Trying to Conceive in Memes

Congratulations!  Deciding to start your family is one of the most serious and transformational decisions you can ever make for your life.  So now that you’ve decided to start, you’ll probably get pregnant the first month you start trying, right?  Possibly yes, but in all likelihood, no.  In fact, there were a lot of misconceptions I had about trying to conceive (TTC) when we first started on our journey 2 1/2 years ago and I really wish I had known the cold, hard truth vs what I may have been led to believe looking at my Facebook feed (OMG every single ONE of these bitches is pregnant) and what I saw in the media.  Maybe my own struggle to get pregnant might have been easier if my expectations were more realistic from the onset.

In other words, I think it’s about damn time someone told the truth about what it’s really like vs what you may otherwise have been led to believe all of these years.  If you’re currently on your own journey of trying to conceive or planning to start soon, I think you’ll love this hilarious compilation of memes that shows what it’s really like – unfiltered – to keep your expectations more in line with reality.  Enjoy, relate, comment and most of all, laugh!

Getting Excited

So you’ve made the decision to start trying to conceive and you’re SO unbelievably excited.  I mean, you and your significant other are about to create LIFE and that is pretty amazing.  YAY!

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Thinking, Of Course, This Should Be Super Easy

When you first get started on your journey, you’ll no doubt be recalling those sex ed classes you had in junior high school and thinking that pregnancy can happen at anytime, to anyone and is pretty much inevitable if you ever dare have sex even once without birth control.  If you’re 15 and addicted to crack OR a pregnancy at this time in your life would otherwise be extremely inconvenient, you are correct and will inevitably get pregnant quickly and typically without even trying.  Now, on the other hand, if you’re a woman in her 30s, both you and your significant other are financially stable as well as emotionally mature and can’t wait to start your family, your TTC journey *may* not play out exactly as you’ve imagined.

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Doing the Deed (A LOT)

When it comes time to actually do the deed (and doing it a LOT), you may be reminiscing about your days of carefree pre-TTC sex and thinking about how much fun this is going to be.  However, it’s more likely that sex will become like a chore just given the extremely narrow window of opportunity that actually exists for a woman to get pregnant and your focus now turned to the endgame vs the journey itself.

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The Dreaded Two Week Wait

After all of the “baby dancing” has been done and your short window of opportunity has closed, then you will start the dreaded “2 week wait”.  This is basically where you sit on pins and needles for 14 straight days just wondering, imagining, hoping and praying that this month will be your month.

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Getting Your First Big Fat Negative (BFN)

If you’ve done absolutely everything right and you and your significant other have no fertility issues to speak of, you have about a 15-25% chance of getting pregnant in any given month when you’re TTC in your 30s.  If you go to take that first pregnancy test and you get that elusive second line, CONGRATULATIONS!  If not, you will study that test and stare at it for several minutes just waiting for that second line to appear but it doesn’t.  Cue the wine.

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Getting a Whole LOT of BFNs

Every month that you go through this process and that second line doesn’t make its cameo it gets a little bit harder to keep the faith.  Particularly if you’ve been on your TTC journey for some time, it can get downright depressing with a seemingly never-ending stream of BFNs.

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Everyone and Everything Around You is Pregnant

In the meantime, it may start to feel like everyone is around you is getting pregnant with ease which really just adds insult to injury.  Your egg has two yolks and that pepper you just cut up had a little teeny tiny baby pepper growing inside of it (side note: do I dare eat a baby pepper?)  Someone you know who wasn’t even trying is pregnant.  Your neighbor’s cat is pregnant.  You come across yet another trash tv show based on some batshit crazy couple with 8,000 children.  That couple that got married a year before you, that couple that got married a year after you and then that couple that literally just got married and OH MY GOD, how in the HELL are they pregnant already?!

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Terrible and Unsolicited Advice

Perhaps the most frustrating thing for me while on this crazy journey (or in our case, a two year long death march) was the litany of terrible, unsolicited advice you will inevitably get from perfectly well-meaning friends, relatives and colleagues when they ask if you’re ever going to try for a baby (none of their business, but I digress) and you so much as mention that in fact you are and you’ve had any difficulty.  ‘Have you ever tried a whole food diet/the power of prayer/acupuncture/doing a headstand for 20 minutes after/this or that sexual position/hopping on one foot while whistling Dixie/this weird tincture from Zanzibar that you can only buy online?’ they’ll ask.  Let me just stop you there – YES I’ve tried it, I’ve tried it ALL at this point and NONE of this made any difference whatsoever.

All of this said, I think my favorite piece of well-meaning “advice” (if you can even call it that) is the age old favorite of “just relax and stop trying!”.  Now, to be clear, I don’t feel like this actually warrants a response so I’ll just leave it at equating that “advice” to literally ANY other situation in life where ANYONE is trying to accomplish ANYTHING.  That is literally the stupidest f!#king shit I’ve ever heard.

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Unexplained Infertility

If you’re like most couples, you will have gotten your big fat positive (BFP) by now (YAY!!!) and your mind can move on to obsessing about all of the worries that will occupy your mind in the first trimester of pregnancy.  If you STILL haven’t gotten your BFP and you’ve been trying for 6 months to 1 year (dependent on age), you may take the perfectly rational approach of dragging your significant other with you to see your doctor and getting some testing done to rule out any weird issues.  In the absence of any said issues, you’ll be branded with the label of ‘unexplained infertility’ which is basically just the doctors’ way of throwing up their hands and telling you that they have no effing clue what is wrong or how to help you.

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Fertility Drugs & Treatments

If you’re STILL not pregnant, you may eventually resort to taking any number of fertility drugs, which may or may not make you an absolutely terrifying hormonal bitch, or even start a round of fertility treatments, none of which seem to cost anything less than a limb (it wasn’t your favorite anyway) and a million trillion dollars.

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Rage/Fuck it Mentality

If you’ve reached this point and you’re STILL not pregnant, you have probably mentally (if not physically) given up any shred of hope you once had.  At first, you may burst into tears randomly thinking about the sweet white picket fence and two and a half kids you’ll never have as well as all of those annoying family Christmas newsletters you’ll never get to write.  But by the end, your attitude will likely be more to the tune of eff this and eff that, get me a bottle of champagne circa NOW and let’s buy a damn condo somewhere tropical already.

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Finally Getting Your BFP

Only after you’ve really given up entirely, made that would-be nursery into a home office and have actually gotten pretty excited about your alternate life plan, it’s practically inevitable that you’ll get your BFP shortly thereafter. SURPRISE!

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If you’re still on your TTC journey after all of this, please just try to remember that you are so NOT alone!  At a certain point, there is very little that you can control about the situation so beyond medical intervention for diagnosed issues (or undiagnosed, as is the case with the ever-frustrating condition of ‘unexplained infertility’), please trust me that you’ll lose your damn mind if you try to attempt this journey without a good dose of humor.  If you’re struggling now or you’ve ever struggled trying to conceive, I hope this made you smile.  If this made you laugh even once, then my work here is done.

If this post resonated with you, please feel free to like, share and/or join in the discussion with comments below to share your TTC stories.  When your journey does come to end, however near or far that may be, CONGRATULATIONS mama and please feel free to read and hopefully enjoy my First Trimester of Pregnancy in Memes post.

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