Our Struggle to get Pregnant

As I’ve contemplated writing this post, I’ve thought a lot about personal blogs and why I enjoy them, both reading about others’ lives as well as sharing some of my own experiences. Some bloggers share only the good in their lives and others are open to sharing the down times as well. To be honest I love them all. I have blogs that I read when I need a guaranteed smile or laugh, and I have others that I enjoy reading because they help me feel compassion for what others go through and inspire me to get through some of my own life struggles. (The same goes for people that I follow or am friends with on social media.) In the small amount of blog posts that I’ve actually written, I find myself worried that I don’t have a good balance. When everything is hunky dory and I want to share how wonderful life is, I’m afraid that I won’t come across as authentic and honest. And when I’m facing trials, I basically stop posting because I don’t want to sound depressed, bitter, or like I’m asking for a pity party. As I share this post, I hope it doesn’t sound like any of those things.

I have seen many things floating around social media on the subject of infertility, and I just wanted to add my voice. Ours is not a crazy story, and I can’t explain really why I’ve wanted to write about it, but I have for a long time.

Jordan and I were married in August of 2011 and we knew from the beginning that we wanted a large family. When asked how many kids we wanted, my answer was 4-5 and Jordan’s answer was 10. Yes, 10. I joked that we better get started soon because women who birth 10 children usually get started pretty early in life. Regardless, we both wanted to wait at least a year to start trying and we were perfectly content for the time being. Being a newlywed is magical and the first year seemed to be flying by.

I joke that attending a family ward as a newly married couple feels a lot like a graduated singles ward. In a singles ward, seeing couples hook up, progress in their relationship, and eventually get engaged seems to be the bane of your existence. It annoys the crap out of you, yet you can’t seem to keep yourself from obsessively thinking about when it will happen to you. (Haha...Mormon culture is so funny, isn’t it?) Well I discovered the same goes for married wards. A cute couple moves in after 2 months of marriage and then BAM! her belly starts growing more and more each week. Before you know it you can’t focus in sacrament meeting because there seems to be an adorable infant to smile at in every direction you look. Then ALL that is on your mind is the constant curiosity of what YOUR babies will look like. Baby hunger is a real thing people.

And I'm pretty sure I was born with the hunger. When I was little, the only thing I ever wanted to do with my friends was play dolls. I remember being embarrassed when I was 5 or so and was caught pretend pushing a baby out from under my shirt and then breast feeding it. I also remember thinking it was weird when I heard people refer to their wedding day as the happiest day of their life. I thought for SURE the happiest day of my life would be when I had a baby. What can I say? I always wanted to be a mommy.

A Long 17 Months

In July of 2012 I went off of my birth control. Like most couples, we started by saying, “we aren’t really TRYING, but we aren’t preventing it either.” I can see now that that was sort of a cushion of protection for the disappointment that came with my period each month. Before I knew it 6 months had passed...and then 9 months. I started getting pretty worried about it, but Jordan reminded me that the semester we had just finished had been the hardest of our marriage. He had just finished his clinical hours for the paramedic program, which meant that for the last 4 months, he was gone for 3 nights out of every week. It was hard. Exhausting for him and lonely for me, and it would OBVIOUSLY interfere with trying to get pregnant. We decided to keep trying and not stress about it until after we had hit our one year mark, since that is when doctors say healthy couples should be able to conceive by. Our plan was to start seeing a doctor for help if we weren’t pregnant by the end of the summer.

Well before we knew it we were in the whirlwind of buying our first house. Add to that the indescribable stress we experienced as we tried to flip the basement (including adding a kitchen and 2 laundry rooms) by the end of July so that our friends could rent it when their apartment contract ended. Every spare second we had last summer was spent working our tails off at the house. We decided to hold off on seeing a fertility doctor due to how busy we were and our tight financial situation.

I didn’t think I could get any more stressed than I was during those last 2 weeks of finishing the basement before our apartment contracts came to an end on July 31st.

Then my brother passed away on July 28th. 

I won’t attempt to describe how hard it was to move into an unfinished and chaotic house while preparing for his funeral that weekend. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

Needless to say, a stressful summer that lead to a fall of mourning definitely didn’t help us in our attempts to get pregnant. Looking back, its pretty darn obvious that of COURSE I couldn’t have gotten pregnant while we were going through all of that. The emotional and physical stress alone could have prevented it. But surprisingly it didn’t distract me from the complete sadness that came every month that I wasn’t pregnant. It just felt like salt added to other wounds. I think the fact that we didn’t KNOW yet if there was something wrong made it harder. If I had been told we were struggling to get pregnant due to X, Y, or Z than I could at least focus on what to do to overcome X, Y or Z. The next time we want to get pregnant, I am going RIGHT to a doctor because the unsureness and waiting game is awful.

In reading about other people’s experiences with disappointment over not getting pregnant easily, I’m realizing that there are very similar feelings between everyone. Feeling like a failure, impatience, and unfortunately, bitterness and frustration toward women who get pregnant easily. Oh boy is that last one hard. There are countless people in my life who have had surprise pregnancies and several of which were outside of wedlock. I don’t bring them up because I resent or disrespect them. Here we were, a happily married couple who were fairly settled in life. We wanted to start a family so badly, and it was really hard to not have it come so easily to us.

Then there are the insensitive comments that come from others. One in particular comes to mind. Last fall I was working with 3 of my coworkers who were all expecting their first babies (yes 3...all at once). At the time I had been trying for 16 months to get pregnant and I had shed more tears than I could have imagined. An employee from another department was nearby and looked at me and asked when I was going to join the pregnancy competition. I said “competition??” and he replied, “Yeah. Choosing a house and a pet over a baby? What’s that about?” ....My heart was pounding so hard that I had to just walk away before I either burst into tears or punched him in the throat. I’ve since forgiven him and I realize people don’t mean to hurt you with insensitive comments. It really is just a matter of them not having experience with it and not realizing how careful they should be with the subject. I really hope that this experience helps me to realize the areas that I could potentially hurt someone’s feelings and that I am as sensitive as possible. Even if it’s in a subject that I know little about.

One More Try

We decided that December would be our last hoo-raw of trying to get pregnant. Come January 1st we would get right in to a specialist. No more wasting time and no more wondering. I had researched and decided on the doctor I wanted to see. We had been preparing ourselves financially to afford infertility treatments. We were ready to tackle this thing. I think it’s funny how many people told us “it’ll happen when you relax and stop trying.” We tried harder in December than any other month. Tried to eat healthier, take our vitamins, be more active, have positive thoughts, yada yada yada. Timing had it so that I could have taken a pregnancy test while we were out at Flaming Gorge for Christmas. Christmas Eve I thought, “No, I’ll take it Christmas morning.” Christmas morning I thought, “No, I don’t want to ruin Christmas with another negative test.” I thought maybe I should take it on my birthday (the 27th) but then I decided that New Years Eve would be the perfect day to take it. If it was negative than I could leave it behind with all of the other crappy things that happened in 2013, and then call my doctor on January 1st. And if it was positive, well, that would be a very happy way to end such a hard year. 

I am going to write a separate post about taking the test and the experience of telling Jordan that we were pregnant, but I cannot say enough how amazing, surreal, and CRAZY it felt to finally see two pink lines! I recently read this amazing post about one couple’s experience with infertility, and in it she talks about how strange it is to have this huge trial come to a screeching halt with one positive pregnancy test. I couldn’t agree more. I went from regularly googling things about infertility to googling things about pregnancy. It was a mental adjustment, but I couldn’t have been more thankful.

A surprisingly hard part of getting pregnant has been dealing with a sort of “guilt” over it. Guilt isn’t the right word, but I don’t know what else to call it. Announcing my pregnancy to some friends who have been struggling for years was extremely hard. I remember several months ago when one of my best friends told me she was pregnant and she was holding back sobs because she knew what I was going through. I hated being “that” friend who women were scared to talk to about their pregnancies. Now I know how she felt. I guess one of the hard parts of being involved with the “infertile” community is feeling a little bad when you do get your miracle. 

Love More, Judge Less

I realize how incredibly brief our experience was compared to so many couples who struggle with infertility. Seventeen months felt like an eternity of disappointment, but I know how fortunate we were that it was ONLY 17 months and that we were able to do it naturally. I don’t know what lies in store for us with our next children, whether it will be a continued challenge or if this was it, but I am thankful for the things it taught me. If you have experienced such heartache or are currently going through it, I just want to say that I love you. If you have been fortunate enough to have not experienced it, don’t take that gift for granted. If you know someone who is going through it, give them a hug. Tell them you love them and think they are amazing. Ask if they want to talk about it, because too often it is a taboo subject. However, be sensitive if they don’t want to discuss it. Like with most trials, this taught us to love more and judge less. You really never know what a person is going through, and it is always better to offer a listening ear or helping hand than to offer criticism and judgment.