I’m childless and lonely. I feel moving would help, but my husband isn’t keen

I’m coming to terms with a life that I wasn’t expecting after 20 years of marriage and am struggling to find a route to a new life. My wish is to live by the coast, about 70 miles from our current home.

My husband and I have come through infertility and eight rounds of IVF without children (adoptions and alternatives have been explored). He is nearly 20 years older than me; I am in my mid-40s, and scared of the menopause robbing me of more of my identity. I don’t necessarily consider myself to be over our loss, but I try to be accepting. Yet it has changed our lives in an unbalanced way. He says that children would have been a bonus, which does relieve the pressure but makes me feel lonely in my recovery. To me, it meant more: the validation of being female, and a space in my heart is missing.

I feel that I’m living a life haunted by what might have been. Our house, bought before we started treatment, has many bedrooms, and my job doesn’t have any career prospects although it is in a field I enjoy. I know that it is time to move on and I could work freelance. My husband thinks that I should stay for the security and the benefits, and his worries are contagious, but I don’t know to whom I would leave my worldly goods if I should die after him.

I yearn for peace and quiet, having also been diagnosed with mild autism. When we go on holiday with our dogs, I find the peaceful places so much better for my state of mind. Walking on beaches is accessible and a rare pleasure for me. I struggle at home in mud and frost.

My husband wishes to stay where we are: he enjoys the city, has friends here and goes to sporting events every weekend. I feel resentful often. While my husband has said he will move, it is said grudgingly. I think life is too short and wish I could make him see that we do have more choices than for me to sit at home on antidepressants.

Yet each time we go away, I ruin the holiday with panic attacks about going home to a life in which I feel lost.

I’m sorry about your failed rounds of IVF: in your longer letter, you called it a trauma but you reduced all of it, pretty much, to a single sentence. Yet its impact, not surprisingly, colours the whole of your letter. The other thing that permeated your letter was identity; you talk of it a few times, once directly. I wonder if you feel that, without the children you planned to have, you don’t know who are.

Barbara Levick, a psychoanalytic psychotherapist (bpc.org.uk), feels that you have had “repeated disappointments” and that “perhaps [not surprisingly], you have real difficulty overcoming the loss. How important is the lack of children to you? It seems a major disappointment, but the catastrophic nature of it is not shared by your husband.”

Or perhaps it is, but there didn’t seem to be a sense of you both having really talked about how you feel. Certainly, I felt you hadn’t told your husband about how you feel. I got the impression of two people, living together in this big house, but locked away in their own worlds.

I kept feeling there were little screams of, “What about me, what about me?” all through your letter. What about you? When do you get to do what you want, say how you really feel? I’m a big fan of good therapy, and I would urge you to hunt some out just for yourself (start with your GP). You need a place where you can talk about how you really feel, and discuss what you really want. “People who are mildly autistic,” says Levick, “can really benefit from some one-to-one work.”

Levick also has the feeling that you have difficulty getting what you want, and wonder why that might be. “I think you need to get yourself doing more of what you like,” she says.

Even without what you have been through, what you want doesn’t seem so very much – a move 70 miles away, to live by the sea, to be able to take good walks. You are not asking for something impossible.

Levick explains that sometimes we don’t do things because guilt or fear hold us back in unconscious ways. I would add that we make excuses for what we can’t do and then we can become so used to those excuses that we start to believe them. Levick feels you are “stuck in concrete”.

I wonder if you could rent a little property by the sea? I wonder how close you could come to making things more into what you need/want? And instead of coming up with reasons why not, think “how could I make this happen?”

Your panic attacks are interesting – talking very generally (and not specifically about you), Levick says that “panic attacks are about [suppressed] aggression. We all have to manage our aggression somehow and it’s a positive thing, it keeps us going. But some children growing up maybe aren’t allowed to express their aggression and then, later, if there are circumstances where the person feels very, very angry that can come out as a panic attack.”

I wonder if any of that resonates with you?

Your problems solved

Contact Annalisa Barbieri, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU, or email annalisa.barbieri@mac.com. Annalisa regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence.

Follow Annalisa on Twitter @AnnalisaB

I’m childless and lonely. I feel moving would help, but my husband isn’t keen

MP Vicky Foxcroft gives moving speech about losing her baby

A heartbreaking speech by a Labour MP moved several members of the House of Commons to tears during a debate on stillbirths, as Vicky Foxcroft described being pregnant at 16 and losing her baby after just five days.

The Lewisham and Deptford MP said the speech was the hardest she had ever had to give, saying she had felt as a frightened teenager that she was “treated like a kid, not a grieving mum”.

Her baby, Veronica, died after the umbilical cord became wrapped around her neck during labour, starving her of oxygen. She died five days later after Foxcroft and her then partner decided to switch off life support.

“I don’t have children now because I’ve lived with the fear of the same thing happening and I couldn’t do it twice,” Foxcroft said.

She had never spoken publicly about her loss before, she said. “The absolute truth is I struggle to talk to my family and my very close friends about it,” she said, describing her daughter as “my little angel”.

“I also want to apologise to my many friends who I haven’t told. It’s not because I don’t want you to know or I am embarrassed, it’s just because I find it so very hard to do so.”

Visibly shaking and close to tears, Foxcroft said she was treated like she should be pleased not to be a teenage mother. “As a young woman, going through this, I felt like most people looked at me as if I should be grateful, but I wasn’t and I’m not,” she said.

“I was her mum and I also hoped one day I would be her best friend. If she was alive today, she would be 23 years old. The pain does get easier to deal with, but it never goes away.

“I hope one day nobody else has to go through this. I want my message to be heard by young women, in my constituency and across the country, just to say you are not alone.”

Describing the moment she decided to turn off her daughter’s life support machine, Foxcroft said: “She was never able to cry, to smile, but I loved her and desperately wanted her. I got to hold her then for the first time until her heart eventually stopped … I never wanted to let her go.”

Sitting down, Foxcroft was comforted by fellow Labour MP Gloria De Piero, who had tears in her eyes.

The Conservative MP Sir Nicholas Soames, who was next to speak, wiped his eyes as he praised Foxcroft.

He said: “I hope that the whole house will read the honourable lady’s speech and will feel that she has done something incredibly brave today and courageous, and to my honourable friends who have proposed this debate, nothing but the greatest respect is due.

“And to my honourable friend who first talked about this with such courage and straightforwardness, all our thoughts are with her and all the other parents who have suffered these terrible losses.”

The debate was brought by the Conservative MPs Antoinette Sandbach and Will Quince, who both also spoke about losing children.

In his speech, Quince praised Foxcroft, saying MPs were “breaking a silence, breaking a taboo, telling parents up and down the country that it is OK to talk about the babies and children we have lost. In the mother of all parliaments, there is no subject we won’t talk about”.

MP Vicky Foxcroft gives moving speech about losing her baby

France moving to ban e-cigarette from public spots, says report

As well as a ban affecting e-cigarettes, France may possibly comply with Australia’s illustration by ordering plain packaging for on tobacco merchandise, says the French newspaper. Photograph: Tim Ireland/PA

France is getting ready to location e-cigarettes on the exact same legal footing as tobacco smoking with draft legislation that aims to ban their use in public locations.

The wellness minister, Marisol Touraine, intends to table a bill on 17 June bringing in anti-smoking measures, Le Figaro reported on Friday.

Not only would France become the first massive European nation to introduce the ban affecting e-cigarettes, but it would also stick to Australia’s example by ordering plain packaging for tobacco goods that display graphic pictures of diseases brought on by smoking.

The proposed bill is more prohibitive than anti-smoking measures adopted by the European parliament in February. It comes at a time when e-cigarette merchants have been springing up across France, which now has nearly one million consumers.

The president of the French Tobacconists’ Confederation, Pascal Montredon, told the Guardian that Touraine was being unrealistic by modelling her reforms on “Anglo-saxon” countries such as Australia and Britain exactly where the cigarette distribution network is fully various from France.

“Tobacconists are fed up with becoming stigmatised at a time when instead the government must be undertaking one thing about the unemployment rate,” he stated. The confederation is pressing for e-cigarettes to be offered solely in tobacconist stores, but the proposed legislation fails to handle this, he explained.

He also explained the government needed to deliver in measures to curb the parallel cigarette market which accounts for 25% of income in France.

Other critics said that studies had proven that smokers are much more influenced by loved ones and buddies in taking up smoking and that extremely number of are influenced by packaging.

Touraine’s workplace did not verify the report in Le Figaro, which was published on the eve of “globe no tobacco day”. But the ministry stated that a “nationwide smoking reduction prepare” was below consideration.

A total 73,000 French smokers die each 12 months from tobacco-relevant cancers.

France moving to ban e-cigarette from public spots, says report

BringJoshHome: father"s moving campaign to support autistic son

Josh is just one particular of much more than two,600 people with understanding and behavioural problems caught in institutions which are both too far from house or not appropriate for their needs.

Anger above the predicament in which he and so a lot of other households locate themselves since of this broken guarantee led Josh’s father to campaign for enhancements to the amenities supplied not just to his own son but to others. These have come to be identified as Winterbourne See instances, after the scandal at the care home, near Bristol, the place residents have been subjected to abuse by personnel.

As portion of that campaign Mr Wills has developed a brief, however heartbreaking movie exhibiting his son’s decline from pleased-go fortunate youngster to a deeply traumatised teenager susceptible to bouts of terrible self-harm, a decline his family blame in component on the stress of being away from residence for so extended.

Mr Wills and his former wife Sarah have no complaint about the good quality of care Josh is obtaining in Birmingham, at a expert children and youthful people’s unit he prefers not to name. Their argument is that he should be treated far closer to residence, exactly where they could pay a visit to him on a more regular, ideally day-to-day, basis and the place he would not have to endure to repeated stress and nervousness of saying goodbye for a week at a time.

BringJoshHome: father"s moving campaign to support autistic son

Thalidomide: The Fifty Yr Battle, BBC Two, evaluation: "engrossing and moving"

Because the late Fifties and early Sixties, individuals who suffered extreme birth defects since their pregnant mothers took the Thalidomide drug for morning sickness have been followed by movie crews and newspaper journalists. The documentary Thalidomide: the Fifty Yr Battle (BBC Two) caught up with some of the 468 British survivors five decades on.

Some were only somewhat affected, other individuals were born with no arms and no legs. Archive footage showed a youthful boy inching painfully out of a toy auto with no limbs for support, and a teenager struggling to stability on his makeshift prosthetic legs, offering a fresh shock to their suffering. Nonetheless, the eloquence with which the Thalidomiders (as these affected now contact themselves) described their struggles was uplifting, and it was touching to see the clever adaptations – such as specially created cars – that have made their lives a tiny more comfy in excess of the years.

It was curious, then, that the insightful interviews did not dominate. Rather than exploring how their lives have altered above the decades, and their hopes for the long term, the Thalidomiders had been often sidelined in favour of journalists who retold the story of their battle for compensation.

Alternatively of documenting a “fifty year fight”, as the title insisted, the bulk of the movie replayed the decades-old wrangling between Distillers, who distributed the drug in Britain, and David Mason, 1 of the mothers and fathers. It did so engrossingly and movingly, but it left also little time to explore the lives of individuals impacted more than the final 25 many years.

In reality, the freshest element of the “fight” was only mentioned at the extremely finish. The survivors’ ongoing attempts to extract compensation from the German makers, Grunenthal (which has apologised but denies it could have identified about the drug’s side-results) could have made a riveting programme in itself but was alternatively neglected until finally the ultimate 3 minutes, as a postscript to a new edition of a historical past that could have been written decades ago. For a documentary that celebrated the position of campaigning journalism in holding Distillers to account, this was an odd determination.

TIMELINE: It has taken half a century for the victims to obtain an apology from Thalidomide’s inventors

This was an elegant summary of “one of the dirtiest pieces of litigation”, but it failed to recognise that the most remarkable “fights” are the triumphs and struggles of the Thalidomiders’ day-to-day lives, not the manoeuvrings of a courtroom.

Read: ‘IS THIS THE FORGOTTEN THALIDOMIDE?’

Thalidomide: The Fifty Yr Battle, BBC Two, evaluation: "engrossing and moving"

Black Rainbow review poetry in a moving account of depression

Poetry became a lifeline for Rachel Kelly in the depths of her depression. Scene in an Interior, 19th century, by Francois-Marius Granet. Photograph: Heritage Picture Partnership Ltd/Alamy

1 horror of depression is how walled-in it tends to make the sufferer feel. Tips from outside can appear meaningless perhaps the greatest gift a depression memoir can offer, for that reason, is the small comfort of comradeship, the reassurance that the author has walked the very same dark path and survived. Rachel Kelly’s memoir goes a single greater: to an account of her personal shockingly sudden descent into depression in the midst of a seemingly fulfilled lifestyle, she adds a assortment of the poetry that helped her articulate one thing of her despair.

Kelly, a journalist and mom of five, describes the fierce battle to keep an outward semblance of normality, even as her grip on her personal sanity crumbles and the effort needed to keep the fiction of her competence at operate and home pushes her further in the direction of catastrophe. Even though she tries a selection of treatment options, her recovery is a slow and painstaking rebuilding of her shattered self, in which the solace of poetry frequently gets a lifeline. Black Rainbow is a moving addition to the physique of depression literature, written with compassion and insight.

Black Rainbow review poetry in a moving account of depression

Medicare Advantage: Moving towards a Much better Model for American Health Care

In spite of the political angst, the doomsday predictions and a very rocky launch, the Inexpensive Care Act has enabled much more than eight million Americans to obtain insurance coverage by means of the public exchanges.

Well being insurance increases the probability that sufferers will entry the healthcare care they require. And my colleagues at Kaiser Permanente are currently seeing some optimistic stories emerging as a result.

They’ve shared dozens of stories with me about sufferers with undiagnosed health-related issues who are now getting therapy. In specific, I loved hearing about two new patients in Northern California who’ve benefited from becoming insured. They came in with daily life-threatening cancer: One, a mom with a uterine malignancy, and the other, a young guy with a testicular mass. Both had gone many years with out health care care due to the fact they have been unable to afford it. And now – thanks to healthcare coverage, early diagnosis and productive treatment method – both will reside.

But expanding access to overall health insurance coverage is only the 1st phase. Improving overall health care delivery is the subsequent stage in this journey.

With all the acrimony in our nation’s capital, bipartisan agreements are few and far in between.

Medicare Advantage might be the a single platform on which each events can stand. Examining this plan and why it has confirmed so profitable provides us insights into the place we as a nation might decide on to go.

Medicare Benefit: A History Born from Necessity

Considering that the Medicare program was produced in 1963, the federal government has been insuring citizens more than the age of 65.

Hundreds of thousands of elderly individuals acquired entry to affordable health care with the legislative passing of authentic Medicare. (Photograph credit score: Wikipedia)

This authentic form of Medicare, called classic Medicare, was and remains a “fee-for-service” program. That signifies the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Companies (CMS) – the company that administers the Medicare plan – pays person physicians for the solutions they supply to Medicare beneficiaries. Consider of a support as an workplace go to, a test or a process. The value for individuals providers is established by the agency’s Physician Charge Schedule.

Starting in 1978, Medicare beneficiaries had a second alternative. They could enroll in private Health Servicing Organizations (HMOs) under a “risk contract” in between CMS and the HMOs.

Over the following 25 many years, many modifications to the authentic legislation have been enacted by Congress. And in 2003, this plan was renamed Medicare Benefit.

As opposed to the government-run traditional Medicare alternative, the existing Medicare Benefit system demands CMS to contract with personal health strategies on a potential payment basis. These overall health plans then contract with personal health care groups and preferred provider networks to deliver the care that enrolled Medicare beneficiaries require.

Operating with a international price range and leveraging their capability to measure and report both high quality efficiency and beneficiary fulfillment, Medicare Benefit strategies have demonstrated increased care coordination and superior clinical outcomes.

As a end result, these plans are turning out to be increasingly desirable to Medicare beneficiaries. In fact, 50 % of new Medicare enrollees pick a Medicare Advantage alternative – enrollment in the system has tripled in a decade, and now exceeds 16 million beneficiaries. Some specialists predict that Medicare Benefit enrollees will signify thirty percent of all Medicare beneficiaries by 2016.

Let’s explore 3 causes why this system is so successful. 

Medicare Advantage: Moving towards a Much better Model for American Health Care

Stephen"s Story: a dying teenager gives charities a moving lesson in storytelling

Stephen’s story encouraged the generosity of men and women across the world and has raised £1.5m for Teenage Cancer Believe in so far.

Stephen’s Story, the story of a dying teenage cancer patient who has recorded his sickness on social media in purchase to raise funds for charity, is getting an impact far past the Uk by capturing the imagination and encouraging the generosity of individuals from across the world.

To date, the viral campaign has raised £1.5m for Teenage Cancer Trust. Its power lies in the reality that it is not Teenage Cancer Trust’s story, but Stephen’s story. Every person at Teenage Cancer Believe in is deeply grateful and humbled by what Stephen, and people who have supported him, are reaching for us. It has produced a wave of awareness, engagement and providing that has the likely to transform what Teenage Cancer Believe in can accomplish.

Stephen has superbly and merely articulated what it truly is like for youthful folks with cancer in his very own words, and he has chosen what he will say and when. We would never have asked a youthful man facing the finish of his daily life to tweet a image and say farewell to the planet – and no charity ever would – but when Stephen did this, it sparked a social media response that no-one particular could have predicted.

Support users talk about your perform in their words, not yours – they never reference a communications manual or use important messages. We discover that assisting young men and women shape the companies we supply and what and how we speak implies we can be more authentic and accurate to them. This is certainly correct of our annual conference which sees 300 youthful men and women collect for a weekend and has been named Locate Your Sense of Tumour – by them, not by us.

Crucially Stephen’s story has been emotionally real. A young guy at the end of his lifestyle had a dream to increase £1m for the charity that had aided him. His dream captured people’s hearts. It was straightforward to give to. The emotion triggered the sharing. His predicament meant it had urgency and, the good news is, the infrastructure was in area.

We had been operating with Stephen on his fundraising for months. He had his very own JustGiving webpage and we had already set up the text to donate code. This meant that when his “last thumbs up” picture tweet got picked up, individuals have been capable to act immediately. We’ve been receiving all around 2,000 text donations an hour.

What we have learnt from the story is to reply swiftly, know your supporters and make confident you will not only verify your social media feeds in workplace hrs. This has took place due to the fact it was not a manufactured try to “go viral”. Folks see via that. I am positive there will be other lessons also, but for now our focus is on creating confident we honour the enormous present this younger guy has offered us and the youthful men and women who want our assist.

Kate Collins is the director of fundraising at Teenage Cancer Trust. Stephen continues to battle the disease and is still posting

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Stephen"s Story: a dying teenager gives charities a moving lesson in storytelling