Chapter 5: Stop Trying and It'll Happen

I was told I wasn't getting pregnant because I wanted it too badly. Turns out it was something else.

The desire to be a mother has been hardwired in me from as early as I can remember. Some of my first memories involve playing with dolls (and not because my parents pushed them on me- in fact, they attempted to raise me with zero gender roles at all.) As I grew up, I prioritized becoming a mom above everything else. I enjoyed writing and performing songs in high school, but shied away from pursuing a career as a musician because I feared that travel would prevent me from getting into a stable relationship. I didn’t go on a semester abroad in college because I was afraid it would eat up a semester that could otherwise have been spent finding a husband (also, with a GPA of 2.3, I didn’t qualify. lol.) Once, I ate lunch in the college dining hall with a cute boy from my history class, and he mentioned that he didn’t like children. I clarified, “So you don’t want them someday?” He said no. I ate the rest of the lunch to be polite, but promptly excused myself. I know that all sounds painfully conservative, but none of this was driven by a belief that a “woman’s place” was in the kitchen or anything. I just really, really wanted to be a wife and mother. It was my ambition. I was a motherhood girlboss. I had my eyes on the prize, and I wasn’t willing to leave anything up to chance.

When I met Nick, we were at a sticky-floored college party and our respective dates had stood us up. Although I initially thought he just wanted to be friends (I thought he was out of my league) the second night we hung out, it became fairly obvious he was interested in me. As we danced, he volunteered that he wanted at least two kids someday and he “didn’t want to be an old dad.” As a nineteen-year-old girl surrounded by boys who didn’t even want girlfriends, let alone wives, this was a game changer.

We fell in love and built our lives around the children we were sure we would have. We got married young (for our social circle, anyway.) Shortly after our wedding, my period was late and I took a pregnancy test, which I foolishly removed from the trash after reading the negative result, only to find a faint second line. Believing this to be a positive test, I went from terror to excitement, ready to figure out how to fit a baby in our minuscule and mold-infested San Francisco apartment. When I took a second test to confirm and it was negative, I was overwhelmingly sad.

When I was twenty-eight and Nick was thirty (and we were living elsewhere, sans mold) we decided we would start trying for real. I had been ready for a while at that point. I followed my doctor’s instructions and stopped using Retin-A three months before I planned to stop taking the pill. I looked up “fertility boosting foods.” Again, I wasn’t leaving anything up to chance.

Given that our parents had both conceived us easily (not that we wanted to imagine it) we figured we would have an easy time of it too. We liked having sex, and we weren’t opposed to doing it all month if we had to. After all, according to pretty much everyone, the only thing guaranteed to prevent you from getting pregnant was “tracking everything and trying too hard to get pregnant.” So our plan would be the opposite of that: – just have sex and “enjoy the process” and get pregnant by accident, but also kind of on purpose.

For the first two months, we just boned constantly. This was fun, but much to my dismay, I didn’t conceive. Although two months sounds like nothing, and people (including, bafflingly, my gynecologist) will claim that “a year is average” I knew that wasn’t true. A year of trying unsuccessfully is actually the point in which a doctor would consider you officially infertile, not the average time to conceive. The average time to conceive is something in the ballpark of three to six months. And that includes people who missed the fertile window, which we never did.

I deduced that at least one thing was wrong with me, which was that I ovulated too close to my period. This condition is known in fertility circles as a “short luteal phase,” but it’s debatable whether it actually causes problems or not. I read up on everything that might lengthen my luteal phase, but nothing worked other than copious amounts of vitamin B12 which I later read could be toxic. A lot of the tips I read about came from online forums, where I felt the need to create new usernames, as I had to repeatedly delete my account after asking one question, inadvertently offending other members and getting piled on. It was clear that fertility was a stressful topic, and apparently saying “I’m only two months in and I have an awful feeling about this,” is not received well by people who have been trying for ten months. But on the flip side, when I felt somewhat optimistic about my odds during a particularly symptomatic two-week-wait (the time before you can take a pregnancy test) I’d be yelled at for rubbing it in people’s faces. There was nothing to rub in anyone’s face though—I wasn’t pregnant. And every time I had to create a new username after another dogpile, it signified just how long this was taking.

Nothing could have prepared me for how horrible it felt to see my period return month after month of trying. Invariably I would wake up at 6 AM to pee, thinking nothing of it, then I’d wipe and see red, both literally and figuratively. Nick never seemed worried. He said he would “start worrying” once we hit ten months. Initially I hadn’t been tracking my ovulation (I had more or less inferred it from my very distinct ovulation symptoms), but eventually I started tracking it with my body temperature just to see if I would uncover some other issue, or figure out exactly how long my too-short luteal phase was. It was easy to say that the tracking apps and thermometers “took the romance out of it” but by the time we had been trying for six months, there wasn’t a whole lot of romance left anyway.

One of the most annoying things about unsuccessfully trying to get pregnant was how obtuse everyone else was about it. First of all, everyone insisted our problem was that I was “just too stressed.” I saw multiple doctors, some of whom turned me away because of my age and duration of trying, and another who told me, “I’ve had patients who thought they were infertile and then tried to adopt and then got pregnant because they weren’t thinking about it.” I even saw an old Chinese acupuncturist who told me that my problem was that Nick was “too poor” (he wasn’t poor, but I used him as an excuse not to buy fertility tea at $20 a cup) and that if I stayed with him, my “skin would get dark.” 

I didn’t understand how my uterus could be some delicate, emotional, volatile entity, supposedly so triggered by every thought and feeling I had—the veritable 2014 Tumblr of uteri—meanwhile women in far more stressful situations got pregnant without trying. Once Nick and I had been trying for eight months or so, we attempted “not trying” which basically meant going back to our old routine of having lots of sex “because we wanted to.” I didn’t want to do it as often as we did. I also still didn’t get pregnant.