We try our whole sexual lives not to get pregnant, and then when we want to, we can’t. Well, some of us can’t. Our best friends, sisters, and relatives, for some reason, don’t have the same problem. But for those of us who share this experience, it’s a challenge we didn’t expect.
How did this happen? We have been warned, scared to death, run to the drugstore hoping no one would see us buying a pregnancy test kit the day after we were late, faced the probability, analyzed the guy we were with and the time in our life, and contemplated parenthood, all in the three minutes the test took to say, “No, you are not pregnant.” This all while we were thinking, “Dodged a bullet. Must be more careful.” It has been drilled into us for years.
So what’s up with the cruel duality? Is it that you can’t have what you want when you want it, or is there some cosmic force or puppeteer playing with us? Our next step is to blame ourselves: It must be me. I should have exercised more, I should have eaten better, I shouldn’t have experimented in college, I waited too long, I’m too old, I shouldn’t have … No, no, it’s not you. It’s life. And life—our life, my life, your life—doesn’t always go as planned.
Thanks to the women who went before us and the pressure they applied to doctors, family, and friends. A few people set out to help those of us who didn’t happen to get pregnant on their wedding night or the day they got engaged or five minutes after you and your husband or partner decided to have children. For the rest of us, we got help. Help that didn’t exist before. Help for what other dear women were labeled: barren.
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.