I get knocked down.

We’ve been away, back to the lovely farm in Devon we fled to last year after Freddie died. It was such a haven last year, a little pocket of time to regroup and breathe and when we left it felt a little as if the first shock of loss had passed. How little I knew of course, that the worst was still to come; that 4 months and 9 months and 11 months would hit me like a crossbow bolt to the shoulder and more than a year would come, still with no baby in my belly or my arms.

Going back this year was strange. By the Monday before I had sobbed to my doctor that I really could take no more, that I was not quite safe to be in charge of myself. There is always a tipping point in trying to manage depression and it comes when dead starts to seem attractive and the time for help has arrived when I start thinking about car crashes into walls. It was time – by last Monday.

My doctor was great as he always is, having seen us through everything over the last few years and suggested that for a while I just see him, rather than going back to the hospital where Freddie was born for a while. He’s the right sort of doctor for that and I think that’s the right decision. I’m so angry and hurting at the moment that it isn’t possible to be rational and more and more I’m just haunted by the fact that someone, somewhere, is responsible for the fact that Freddie is dead. Maybe it was me, my body, my choices, my health, my fatness, my something that was wrong and killed him. But if it wasn’t, then someone missed something and I don’t know who or what or why and it is making me distraught. If I had a new baby to care for, perhaps this would bother me less but right now, I think he is probably right that I need some space. I’m so sick of hearing that it is stress, it takes time, there are procedures to follow, that some people take x long to get pregnant under worse circumstances than mine. Someone somewhere should be glad I only ever blame myself. It feels like the questions never end, spinning round my head. Ones about Freddie, ones about why I’m not pregnant and I can’t get hold of any knowledge, any understanding or any answers. There is nothing to be done but live it, endure it, grit my teeth and get through each day.

I got ill, 3 days before we went with a throat abscess like the ones I used to get, that stole months and months of my time with my children while they were little. I haven’t had one for a few years; miraculously it appeared, as usual, on the day I wasn’t pregnant again. It makes me want to scream knowing that must be a clue to what is going on and no one believes me. For 3 days I was fit for nothing but lying in bed with a wheat bag on my neck until my throat was touching on the inside and making me retch. I took so many painkillers that I hardly knew where I was, never mind the pain they hardly reduced at all and the madness of not being able to eat or drink. At least I lost a few pounds. And the happy pills always help a bit there too. And the Clomid… never mind not helping me get pregnant, it reduced my cycle to a tiny thought of a period, so even if I had had a egg get lucky in there, there would have been nothing for it to implant in anyway. That isn’t supposed to be a side effect for a few doses. So I guess that closes that door too.

But I got lucky being ill anyway and the thing in my throat burst so that I was well enough to go away only a day late although I had to take meds for most of the week and it was only in the last couple of days I realised that the codeine had made me a space cadet for most of the week. But we had a lovely week and it felt very healing. Either the happy pills started to work or the time did me good or? – well I don’t know – but after the faint surprise of being back in a place with so many emotional memories, it did me good. I didn’t cry or think too much and I even managed to think maybe the throat thing was a good sign, that the antibiotics might clean something mysterious up somewhere in me. I even, in a few odd moments, started to think about work again. We had lovely days, worthy of a more cheerful set of posts than this whingy misery and I felt very nearly happy on the way home.

Getting home has brought all my equilibrium tumbling down again. There is yet another mountain of emotion and pain and turmoil to climb, yet again mixed with the knowledge that I’m a jealous, selfish, broken cow who can’t be happy even for people I love. I just want a break. I just want all this to be over. I just want to be 80 years old and at the end and to close my eyes and not open them ever again. I want it to be over. I don’t have the strength for all this. I don’t have the gumption. I don’t have the ability to pull myself up and keep walking. I just want it to be over. I’ve given up believing I deserve a happy ending or that I’ll get one.? It’s no one’s fault but the sheer effort of living alongside life as it just is is too much, too unbearable, too much more than I can manage any more. And there is no escape. I can’t halt everyone else’s life and I can’t stop my own. I’m needed. The low I reached before we went away was where I really am and I honestly don’t think I have the energy to pull myself up another hill. I keep thinking that with a life that is panning out like a bad novel, there ought to be a moment where the plot swings and it tentatively creeps towards something good again. But just doesn’t. It just isn’t doing. I just don’t believe in happy ever after for me any more.