In Vitro Fertility Goddess
In Vitro Fertility Goddess is "a fantastic book", "a page-turner", "a great read!"... All Reviews Here » .
Tis the season to be jolly, but try telling that to the women and couples out there who have tried and failed to conceive this year. Or those who have lost a baby through miscarriage.
If any season brings home the feeling of emptiness and sadness to the infertile it's Christmas. For Christmas has children at its heart whether you look at it commercially or religiously.
While the Christian world celebrates, of all things, the birth of a baby and stores have Santa trails especially for children nothing emphasises a state of childlessness in such an inescapable marked way.
So what to do if you are involuntarily and regrettably childless?
‘Carols by Candlelight', an event awash with families and ringing with the sound of excited children's voices is clearly to be avoided at all costs.
You'd escape to the cinema except everything playing features Ben Stiller or Tim Allen as a Christmas elf and besides, the audience are mostly elf-size themselves.
Similarly shopping centres have stages with non-stop children's entertainment and you can't even get past them for the dancing toddlers and Hummer-sized prams.
You'd go to the ballet but they're performing the children's Christmas favourite ‘The Nutcracker'. And the Eagles, Silverchair and Kylie are long gone from the Entertainment Centre, instead it's the Wiggles if you please and of course you don't.
Meantime the advent of Christmas feels like the build-up of an enormous pressure cooker, a forced time of celebration when all you feel like is fleeing to a desert island where there are strictly no children allowed.
Anything to avoid Christmas Day either with ‘unrequited' grandparents or nephews and nieces, oh so cute in their Christmas finery. These are the nephews and nieces you had to negotiate hundreds of children and their frazzled parents at ‘Toys R Us' to purchase presents for.
It's the frazzled parents that get to you the most, you don't understand them at all. How could anyone who's a parent possibly be frazzled? When you've been trying for years to become a parent yourself it's beyond comprehension.
Possibly it's the John Lennon Christmas song that is the worst of all the Christmas songs. ‘Another year over and what have you done' is haunting to the point of being disturbing. Especially when the answer is you spent the whole year trying to conceive and didn't get anywhere. Another year over and still no baby.
And spare a thought for those going through IVF over Christmas, it's highly incompatible with feeling festive and the drugs don't help. Imagine having to run off and inject yourself with a follicle-stimulating hormone during the turkey, come back and resume your seat and your paper hat with a big smile.
Yet if there's anything good about Christmas it is that it's followed by the New Year. A chance for new beginnings, the hope that this time next year you'll be pregnant or have a baby and this will have been the last childless Christmas.
A time when like people the world over you'll be celebrating the birth of a baby but this one will be your own.
