Trying times, trying to conceive.
September 11th 2006 02:53
When you’re younger you just assume that you can get pregnant. You don’t even think much about your monthly bleeds, until you actually need to take advantage of them.
It’s only when you get older that you start to realise that it’s sometimes just not that easy to conceive. I kissed many frogs before I found my prince and so it was through doing the right thing that I waited before trying for a family.
Once I had been married for a couple of years and hit thirty five my fertility became a discussion point, regardless of my permission, it was a topic of conversation whether I liked it or not.
My husband and I would be stood socialising at a party, glass of wine in hand while people told me I shouldn’t be drinking “if I was trying to you-know-what”. Friends and family found it perfectly natural to talk me through a healthy eating plan of green leafy vegetables, Vitamin C, Folate, Zinc and lots of water. Colleagues started to assume I wouldn’t be looking for promotion any time soon. Why people thought it was their divine right to comment I’ll never know but I wouldn’t dream of asking them how many times they shagged every week or whether they had erection problems.
My journey has been interesting to say the least and after two years of trying we decided to seek help, medical, specialised help. This in itself is quite hard to come to terms with as you are admitting that at least one of you has a problem “down there”. AND you feel somehow that you are giving in to the whims of everyone else too.
You see once you start trying, without success, you find everyone around you talking about babies. Nappy adverts are two a penny and every other woman you walk past in the street is heavily pregnant and looking very smug about it (so you think). It’s the same when you break up with someone, when your sensitivity levels are heightened to something in particular, the world seems to start a conspiracy against you.
So do you tell people that you are trying? Well, in truth it doesn’t actually matter whether you verbalise it or not because they often make the assumption anyway. Unfortunately I find the success of my life now measured on my ability to produce a healthy child.
A very good friend of mine is in her late forties, she is happily married, has a fulfilling life and has decided against having children. She doesn’t want to “fuck up someone else’s life for them, the way her parents did with hers”. Fair enough I say. However, she is amazed by the number of forlorn, sympathetic looks that she receives when she tells people that she doesn’t have children. 1 in 100 people actually credit her with making an informed decision but most believe her life is so busy to compensate for her void. Well quite the opposite, one of the many reasons she decided not to bother was BECAUSE she and her hubby were so fulfilled and couldn’t, or chose not to, fit small people into their schedules.
So once you decide you want to get pregnant but find it’s proving a tad harder than you originally expected do you undertake your own research project? Well, it’s hard not to these days with easy access to media, books galore on every subject under the sun and the World Wide Web at your finger tips. And of course if you know other people are going through the same thing as you, it’s sometimes easier to swallow, I was never one to get into all the chat rooms though.
I must admit that once I started to Google “infertility” “I.V.F” and the like, a whole new world opened up to me and I discovered things about my own body I never knew, even at the ripe old age of 35. My body had been giving me certain signals since I was 11 years old and I just didn’t know it.
The downside of research is coming across website after website depicting the diaries of women who desperately want children. Who chart their daily temperature every single morning between the hours of 6am-8am, before they’ve even lifted their head from the pillow they reach for the mercury. They mark the days they have intercourse, check their daily discharge, look for a fern pattern in their saliva through special magnifying glasses and then go for their life in the 5 – 7 day window of fertility, mid cycle. All this often results in tears down the loo when once again the monthly painters and decorators knock on the door.
So what was the first thing our specialist said on our first visit before we even opened our mouths?
Throw away any thermometers, throw away your “Maybe baby”, don’t listen to what other people say, have sex three times a week and enjoy it. I think that’s pretty good advice for now.
It’s only when you get older that you start to realise that it’s sometimes just not that easy to conceive. I kissed many frogs before I found my prince and so it was through doing the right thing that I waited before trying for a family.
Once I had been married for a couple of years and hit thirty five my fertility became a discussion point, regardless of my permission, it was a topic of conversation whether I liked it or not.
My husband and I would be stood socialising at a party, glass of wine in hand while people told me I shouldn’t be drinking “if I was trying to you-know-what”. Friends and family found it perfectly natural to talk me through a healthy eating plan of green leafy vegetables, Vitamin C, Folate, Zinc and lots of water. Colleagues started to assume I wouldn’t be looking for promotion any time soon. Why people thought it was their divine right to comment I’ll never know but I wouldn’t dream of asking them how many times they shagged every week or whether they had erection problems.
My journey has been interesting to say the least and after two years of trying we decided to seek help, medical, specialised help. This in itself is quite hard to come to terms with as you are admitting that at least one of you has a problem “down there”. AND you feel somehow that you are giving in to the whims of everyone else too.
You see once you start trying, without success, you find everyone around you talking about babies. Nappy adverts are two a penny and every other woman you walk past in the street is heavily pregnant and looking very smug about it (so you think). It’s the same when you break up with someone, when your sensitivity levels are heightened to something in particular, the world seems to start a conspiracy against you.
So do you tell people that you are trying? Well, in truth it doesn’t actually matter whether you verbalise it or not because they often make the assumption anyway. Unfortunately I find the success of my life now measured on my ability to produce a healthy child.
A very good friend of mine is in her late forties, she is happily married, has a fulfilling life and has decided against having children. She doesn’t want to “fuck up someone else’s life for them, the way her parents did with hers”. Fair enough I say. However, she is amazed by the number of forlorn, sympathetic looks that she receives when she tells people that she doesn’t have children. 1 in 100 people actually credit her with making an informed decision but most believe her life is so busy to compensate for her void. Well quite the opposite, one of the many reasons she decided not to bother was BECAUSE she and her hubby were so fulfilled and couldn’t, or chose not to, fit small people into their schedules.
So once you decide you want to get pregnant but find it’s proving a tad harder than you originally expected do you undertake your own research project? Well, it’s hard not to these days with easy access to media, books galore on every subject under the sun and the World Wide Web at your finger tips. And of course if you know other people are going through the same thing as you, it’s sometimes easier to swallow, I was never one to get into all the chat rooms though.
I must admit that once I started to Google “infertility” “I.V.F” and the like, a whole new world opened up to me and I discovered things about my own body I never knew, even at the ripe old age of 35. My body had been giving me certain signals since I was 11 years old and I just didn’t know it.
The downside of research is coming across website after website depicting the diaries of women who desperately want children. Who chart their daily temperature every single morning between the hours of 6am-8am, before they’ve even lifted their head from the pillow they reach for the mercury. They mark the days they have intercourse, check their daily discharge, look for a fern pattern in their saliva through special magnifying glasses and then go for their life in the 5 – 7 day window of fertility, mid cycle. All this often results in tears down the loo when once again the monthly painters and decorators knock on the door.
So what was the first thing our specialist said on our first visit before we even opened our mouths?
Throw away any thermometers, throw away your “Maybe baby”, don’t listen to what other people say, have sex three times a week and enjoy it. I think that’s pretty good advice for now.
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