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Conception

The intention of Anne’s Mommy Moments is to share my personal experiences as a mother so that moms who are going through something similar can feel less alone. Often, when we are struggling, what we seek isn’t advice, it’s the assurance that someone gets what we are going through and that it will end. That is why I wrote The Mommy Monologues. These stories, told by women from all walks of life, tell the reader, “It’s ok, I’ve been there. I understand. It will get better.”

My journey begins as a 34 year old newlywed. I was so ready to be a mom. My husband was also eager to get started. He’s older than I am and he had once given up on this dream, thinking it was too late in the game for him but, he was wrong. I approached fertility the same way I handle everything else-preparation, lists and paperwork. I kept a thermometer, a pen and a journal in the drawer of my night table. Every morning, I took my temperature to see if I was ovulating. My husband noticed what I was doing and was annoyed. I’d stay in bed after we had sex, propping up my butt with a pillow and waving my legs in the air to help the sperm find my egg. Ok, I’ll admit it. I was being a bit of a whack job but I really wanted this.

Every time a couple is trying to conceive, men joke that they hope it takes a while because of all the sex they get to have. The assumption is that men will love having all that sex. However, as time went on, I found that my husband was less and less interested. It wasn’t that he didn’t like sex. It was my new approach to our sex life. As soon as I was ovulating, I insisted that we have sex. I’d pull out the lingerie and be all over him. He felt used and resented that he had to have sex on that specific day. He would often put off love-making until the next day or even a few days later. I was bummed. I’d missed another opportunity to get pregnant.

As the months passed and I was still not pregnant, I started to worry. What if it never happened for us? My husband was working in our home at the time and his clients, mostly women, would give me advice. “We adopted. Here’s the agency we used, give them a call”. “It took us years to get pregnant, we ended up going for fertility treatments”. I heard about all the costly and painful ways we could conceive and I got even more discouraged. How could I not be pregnant? I had done everything by the book. I was taking my multivitamins, eating lots of healthy food, exercising and having sex when my body was ovulating….or so I thought.

My husband had an opportunity to go to Ireland and sing in a band for a contest. He asked me to go with him. We flew out on the Thursday and returned on the Monday. It was a fantastic trip! We ate, drank, visited Tipperary and had sex. When we returned, I found out we were pregnant. How could this be? The timing was wrong. It turns out, because my cycle only lasts 21 days (I have my period every three weeks), my ovulation happened much sooner than the normal equation, the one I was using to plan this pregnancy. I was elated!!! Overall, it took us nine months to conceive which isn’t that long in retrospect but it felt like an eternity.

It was early in the morning when I peed on the pregnancy test. I rushed back to our bedroom and woke up my husband to tell him the good news. He woke up really fast, grabbed the stick and made his way to the washroom where he could turn on the light and inspect it. He had this expression of disbelief on his face like, “Holy Sh*t! I’m going to be a dad. This is happening”. There were hugs and jumping around and then we went back to bed to snuggle and catch a bit more sleep. Let the adventure begin!

I’d love to hear about your journey. Feel free to share your stories in the comments section.