The story so far...

(taps microphone..) Testing, testing.. is this thing on?

Wow.. I started a blog. Given that I’m a Leo/Cancer cusp, there’s every possibility that my good intentions might start boring me and I could drift off one day leaving the story unfinished. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

There’s also the little matter of my (shall we say..) unique sense of humour that not everyone ‘gets’. So if my habit of laughing at life through a glass darkly offends, again you can’t say you weren’t warned.

So where do I put this blog, hmm? In the animal lovers category? That would fit – two dogs, six cats, a dozen or so parrots, five horses and some farm critters. Plus a semi-domesticated magpie who abuses our open door to animals policy.

Or should this go in the alternative category? Pagan and proud – that’s us.

Or perhaps this should go in the baby category … because just last week we discovered to our amazement that we are going to be parents. The shock has not worn off yet, despite very strong efforts from mother nature to make me wake up and smell the sickbag. I saw a programme on the Discovery Channel the other day about some women giving birth, and one woman said she wanted a tee shirt that said “Yes I’m 45. Yes I’m pregnant. Yes it’s my last. Yes all my children have the same father.” I want one that goes something like this:

Yes I’m 41
Yes I’m pregnant.
Yes it’s my first.
Yes it’s my last.
And btw, I’m up here (insert arrow upwards).

So this is pregnancy, huh? Technically it’s not my first. In my previous incarnation (ie my 20’s and first marriage) I tried very hard to become a mother. To call my efforts a disaster would be subtle. I had my feet in the stirrups at doctor’s offices more often than I had them in the stirrups of choice (ie horse riding). Mum was right when she warned me that “the girls in our family are very fertile – hang a pair of pants up at the end of the bed and you’re pregnant.” Trouble was, doctors like a little thing called a blood test to confirm pregnancy and I’m not the poster child for hypodermics. A typical Karl reaction could be as mild as watching me bulldoze my way out of the room at top speed, or as dangerous as having to duck as I throw a chair at the doctor or bite/punch/kick anyone I perceive as trying to force a needle on me.

Hence by the time then-husband and I gave up on the idea as a bad joke, I had only one confirmed pregnancy (lost at around 16 weeks) and something like ten ‘likely’ pregnancies ending in early miscarriages. For the sake of my sanity I decided that I would abandon this baby lark and did a lot of work on myself to turn my longing into rejection of all things maternal.

Yeah that worked. Have a look at all our animals and tell me I didn’t redirect it elsewhere!

Anyhoo, in my early 30’s I called an end to the marriage (long story.. I hear his version is quite entertaining, pity it bears no resemblance to the truth), and a short time later got involved with my best friend, a guy called Wayne.

This proved to be one of the few really smart things I’ve done. So damn smart I married the guy a couple of years ago. This one is definitely not undersized (take that as you wish!) so I’m not throwing him back.

With me so far? Okay fast forward now to December 2004 when life started to resemble something out of the twilight zone. I’ll summarise for succinctness.

First our bank started to act bizarrely. It’s taken until just a week ago to finally get everything sorted, but if there’s a moral of the story it’s this: If you are in business for yourself, and you have a mortgage, I recommend that your business bank and your mortgage bank are separate. That way if you run up against a weird individual on a power trip and have a minor spat over a small overdraft abberation, she cannot freeze your business accounts. What’s even weirder was that there was sufficient available funds in the business accounts to deal with the overdraft. Defies logic, eh.

So when in business, do not have all your eggs in one basket. The second part of the lesson was ‘if your bank suddenly behaves unprofessionally, document everything and follow the complaints procedure right through to the Banking Ombudsman’. Here endeth that lesson.

Then we had three unexpected deaths among friends (1) and family (2). The last of those deaths left quite a nasty taste in everyone’s mouth, which brings me to another lesson we learned. How good is your will? How up to date is it? Are you SURE your last wishes are going to be honoured, or are you too trusting of your Executor to do the right thing? Remember – what you consider ‘the right thing’ and what they think could well be poles apart. You too could be buried in the most awful frock (when your whole life you wore pants and shorts), and have your relatives refused permission to even attend the garage sale of your effects so that they could purchase a momento. Yes – you read right. Purchase. Refused. Words fail me…

This made us sit back and realise that we need to revisit our wills. Presently Wayne leaves me everything, and I leave him everything. But what if we die together? What happens when the surviving partner dies? I mean, who’s going to look after all our animals?

So the idea was (JOKINGLY!!!) mooted that perhaps we should have a child – someone to leave the farm and the animals to. After all, some of our parrots could well live for another 80+ years. Here’s your third lesson.. careful what you joke about, the universe could be listening.

In the middle of all these goings on, my mother became really ill and needed some home-care and eventually ended up in hospital twice. She’s well on the way to being okay now (whew!) but for a month there things were very disrupted in our household.

So when the January cycle was missed, I put it down to stress. I went to my niece/good mate Chris’s home and got seriously blasted. Amazing.. I didn’t know I could drink that much and stay upright. Hell, a troop of marines could not have done better. February rolled around and still no-show. Wayne raised the “P” word for the first time and got his head handed to him on a plate. “Don’t be bloody ridiculous! It’s more likely to be menopause!”

February 8th, the 6th anniversary of our moving into Nutters Grove and the 2nd anniversary of our handfasting. I was really snippy that day and managed to lose my temper with my mother – something I hadn’t done in a long time. Old grumpy guts went for a drive to cool off. I found myself at the chemist, comparing prices on boxes of home pregnancy tests. I felt pretty silly buying that test – I thought that my bad mood was a good indication of PMT. Back home in the bathroom, I followed the proceedure and watched with alarm as the second pink line (positive result) appeared hard on the heels of the first (tester).

“Wayne! Get in here boy, you’ve got some explaining to do!”