How Long Does It Take?

 I do seriously try to stay away from controversy when I blog, but sometimes, you have to hurt some feelings and step on some toes.  I’m sorry to anyone who is offended by the rant I am about to lay on ya, but remember, this is my blog and these are my opinions.  If you want to go somewhere where someone will tell you what you want to hear, your bathroom mirror is a good place to start.

So how long does it take, in the words of my Aussie friend Aramanth, to fall pregnant?  How long did it take you, those of you who are moms, to become pregnant?  And I am of course referring to those of you that actually had to try, as opposed to those of you who were shocked and surprised to find out where babies come from as you were sitting in the obstetrician’s office.

For me, the whole getting pregnant thing was not as easy as they make it look in movies about crack whores with 9 children from 8 different baby daddys.  For me, staying pregnant was also excruciatingly difficult.  So when someone starts whining and pissing and moaning because they’ve been trying for 3 long months to get pregnant and it hasn’t happened, I find a fatal error in my sympathy programming. 

With Brighid, I was definitely one of those women sitting in the ob’s office, having to find out how the hell I got into the situation I was in.  We were in the final stages of planning our wedding when we decided since we had technically already gone 2+ years without birth control without getting pregnant, we might want to go find out what it would take to actually get pregnant.  Apparently, all it took was a visit to the doctor, because after some testing and poking, I got the call two days into our honeymoon that I was already pregnant.  Who knew?  They estimated I was about 9 weeks along.

After Brighid, things seemed to stop working again.  Five years later, when I finally did get pregnant, our joyous celebration was crushed by the first of many miscarriages.  But it never took us anything less than 2 years to get pregnant.  Eilis came nearly 10 years after Brighid, and Granuaile more than 4 years after that.  My obstetrical history reads like a horror story, and it’s sometimes painful to think about.  5 babies lost.  5 hearts that flickered on that ultrasound screen one visit, and disappeared the next. 

So when someone is complaining that they’ve had to read a book about getting pregnant to figure out how to do it; or they’ve had to take pregnancy test after pregnancy test every month for 3 long months, please forgive me if I can’t participate in the conversation for fear of ripping someone’s head off.

Honey, call me when you have 13 years of negative pregnancy tests in your trash can.  Call me when you’ve done hormone shots, progesterone creams, vitamins, herbs, voodoo – exhausted EVERY damn resource to have a baby.  And it takes longer than 3 months to do that.  For some of us, it takes the better part of our lives.