Getting pregnant seems to be a bit of a bitch so far.
At first I thought it would happen immediately. The Mirena came out *pop* and boom I would be fertile as hell and Tommie would just walk by me and voila!
Little Grovetjie on the way.
As the months passed I started realising that this is not so.
Why not? Teenagers all swear they only did it once and fell pregnant.
Am I too old? Are my ovaries so conditioned by the fervent please-don't-let-me-be-pregnant prayers I've been saying every night for the past ten years?
Other people say it's because I am stressed. How does one tell exactly how stressed one is?
I usually know my stress levels are through the roof when my eyes start twitching and I stop going number two for weeks on end, which culminates in extreme stomach ache and moodiness.
These days whenever I feel moody I assess what time of the month it is.
Since going off my antidepressants (blog to follow) and birth control I have had insane PMS every month but only a few days before Aunt Flo visits.
This past month I had PMS-like symptoms for two weeks before hand, headaches every day, bloatedness and crazy dreams.
Thus, said my mind, I must be pregnant, finally.
And this time I felt ready.
The last time I thought I might be it scared me a little and I groped for the bottle.
Since then I stopped drinking (blog to follow).
I mean, since Feb. I have stopped my sleeping tablets, antidepressants, mood stabilisers, antihistamines and alcohol.
I am extremely sober and feel everything.
Am I not a worthy subject for a child?
This seems to be a common conclusion in women that struggle to fall pregnant. What's wrong with us? Do we have so many feelings of guilt and shame that we believe we don't
deserve a kid?
And then when the kid is there it also seems like a kind of punishment.
Then women seem to think back to all the grief they gave their own mothers and start feeling like God gave them a difficult child to get back at them.
Granted this does seem to be the cycle of life.
We are born, we give our parents hell and then we have our own children who give us hell until they in turn give us grandchildren who give them hell and so on and so forth
until the sun supernovas and kills us all.
Let's start at the beginning.
In Feb. my Mirena has done its job for five years which means it was time to have it removed.
Getting it in was such a mission that the doctor had to put me under to succeed and a 15 min operation turned into almost an hour.
He said my cervix was so small I barely needed the damn thing.
So understandably I was a bit worried when he said he'll just yank it out in the chair without any drugs of any sort.
At this point you might be wondering how a person like me is ever going to survive labour or even a c-section.
Anywho, I decided to trust the man and went to the appointment ready to be yanked. At least I was still drinking back then so I had that and a holiday we were planning
to look forward to.
When push came to shove, or rather yank came to shove, I was petrified and steeled myself for excruciating pain but before it could even start feeling like pain it was
over and I felt like a kind of Mirena birthing goddess.
A highly fertile one.
So off we went on holiday because whenever one of us quits our jobs we have to go to the coast to "wash off the misery" before starting the next one, and I had just finished
my notice month at the hell I worked at for five and a half years (blog to follow...maybe).
The first time we did it I thought we were pregnant. I mean isn't that what sex-ed taught us all? Sex leads to pregnancy?
It seems this is only true for teenagers.
I started talking to other women, customers actually, some of which went to school with me or studied with me. A lot of them had also recently started trying for kids
and had varying degrees of success.
They gave me tips about downloading apps and eating certain things and lying on your back afterward to "help the little guys" and so on and so forth.
So I downloaded an app which tells me specifically when the "window is open" and we must get down to business, so to speak.
This quickly grew tiresome.
Scheduling sex time is not supposed to have to happen in the first two years of marriage, I believe, but you know how it goes...right?
Sometimes we are busy and tired and whatever, but the "full window has to be used" according to the app.
Other sites say that every second day is fine. This is still way too much thinking and planning for me.
And why on earth did God make us so that we can only really fall pregnant one day out of the month. Is it so that we won't have millions of children running around without planning them?
Because that seems to happen anyway. To people that aren't me, anyway.
Spending time with little kids also doesn't seem to be a good idea because they look like extremely hard work and can be highly annoying (when I suspect I might be up the duff).
Other times they are adorable and beautiful and give meaning to life (when I know I am not pregnant).
This see saw is driving me crazy.
The worst part is seeing other people fall pregnant around me.
I have a friend who is planning on having a baby on her own and has started the process. We have been dreaming of falling pregnant together for three years.
What if she manages and I can't?
What will that say about me?
I have my issues and am still struggling with a few things but that can't be why, right?
I should be healthy and fertile as fuck right now but noooo.
It might be because husband and I still smoke. Now, I have been told that quitting drinking and smoking at the same time is a terrible idea and I am blindly following all instructions
I receive from people that have been sober now for over a year because they obviously know what they are doing.
Then I realise that I am 33 years old, the age my mother fell pregnant with me, her fourth child.
An unplanned "laat lammetjie".
I've quit smoking before with Mr. Carr and it wasn't hard but I don't want to screw up my sobriety, which I consider the most important thing in my life at the moment.
So we are back at square one. The square where everyone tells me to "just relax" and "stop trying so hard".
What does that even mean? Should I think about all the horrible parts of being a parent so the universe will knock me up just to be spiteful?
At some point I decided to just enjoy all the things a childless person can enjoy, which previously came down to mostly one thing: drinking.
A thing which parents actually seem to embrace with a passion once the little bundle of love is off the breast.
But I hear other things I can add to this list are: sleeping, leaving the house and not worrying/crying all the time.
On the plus side, I am losing weight. It seems that the Mirena can increase appetite and bmi. Also, we all know alcohol is fattening.
After 30 anyway, before, it seemed to be slimming, haha.
I'm going to go read a book now...another thing I can add to the list of things children seem to take away from you.
Sigh.
