Not Pregnant - one liners and the vanishing of innocence...

and if our lost innocence is a road of no return, what do we do with that?

Somewhere out there, in a parallel dimension is our innocent reproductive story, the one where we somehow, easily become pregnant, perhaps by accident, unexpectedly, or neatly planned on honeymoons, or for babies to be born with convenient or desired due dates.

In our innocent story, maybe we look up these due dates with no reason to think that anything would go wrong between now and then. It’s our carefree story. The one where we post a scan photo on social media at twelve weeks because that’s what you do and we are excited.

In our innocent story we can imagine laughing more, buying baby things early, perhaps a surprise baby shower. This is the story that many, many people get.

It wasn’t mine.

In January 2010 I missed my period.

We were not yet engaged or married, living together happily with a clear sense that these things were coming. My period was never late. It feels incredible to me now that it took me at least a week to notice. I sat on my sofa doing the maths that I’d had my period on my birthday five weeks prior. We hadn’t planned a pregnancy, though I had come off the pill. I thought we were using natural family planning really well (the sad irony of this has not been lost on me over the years).

I didn’t mention it that night. I decided to do a pregnancy test the next day. The potential news felt weirdly.. exciting. And all mine. I also felt fine with the possibility that it might be a blip. I had no reason to feel anything other than neutral about it, no premonition that we couldn’t be pregnant whenever we wanted to be, and if not now, probably soon.

Life not knowing about infertility, of living with my fifteen year old mythology that the challenge was staying unpregnant …it’s almost hard to recall now. I daydreamed of surprising ways to reveal the test, my news evolving into our news. I bought one some distance away from the University we both worked at for fear that a student would catch me red handed.

Not Pregnant flashed up on the digital window.

I put it down to the flu I’d had before Christmas, throwing ovulation off. I didn’t think much about it at all.

That summer we got engaged and were married the same October. Maybe that ‘near miss’ finally tuned me into the sound of my biological clock, at 33. Suddenly and all at once, I was ready to be pregnant, to Do This and life circumstances allowed me that privilege. My first negative test after we threw all caution to the wind on our honeymoon, affronted me. No one in my family or friendship group had tried to get pregnant for longer that one or two months. That’s how I thought it worked.

Four months later, I was already getting worried. We saw a GP at six months and slipped slowly, through the months - and years - that followed, away from the shallows of the reproductive story I thought was ours.

When you decide to have a child, the wish to be a parent becomes almost primal. You decide to stop using contraception, start lovemaking, and imagine that conception will take place in a mystical, romantic sort of way. You begin to hum the lullabies that you've always dreamed of singing to your baby.

What you don't wish for- -or even imagine--is that this won't happen. That instead of making love you might be having timed sex on a doctor's orders, giving yourself injections, providing sperm samples. What's supposed to be natural has now become a high-tech pursuit. Even if you knew or vaguely worried that you might have fertility problems, you never imagined that this would be what it took to try to make a baby.

Jaffe, J, Diamond, M & Diamond, D Unsung Lullabies; Understanding and Coping with Infertility

There are chapters of my story not yet told here that further contextualise the gulf between my innocent reproductive story and the one I live within now. There is a happy ending (that wasn’t really an ending, but a beginning). There is a lot of ‘sit on the edge of your seat’ grizzly footage. There is loss, of many things. Some are clearly tangible. But the grieving of what we don’t get is less easy to speak of and acknowledge. There is a haunting beauty in my actual story and how the cards eventually landed. The small (large) print of eternal gratitude is a header and footer on all that I write.

And some days, I am still affronted by some of my cut scenes.

We do get to stand in our grief of the loss of our innocence, regardless of how our story ultimately unfolds, or where we are on the timeline. We should have had the story we imagined, a story that often has a taproot embedded in our formative years. Ease shouldn’t be an essence we are forced to surrender. And yet, for one in four of us, we get the unexpected story. Learning to love the gnarly pages of it isn’t easy. It’s almost impossible when you see no mirage at all yet of how the story might conclude.

There are words that I have rejected, circled around and come back to. Acceptance. Acknowledgment. Allowing. These days they fit me better, I have grown into them through more orbits around the sun. We need to respond to our own unique grief in our own unique ways.We don't have to compare or invalidate the intangible tendrils of grief that accompany a long fertility journey.

Your pain is, your pain.

I see it. The TTC community sees it and the people who love and know you should see it too.