I’d like to announce I’m expecting…to be trying to conceive for quite some time.
So the first question I had to ask myself when starting this blog was, ‘does the world need another fertility blog’? I let that question resonate in the depths of my soul, until I finally came up with an answer…erm…Yeah. Sure. Why not?
Back in days of yore, when I was a fresh-faced, (kind of spotty/kind of wrinkly/often hungover) naive, hopeful lass, who giddily told her doctor she only needed one more packet of the pill because she was planning to try for a baby, there were far fewer blogs around the topic of not being a fertility goddess. As I continued on my fertility path, and manically googled each new experience and term, from ‘ovulation’ to ‘positive test’ to ‘missed miscarriage’ to ‘infertile’, I was often led to only a few sites and posts. I was bouncing from stories of women who were pregnant with triplets before they could finish the sentence ‘fancy a quickie?’ to women who had been trying for over ten years, with no success, to naturally conceive. However, there wasn’t much in the middle. I couldn’t find the sites for the women like me, who quietly picked themselves up after the fourth, fifth, or sixth month with that awful sinking feeling in their heart as the period pains start to tug at their womb.
These days, there’s a lot more on offer, as more women feel able to talk about their varied journeys to becoming a Mum (journeys that include IVF, surrogacy, or adoption as well as natural conception). The numbers are growing, which is a brilliant thing for those of us with loving Mums and Sisters, and groups of girlfriends, who still, somehow, find ourselves completely alone, awake at three am, googling the difference between a period and implantation spotting.
Even with the seemingly unlimited resources of Google, it can still feel lonely when your feed is flooded with baby announcements. It seems like suddenly everyone, everywhere, is knocked up and that is amazing because it offers proof that nearly all of us who want to have a baby, do end up having a baby, but, after a year of trying there are still about 20% of women who haven’t got a baby in their tummy yet. Many of these women haven’t waded into the world of specialists or IVF, but still haven’t been able to post a picture of a healthy baby scan with one hundred smiley face emojis, and are still, full of hope, and are already tracking their ovulation for the following month.
So yes. Yes. We still need more blogs about trying for a baby, until there are 2 for every 8 glamourous mummy blogs. Until women stop being ashamed that the road to that glorious state of motherhood can be paved with periods, negative tests, miscarriages and a strange craving for liquorice, which has you convinced that those five negative tests must be wrong. We need more blogs until we understand that fertility can be a journey not just an endpoint of pregnancy. We need to accept that striving for a baby is a stage of life, just as much as being pregnant. We need more blogs until we just let women try. Until women feel OK saying no to a drink because they are in their two week wait, until women can tell their friends they don’t feel like going out because they just got their period again, and until we aren’t just comfortable posting a picture of a positive pregnancy test on Instagram but we are also, finally, comfortable posting a negative one, with our fingers crossed for next month.