Tears, Sweat and Blood — Seeking an Answer to Unexplained Infertility
How an ancestor helped to solve the eternal question, ‘Why me?’
Unexplained infertility is a good news/bad news kind of joke. Good news! There’s nothing wrong with you. Bad news! There’s nothing wrong with you. ’Cause, if it ain’t broke you can’t fix it.
One of the hardest parts of unexplained infertility is that you look for explanations everywhere. You desperately hope to Miss Marple your way to fertility. Hell, explicable infertility would do, at least then there might be a cure or culprit.
Over the years in my attempts to answer the ‘Why me?’ and ‘How do I fix this?’ I tried everything: acupuncture, aromatherapy and activated charcoal to Zang-fu (it’s a thing) via hypnotherapy, and meditation (transcendental, guided, and vipassana).
At times, I became a prototype Goopie eating raw and organic. And if I had the money and could have found a chemical-free hair dye, I’d have gone blonde and worn unbleached linen while burning the scent of Gwyneth’s vagina.
At times, I was wild; clubbing, living on beans (baked and coffee), and travelling in places that the Foreign Office deemed dangerous.
Nothing made a jot of difference. It was unfair and left me with only myself to blame.
Had I secretly believed the fortune teller who told me at 17 that I wouldn’t have children; planting a seed that matured to sterility? Or the nurse after that ‘weird’ smear test who said, casually cruel, ‘Well of course, you’ll likely never have children. Nice cervix by the way.’
What about the Children’s Book of British Heroines: Gracie Darling, Florence Nightingale, Jane Austen, Amy Johnson among others? All amazing, all childless. Had I understood from them that to achieve meant not to conceive?
Through all this answer-seeking I spoke little of what I was going through; a combination of guilt, shame, embarrassment and a fear of tempting fate.
Meanwhile, friends had children, abortions, miscarriages, and grandchildren. We celebrated with presents, visits, flowers or sobbed with alcohol, cards and flowers. Though my womb could bear nothing, I bore witness to their joys and sufferings.
Through decades of hoping, I never got one card, no cries on someone’s shoulder, not even a simple daisy.
Because there aren’t milestones on the road of trying to, hoping to and failing to. The saying goes, ‘Where there’s life there’s hope’ but, as it transpires, not every hope begets life.
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Not everyone becomes a mother.
Why me? Is a heavy burden. On bad days, I’ve been overwhelmed by the unfairness. I’d have been a good mum, and yet, worse ones bred.
On bad days grief is a gold nugget excavated in perfect shininess despite aeons in the darkness.
Having lived with this soft sorrow for three decades, I know its size. I cradle it within my ribcage. I’ve grown to love it like an arranged marriage. I coexist with it like my busted rotator cuff and myopia.
I appear peachy, but grief is the dead wasp that feeds the fig. You may not hear it buzzing but it’s an indivisible part of the flesh.
Remedies arrive in the oddest packages, however. Mine had just been delayed in the post for nearly a century.
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I was full of foreboding.
I’d never been in a sweat lodge. It sounded like the end of ‘Apocalypse Now’ minus the drugs and a perspiring Marlon Brando. Besides, I wasn’t entirely sure about cultural appropriation. Yes, the Celts had sweathouses, but they were more for rheumatics than ruminations.
Before we went into Sweat (said as a noun by those in headwraps and harem pants) we were walked through the ritual of it. The idea is that a lodge represents a womb out of which, after journeying with our ancestors, we are reborn.
Years ago, in Peru, I took a mild hallucinogen called San Pedro because it briefly opens the gates of heaven. I saw the wind and the heat haze connecting all things. I sat in a river with a box of green and orange Tic Tacs repeating awestruck — ‘Look at the colour of my Tic Tacs.’
The experience was, as advertised, very heaven.
Well, until a black-heart turned up and I couldn’t close the energy between us. Some French guys saw him off, before giving me chocolate to reground me. My fear was the Sweat would be like that. I’d be sucked into a vortex of other’s ancestral journeys, without the bodyguards or chocolate.
Inside the lodge was hotter, more humid and blacker than a Malaysian midnight. Then the drumming and singing began. Apparently, singing would keep us cool. It did. Who knew?
We were told to communicate with the ancestors out loud; over the drumming no one else would hear and it was so dark no one could see. No need for embarrassment or inhibition.
‘You are the fulfilment of your ancestors’ dreams,’ Willow said (not her real name). ‘Listen to those dreams and work out why you’re here.’
Maybe my ancestors didn’t dream. Perhaps they couldn’t hear me over the drumming. But I came away without a single idea of why I was there. I did have a line of ant bites for my troubles and a sarong that would rot from the salty perspiration.
‘It can take up to four days for shifts to happen,’ Willow said.
Of course, it will, Cynic-me thought.
But over the next four days, things did shift. In the Sweat, I had prayed. I had prayed and I had prayed. Please ancestors heal the sorrow at the core of me. I hadn’t expected anyone to answer.
*
On the fourth day after the sweat lodge, I received a visit from an ancestor. I write that, knowing it sounds bonkers. Of course, the timing could be a coincidence, and the visitation could just be me talking to myself but bear with me.
My dad’s mum, Elizabeth, died before I was born. I knew Dad was one of seven boys only two of whom made it past childhood. And that was pretty much all I knew of Elizabeth other than she had had an 18-inch waist, size one feet and was diabetic.
Yet it was Elizabeth who, four days after the Sweat, popped into my head and wouldn’t leave.
I decided to look more deeply into her life. I hoped she had a message for me while honestly expecting nothing.
I began with some facts found on Ancestry which were as brutal as they were brief.
Elizabeth’s two firstborn, twins James and William, died aged four when her third son, Robert was one (died aged three). My only living uncle, John, was born two years after. There followed, at two-year intervals, Dennis (died aged three), and Thomas (stillborn).
The seventh and last was my dad, Joseph.
My grandmother had parented seven boys but could only keep two of them safe. A Planet Earth spectacle of baby iguanas being chased by killer snakes across a Galapagos beach had played out on endless repeat in an Oldham terrace.
When did my grandmother allow herself to breathe out, to believe that Uncle John and Dad had escaped the vipers and made it to the safety of the rocks?
How can you love in the face of such loss? Or is love fiercer because you understand how little time you have in which to give it?
I’ve long thought empathy was overrated. There are places our imaginations can’t take us. What Elizabeth went through was beyond imagining. What I did feel was compassion and a heartbreaking heat haze of connection.
And I understood. I understood how Elizabeth might have sat in the dark by a cooling coal fire and dreamt that no granddaughter would ever have to go through what she was suffering. Unable to stop the constant pregnancies despite birthing death.
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