After spending most of my younger life, particularly my 20s, drunkenly barhopping and blissfully kissing my way through Manhattan, I thought I would easily be able to conceive a child when I was ready. Like a lot of women, I spent many of those years being terrified that it would be too easy to conceive one when I wasn’t ready.
I stopped taking birth control pills about a year or so before Billy and I got married because a friend convinced me that they were terrible for my body, and I finally felt like it wouldn’t be more terrible to be pregnant. We’ll be celebrating our second anniversary in April, he’ll turn 36 in a few weeks and I’ll be right behind him in September. I am ready, waiting and practically dying to be pregnant.
After getting married, I wanted to have kids, but I didn’t want to work at having them – I wanted a baby to come naturally. I refused to be that neurotic, maternal Medusa scheduling sex with her husband. I took for granted that I’d get pregnant without having to think twice about it. I was so wrong.
On the horrible-things-in-life scale, infertility ranks galaxies away from the worst. I try to constantly remind myself of this so I can better appreciate what gifts I do have. Coworkers, friends, and their families have been touched by cancer, death, and loss. Every day, the media inundates us with news of unthinkable violence and tragedy, both at home and around the world.
And yet, here I am, bawling so hard that I can’t breathe on a morning I woke up to discover, yet again, that my period came – a depressing sign our efforts this month were futile, again.
While living in Los Angeles, I met a lovely couple who struggled to get pregnant. They had tried in vitro fertilization a couple times without success. The wife lent me a self-help book called Taking Charge of Your Fertility and I tossed it aside, thinking, That challenge she’s facing isn’t my challenge. It’s not going to happen to me. I’m young. I’m healthy. I will not face what she’s facing.
But that book, a bible of sorts for those unlucky in baby-making, now has a permanent place on my nightstand. I’ve read it. I’ve highlighted parts. I’ve ripped out pages of charts. And still, nothing’s changed.
My doctor recommended fertility yoga and meditation. I signed up for classes at a local yoga studio days later, and then I Googled “fertility meditation” and listened to a soft voice telling me to chill and think about becoming pregnant for 15 minutes. After a sperm test proved that his count is good, but his motility is not, our doctor also prescribed my husband something to help – like Mucinex to help break up his semen.
After about a year of doing nothing, six months of charting my ovulation without results and then peeing on dozens of ovulation sticks with ambiguous results, I decided to start taking Clomid, a pill you take on days 3-7 of your cycle that’s supposed to stimulate the release of hormones which cause ovulation. I’ve completed three months of Clomid and I’m already eager to move to the next phase: intrauterine insemination. I don’t care any more about being Medusa or being natural; I just want a baby.
The pain of dealing with knowing that my body’s betraying me is difficult to share with people. It makes me feel weak. I think of women who have just given birth and the euphoria they feel, and compare them with me and my body, supposedly built specifically to achieve the one thing I cannot. There’s so little I can do to control it. I’ve always been a fairly positive person, but now I’m living with this strong black tide that rolls in uninvited and washes the joy and happiness away.
One of the lowest points of my experience was crying when a close friend told me she was pregnant. They were not happy tears; they were ugly, dark green tears of incredulous jealousy. She’d only gotten married a few months earlier, I thought. I am the one who is supposed to be pregnant! As I cried to my husband, I thought, What is happening to me? What sort of demon have I become?
Only a handful of friends ask how we’re doing with trying to get pregnant. They’ll proceed delicately, afraid of opening my tearful floodgates, but I want and need to talk about it. It’s the friends who don’t ask who hurt the most. I know I’m not alone, but as a work-at-home dog mom living in a new town, it’s easy to forget. I have only one close friend who is going though what I’m going through: after months of trying, she’s turned to Clomid, and is still waiting for the magical pill to work. I have a greater appreciation now for friends and relatives who battled their own infertility with as much strength and grace they could muster, long before I was dealing with mine. I wish I had been there more for these friends.
I don’t know what this year will bring. I just know what we desperately want it to hold. Maybe there’s a silver lining in all this – I am trying to stay more positive, as my yoga teacher promises it will help – but today it’s just out of my reach. Like a baby.
