‘MAYBE
BABY?’I hear it sometimes when I lie in bed awake at night - the tick-tock of my biological clock taking its last courageous beats of fertility, before slipping into the menopausal abyss of a paper-dry vagina and brittle bones. I look at the man sleeping beside me, achingly handsome, with a perfect bone structure and bank balance, and I think I’d like to do the baby thing with him. Before it’s too late.
Perhaps it’s because I’m turning thirty-five later this year, the age when you’re savagely thrust into the next category of tick boxes on many questionnaires, a dreaded 35 - 44. Before you’d be grouped with people in their twenties and it seems acceptable to hold onto the pitiful delusion that its still okay to buy things from Top Shop. But not now. I feel like I’m hurtling into middle age and if I don’t have another baby soon I’ll be past it. At the moment, I’m described by my youngest son as: “the coolest mum in the school” and my God, doesn’t that statement just make my shallow little cup over-flow with delight!
I had my sons when I was 23 and 25, so I suppose I’m younger than most of the other suburban mums and I’m sure I was the only one wearing five-inch Gucci heels at the summer fête. I don’t want to be the only mother wearing support pop socks and incontinence knickers for the potential new child in 20 years time.
Maybe, I simply want to prove to myself that being HIV positive isn’t a barrier to doing anything I fancy. I realise that the risk of transmission to a baby can be less than one per cent as I have an undetectable viral load, and quite frankly fancy myself as ‘too posh to push’, so I’d want a Caesarean anyway.
However, I’d be lying if I said that my positive status doesn’t impact on my decision to have more children. Less than one per cent chance of transmission isn’t the same as absolutely no chance of transmission and let’s face it, I don’t have the best track record in statistical luck. (What would be the percentage chance of a female suburbanite, with a penchant for condoms, becoming HIV positive?)
Then there’s the efavirenz thing. Of course I’m on it, as it’s the drug de jour. Apart from the odd, weird dream - like having sex with Saddam Hussein (which bizarrely wasn’t half bad) and getting the new once-a-day larger pill stuck in my throat one night (luckily my partner wasn’t asleep then) - I’m doing just fine on it.
If I do decide to have a baby, I realise I’ll have to change my combination as you can’t get pregnant on it (in the freaky side effect way, not ‘can’t get pregnant’ miracle contraception way).
Conception wouldn’t quite be the romantic night of passion either, as my partner is negative and I don’t want to risk infecting him. While the Beckhams called their baby Paris, as he was conceived there, we’d have to call our child ‘Syringe’ as daddy had to wank into a container, then squirt his semen into mummy via a syringe, so as not to catch the nastiest sexually-transmitted disease. I can just imagine our child sharing that story in the classroom, when it’s their turn to explain how they got their name.
I suppose there’s also the D-word. Talking about dying seems to be the
most shocking taboo in our sanitised easy-access-to-HAART British HIV world.
I know I’m meant to feel lucky, that living in the small section of the
world with ready access to antiretrovirals provides a very different experience
to the majority of the world where 7,000 people a day die from Aids. But sometimes
I can’t help worrying about whether my liver is being pickled by my medication,
whether I’m going to flitter through my drug options while developing
more drug-resistant mutations, whether I’m just one of the unlucky ones
who simply don’t make it into the long term. Do I really want to have
another child now and perhaps not be around to see it grow into an adult?
To be honest, I simply can’t make up my mind. Despite the potential HIV-related horrors, fear of diabolical maternity fashions, my breasts heading even further south into truly pendulous udders, stretch marks, sleepless nights, a non-existent social life - a weird mumsy part of me yearns to have another baby.
Has anyone got a spare syringe knocking about?
