Confessions of an Unpregnant Woman

The first time my husband and I decided we’d like to get pregnant, we decided to say goodbye to contraception ‘and see what happened’. I had no idea when I ovulated, I didn’t chart and we didn’t plan. We got pregnant in our first month. This confirmed the theory that the first time you have unprotected sex, you’ll get pregnant! It’s popular in putting the fear of God into teenagers. And also a key part of all reality TV programming. Oh yes, I watch Dr Phil AND sometimes I even slum it on Maury (shhh!) but that’s a whole other confession.

I rather naively believed that it would be just as easy second time around.We planned. We planned for the right time and the right financial situation. We even planned for an optimal amount of time since my last pregnancy to give me a good chance of a successful VBAC after my emergency cesarean. My control freak was in full flight and my pragmatist had gone mysteriously AWOL. At some stage I’ll have to track the pragmatist down, I could use her help.

In the first month I had a miscarriage (the second of my life). An observant or anal person might notice that while I said ‘we’ got pregnant, I do not say ‘we’ had a miscarriage, because it was just me, or it felt that way. I was grief-stricken in a way that I wasn’t before I had my daughter – because it was so much more real, and so less abstract. It was an early loss, which I am grateful for.

We are now in our fourth month of trying. And I’ll be the first to admit that I am a neurotic mess. Have you met me? I’m neurotic at the best of times. Somehow, I’ve now managed to take it to a new level. Impressive, even for me.

Things that I loathe the most:

  • Pre-menstrual symptoms are almost identical to early pregnancy symptoms. That’s awesome. Thanks female reproductive system. If I was God for a day that would totally be the first thing I would change. You see? That’s what I’ve been reduced to – not world peace, or end world hunger but that.
  • I hate waiting with a passion that is difficult to communicate. I’m not a limbo person. The game or the state of being. I like to know, and I like to know now. It’s a miracle that I didn’t find out the sex of my first baby before she was born. I’m not content for my email to check every 5 or 10 minutes I have to press the “Get Mail” button. Ok, I might also have an immediate gratification problem.
  • I hate waiting to NOT get my period. Waiting for something to not happen makes me even more neurotic. Oh, it’s possible.
  • The months where I am so sure that I am pregnant until . . . And then I’m devastated, again. And pregnancy tests, they mock me. So cold, so heartless, so accurate.
  • Feeling like an ungrateful mother when I look at my beautiful two year old daughter.
  • Feeling like an ungrateful woman when I think about all the women out there with actual fertility problems.
  • Well meaning people giving me good advice that I do not have the capacity to take: ‘If you stop worrying about it, it will happen.’
  • Google. Ordinarily I love Google. Ordinarily Google is like my safe, dependable best friend, who I might or might not have occasional lustful feelings for. Not so here. Google is the enemy of the neurotic. Because it knows everything. It knows which are early pregnancy symptoms, which are menstrual symptoms. When you ovulate. When you should have sex. How often you should have sex. What you should eat. What you shouldn’t eat. I confess, I’m Google’s bitch.

I don’t know how long it will take us to get pregnant this time. What I do know? I’m giving up on planning. Do you hear that? My inner control freak is screaming. But I think my pragmatist has finally shown up and…

She’s smiling.

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

Thank you to Zoey for her honest reflections on a difficult time, waiting can be truly torturous when we are ready to embrace a new reality. Zoey is a (mostly) stay at home mother of one (her nearly two year old daughter, Riley). She spends her days toddler wrangling, writing, resisting perfectionist tendencies and dabbling in photography. Zoey is hoping for a big family (really big) and is interested in attachment parenting, home renovation and cooking lots of comfort food. To learn more about Zoey, visit her blog.

Image: Megyarsh

13 Comments

  1. Thanks for sharing that Zoey. Wishing you all the best. I know exactly how hard it is xo

  2. Oh Zoey, I understand. Hating google, the grief, the symptom wait. All of it. Hugs and hoping for good things for you xxx

  3. What a fabulous, heart breaking, real account… and for the record I tried to give up 'planning' to have kids after the girls hit me for a six, yet here I am six years later and I still haven't learnt my lesson!

  4. Zoey @ Good Goog says:

    Thanks everyone. It was a cathartic experience to just write down all those things that taunt you when you are trying to get pregnant.

  5. Farmers Wife says:

    I agree with everything you wrote about what you loathe..the waiting, the being in limbo, it's really the worst! I have 3 kids but I've had 4 miscarriages trying for the elusive number 4 baby, so I have had heartache but joy in my children I already have. I am very thankful.

  6. I so feel this – I mean, not right NOW, but before I had my son, it took us several months of waiting (about 15), and those were the hardest months of my life. 🙁 Thanks for sharing!

  7. I hear you Zoey. So much. All my love and best wishes to you. xxx

  8. All my best to you, Zoey. Similarly to you, we got pregnant with our first almost immediately. And when we decided to try for #2, we got pregnant almost immediately again–and lost that pregnancy almost immediately. God, that was an awful time in my life, and it was followed by several months of waiting–to see if we would get pregnant, to see if we could get pregnant (after the loss, I became paranoid that I was somehow "broken" now), to see if a new pregnancy would "take."

    I am now the proud mother of three healthy, beautiful children, and I can't believe I was ever that crazy person driving to the Dollar Store on her lunch hour to pick up a handful of pregnancy tests–just in case I'd gotten pregnant in the last two hours, you know. It's a hard, crazy thing to endure, and I hope all the waiting ends for you soon.

  9. Katy, Peace, Paula says:

    Good luck Zoey and thanks for sharing your story. Peace xx

  10. Zoey @ Good Goog says:

    Thanks again everyone for making me feel less neurotic and more human.

  11. This is beautiful Zoey. Thank you for sharing in such an honest way. I hope people don't say to you, "Be glad you have one," or "It will happen, don't worry." In my experience, those comments DON'T HELP!! This must have been exhausting for you to write. I'm proud of you!!!

  12. Hobo Mama says:

    Aren't those early pregnancy/PMS symptoms mean? Agh.

    I was getting so frantic over getting pregnant that I finally had to have a talk with myself and force myself to enjoy the journey — that the trying to conceive was significant in itself. It didn't make all the frustration go away, but it helped. I don't think it would help for someone who's been trying a really long time, and my heart goes out to them — only the unreasonably antsy types like I was!

  13. My advice (after many years of trying and losing a baby) is to find something to focus some of your attention and energy into. Like a new hobby, rearranging the furniture in your house, a craft project or even joining the gym or a club. I found that this helped me to shift my focus and attention to something else. Babies will still be important, but it wont consume you and take over completely.
    Good luck with your journey, and find peace in the fact that so many women are on that journey to and you are not in it alone 🙂

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