‘How’s it going?’
The question that all couples who are trying for a baby love to hear. Not. The ‘not this month’ answer is too depressing and ‘twice last week, once this, we’re still piling pillows under my bum’ is straying dangerously into oversharing territory.
Our friends wanted to support us but what were they supposed to do?
Cheerleading
After all, they can hardly stand in our bedroom by the side of the bed with those big fluffy pompoms, chanting “Give Us a Bee, Give Us an Ay, Give Us another Bee, Give Us a Why, What Have You Got? A BABY!!” because that’s not going to help us conceive.
But it’s hard to just sit by and watch someone’s dreams of having a child evaporate, so instead they would pass on advice that was highly unscientific and barely proven – just because you can draw a Venn Diagram with an overlap between two unrelated items does not mean that there is a causal relationship between them. I like using purple ink in my fountain pen and am gluten-intolerant, but the that doesn’t mean that the ink causes my intolerance. Still why let scientific principles get in the way of a pointless suggestion to help us get pregnant?
Apparently, we needed to:
Go On Holiday
Despite peering through the small print on many a holiday contract (the first few lines at least), I’ve never found travel agents warning me that ‘this holiday could result in pregnancy.’ Are there perhaps special ‘ovulation breaks’ where you get to time your holiday to your ovulation cycle and ensure that your holiday falls mid-cycle for optimum baby-making?
Perhaps our friends hoped that being away from all the stress, and having not much to do would help. However, in the climate I yearn for on holiday (sunny for sandal-toting, coat-abandoning warmth), my husband’s skins welters into a irritatingly tickly and painful heat rash and when that happens, there’s no way I am getting anywhere near his body, not even for a few minutes of serious sexual communion. But that wasn’t the main reason we had to reject this solution – we blew so much money on our honeymoon-of-a-lifetime, our holiday funds were as overdrawn as the British government.
Next?
Quit Our Job(s)
Apparently someone (one person, you call that cause and effect?) had had trouble conceiving, quit their job and miraculously became pregnant. By the same unrelated lack of cause-and-effect I bet someone got pregnant after signing a petition, closing their MySpace account or cleaning out the hamster’s cage. Forgive me for my sarcasm, but I expect it was having sex that got them pregnant, not quitting their job.
Now my job was not great and my boss was an obnoxious bully who shouted at me, paid me less than half I was worth and I tried to leap at this vague equationless science, because I was really fed up with a git of a boss and felt sure I would’ve been more amenable to Andy’s advances if I wasn’t wound as tight as an old lady who’d waited 30 minutes in a queue at the Post Office for her pension. I’d be happier, less stressed and who knows Andy, it might just work, I reasoned one evening. He countered that I had to find another job first. He can be so reasonable and logical at times. Spoil sport.
Next?
Get A Dog
Random or what? The RSPCA/ Dog’s Trust would have serious problems re-homing dogs if their leaflet was legally obliged to mention that there was a high risk of pregnancy involved in the arrival of your pooch. I have plenty of friends who have dogs and none of them have spontaneously grown a child within them and conversely friends who became pregnant without even petting a dachshund. (I recall the irony of a work colleague a generation older than me, telling me categorically that I shouldn’t get a dog “because what happens when you want to go on holiday?” and in the same breath telling me to hurry up and have kids “before it’s too late.”)
I am not getting a dog.
But the psychobabble our friends were spouting showed just how much we were all running out of ideas. That coupled with our total lack of results in two years told us we needed to go and seek professional help.
