Hi everyone. This week’s newsletter is pretty raw and emotional, and I write pretty candidly about the day-to-day of infertility. I know that there are plenty of you who are also on this journey, so please take care while reading. And to my subscribers who are usually here for the essays about food and relationships and fashion, I really do hope to one day get back to that. But I have only ever written about what is going on in my life at the moment — and this is what is currently consuming me. Thank you for being here.
I am currently living my life in four week intervals.
Week one is the week I get my period. That first day usually involves hours spent in bed crying, writing, and trying not to let my mind fall down a rabbit hole of destructive thoughts. Like this little nugget: I’ve been thinking about a video I saw on TikTok a few months before we started trying to get pregnant. A woman, clutching a positive pregnancy test, crying as her husband comforts her. She’s in a panic, because they have a four month old, and she has no idea how they’re going to make it all work. I imagine screaming at her until I turn blue in the face and my eyes water about how lucky she is and how she needs to shut the fuck up. (I then feel bad and spiral over how negative thoughts like this are keeping me from getting pregnant myself.)
On day one of week one, I also call my doctor’s office and let them know that I got my period, and that we need to start the process all over again. When I first started making these calls early in the process, I was pleasant. Almost chipper. There was a plan! We were following the plan, and it was going to work eventually, right? Now, when the nurse says she is sorry that I got my period, it’s all I can do to not break into guttural sobs.
That day one phone call always ends with an appointment to come in on day three so they can check to see whether I’ll be producing another egg this month. I wake up early and trudge into the office — no coffee or food, because I need to give blood. I sit in a waiting room with my sisters in infertility. There is usually a male partner or two, staring awkwardly into space. Nobody talks, and although I once had visions of friendly banter with my fellow patients while we waited for our transvaginal ultrasounds, now I just want to get in and out as quickly as possible. The other women seem to agree. We just sit in silence, waiting to hear the friendly nurse chirp our names and usher us back.
I used to hate needles, but now giving blood is old hat. I always have them enter the same vein in the same arm — my right, just above the ladybug tattoo I got shortly after Ben and I moved in together. The nurse calls me ladybug because of this tattoo. I smile and ask about her weekend, trying to act like this is how everyone gets pregnant. Next is the exam room, where I peel off my bottom layer and throw my legs into the stirrups. My doctor enters shortly after, lubes up the ultrasound probe, dims the lights, and gives me a guided tour of my uterus. I turn my head to the right to watch the show, fingers crossed that this ultrasound isn’t the one where he tells me he sees no follicles, only tumbleweeds wafting across my insides.
Usually, he heads directly over to my right ovary, because that one has been doing the heavy lifting while my left ovary takes early retirement. But last month he surprised us both by saying I was ovulating out of my left — news that made me cry so hard he handed me an entire box of tissues. It was the first bit of hope I’d felt in a long time and I reveled in it.
He tells me things look good (for now) and that the nurses will follow up with the results of my blood test later on in the afternoon. I leave the office, get on the subway, and head into work to try and pretend that this isn’t my life, and that none of this is happening to me, and that I’m a perfectly functioning woman with a working uterus who will eventually give my husband and myself a baby. Before I get into the office, I remove the Band-Aid from the spot where they’ve taken my blood, and notice I’m developing scar tissue.
I ignore reality for a bit until that phone call comes in — my follicle-stimulating hormone is still too high for me to go on Clomid, a medication that might make me over-produce eggs, which may provide a more positive outcome. We schedule another appointment for next week to see when I might be ovulating, and I put it into Ben and my shared calendar. I go to the bathroom at work, set a timer for two minutes, and cry. When my phone chirps, I wipe the tears from my eyes, fix my mascara, and get back to work.
For the rest of the week, I pretend none of this bothers me. I smile. I put out fires at work. I notice that this has been going on for so long that people have mostly stopped asking how I’m doing, but then quickly realize I’d have no idea what to say if they did. I cry in therapy. I wince at baby pictures in group chats and quickly scroll past pregnancy announcements on Instagram. I try to believe it will eventually work.
Week two is slightly more eventful, a real wild card, because sometimes I need to go in for two appointments instead of just one. (A truly diabolical bang-bang.) I fast again, go into the office, don’t speak in the waiting room, give blood, and get another ultrasound. If that first appointment is a bust, and my hormones aren’t surging yet, they’ll book me in for the second about 24-48 hours later.
But if my hormones are surging? Then the sex instructions come — and if you want to know the least exciting kind of sex talk, it’s a doctor telling you detailed instructions for when to “time intercourse” while you’re still in stirrups, splayed out like a Thanksgiving turkey. Sometimes it’s every day for the next three days. Sometimes it’s every-other day for the next four. But whatever the case, I give the news to Ben over the phone on my way into the office, and then spend the day trying to keep myself from getting too stressed out so I can be somewhat in the mood to fuck my husband when I get home. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But come hell or high water, we are having sex when the doctor tells us to, lest we skip a day, don’t get pregnant that month, and I need to give myself a mental lashing painful enough that it never happens again.
I sometimes feel like a sex drill sergeant mixed with a Cirque du Soleil performer. I recently broke down during a therapy session about how much animosity had developed for me around sex — a terrifying development, as intimacy was a part of Ben and my relationship that literally never had any problems. But it’s easy for things to falter when you’re constantly having sex with a goal in mind. It’s never just you and your partner. There’s this whole other thing in the room. It sometimes feels like I’m in that sketch from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life where John-Cleese-as-sex-educator is having sex with his wife in front of his classroom, narrating the entire experience. When we’re finished, I get the pleasant experience of laying with my hips elevated for 15 minutes — plenty of time for me to spiral and wonder if it worked this time.
Week three is actually the easiest of all, because there is hope — hope that maybe this time we did it. Maybe this time it actually worked. Maybe this will be the last month I’ll have to do all of this bullshit in order to have a baby.
I have my last appointment of the month. This time, it’s only blood work to confirm I have indeed ovulated. The nurse calls and tells me that I have and to take a pregnancy test on [insert very specific date here], and I float on air. I try to hush the little voice in the back of my head that reminds me I’ve never taken a pregnancy test because my period has always come first. I white knuckle hope with both hands.
I smile at babies on the street. I accept pictures of my friends’ children with glee. Pregnant women in my life don’t make me squirm. I am like a University of Alabama freshman during rush week, working my ass off to pledge a sorority I’m desperate to enter. I try to show the universe I am worthy of this blessing. See how good I’m being? I think as I make my way through the world with a smile. Won’t you just give me the thing I desire most?
By week four, I’m exhausted. Wrung out emotionally and physically. I obsessively track every twinge, tweak, and change in my body and Google it, trying to figure out whether it’s an early pregnancy symptom or a signal that my period is arriving soon to ruin my entire life. I tick off the days, counting down to T-Day (testing day) and cross my fingers I’ll actually get there.
But usually, around three days to T-Day, the familiar period signs will show up. A family of white heads will move in on my chin. I’ll start to cramp a bit. I try to talk myself down off the ledge, and repeat the mantras I’ve read on my infertility Reddit boards: Pregnancy symptoms and PMS symptoms are usually incredibly similar. I try to remain optimistic. But as the days tick down, my hope evaporates, until one day, usually the day before T-Day, I go to the bathroom and realize I’ve gotten my period.
Usually this happens when I’m at home, so I can cry my head off immediately and crawl into bed with my heating pad. The worst months are when it happens at work, and I need to go back to being an actual, functioning person immediately after getting the worst news of my life for another month in a row. I don’t really know how I get through those days.
On the way home, I seem to always encounter a little baby — sleepy, chubby-toed, and giggling manically, like some kind of demon sent to torture me. I close my eyes and beg the universe to let next month be different. I pray for it to work. Because it has to work. It cannot fathom a reality in which it doesn’t work.
Eventually, I make it home, and I collapse into Ben’s arms. We cry together, mourning a child that never was. A child we hope will one day be.
And that is how we begin week one.
love you ♥️
Oh Maria, I'm sending you a big hug ❤️