Everyone knows it's harder to get pregnant as you get older, but if you're young and healthy, people assume not having children is a choice, and they want to tell you how smart you are for waiting for the right time. If you decide to tell them that you have actually been trying unsuccessfully for a while, they generally give you the same useless advice of "Relax and it'll happen." You know, I never thought of that. Excuse me while I unclench my uterus.
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.
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Every Month Is A Tiny Disappointment
Every month, without fail, you find a reason to convince yourself you're pregnant. "I feel mildly nauseous. Yay, I'm pregnant! This is the only possible explanation and is in no way related to the humid, dimly lit buffet I ate lunch at." Then you start picking out names and deciding how to tell your family, and just as you're booking the local Sir Mix-A-Lot cover band (Becky and the Anacondas, now accepting gigs in the Nashville/Murfreesboro/Lebanon area!) for your flash mob reveal, you discover you're not pregnant.
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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Lydia Bugg
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