30s TTC - Our BESH GussetWatch Ever, With Guest Star Joe Mangel!

[Scorpette]

Come on in, you raddled old caaaaahs, whotchoo waitin' for?

I've gone for a groovy 60s psychedelic theme, so get your fat upper arms comfy in the hanging globe chairs and hide your mememe shame in the glow of the lava lamps!

Russell Howard is our new bartender, although I don't think he's happy at the flares 'n' kipper tie outfit I've forced him to wear. And of course, Mitchell is in the pit, nervously awaiting his first guest.

Let's make this one diffalicious!

Maswera, how dare you be correct!

I am bored and miserable and all 'where's my baybeeeeeeeeeeeee?' so not much fun. The last few months, the only time I've felt remotely cheerful and normal has been the week after Ov 'n' SWI, ie whilst I can convince myself I've won, so now I can't have that this month (this is that specific week), I'm really struggling Thankfully, a certain Pooey-smelling BESH has cheered me right up with phone loveliness and I be here. With nowt else to say except poor me, well done LaurieBro and fingers crossed for Lorry. May you be full of a truckload (see what I did there? ) of baybees

Poor Scorps. Is it like Barber's Adagio for Strings type dolefulness? Because that is crap indeed.

Cat is wailing for food. Husband is away again for three days in France - how very dare he? - and she's missing him, and being a real bitch to me to try and make me feel bad. For what? I feed her. I take her to the vets and pay exorbitant fees for injections she doesn't even appreciate. I clean out her shitty tray. I apply lotion to her neck when she has fleas. I comb her fur. I even take her 200 miles to stay with my mother rather than put her in a cattery thus avoiding all the accompanying trauma. Yet you'd think it was her house and I was a mere squatter. Bloody cats.

Well, at least you're getting in expert training for mothering a toddler (hopefully minus the fleas and cattery)

Scropulous you're back!

Come on then who will join me in a round of flaming sambucas? And some dark choc raspberry tart... nom nom nom.

Fucking great. In addition to baybee-madness, I have just had an explosive weep on the bus owing to overwhelming desire to join the profession which I sort-of but totally-don't work in (shan't out myself but it's a bit like being a senior hospital administrator but passionately wanting to be a surgeon).

I mean. Complete identity crisis. Full epistemological unease. Fucking wretched thing is that I'm still young enough to change careers and I'd be fucking good at it but I don't have fucking £25k on me just now for fucking qualifying and also my fucking womb is fucking ticking.

OH GOD THERE IS NO SOLUTION.

As you were.

Hello everyone!

Oh HB I feel your pain. Come here pet and have a snuggle. I am desperate to retrain - I need 15K to do an acupuncture course. That is out of the question at the mo, I'd have trouble scraping 15 quid together! Or I want to start my own business. Either way, both are on hold for a while now. I am just desperate not to go back to accountancy - unfortunately it pays well and TG is desperate not to work too hard be the traditional 'breadwinner' so as soon as he feels it is time, he will be shoving me out the door.

TG has written a book, he is currently doing a second draft. He has notions of being a fully paid up writer and combining that with stay-at-home-dadness. Which means shoving me out to work. Me no likey that plan either.

Am intrigued HB, what kind of re-training is it you want to do? Tell me in t'other place if you prefer. You will not die unfulfilled and embittered. You will die a very old and slightly eccentric lady, surrounded by your grown-up children and grandkids. Now shuddup! You are still v young (much younger than me you caaah) and you can have children AND retrain, and still have a career. So there. We can have it all, don'tcha know? Well we'd bloody better get it, or else I want a refund.

Oh I do love baking to relieve stress. Shame our cooker is so shit, it has put me off making cakes - it cooks the outside of the cake to a blackened crisp and the inside is still runny. No, it is not my cooking, it is definitely the oven.

I'm off to uvverplace!

Oh God. I swear. If I don't bake, I lose a good stone and a half. Start baking again and it's like someone shoved a fricking bicycle pump up my jacksie and set about inflating me!

Loving the imagery edcase

Right, Headfuck, come here for a loving Chinese burn and a stamp on the foot. You are a young, clearly very intelligent and no doubt gorgeous woman and you have plenty of time. To echo Pollster, you won't die embittered and alone. You'll die like Queen Victoria, surrounded by your grandchildren - though hopefully one of them won't be a German megalomaniac dictator who starts a world war.

Here's some things, which you are welcome to read and nod wisely to, or ignore if you wish. By the time I was thirty I had a well paid career in education. I was good at it and we had a mortgage and a house in a nice town blah blah blah. But on the whole, I didn't like it. I liked some bits of it, but loathed others. OH was the same (we met when we were training). So we made plans and one summer we gave it up and took up something utterly different, which involved giving up a well paid, secure teaching job, selling the house, moving and starting up a business in somewhere new and renting again as we had used the house proceeds in the start up. People threw up their hands in horror. No house! No career! No secure pension! Now you can't have children obviously (my mum's favourite)! The amount of angst it cause amongst everyone other than ourselves was remarkable. Five years later and, to quote Nessa, I'm not gonna lie to you, it has been an immense struggle. But the business is succeeding, we've learned how to do an enormous amount of things I never thought I'd be able to do and now we're just about to embark on Round Two of the great business adventure at the same time as TTC. Neither of us has family near, which does make me worry A LOT sometimes (but I'm hoping they'll move to babysit, but not bother me in any other way!)

I'm not telling you all this to be smug, far from it. We've made some crap decisions and made some utter fuck ups. But we're still here and still making a go of it. You can do it if you want to - there are ways. And if things go tits up and you don't succeed, at least you'll have tried.

Now I just want a baybee .

Am proper LOLing (and I swear that is the first time I have ever said that in all my born dayz) at the German megalomaniac.

Aside from the gorgeousness (she said picking at her ghastly complexion) yes, I am youngish and generally thought to be fairly bright I s'pose. But not young ENOUGH I don't think...I am trapped. By rent and council tax and marriage (which is LOVELY to a LOVELY man but I can't be selfish) and responsibilities.

Also I am worried that it's only because I feel unfulfilled generally that I'm fixing on this particular career. If I'd happened to fall in with a bunch of brain surgeons I'd probably be moaning that I wanted to go into neurosurgery...but I just don't want to be one giant bag of WHAT IF.

However. All the above was dead cheering and encouraging Aries. I was nodding all along and it wasn't the least bit smug. Except I am now dying to know what your business is...

I am going to bed now, to muse on these things and one ro two other things as well.

And think about the fact that if I knew someone who jacked in Career A to re-train for Career B and then neared the end of training for Career B and thought mistily about re-training for Career C, I would fetch them a slap, then urge them to at least try Career B for a bit before jacking it in for Career C, especially as judging by all the foregoing evidence it would seem likely they'd barely begin Career C before Googling the training pathway for Career D.

And if you followed that, you're a better man than I am. True dat.

HB I will have to message you. How does one do that?

Right then! I win the crappy-job-situation-and-where-the-fuck-is-my-baby competition hands down: am 37 and have had less than one year of a 'proper job' in my entire adult life, due to ill health (and that job was being a proofreader and copywriter, so hardly Chairman of ICI stuff). Yah, I have my top BA (Hons, dahlink, Hons) and MA, but they've not helped me one jot. And I've been promised PhD funding for the past FOUR bastard years without getting a single penny and therefore being able to start the course. My topic will be vastly outdated by the time I get cash - if I ever do.

Add to my shit health and non-existent career (I do a lowly pt job working for my friend) and CV that screams 'Alert! Unreliable Hypochondriac of child-bearing age! Avoid! Avoid!' my laziness, procrastination and towering levels of Jack of All Trades-ness and you have a bottomless pit of self-loathing, feeling worthless and like a total failure, negativity, fear for the future and despair. I cry several times every week at how useless I am and how I've spent at least 12 years daydreaming about what I want to do and never getting any-fucking-where due to trying really half-heartedly and giving up or not even trying or actually properly trying and failing cos of health issues (I was given a massive and prestigious dance bursary from a top modern dance agency which I had to give up and repay cos of ill health fucking it all up, for example. As I'm sure I've whined before, I had the ability to be a proper serious dancer but not the health, and it's something that torments me daily that I never got to do it fully. And no longer have a dancer's body - unless you count The Roly-Polys ). I have squandered more potential in just over a decade than many people have to use in a lifetime (not meant to be as egotistical as it sounds).

And the one thing I've always wanted to do, more than anything, is be a Mum. I actually superstitiously think I want it so much that I'm making it impossible somehow (so speaks the Militant Atheist!).

And I've had wicked Writer's Block for over a year so my amazing, award-winning, genre-busting novel is not exactly coming along a-pace...

Have I cheered you all up yet? MEMEMEBOOHOOHOO!

Head, you come across as the sort of gel ('ghell') who could do anything she put her heart to. And have you also considered the fact that making a massive upheaval to change your career will automatically insure a win on the grounds of it being the one time it's really inconvenient?

Poosticles You would be a superb Needles lady. I can totally see you, TG, Boo and Boo Two living in Cornwall, you with your little treatment room with a view of the sea and a little path leading to it lined with seashells. I hope you make it real somehow sooooooooooooooooo bad. Get him to get novel published ASAP and make it happen with the royalties.

Me, I just wanna be a Mum and a successful writer. Please to accept all violence to knock the self-pity out of me!

PS Am seeing Needles Lady tomorrow, as she had a consultation. I shall ask her to pay special attention to my 'self-indulgent twat' meridian [shame]

Erm, clearly my Writer's Block does not extend to whining about myself...

Just to add this in quickly: I embarked on chiro skool when DS1 was 4 months old. Am now midway thru year 2 of 5 and as you know, have been ttc no.2 for, well, flipping ages now. So retraining and baybees can indeed be done. Takes a bit more discipline, tis all.

More later.

Morning all,

Sorry you're all having career crisis etc. No words of wisdom here having been made redundant twice & currently hanging onto this civil service job & for the first time in my life being actually interested in the election!

Thanks for lauriebro good wishes. I had to drop him off this morning. Talk about Mother Hen!! Jeez, I still have butterflies & won't be happy til I speak to him, hopefully later today. He's 35 FFS!!!

Anyhoo, CD30 & gusset watch has reached fever pitch. Have wiped myself dry constantly checking. I've also decided that my 2 spots are an obvious sign of diff. A male colleague said he knew another colleague was updiffed before she announced it as her usual clear skin became spotty. So at the very least my spotty skin + donut belly = office gossip that I'm diffed.

Aries, chicken, try me here: beshlet at hotmail dot com. Ooo, funz!

Scorpie my love, that made me all clenched and sad for you. Even THIS sad . There, I was driven to emoticon use. I refuse to believe that things are as hopeless as all that, and I am thoroughly chastened, because whatever dissatisfactions I have are owing to being lazy and lacking foresight and planning (or the ability to stick to one thing longer than four years). Having everything royally shafted bceause of ill health must be bitterly disappointing to say the very least.

Ill health no bar to successful writing career though - just ask my favourite writer (Orwell darling, take a bow).

Frantic at work - wish I could write more. Woke this morning feeling slightly foolish as to the Existential Crisis. The OM has wisely pointed out that it all arises from a need for status and success, and that might still come from my current path, if I bide my time a year longer. He's suggested that if a year hence I feel much the same, then we should talk seriously.

It's just. I keep thinking that if I change path now by 40 I could be a fairly established ! ARGH!

Anyway. Self-indulgence over. I am going to day-dream about having some treatment at Poo's clinic...

Come and Frolic awhile, GirlInTheMoshpit. They're usually all so happy and positive they're bound to cheer you up. Having said that, some of them are going through some times at the moment e.g. hitting the 12 month mark, crap GP-angst etc etc.

Not trying to poach her, honest. Can you be on two threads equally without being considered some dirty turncoat traitor spy? Don't make me choose!

aries as you may or may not remember I happily frolicked without being chastened. You're right, it is a haven of happy thoughts with (IIRC) not too much honey-schweetums-baybee dusting. Some lovelies there who I miss a bit. Must pop over.

Just been catching up on all your woes and feel for all who feel unfilled professionally. Wish I could help. Please to be taking this huge box of doughnuts and a crate of gin for your elevenses (or tenses, or nine-thirtieseses)

Hurrah for lorrybro and bosom-snuggles for lurkycho who I hope can can return with good news.

hair tugs and toe stamps all round.

Scorps you mean the world to all of us, you are not useless, I'm sure I'm not the only one who has no doubt at all that your milieu will make itself known at the most surprising, least expected moment. And probably coinciding with a diff, cos life is never straightforward.

(And although I'm working, I still get the feeling I'm wasting my life in accountancy and have missed the boat too, if that helps. Though I've never been much good at anything specific so I have nowhere to leapt to).

Champagne and American Pancakes all round. I feel the need this morning.

Bangers, I just emailed you. And the address you gave me doesn't work. It was such a lovely email too

BUMBOLLOCKS! Hang on let me look again...