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
Christie Burnett is a teacher, presenter, writer and the mother of two. She created Childhood 101 as a place for teachers and parents to access engaging, high quality learning ideas.
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.
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!
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 :-)