Thank you to the brave women who went before us. Thank you. And shame on the press that labeled your beautiful child a test-tube baby. Shame on you; some of you have children or grandchildren whom you labeled as such. They are a gift, no matter how we got there and maybe even if we didn’t. But they are not different, no less special and no less loved because their mom and dad had help. Help for the very thing that we first thought might happen if we sat on a public toilet seat or kissed a boy, to later worrying it had happened by accident almost every month of our life.
Getting pregnant, it turns out, is not an accident. Once you have been given the details of the so many hours the sperm is alive, the so many hours you have an egg available and in the right spot, the millimeters your uterine lining must be to have it “stick” (what is this Ping-Pong, and you hope for the Velcro?), then the cells must divide and divide and divide and divide and only then can a little heart beat. Are you kidding me? No wonder I can’t get pregnant. How does anyone get pregnant? So the story goes, getting pregnant is not always what you thought it was.
