P is for…

Not only am I all the P words mentioned in the Magnificent 7Ps but I am also one more – prehistoric.

I am 46 years old. Yes, I have a much younger looking body and I’m very fortunate that my face isn’t wearing too badly either. However, the march of time often catches up with me to tap me on the shoulder and remind me that the sands in the hour glass may now have more settled in the bottom than still to flow through from the top.

I come from a family of women who all lived well into their nineties. My grandmother is over one hundred. But that doesn’t make me superwoman. My eggs suffer the same degradation as any other woman’s as they age. Much as I would love to give Ruf a child, I know that this is not really feasible. The chances of a 40 year old man and a 46 year old woman producing a damaged baby are statistically so much greater than those of a 40 year old man and, say, a 36 year old woman. We both freely admit that we are now too selfish and too stubborn to contemplate the prospect of our lifestyles being changed in so dramatic a fashion as would occur with the advent of a disabled child, notwithstanding all the other considerations.

However, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t still hurt to think that if he wanted one, I couldn’t fulfil that desire and I worry that my presence in his life might well stop him from achieving what is every man’s natural goal – to procreate and perpetuate his genes.

My periods have always been relatively regular – 28 or 35 days. There might be the odd slightly shorter or slightly longer gap but pretty much I knew roughly when they would occur. So when, last year, I failed to menstruate at all one month, I was naturally a little alarmed but I did a test and it was negative. The decorators duly arrived for the following month and I put it down to another P word – premenopausal – and started taking the requisite herbs in tablet form, which sorted things out again.

Naturally, when it happened again last month, I was not unduly concerned.

Common sense told me that I had been pregnant three times and carried two to term but all three had started with very similar symptoms and I knew I was pregnant within a couple of days of conception, borne out by my first baby starting contractions on the exact day I said she was due – despite the ‘experts’ telling me that I had gone a week over. I didn’t keep a temperature chart for nothing and that showed that I had had a 35 day cycle the month that the teen was conceived.

When I fall pregnant, I can feel the closure of my cervix, like a bung inside me. There was no such sensation this time. When I fall pregnant, my nipples feel as if they are on fire and I can hardly bear to put on a bra. I have to admit that the left one has been a little tender but in more like a precursor to menstruation than a pregnant way and, bearing in mind that Ruf had just spent a weekend twisting and squeezing them with an abandon which should have been impossible…

It was the faint but continual feeling of nausea this time around that really made me worry, especially as it started just over a week after Finger Fucking Friday. But, again, it wasn’t like the nausea I have had in previous pregnancies and I put it down to an inner ear problem that I often get.

Of course, it was the craving that finally set all the alarm bells ringing. On Sunday, I had this amazing desire for chips and gravy which Ruf duly produced. When I drove home on Monday I had to stop after a couple of hours and buy a portion of chips to eat as I drove. On Tuesday, I ate masses of mashed potatoes. I was standing in the kitchen tucking into the cold leftovers at midnight before I went to bed! Yesterday I just had to have salt and vinegar crisps followed by chips and gravy again for tea.

I am an anorexic. This is not normal behaviour.

So, this morning, I took the test.

The pink line showed up almost straightaway, darkening ominously the longer I looked at it.

Fuck.