I want...

Yesterday I paid for drugs.

Lots of drugs, actually, worth over £700.00 in total.

This fact leaves me feeling all sorts of emotions at the same time. So many that I am not sure I can articulate them coherently, but I feel I should try.

In 14 days our home will, once again, be filled with needles and alcohol wipes and my abdomen will again become filled with tiny holes. Holes through which I will inject the necessary hormones for trying to conceive via IVF.

Spouse and I have travelled this road together before. After "forever" of trying naturally, we started in October 2016. By December we learned that we'd not been lucky.

Of the eleven eggs removed; four fertilised. Two perfect embryos were implanted - and two perished before they could be frozen. The two that were implanted didn't "stick" and so the seven pregnancy tests I took that fateful day all came back negative.

No one knows why our embryos didn't "stick". I wrote cryptically about my reaction here and, to this day, the box has not been opened.

But it's not such a large box that I am unwilling to perhaps create another.

I adore my daughter; she's one of the most amazing people I've ever met, hands down, but I want a baby. I want a child with Spouse. I want to see his little face on a tiny human that he and I made together. I want to help raise amazing people who will change the world. I want to once again see my heart outside my body. I want...

I want.

The decision was fundamentally down to two things: me and finances. Spouse has been amazing throughout all of this. He cannot bear to do the injections or even watch me do them myself (I have no problem with them, thankfully), but whatever I have said, done, wanted or needed, he has been there, done that - no questions (other than the occasional checking in to make sure I'm not holding something back - I do have a tendency to do that).

As an aside, when this works and our child/ren ask where babies come from, we're going to tell them: When two people love each other very much.... Mummy becomes a pin cushion!

Or maybe not. But the chance to have to make that decision is a chance I cannot pass up.

So, I will be drugged and we will hope for "sticky" babies this time and I will be grateful that this option is available to us for we have tried and I am ageing and I want...

I want.

I now have another box.

Traditionally, I am ever the optimist. I am easily led from sadness or melancholy and straight back into, if not happiness, then comfort, certainly.

I have finally built a life around me that means I can be this way. I can be happy. I am happy.

I have found a system that works for me when it comes to Bad Things in my life. When they arise, as they always will; it's Life, after all - I simply deal with the emotions and thoughts straight away then move on. I do not have enough time on this earth to be dealing with negative thoughts or emotions any longer than absolutely necessary. I have too much good I want to do. There is too much fun to be had.

But, as with everyone, there are things in my past, things in my history which are not happy. Memories, thoughts, feelings, events, circumstances that I cannot move past.

I put these things into Boxes. Boxes in my mind that store the things with which I don't want to deal, the things with which I am, to varying degrees, frightened would break me.

Some of the boxes are doodle-covered cardboard, covered in dust, simply taped shut. Eventually, I think, I might open them and see what comes out. Thankfully, I don't have many of these boxes.

Some of the boxes are solid metal chests with locks of the kind Houdini couldn't even open. I have two of these boxes and I hope I've lost the keys.

Sadly, a new box was installed yesterday.

I don't yet know what it looks like as I keep wilfully ignoring its presence, hoping it will go away.

I know what the box contains, I can hear it whisper to me in the quiet moments, taunting me - the Thing inside still so new that it hasn't yet learned its place, its fate inside that box.

But I don't want to know. Not now. I might not ever.

There's a Thing inside a new Box and it's calling to me and I refuse to look for the key.