Ugly Truths | Trying to Conceive

Most of us have been there. That stuffy public school classroom packed with prepubescent (or crazy hormonal) students when the teacher whips out the Sex Ed packet. That awkward unit where your teacher starts in about hygiene, changes in your body, and how a family is made which inevitably leads to the teacher standing in front of said group embarrassingly applying a condom to a banana. You end the unit with the party line branded into your mind: "Unprotected Sex always results in Disease and/or Pregnancy, but the only 'Safe Sex' is abstaining from sex." You get a new rendition every year for 3-5 more years.

You go through your teens and on through college with that idea in the back of your head. You cautiously avoid the miracle of life by being vigilant with contraception or abstinence. Finally, you settle down, meet the man (or woman) of your dreams and get slapped with the ugly truth; getting pregnant isn't as easy as it seems. 

You go at it for months, not really "trying" but enjoying being newlyweds. You brush off the lack of pregnancy because you are too consumed with the newness of marriage. Then it kicks in that all that "unprotected sex" did not in fact result in a developing baby squatting in your uterus. You start looking at the calendar and aligning days. You pump yourself full of vitamins, you know, just in case. You gotta have that folic acid for weeks 2-5 when his brain stem is developing. 

Then your mom dies, your grandpa dies, your best friends die, and your world gets turned upside down making you ache for children that much more. Your hormones will get all mixed up and the horrible thing is the emotional stress will cause you to miss periods and you'll devastatingly think you may be pregnant. But the sad fact is that despite the planning, the vitamins, being healthy, and acting like rabbits, you still aren't!

This where we are. It has technically been 21 months of trying to conceive and about 15 months of me being consumed by the idea that I can't make a perfect baby conducive internal environment and that we may be facing infertility. 21 months of being jealous of friends, acquaintances, and strangers that seem to have magic uteri. Staring longingly oddly at the midsections of our friends that are on second and third pregnancies since we first started trying to conceive. Unfairly loathing ladies that call their occupied womb "a happy accident" that "just happened". 21 months of us sugarcoating our struggles when people ask us when we are having kids with blanket statements like "When God decides to bless us with one" and "It'll happen when it happens."

The Ugly Truth about Trying to Conceive: We (as a society) spend the 10-20 years post puberty actively trying to not get pregnant, not expecting that when we try to switch gears to actively trying to get pregnant there is still a pretty good chance that you won't. You can try and try and despite what your middle school sex ed teacher told you, sex doesn't always mean a baby! For now, for us anyways, there is still hope. This is just the beginning of our journey, so I am going to sit here with my empty uterus (thanks Gretta!) and enjoy my kale smoothie and handful of vitamins, while I try to make my womb look like a great fit for a future temporary tenant. Please excuse me when I enviously stare at your developing baby while simultaneously hating you and celebrating the new life you made.