And then it was weeks between the testing and the results.  And then I was left with nothing but a phone number for a charity that offered counselling (which I was never brave enough to call) and an instruction to call the specialist back when I was pregnant again.  Each person I have dealt with has individually been very nice and understanding, but the whole process feels so impersonal.  It doesn't leave me in any way confident that this time will be any better.  And that makes me want to cry again.  Still, at least we have the NHS.  I can't even imagine what this would be like in the US.

What makes a woman

I feel really passionate about the need for good access to abortion services. I always have, but I've felt the need to speak out a bit more about it since I heard an anti-abortion argument (sorry, I can't remember where) saying "try telling a woman who has just had a miscarriage that what she lost wasn't a baby".  As a woman who had recently had a miscarriage at the time, I hated being used in this way.  (I know that the definition of "the beginning of life" is something that is inherently tied up in the abortion debate for many, but that is a post for another day).  That is why I jumped in feet first with my letter the other day.

I have realised that I didn't do nearly enough reading of other people's blogs before jumping in.  I was so passionate about adding my voice to the chorus, that I didn't even stop to think about whether or not it was a good idea.  Quiet Riot Girl made some good point against the letters (http://quietgirlriot.wordpress.com/2011/09/01/dear-nadine-dorries/).  On the whole, I think it was a good idea (I don't think any of the letters have descended into personal insults, and I certainly didn't write my letter expecting Nadine Dorries to even read it, let alone change her mind).  But what I really wanted to blog about today was Quiet Riot Girl's interpretation that the letters characterised the "identity of woman as ‘she who has a womb'".

What makes someone a woman is something I have though about a lot lately.  I don't profess to have any answers, and generally, I would prefer the thing(s) that defines someone as a woman is that someone ascribing that identity to themselves.  But as someone to does self-describe as a woman, even I'm not that sure.

I have always considered myself to be female.  I am unambiguously biologically female.  I have the sort of body that is associated with women: I have large breasts, large hips, a not quite as small as I'd like waist, etc. But I have spent a lot of my life partially wishing that I was a man.  As a teenager (17yo), I even toyed with the idea of trying to pass as a man.  I chose a gender ambiguous shortening of my name (which I still use), but by then I already had the sort of body that was never going to look masculine without surgery (no amount of binding is ever going to hide my boobs!).  You see, for the first time in my life, I was beginning to encounter sexism. I am incredibly lucky that my family is very supportive, and I was raised in an environment that was mostly gender neutral.  Which is in part why I didn't have second thoughts about choosing a career and a life as an engineer. 

And that was when the sexism became a part of my life.  I lived in a fairly small country town, so lots of people knew I'd be finishing school that year.  A taxi driver asked what I wanted to do when I finished school and  I told him I was going to study engineering. His response was "isn't that a bit hard for a girl?"  I curtly told him "no, it's not" and the rest of the journey was spent in uncomfortable silence.  At our final school assembly, each graduating student was presented in turn with their certificate, and something small was said about them.  While a few of the boys were going to be engineers, they said only that I wanted to be one. And I started to think, "if only I could be treated like a boy".

I'm still an engineer, and I still encounter levels of sexism that I think would shock most people.  But I mostly put my gender to the back of my mind and get on with life.  Between my work and my hobbies (I'm a big nerd), most of my life has been spent in hugely male dominated situations.  I suppose I had begun to think of myself as genderless and generally hating my body  (being both female and overweight).  My gender wasn't that important to me. I believe that gender should be irrelevant in almost all situations. I think of sexism as gender being brought into a situation where it doesn't belong.  Hence, I think of myself as feminist. I admit, I haven't done much reading bout or studying of feminism, and I know that I should.  I suppose I have always excused myself by telling myself that my continued career in a very male dominated (and far too often sexist) industry was me doing my part in the fight for gender equality.

But I digress. As I said, my gender wasn't that important to my identity, that is, until my husband and I decided that we wanted to have a child.  This was the first situation I've been in where being female had to matter.  In my mind, it is the first "womanly" thing I have tried to do.

I'm someone who likes to do my research.  I knew the statistics about conception.  I knew my family history.  I starting taking folic acid supplements 3 months before having my implanon removed.  It was 11 and a half months before I finally go a positive pregnancy test.  I knew this was still within the "normal range", but it was still disheartening.  I found the miscarriage to be devastating, but it was just one of those unlucky things.  Another year and a half (and another miscarriage) later and I'm not currently pregnant.  I still don't have any children.  I am apparently still just at the unlucky end of "normal".

I feel like a failure of as a woman. Childbearing was the one "female" thing I've wanted or tried to do.  And I'm failing at it (did I mention my perfectionist tendencies).  I've watched many friends and relatives fall pregnant and have children over these last two and a half years with varying degrees of ease. But for all my efforts and heartache, I can't seem to reproduce.

So am I only a woman because I have a functioning womb (and by corollary, if I can't spawn my own offspring, am I not a woman)?  Although I sometimes find myself wishing that, it clearly isn't true.  Am I a woman because I look like I should have a womb (of some functionality)? Maybe, certainly I am treated differently to my colleagues based on appearance.  Am I a woman because I want to be? Certainly not. I am not some sort of deity whose desires and whims can directly affect reality.  I did say at the start that I didn't have any answers.

Quiet Riot Girl is right, in that I did use "woman" as short-hand for "uterus owner" in my letter.  I do feel bad for potentially excluding male identifying uterus owners.  They have the right to access abortion services just as much as female identifying uterus owners.  I let my own messed up gender identity thoughts get in the way.  Sorry.  I hope the message (about access to abortion, rather than gender-pigeon-holing) was clear.

More letters to Nadine Dorries

Stavvers has created a masterlist of letters to Nadine Dorries:
https://stavvers.wordpress.com/2011/08/31/letters-to-nadine-dorries-masterlist/

I would highly recommend each and every one!