Internet? Meet Emily.

When I was doing my book tour last year, one of the interviews I did was with the breakfast team at Triple M in Brisbane. That’s where I met Emily Jade O’Keefe. She told me she’d read my book, hangs out often on Mamamia and had a blog of her own. Recently, she got in contact again and in the course of our chats, I decided she had a story well worth sharing. Poignant, sad and often hilarious, I thought it might be interesting to share the very big journey she’s on at the moment, one that will no doubt resonate with many of us and even if it doesn’t, is a cracker read.

Born into a family of Breeders, the eldest of 5 siblings, and one of 17 cousins, she looked forward to starting a family when she married her younger handsome husband Gerard, who also boasted a big family being one of four siblings and over 30 cousins. So it came as a bit of a surprise to the both of them when 12 months ago they decided to fall pregnant and found they just couldn’t.

Proving that while you can have a great job, great husband, great friends, family and life…you can’t always have it all.

Instead of keeping her infertility to herself, she started to open up about her struggle for a baby on the air and through her writing. At first many friends, family and listeners told her she probably should not share her journey, infertility being a touchy and private subject but she decided to continue to tell her story as she found many many more women just like her in the midst of a secret devastating struggle. It is with this in mind that we’ve decided to include Emily’s journey on Mamamia.

Positive that this will be a happy ending, she will continue to share her baby making tactics and stories until the stork finally arrives..

And yes…she has tried having sex, just in case you were wondering.

Emily writes…..

PART ONE

“I want a baby..

At first my Husband Gerard and I were in limbo about ‘when’ to start trying for a baby. Married for a year, we knew the time was rapidly approaching, but we were making those last minute excuses, simply because we were scared to death. What about the mortgage?, What about my career?, What about our fabulous ‘dink’ life. But twelve months ago one momentous day changed all that for me.

That day my friend Renae called me, and during that conversation I had myself a big fat dose of foot in mouth.  And it didn’t happen once, it happened twice.

I’m sitting in a cafe meeting one of our other friend’s new girlfriends when she called.  It was a ‘show and tell’ coffee catch up. Much like when a cat catches a mouse and proudly presents it at your feet with a loud meow to say ‘look how clever I am, I caught this myself, for you!… OK not really for you, for I am a cat and I don’t really care about you, but here it is anyway, isn’t it lovely and dead and I am just  so clever’…

Caller recognition reveals that it is our friend Renae calling and I hand him the phone thinking how funny it would be for her to assume she is calling me and he answers the phone… I know, it’s a ‘you had to be there’ kind of hilarity, but he answers and indeed she does find it funny…

Not so much because he answered but because she is in labour and calling me to call off our afternoon catch-up.

Being a man he freaks the hell out and footy passes the phone into my hands with a ‘Jesus she’s having a baby, you better deal with this’’, their funny phone conversation lasting 2.5 seconds and he’s broken into a ‘what should we do sweat’ and he’s not even in the same suburb.

Renae tells me her exciting news in between big laborious breaths, and foot in mouth episode number one explodes out of my mouth.

“Wait there, I want to come over and look at you, I’ve never seen anyone in labour!”

I hang up, tell my mates new girlfriend she is beautiful and nice and thanks for making my friend so happy and run from the coffee shop when I realise, I’ve just treated my labouring friend like she is an exhibit in the zoo…. I play my last words over in my head… I want to come and LOOK AT YOU!!  What the hell kind of dumb thing was that to say to a friend in the worse pain of her life? She’s not a farm animal for Gods sake.

Hoping she will forgive me, I drive the longest drive of my life, getting every single damn red light praying she will still be at home so I can ‘look at her’’  labouring away.  I have visions of me being all Florence Nightingale wiping her brow with a cool damp cloth calmly telling her to push.

I arrive and bound up her stairs and burst through the door with a ‘this is SOOOO exciting’’  and find her calmly sitting on a chair looking like she has just walked out of a salon,  her 2 year old running around laughing, her partner making lunch and her mother reading a magazine.

WHAT!

THIS was not the spectacle I had eagerly anticipated. I wanted movie scene stuff, her all sweaty and grunting and people demanding she push NOW and her screaming and yelling at her partner “YOU DID THIS TO ME!”

Instead she is having a cup of tea and laughs and invites me over to ‘look at her”. I know I am forgiven for the zoo animal comparison and she cements my best friend status when she asks me to stay to pass the time.

Now I am really out of my skin. Do you know how much of an honour that is? Slightly petrified I sit next to her and we chat as she has the occasional contraction.

In the hours afterwards I realised how odd it was to be sitting with her, talking about such trivial things, like the last episode of Desperate Housewives, and our friends new girlfriend, and work this week when THE MOST AMAZING THING EVER IS HAPPENING BEFORE MY VERY EYES!

As the hours pass she is in more and more pain, and I feel totally useless, but my Florence Nightingale aspirations kick in. I am helping to mop her neck and brow and rub her back and offer up words of encouragement when it becomes evident that my movie moment is about to occur, her partner and mum agree ‘it’s time!”

She has to get to the hospital.

So we walk her to the car and I give her a big hug and foot in mouth mark two blurts out.

“Have Fun’’ I say……

Yep, those were the exact words my mouth decided to say.

HAVE FUN.

Pretty sure she must have been delirious as she laughed out loud .

In fact we all laugh, her partner, her mum and me.

So I correct myself and say ‘have a good baby’

And they laugh again and off they zoom.

‘GOOD LUCK”…. THAT was what I was trying to say…

So I yell it at the disappearing car, when the weirdest feeling came over me, suddenly I felt jealous.

I want a baby.

I haven’t heard that inner clock, I don’t pick up a baby and start to cluck, I listen to my friends who tell me having a baby is like getting a perm, you have to be really really sure, and even then you might walk out disappointed wishing you had given it a little more thought and can’t wait for it to grow out.

But it took 2 hours off seeing my friend in incredible labour pain to finally be hit on the head by the cabbage carrying stork for it to dawn on me that.

I’M READY FOR A BABY.

Emily Jade O’Keefe is the female voice in The Cage Breakfast team in Brisbane on 104.5 Triple M. She also freelances for Channel 9 on Kerri-Anne, writes for the Courier Mail and on the weekends moonlights as a Marriage Celebrant.