I never thought I wanted children. Or a husband. Or anything that I deemed "conventional" or "what the man said I should do." If you asked me (or even if you didn't ask) about 10 years ago if I wanted a family, I would have laughed, picturing my life as cool as these guys:
Fast-forward a couple glorious, reckless, irreplaceable, and most of all humbling years of traveling the globe and realizing that the world is a very big place and I am just a small part of the bigger picture. Somewhere in those years, I realized that I needed to stop speaking in superlatives because I wasn't really too cool or too sure of anything.
And then....Garrison entered my life. Well, not exactly entered. He actually entered my life in 1988 on our elementary school playground during a field day. I remember someone talking about the short, red-headed kid who had just won some event or another (He would want me to be sure to tell you that he may be short, but he's very fast.). I looked up and saw a boy with the cutest red curls I had ever seen. My next memories of him are vague and fleeting...seeing him play soccer in high school, him walking through the hall with the other soccer guys wearing khaki shorts in December, at a party sitting across from him on a couch laughing while we raced to see who could guess Ice Ice Baby or Push It first. Then, at 26 years old, this distant acquaintance from my past walked back into my life at a mutual friend's cookout and became the unlikely love of my life.
Fast forward again a few years...I moved to our hometown (the 24-year-old me gagging at the thought), Garrison and I bought a house, and began to settle in. However, we were just shacking up, so I still held on to the feelings of being unconventional and independent that made me most comfortable. Babies were still nowhere close to being on the radar for me and he seemed happy with that as well.
Then, in 2008, my family's entire world was rocked. My mother had been having some digestive issues for a few months and after getting back from a beautiful, two-week family vacation in Costa Rica, she was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer of unknown primary source (CUPS). CUPS is a really nice name for a really shitty type of cancer that is hard to fight because you don't know where it started. So, my amazing, beautiful, healthy, non-smoking, non-drinking (except for her ONE glass of pinot grigio per night), gym-going mother, died at 57 years of age after only getting to fight her battle for 10 months.
The utter devastation of those 10 months in which I lost my very best buddy in the whole world and my family lost its nucleus and its rudder is another blog entirely. But, in short, in those 10 months there were big changes. My sister and her husband moved across the country to be with the family and got pregnant in hopes that my mother would be able to hold at least one grandchild (sadly, she missed her granddaughter by 3 months). Garrison and I decided that "being unconventional" was less important than making another beautiful memory that included my mother. So, I did the whole shebang. My mother, sister, and I did the whole wedding planning thing. We condensed it into about a month and had a small family wedding in front of the fireplace, but we did it. And although the circumstances were utter crap, I don't regret it for a second.
So, we were married. Ten months later, my sister and brother-in-law had their beautiful daughter and were gracious enough to invite me to attend the birth. Witnessing that sassy, precious, amazing little creature enter the world was by far the most incredible experience of my life. Holding my mother in my arms as she left the world and holding my niece in my arms so soon after she entered the world triggered a new longing that I had never felt before. Call me daft, but I had never given much thought to the circle of life and then it was suddenly very real and obvious for me. And I wanted to be part of it. Immediately.
There was just one problem. My newly minted husband and I hadn't really agreed upon this. Although we hadn't agreed NOT to have children, we had agreed that we would take life as it came and that we wouldn't feel incomplete without babies. Oops. (Marriage Rule #27: Do NOT walk down the aisle without hammering out a solid plan on this issue.) Now I was feeling VERY incomplete and desperate for a child of my own. He was feeling VERY much the opposite.
The next part of this story is not very developed. I'm not really sure exactly how he finally came to the conclusion that children should be part of our future.We spent the next three years going back and forth on this topic. Let's just say that this is the part of my life when I perfected my passive-aggressiveness and martyrdom.
However, I didn't want him to ever feel forced into fatherhood. I knew that if we had children, I wanted him to be on board whole-heartedly. I wanted that moment of high-fiving over a positive pregnancy test. He never said absolutely no, it was always, "Maybe. Not today." And then, on New Year's Eve last year, he and I decided to avoid the hooplah and stay in with a couple bottles of wine, Chinese food, Trivial Pursuit, and a Coldplay concert on TV. We started talking about what we predicted would be different on the following New Year's Eve. He said, "You'll probably be knocked up." Swoon. The most romantic words I'd ever heard.
So. Here we are. We decided to officially start trying this past March. Much like most people who are trying to conceive, we thought that we would remove the goalie and poof! we'd be pregnant. But, if you are reading TTC blogs, you are probably like me and have quickly realized that it isn't so easy.
I forgot to mention before that my sister is a midwife. So, the first month of TTC, I felt pretty sure of myself. To most of us, words like ovulation, luteal phase, and cervical mucus are part of this new language that we begin to acquire when we become citizens of this foreign world of baby making. I had already begun to pick up some of this vocabulary through conversation with my sister. So, I thought TTC would be as easy as going to the drugstore, picking up a couple of OPK's, a little tango-ing between the sheets and I'd have a bun in my oven. Not so much.
The first month, I never had a positive OPK. Hmmm. The second month, I had a positive OPK, but it was only six days before the start of my period. Here is where I added a new phrase to my TTC vocabulary: luteal phase defect. This is a frustrating problem to have, but on the spectrum of fertility issues, it's not so bad. I starting taking progesterone and thought that would fix the issue and we'd be pregnant in no time.
For the next couple of months, there was absolutely no change in my luteal phase. So, the next stage was to decrease my exercise and increase my BMI. That sounded like a FABULOUS solution! Sleeping in instead of getting up to run at 5 am? Pizza and ice cream? Giddy up! What a wonderful world it was at first...until I realized that the combination of added progesterone and decreased endorphins makes me a raging bitch.
The good news is that my luteal phase is now up to 10 days. Solid! The bad news is that the alternating screaming and weeping is not a sexy look. In addition, as much as I hate to admit to being so vain, running makes me feel sexy. Adding some extra pounds and not being able to exercise has taken a real toll on my libido. Even less hot is my new foreplay technique of tapping Garrison on the shoulder and saying, "I just peed on a stick and it says I'm ovulating. Impregnate me." So, now the problem lies less in issues with my reproductive system and more in the fact that Garrison and I rarely feel like doing the deed.
We've now been trying for seven months. The last couple of months were the first that I began feeling truly discouraged and depressed when the double lines didn't show. Many women have been trying for much, much longer than that, so putting my thoughts out there on this blog is not to imply that my wait has been so terribly long. I'm simply finding that this process is much more frustrating and emotionally taxing than I realized it would be.
I'm just starting my "two week wait." I'll take my next pregnancy test on November 10th. Or...maybe the 9th. Or....the 8th. Until then, I'll be over here imagining that every gas bubble is implantation and that every twinge in my boob is caused by pregnancy hormones rather than the ill-fitting sports bra that I've been wearing for three days.
I'll also be giving the side eye to my coworker who just started trying in August and is already pregnant.
Good to meet all of you! Anyone out there want to be pals?
