My Fertility Experience

Why don’t most people talk about their fertility journey when they’re in the middle of it? And why do they only share how hard it was once they actually are pregnant and it’s behind them??

I wondered this aloud to my husband as we began our first foray into what we’ve begun to call “getting pregnant on purpose”. GPOP. 

“Babe, it’s GPOP time! #gpop #letsdothisbro #imalreadynaked #putthatbabyinme”

(You guys don’t text your spouse in weird hashtags with code you made up? Highly recommend.)

With Eric (husband) I’ve gotten pregnant three times before. For someone who is TTC (which means ‘trying to conceive’ for anyone else new to this world like me), this might sound braggy. But none of those positive tests led to healthy babies, so I feel like that statement falls somewhere in between. It just..is. We got pregnant easily and without thinking before, and now the prospect of trying to get pregnant now consumes our every waking thought.

‘Getting pregnant on purpose’ is where Eric and I are now, about four months in. Too soon, apparently, to be worried about it according to almost everyone I’ve shared this with. “Just relax, don’t think about it.”

But I cannot *not* think about it now that I’ve started to. It’s a well-meaning sentiment that doesn’t make me feel well at all. Kind of like when the nurse in the maternity ward wrote on the white board in my hospital room under Daily Goals: “Stay pregnant! :)” I’m sure she meant well by it when she wrote it, as that was certainly the goal. But how it made me feel (like it was my fault when I was no longer pregnant) was enough for my therapist and I to play with for a few years.

So my story is a little complicated. Trying to find someone who can understand how I feel right now is difficult. I don’t seem to fit in anywhere, not quite at home in any of the TTC camps. Let me explain.

There is the space of people TTC who are on long, battlefield roads of infertility. Incredibly difficult marathons. Those people are warriors. Reading their stories of resilience and determination gives me hope to keep going. Watching my best friend try to get pregnant for three years, starting on her wedding night, and never once giving up - that is deeply inspiring.

There is another group of people TTC who are trying again after losses. I’ll say this now, there is not a single act of courage more steeped in hope than trying to have a baby again after losing one. Or, after losing a few. After our son Finn died, my husband and I went through a whole myriad of feelings about trying again. At first I wanted to try again right away; I was pregnant, I was JUST pregnant, and I needed to be pregnant again immediately. It was a visceral longing. Not being pregnant anymore without a baby in my arms made zero sense in my brain and in my body. Then, when my milk came in, and I pumped alone on my in-laws’ bathroom floor the day after Christmas, I texted my whiskey-drunk trying-to-be-okay husband that I couldn’t do this again. By “this”, I meant I couldn’t lose another baby. Not a fourth one.

This is the complicated part. We lost two babies before Finn died, by choice. My husband and I have had two abortions. Before you stifle, or even voice, an opinion on that, trust me when I tell you this: there is literally nothing worse you could think about me and those choices than what I have already said to myself in the mirror. There is nothing more horrific you could possibly say than what I wrote in my suicide letter when I tried to take my own life. I don’t know if there will ever be a part of me that thinks I deserve a healthy baby after willingly choosing to not have two of them. It doesn’t matter how much it made more sense for my life and those babies that they did not come into the world through me at that time. I haven’t found a lot of people talking about trying to get pregnant again after having an abortion because there is a stigma that we hate babies, and therefore shouldn’t talk about our experiences and grief. I’ve had people tell me I’m not allowed to grieve those babies because it’s my fault they’re gone. I also had someone tell me it made sense that my son, Finn, died because my body was “used to killing babies”. (Again, not worse than what I’ve already thought in my own head.)

So I’m at this intersection of not able to get pregnant yet, trying to get pregnant again after a loss, and reconciling my guilt from my abortions in order to allow myself to try to get pregnant in the first place. Complicated.

I started to feel super lonely in this space, that’s why I sought out other people who might understand. And honestly, I can’t find anyone that’s in my uniquely painful pair of shoes. But I’ve realized that no matter where I could be standing in the space of TTC, that’s true. No one’s experience is ever the same.

It reminds me of the support group my husband and I went to a month after we lost Finn. I was five months pregnant when I went into pre-term labor, so it is considered a late-term loss. We found a general support group for parents who have lost babies, and everyone there had a different story. One woman’s little girl died in her womb, and she made the choice to carry her until her body delivered, knowing her baby would not be alive when she was born. One set of parents lost their baby when he was five days old, the day before Christmas, from SIDS. One woman went into labor normally, and the baby was born still with no explanation. None of their stories matched ours at all, and at first we felt like it wasn’t even worth it to be there. No one could possibly understand each other, we thought. But as we continued to connect, we held each other up in the things we had in common. We all had the same hollow look in our eyes of a future ripped from our grasp. And yet we all had this odd sense of hope, somehow, for a new future. We were all in this club that none of us wanted to join, and all of us felt like no one had the same experience. All of us were deeply, irrevocably in love with our children. We were all alone, and we were all together in that.

So I realize now why not too many people speak or write about trying to get pregnant in the middle of it. For most of us, it’s a long and grueling road. It’s mired with reminders of our past; losses, abortions, maybe a difficult relationship with parents that leads to a myriad of emotions around becoming parents. It’s traumatizing; the blood in my underwear used to mean my son was dying, and now it means I’m not pregnant yet. I go through that double trauma on a monthly basis. It’s super fucking lonely; sure, your partner is *with* you in the process, but if they aren’t the one who will carry the baby, they don’t fully understand. It’s taxing on our mental health and self-esteem, because since the beginning of time, a person with a womb should be able to make a baby in it and bring that baby into the world. If we’re choosing to try to make a baby, and that’s not happening, it feels a little like there must be something wrong with us.

But there isn’t. For as many of us trying to get pregnant on purpose, there are as many reasons it is difficult. And that’s where we can come together. I’m not asking you to outwardly share your story of TTC if that’s the space you’re in now; but I do want you to know that whatever that story feels like, you aren’t alone. None of us are required to talk about our struggles, our abortions, our losses, our grief, and our pain. But I can tell you that doing so makes us all a little less lonely. It brings us closer together in our differences and in how we are the same.

We are the same because trying to get pregnant, calling in a baby, regardless of the circumstances - this is an act of courage. It is a bodily manifestation of hope for tomorrow, that the future will be brighter than the one we’re in now. And that is something worth talking about together.