The Waiting Room
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday April 19, 2014

Here I am, installed in a leather armchair, having an earnest exchange with a man who knows all my womanly secrets.

I must have sat in his office forty times in the past fifteen years, so familiar is the antique desk, the leadlight window throwing sunlit patterns on the wall. Behind him hangs a haunting Robert Dickerson portrait – a girl with an aquiline face and brooding almond-shaped eyes.

Without turning my head, I know the brightly-lit alcove over my right shoulder contains a waist-high bench topped with a hard mattress and a blue-and-white striped seersucker sheet.

I am sitting in the office of my obstetrician. Except on this occasion, I realise, I can no longer call him my obstetrician, because I’m sadly finished with the fraught business of making babies. Now, he becomes my gynaecologist, a word for making women squirm.

I’m here to remedy a low iron count: a pedestrian complaint for someone who associates this room with both euphoria and dread. On three occasions, it was in this chair I drank in the words I’d waited months, years, to hear: “You’re pregnant!”

On four other occasions, he patted my arm and gently dismantled all hope. “Chin up,” he said as my world collapsed, “we’ll try again soon.”

But today, I feel none of the desperate longing I associate with this room. Instead, I feel strangely bereft, my tummy lifeless and empty. I’m used to seeing the corridor filled with big-bellied women reading New Ideas and stretching restless legs.

Now I am done. No more breathless anticipation, no more lingering over doll-sized clothes in baby shops, or poring over name books, secretly scoffing at my husband’s suggestions. I find myself pining for the see-sawing emotions that ruled my decade of unpredictable fecundity.

I think of those women whose babies never came, who never had an obstetrician. Those women whose dreams of motherhood would slip away, month by month, in the waiting rooms of fertility clinics.

I served my time there too – running late for work, waiting impatiently to be pumped full of drugs that made me moody and morose. I dreaded those appointments – we desperates all lumped in together. “Take a number” the receptionist would say. “The nurse will come and get you in a minute.” I’d stare at the plastic card in my lap, my ticket in this baby-making lottery, and beg the universe to please, make me the one to get pregnant this time. And then I’d feel guilty, because wishing for success might heap bad luck on someone else. We all knew the statistics.

My girlfriends still tease me about my odd affection for the doctor who nurtured me through three pregnancies. The man who, thirteen years ago, laughed at my disbelief as he held up my newborn son and declared: “He’s all yours.”

He’s the same man who made a habit of gripping my hand as I was wheeled into theatre, when fate chose, yet again, to sabotage another new life. I feared I might never trust my body again.  

Now, the obsession with babies is over at last. I am grateful mother to two sturdy boys and a chatterbox in a rainbow dress. I see pregnant women at the shops and feel a mixture of admiration and relief. But when I hear the bleating distress of a newborn I stiffen, my jaw tightens. I am still overwhelmed by the desire to comfort, to quieten the cries that grate on my primal brain.

My girlfriends and I slide through our forties and begin to wonder what’s in store for our bodies? Bits of us no longer in use become troublesome – there are worrying tests, trips to day surgery, procedures needed to keep wayward organs in check. Or worse – removed altogether. Already, two close pals have struggled through a dreaded hysterectomy. I despair for what menopause holds – I’m in mourning for my former riper self.

I’m jolted back to the present as my gynaecologist suggests a course of iron injections. I nod enthusiastically. I’m thankful the tests showed up nothing sinister to explain my unnatural tiredness. “I warn you,” he says. “Those jabs can really hurt.”

I laugh and wonder how many other women have been transformed by their journeys through this office. “I think I’ll live,” I reassure him.