When your donor says no...I dont want to have a baby anymore

This was written when a close and dear friend who had agreed to be a donor for myself and my partner chose to back out of this arrangement. Writing this piece and giving this to him helped me to forgive his decision in my heart. He told me it helped him to understand how it was for me and helped us both find a space to move on. This story chronicles our friendship and our journey.I have nothing but love for him and respect for his decision but it was a profoundly difficult time for all three of us. I share it now as a way of respect and also as a way of reaching out to others who have been through this experience..

It is such a huge thing to ask and a huge thing also when it doesnt work out the way you hoped it might.

Our friendship has never fully been the same but we are still dear and close friends following this, and I still love him dearly. This happened now in our first year of seeking to concieve and he was the first friend we considered and who pulled out. It was a very difficult time.

The Weir

It felt tangerine when I first met him. Lonely as I was with lime green swirls, crying out half my heart over another emotionally unavailable lesbian with a mother complex. He listened gently and sweetly, handing me tissues from the dashboard, this virtual stranger that I then went and sat with in the too tight seats at the Astor, watching yet another polystyrene reinforcement of the true love that I couldn’t find. Throughout this humiliation he didn’t judge, swapping popcorn and kleenex as the need arose. I was embarrassed in the way that only a stoic from a north Queensland town can be, has to be, to survive in a jungle of Akubras and intolerance. He though, wasn’t cut from that cloth. He understood the wet season that comes for us all, all of us that is who harbor 12 months of pent up lust for yet another uncaring woman.

So I didn’t see him for a while, long enough to show him I didn’t care and that I was tough stuff enough without his support, that that rainy night was an aberration to the slick shell that I passed with. No vulnerability here.

Despite this wall resurrection, we manically danced with gay abandon; no pun intended on the quadrangle at university, while I defiantly didn’t wear my bra and got backaches as a result. He laughed at my witticisms and was quirky and quick witted with a pun. The beginnings and follow on of friendship was firmed literally over the Jesus cross and then on and then on and then on.

Laughs at pride, drugs at the peel, always bussi kisses, with each new meeting and it never ever felt wrong or false, even though I was gifted in the art of slick deception. Gentle and forgiving he clapped from the bar as I sang on the stage. Always he told me I sang well, even when we both knew that my notes were off and I had drunk too much anyway. He told me this, I now know, because he understood how much it meant to me, even though I would never show it. Obnoxiously drunk, we breathed out fumes and caustic humor, the humor that then I lived behind, in an effort not to be seen.

Yet he saw me, in his gentle non sexual way, and he loved me, but always in a safe enough way that I could leave the club laughing and not think of him until the next kiss hello.

Years pass in this fashion, I know he’s in love, in love with another older than he. He dances poker chips over his fingers and he puts his friends on the plastic couch that I am not yet close enough to see, and he recites his own double entrendes about the flat in St Kilda and his disastrous love life, as I double over in laughter.

Meanwhile I listen to the new group of women that reassure me that I am something, maybe not enough but something more than the abused shadow of fat that I was. These sirens build me up with careful strokes of clay into whatever their dreams desire, and I am it, for each and every one of them. I try the same, but the clay always slips and they end up being in different shapes and shadows than the ones I imagined. And in that moment I fail them too. I fail in the bed, I fail in my moods, I fail in eliciting the desires I deserve.

It’s at that time that depression stops being a protective soul that helps me get through this vacuum we call life and starts to bind her own silken scarves around my wrists. I fight it, in my own inarticulate North Queensland way, geographical relocation, burying myself in others dramas, and food. Always food. Still my compadre dances like a well meaning jester on the nights I leave the fridge for the bars, and we blend and bond over bad eighties music.

It is then that you start to become you instead of him, because he is another person, one who was a little less close, who wasn’t privy to the inner levels of my obsessions. I cook, badly, for you, and you appreciate the sentiment if not the meal. You laugh at my jokes, different jokes this time, the ones I don’t have to think of for a long time to sound funny. Still you walk around on the edge of my wishing well, partly because the wooden boards are guarded by a very strong set of spikes and my ferocious need for independence.

Then something changes, in the way that a flat mess becomes a soufflé. I meet her. She who sticks like a magnet to the iron fillings in my heart. I have never met such a determined woman. She takes a needle to my boil and with a flourish she lets the shit run free. Late at night while I wrestle with new love, you are retiring yet again to a warm back but a cold home with a man who no longer feeds your heart. You leave him, and you too write late at night, at a time when I have yet again, nothing to say. I am closed like the clam, comfortable in my own mess.

With a determined thrust she, the lover, the magnet, prises open my metal heart and softly runs a damp cloth of healing over the rust. My pottery companions fluff and fumble and after trying several times to get me to join their collaborations, one by one they walk, taking a little piece of my miraculous hall of mirrors with them. Through it all she, the magnet, keeps scrubbing, and polishing a new truth. And as the others walk, so too does my denial. I still have food though, that counts for something.

It doesn’t mean I don’t miss them. It doesn’t mean that at all. It just means there is a new screen to erect, the screen of feminism and long ago body betrayal, for my new amour, she too has her moments. Her love though, is a warm shower of the like I have never before seen. She bathes my spirit in myrrh and oil. These spices help me, even as my body grows outwards to conceal, to grow as well in the spirit. With determined eyes that have been made clear by the pain of lost loves and forgotten friendships she points to you and says “that one”, clearing the way through the gods with clay feet as she does so.

Reluctantly I acknowledge, because in the world I come from, trust means pain, that you are perhaps special, a soul who I want to share my dance with. And as the petals open,

like a magenta marvel you come and bless me with your companionship. You and her dance your own dance, red and passionate, black and stormy, it is a delight all of its own, the delight of watching two brilliant and enquiring minds entwine and grow in their differences. Like a rose she unfolds in your company, like a stream, the passion that drives you bubbles over in lively discussion. Two eager companions on a journey of renounced Catholicism and river navigation.

Our bond is quieter. Like ivy in the sun, we grow and the friendship, because that’s what it is, becomes solid and sunbathed in stone.

With her love comes pain. Grey halls of sickness, angry words, medication. I struggle to stay upright, I shudder under the weight of an unquiet mind that is not my own. I look vainly for my loved one down long corridors and I don’t recognize her in her own eyes. Around and around the weir you walk me, so sad in purple I can barely stand. I cannot cry. You hurt and ache for me. But you don’t understand. It’s just like measles, and she can’t help it. For me in my picture, that’s when the disquiet starts for you.

Your rocklike strength gets me through, a strength I never expected, a strength forged in steps with me through wet grass and sorrow. Every day, you walk me around and around, and I go home to gaze through the fog at my poor girl. It is then for me, I realize, like the weir, you are always there. The last shutters open and I throw down the spikes from the wishing well, for like Jason of the golden fleece, you have proved your worth through a thousand footsteps, and through the pit of serpents.

I do not, however, see everything. You can’t let go of the words that, that girl, that angry girl, throws at me. And while a seed of doubt is planted in your mind, a fetus of hope is growing in my womb, because you and me and her, together we talked the magic words of baby. She gets better and the dreams burgeon and grow in bubble like splendor.

A baby I breathe in shell pink hope. Can it be true? Can it? And I look into your eyes, the eyes we both have grown to love and trust so much and I think maybe. You know what? I know it was done from love. I know it was done from compassion, and truth. But truth comes in many shades, and in shiny streaks of silver that cuts like a knife, as like a surgeon, you, try, kindly perhaps but it hurts, to let me know no. No baby. Not in my womb. Not from you.

Perhaps for another woman. Not for me.

A part of me that hasn’t been shown for a long time on that day, dies. And perhaps it is cruel to let you know that, but I must, because what there is left is only truth. You say, another baby, another man, but the point is that baby is not yours. Yours and mine and hers, that baby, dies with your no. And I loved that baby of ours. For me, that baby already lived, in my heart, in her heart, and I thought in yours.

I thought wrong.

That for me is when the words dry up and I am cast adrift in a grey barren sea. I mourn silently my babies passing. You leave us. You leave us in a way I never thought you would. I drift alone, for I can’t tell my girl as she grieves on her own this child’s passing. I can’t tell you of the hole in my stomach or in my heart.

Do you grieve? I don’t know. I can’t see through the fog. I can see, however, though you visit and say the right or wrong things, even then I see that you are no longer there.

Its not that I don’t understand. I do. Its not that I don’t respect your right to choose. I do. I just also need to let you know how much I died on that day, and I have to let you know that because I love you still. Because as it turns out I was right. Trust can and does mean pain. But pain can lead to rebirth, and I have learnt that, at least partly, through my journey with you.

Walking the weir taught me many things. One of which is there is something to be said for silent compassion and forgiveness, and that the journey doesn’t end, even when you walk alone.

I can still love you. Perhaps not as the man I thought you were, because you are no longer that man. Perhaps not as the man I would like you to be, because you are not that man either. Perhaps, somewhere, the shadow of what might have been will lead me to the man you really are, and that is the man I want to learn to love. In that man is a soul who loved me in difficult and dark times. I want to love you through yours as well.

Its not that it won’t be hard, and honesty is to trust in my heart, a heart that doesn’t know the answers. I don’t know if you have the strength to do it. I don’t know how I would ever be able to trust you, but I need to trust that I can try. The point is in the trying, the walking round the weir. Perhaps in the walking and the speaking we can forge anew.