In Vitro Fertility Goddess.
Back at work after the failed conception trip to Paris, one thing I seem unable to avoid is Fertility Goddess workmates.
There used to be one on a flight per week, but all of a sudden there seems to be at least one on every flight.
Is like lambing season in the air, with protruding stomachs wherever you look. The main culprit (besides the husbands) is the Olympic Games which are fast approaching and nobody wants to fly during them. Girls have actually postponed/timed their families around the event to avoid it!
And worse, they've succeeded. The joke is that the maternity uniform is actually the official Olympic uniform. Almost every flight I find myself working with a pregnant fertility goddess and the most annoying attribute is their perception that because they are glowingly pregnant everyone else must be pregnant or at least trying.
Worse, the ones who know I've been to Paris get all ‘nudge, nudge, wink, wink' with me, throwing meaningful glances at my stomach and making comments like "Oh Paris is the city of lurve. My friend went there and it was so romantic she got pregnant!"
What do they think, the sight of the Eiffel Tower and all that Haussman architecture turns you into rabbits bonking day and night for weeks on end?
And, like women in the newly engaged state who are incapable of discussing anything but wedding dresses and engagement rings, these pregnant women are incapable of talking about any topic save for ultrasounds and baby names. Is totally excruciating!
This morning I was on the end of a trolley with one such girl and by about halfway through handing out the trays, was practically at the point of forcibly opening an aircraft door mid-flight and getting self sucked into the upper atmosphere. The morning sickness, the cravings, the veins, on it went. Then she interrupted herself to throw in,
‘Oh, what about you then? You've been married for years now, when are you going to have a baby?"
With every bit of self-control I could find, I stopped myself just in time from inducing an aisle birth by way of trolley.
"Actually I just lost one, miscarriage, you know."
She went slightly green but it could have been her morning sickness.
There, I'd said it. Shouted it, actually, at thirty-nine thousand feet. The entire rear of the plane simultaneously looked up from their turkey rissoles and this was strangely liberating. Back in the galley the no-longer-smug girl apologised and the other girls went all quiet and seemed to whisper for the rest of the flight.
Later as we were leaving the aircraft a non-pregnant girl attached herself to my side and confessed that she too had had a miscarriage last year and I was the first person she'd told outside of immediate family.
"What is it, why don't we talk about it? It's like there's a hidden code of silence or something. I've never in ten years of working here heard of one miscarriage. And I've heard all about every birth."
"They're all proud of their births, nobody's proud of having miscarriage."
"But we don't deliberately cause our miscarriages."
What was wrong with women that they felt so ashamed to talk about their reproductive failings and so compelled to flaunt their fertility to each other?
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