Warning: Contains Discussion of Lady Bits
Here's a public service announcement:
The worst thing you can possibly say to someone who is trying to have a baby is the apparently common catch phrase: "You just need to stop trying." Or, my personal favorite: "The minute you stop trying, it will happen."
I don't think you people understand. Telling someone to stop trying is like telling someone not to think of an elephant. Once it's there, it's there. You can't just magically stop thinking about it.
There is not a single moment of any day we are not trying. The minute I went off birth control, we were trying. Every time we have sex, we're trying. Every day I take my temperature to find out if I'm finally ovulating, we're trying. Every morning when I pee on a stick to tell me if my body is ready, we're trying. Every time he declines a drink or a smoke, we're trying. Every time I go to the bathroom, dreading that today is the day gravity pulls my insides out through my lady parts and I start bleeding, we're trying.
And that little smear of blood that ruins my underwear and inconveniences me for a week is just about the worst emotional pain you can possibly imagine.
I am sick to DEATH of hearing "everything happens for a reason" and "it's in God's hands." I am not a religious person. Telling me it's in god's hands is like telling me there is zero chance of this ever happening. "God will bless you with a child when He is ready" is like a slap in the face. I know you all mean well and that's fine, but please stop bringing religion into something that is strictly biology.
I just don't understand why it is so fucking hard. People do this all the time. Every single day, people are discovering unwanted pregnancies and deciding whether or not they want to keep them. All my life, I've been taught that birth control and contraceptives are the strict rule when it comes to sex. We are told as grade schoolers going through our first sex-ed class that if you so much as look at a boy without a condom on, you get pregnant. Not that I want to get into it with the safe-sex activists out there, and I realize it has zero influence on STD awareness, but that is apparently total and complete bullshit.
Do you know how many factors have to be dead on in order to even get pregnant in the first place? There are so many things that could go wrong, it's almost laughable. First, you're not supposed to have too much sex, lest your body grow a natural defense mechanism against his sperm. Did you know that? Probably not. I sure didn't. Evidently the best way to ensure pregnancy is to have unprotected sex with multiple partners, because their sperm is then forced to "fight" for the right to fertilize your egg and your body is more receptive to said sperm because it doesn't have the chance to grow an immunity to any single person's ejaculate. Yeah. Bullshit, right? In a society where monogamy is the "normal" thing to do, you'd think our bodies would have grown accustomed to dealing with that little fact, no? That's why you see all those people on terrible crap television with ten children from eight different fathers who have no business having even one kid, much less a veritable fleet. It's ridiculous.
So once you've found your chosen partner, and resigned yourself to the fact that sex is now a planned and regulated Thing, you then have to figure out when your body is ovulating, which results in hundreds of dollars spent on tests to tell you when is the proper time to get down and dirty. Let me tell you something: the minute you decide to start trying for a kid, all dignity flies spectacularly out the window. You try peeing on a stick every morning and tell me you're not mostly peeing on your hand, the toilet seat, the floor and everything else. Then, once your body decides it's time, you have to have sex as much as humanly possible, regardless of whether or not you're in the mood.
And then, if all the stars align properly and you do in fact manage to get one of his sperm to fertilize your egg, then you have to hope and wait that the damn thing sticks to the inside of your uterus. There's a chance we keep getting lucky with fertilized eggs, but they're simply not sticking to the walls of my insides, in which case they just flush out with the rest of your guts at the end of every month (or so. Don't even get me started on that).
So. Say you magically manage to actually get all your timing right and the thing actually clings to your insides. Congratulations. Now you just have to keep it in there for the first trimester. Did you know that one in four pregnancies end in a miscarriage in the first three months? One in four. It's amazing how common such a thing actually is.
So don't tell me to stop thinking about it. Don't tell me that the minute we stop trying, it'll happen.
In fact, don't say anything at all.
