5 Things Nobody Tells You About Trying To Get Pregnant

Avoiding this stuff for nine months sounded doable to me, but avoiding it for the unknowable amount of time it takes to actually conceive a baby is torture. No brie for a couple of years is white girl hell. You don't have to choose to avoid these things, but every time you don't get pregnant, you're going to picture that delicious chunk of creamy cheese you ate and decide it caused some kind of karmic upheaval in your womb.

There are tons of websites that are just trying to be helpful, with lists of things to do and not do when you're trying to conceive. They basically all amount to "Be a normal healthy person," but once you take in enough of them, you start to read them with an implied "or else." That makes them much more intimidating. It's like you're on a game show, and the grand prize is guilt, and you always win! Yay?

It also wanted to know what my cervical mucus was like, and "Like two words which combined make me unable to feel sexual attraction ever again" was not an option. Apparently the cervix is really important to pregnancy. Until this point, I thought that if my reproductive system was NSYNC, the cervix was Joey Fatone. But now Joey's running the whole show, and I guess I have to be cool with that.

I know pregnancy is often depicted as this magical time when you're glowing and floating and strong like a Super Saiyan, but it's actually a time when you're sweating and screaming and mean, also like a Super Saiyan. Getting pregnant is supposed to be the fun part, not the part where I try to determine whether I have hostile cervical mucus.

One thing a lot of people swear by is acupuncture. However, I'm a tad skeptical about paying someone who probably has a PhD in crystal therapy from Miss Cleo University to stick needles all over my body, just so I can avoid a handful of needles stuck into one measly internal organ. There is a needle-free acupuncture product that asks you to tape a bunch of seeds to your ears. So that's a little sad.

But it's not the saddest thing. The saddest thing about these products is that there's a tiny part of your brain that will consider each and every one of them a little bit. You have to explore every available option, right? Even if that option is putting a crystal ... somewhere you don't normally keep things.

They're not trying to be dicks, as they're just presenting you with the most pleasant platitude that jumps into their minds at that moment. Even though you know that on a rational level, there's still a part of you that silently pictures a piano falling from the sky and smooshing them. Then you feel guilty for committing mental pianocide. So you go and eat some soft cheese to make you feel better. Then you feel guilty for eating the cheese. It's a vicious cycle.

Irrational anger comes with the irrational guilt, and at times, you'll find your frustration directed at the most innocent of targets: babies. Some broken part of your brain starts to think that all babies know each other and are somehow conspiring against you. Every time the song "Baby Got Back" comes on the radio, you find yourself yelling, "BABIES AINT THAT GREAT, SIR MIX-A-LOT!" and changing the channel. That'll teach babies. And Sir Mix-A-Lot.

It's a real roller coaster ride, and it's going to happen over and over again for the foreseeable future. But you keep pounding away (LOL) and trying to downplay the excitement you feel every single time you convince yourself it's happened.

To make it even worse, you end up having to break the news to your partner, saying the same thing month after month. "Nope, not this time," or "Maybe next month," or "No, I don't want to go back to Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville. I want to conceive this baby someplace nice, like Red Lobster."

Then you realize that if you manage to get pregnant, you could end up having a miscarriage, like 15-20 percent of women do. If you do manage to deliver a healthy child, you then have to worry about keeping it alive and making sure it doesn't murder people for at least 18 years. So I guess the horrors of trying to conceive are actually just an introduction to (what I'm going to assume must be) the constant mind-numbing terror of parenthood. Oh good. I feel better now.

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Look, here's some delicious Giant Pocky, because we don't really know anything about fertility medicine.

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