Isn’t it ironic that you spend most of your teenage years and early twenties trying not to get pregnant and then when you want it to happen its actually a lot harder than you thought?
I/we were quite traditional in our plans for a family. We bought a house, got married, travelled and spent two years as a married couple before trying to start a family.
The time we spent together before trying for a family was invaluable. We grew as individuals and as a couple we went from strength to strength. It was time and we were ready…well sort of.
Dom, my husband, was a little more cautious than me. He knew that trying for a baby meant actually having a baby and it could happen at any time. He knew that our carefree lives would change forever.
I was probably a little more naïve. Dom had ALL (Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia) as a child and I had it in my mind that we would need medical intervention to help us get pregnant, something that takes a lot of time.
I thought we had years of trying and rounds of IVF ahead of us.
Despite my mindset that it would take us ages to conceive, the first month we tried and it didn’t happen I was disappointed.
As the months went on, the disappointment didn’t lessen.
I had acupuncture weekly as my cycles weren’t exactly regular. I took my temperature, did ovulation tests and changed my diet.
It’s crazy to think that I had mentally prepared myself for such a long journey, yet the reality of it not happening right away was eating me up.
No matter how relaxed you are, how informed you are or how realistic you are, trying for a baby can easily consume you.
For those of you reading this who are not ready for children yet and have friends who are trying to conceive, please try not to be too harsh if they talk about babies all the time. No matter how hard you try, it is all consuming…especially after a long period of time.
Future plans, holidays, and concerts all have an invisible question mark hanging over them… ‘what if I’m pregnant?’
Sometimes those words slip out in conversations and I’m sure it can be seen as annoying or obsessive but once you make the decision to have a family, you are ready for it, you want it, you crave it and you start planning and thinking about the day you will become parents.
We were lucky. It took eight months of trying to get pregnant.
As silly as it sounds because we were ‘trying’ it still came as a complete shock!
We had retuned from our overseas trip/late honeymoon (not pregnant) and had itchy feet, our house was mostly renovated and we just needed to move forward, within two weeks our house was ready and on the market. We didn’t have a plan other than just seeing what would happen.
The house sold within three weeks and then we had 22 days to move out – two days before Christmas…great! Baby making was put right to the back of our minds (and I say this because as much as you would think that it would be completely off our radar…its never very far from your thoughts).
We moved all of our belongings into storage and began our Christmas celebrations.
After a few weeks on holiday we came back to stay with our friends while we began the house hunt. One week later on the 12th January 2017, I found myself home alone with a few hours to kill before I had work. I decided to take a pregnancy test.
Each month was disappointment after disappointment and I had come to expect the little single line.
Two lines appeared almost immediately and I began to shake with excitement!
Could it really be positive? I took a photo of the test just to double check!
We had done it…I was pregnant…and we were homeless!