An “F” In Conception

I’ve never understood the whole “Birds and Bees” thing. Perhaps I missed a story somewhere about some strange intra-species love affair, but if not, I fail to see the comparison of a bird or bee to anything having to do with human conception.

To my understanding, first a bird finds a partner, makes a nest, has a little fun and lays some eggs. After sitting on the eggs for a few weeks, mom and dad bird spend their time flying about looking for food. In a few months it’s time to fly south, and they all part ways to go on vacation. The following year, mom bird finds a nice new bird partner and the process starts over.

Bees on the other hand are a completely different story. There is but one queen. The queen does nothing but lies in the hive and pops out thousands of eggs. She has a husband or two, but all the rest of the bees are drones. For those who are not heavily into insect social structures, drones are mundane little workers with no other purpose than feeding and maintaining the hive. If you are born (or hatched) as a bee, there is very little chance you will have the luck to be a queen or one of her trysting partners. You will probably be a boring little drone, running about with pollen on your feet gossiping about the bees down in Honey Production not keeping up with demand.

Humans are different. Not to say some of them don’t find a new mate every year like birds, but it’s not the generally approved method for creating a family. And of course like the bee, some people are so focused on work they forget to have a family. But other than a few freak similarities, our mating habits are completely different.

Through our younger years we do what we can to prevent a family. We won’t even hug our own parents in public… we wouldn’t want anyone to think we actually liked those people! Then as young adults, we court, but try not to conceive or marry. If we are intelligent young adults, we utilize good birth control methods and leave nothing to chance. We eventually find the person we hope will be Mr. or Mrs. Right, settle down and wait until everything is perfect before conceiving.

Once we realize that nothing is ever perfect enough to have a child and that our biological clocks are ticking so loudly they’re keeping us up at night, we decide to stop preventing a family. For those that did not conceive by accident prior to this time, most will conceive within a few months of “not preventing.”

And then there are the rest of us - a small group who, after not preventing for a year or so, actually start trying. And trying. And trying. And when that doesn’t work, we seek medical attention. And thus begins the baby obsession.

The hardest part about belonging to the group of those “trying to conceive” or TTC, is that while we’ve finally made up our minds that we want a baby (bad!), all our friends seem to just pop them out like toast. In fact it frequently happens that a fertility-challenged woman will be surrounded by co-workers who get pregnant by accident, and complain about it incessantly. Fertility challenged women just love hearing about how pissed off a co-worker is about not being able to sit in the hot tub at a friend’s party last week! Love it.

Eventually we start to see the irony in the fact that we were so careful in preventing a family for so long before we were “ready.” We did the right thing, right? We were the smart ones, right? Oh, what we wouldn’t give to have the “luck” of those unsuspecting high-school girls who, whoops, get pregnant seemingly from just looking at someone of the opposite sex. How do they make it seem so easy? It is simply not fair!

And why does it always seem to be that the people who want babies the least seem to have the most? We have to watch the news with stories of little Joey and his 23 brothers and sisters being put in foster care when it is found that their 34-year-old mother has gone on vacation without them… for a year.

Perhaps from these experiences we become better parent material. We spend years wanting what we can’t seem to produce for ourselves, and dreaming about what we’d do if we had just one baby. When we’re lucky enough to have our own or adopt one, no-one in the world could make us treat that bundle of hopes and dreams in a less than wonderful way – ever! Our children will always know how much we wanted them and needed them.

Then, after experiencing the sheer joy of parenthood, we simply must have another. And the whole process starts over again. It doesn’t matter what they look like. It doesn’t matter if their skin is the same color or their eyes the same shape. What matters is that incredible bond between parent and child – that pure and overwhelming love that comes over us like an ocean wave.

I admit it. I value the lessons I’ve learned through the years I yearned to be a parent. Perhaps I don’t react so harshly when little shoes show up caked in mud. Perhaps I’ve made less silly rules than I would have had this gift from God come easily to me. In my house, “Don’t touch!” was replaced with “Let’s hold that together so you can see it better.” “No!” was replaced with “I’m worried you might get hurt if you do that. I want you safe because you are so important to me. Mommy would cry if you got hurt.”

I don’t know how birds handle infertility. Do they count their eggs before they’ve hatched? I don’t know if queen bees long for just one more larvae in the hive. Either way, we as humans are cursed with the knowledge of and longing for what we don’t have, and sometimes without the understanding of how much we’ve already got.

Such was the case for my husband and me. It had been almost two years since we had “stopped preventing.” It had been at least a year and a half since we started making charts, graphs and taking temperatures... sexy! On a number of occasions my husband had left work early, telling his commanding officer that his wife might be about to get pregnant, and he wanted to be there when it happened.

I had read all the books and knew enough to realize that I was somehow not quite “normal.” Instead of the neat little twenty-eight day cycle women were supposed to have, mine seemed to be all over the chart. Sometimes it was as short as thirty-four days and sometimes as long as fifty-six days. I knew I was supposed to ovulate fourteen days prior to having my period, but as these were the days before ovulation detection kits, I had no earthly clue when that might be on any given month.

As the months came and went, I almost always felt sure that “this was the month.” My breasts felt sore, I felt grumpy and tired and my period was late. After two years I finally had to understand that those symptoms were just the normal PMS symptoms I got, every stinking month! Like taking a bite of food in a restaurant will signal the wait staff to come ask you a question, for me taking a pregnancy test always brought on “Aunt Flo.”

In August of 1994 I was feeling particularly bad. I was considering getting my hopes up, but then made that regularly depressing discovery in the restroom. Of course I did what any other warm-blooded depressed, monetarily challenged woman would do. I went shopping. How else could I keep my mind off my failure? On the way home I stopped and picked up a home pregnancy test out of habit.

I realize that sounds totally and completely idiotic. It was, yet it was also a compulsion at this point in my TTC career. I cried as I took the test, just knowing I was about to get another “F” in conception. As with every other month, I immediately tossed the soggy stick into the garbage and then grabbed it out again and sat staring at it while the wetness slowly soaked it’s way up the material inside the plastic. I closed my eyes, prayed, cried and lost all hope. I opened my eyes and witnessed the most beautiful sight I had ever seen.

There were two perfectly clear lines created by my very own pee-pee on the test stick. Two of them! I cried even harder, prayed even harder and had two years of hope overcome my entire existence in that moment.

Throughout the rest of the day I planned how I would spring the big news to my husband for this was going to be one of the most important days of our lives. I didn’t have a pretty watch box and a gift would only raise his suspicions when I wasn’t supposed to be spending any money. I’d just have to hold it behind my back.

As he entered the house, I held both my hands behind my back and begged him to “pick a hand!”
“I’ve had a long day and I’m not up for games right now!” he said, pushing past me.
I positioned myself in front of him again and asked as sweetly as I could, “Please just pick a hand. Any hand!”
“You don’t even have dinner on yet?” he snapped at me. “I am hungry and tired and I am not up for games!”

I was so used to accepting this kind of treatment that it bounced right over my happy little head. I brought my arm around to my front and proffered the stick to him.
“What the hell is this?” he grumbled, taking the stick from my hand and then in horror he asked “Did you PEE on this?”
“I sure did!” I exclaimed proudly.
The slow realization of what he was holding finally worked its way up to the stony expression on his face.
“Oh my God! Oh my God!” he stammered.
I then received one of the nicest and happiest hugs from him in the history of our marriage.

Later on that evening on our way back from a dull army function, my husband stopped in at the local pharmacy.
“What are we doing here?” I wondered aloud.
“I’m getting two more tests to make sure you didn’t mess the first one up and get my hopes up for no reason.” He said as he closed the car door.
Both of those tests showed positive results too, much to his consternation and my glee.

Though all the tests showed I was pregnant, as I mentioned before, I had also gotten my period. The bleeding came and went, as did my concern over the tiny life nestled deep inside of me. The doctors were a bit befuddled and told me simply not to get my hopes up. Like hell! After over two years of wanting a child with all my heart, I wasn’t losing this one! I truly believed that nothing in the world could have brought me down from my wondrous cloud.