closure

I need to finish this blog. Once again, an overwhelming inertia stopped me posting about this miscarriage at the time. After the last post, I had the NHS early pregnancy ultrasound the following morning. By then, I was beginning to bleed quite definitely, and therefore was in no doubt at all that the news would be bad. Imagine my annoyance to be faced, yet again, with an unreasonably cheerful and condescending ultrasound technician, who showed me a small, heartbeat-free speck in a small, collapsing sac, and managed, in the face of me bleeding on her couch and affirming my certainty about my dates, still to tell me that maybe the bleeding was trivial, maybe my dates were wrong, and maybe this was a 5 week pregnancy with a bit of insignificant blood loss rather than a 7 week one (or whatever the age was, I forget now) on its way out. Who do they think they are kidding, or reassuring, with this blind optimism in the face of reality? I really don't understand.
Anyway, I got a picture of the embryo to remember it by (in an incongrously cheerful folder with a duckling on the front) and had another conversation with the same very nice midwife as last year, who agreed that since I'd had a natural miscarriage successfully last time, it was reasonable for me to try the same approach again,and contact them if I had problems.
So I went home, and went to work that afternoon, and sure enough that very evening I began to have cramps, and had the most low-key, stress-free, natural miscarriage imaginable, all over by about 1.30 am. Really, in comparison to last year's, it was nothing; hardly more blood than a normal period, a small, recognisable gestation sac easily passed, a few cramps, and that was it.
Emotionally, it's been much, much easier than last year, too. I haven't seriously considered trying a third time. This is partly because I don't see why I should put myself through all this again; I have two children, the odds of a successful pregnancy aren't improving, and at 42 with two healthy children, I don't think it's appropriate to investigate or keep trying as I would if I were younger or had no children already. Also, as I get older, I realise I don't exactly want another baby any more: I want a third child. What I really want is to have had another child five or six years ago, when I was still comfortably on the other (I won't say "right") side of forty. And I didn't, and nothing I can ever do will change that.
And I'm in a different place now, slightly; my older daughter is a teenager now, and it's time I moved on. I want to write more on the other blog again, but for now I just want to close this one. I think it will be years before I completely stamp on the "what-if"s, especially when I know I'm ovulating and am passing up another of the few remaining chances to conceive. But the horse is dead, or nearly: it's just not on to flog it any more.