Parenthood, Part Two

So that summer I had a regular checkup with my gynecologist and just casually mentioned that we might be thinking about trying to conceive. He told me that at that point he saw no reason to worry and that he wasn't anticipating any problems. If I was not pregnant in a year, we would talk about things. Okay, that seemed fair enough.

We had decided that we weren't going to tell ANYONE that we were going to try. It was going to be our little secret until it happened. But that wasn't going to take long. I would probably be pregnant within two months at the most. That's the way this whole trying to conceive thing worked, right?

I was desperately trying to remember everything Shannon had ever told me about her infertility issues and whether or not there was anything in all that information that could make this happen for us immediately. All I could come up with was a temperature chart. So I bought some graph paper and created my own chart. Remember this was back in the mid 1980s, before the internet could provide anything like that at the stroke of a few keys.

So I had a thermometer and graph paper and I was ready to go. Every morning I would take my temperature around the same time, then graph it. When I saw that ovulation was about to take place, I told Ted, and that evening, we let "nature take its course."

Afterwards, I can remember thinking to myself, "Oh no...what have we DONE???" I got so worked up about this that I was sick to my stomach. And then I thought that, hey, what's done is done, and our lives are about to change forever!

Oh wow...I can't believe how naive we were. We just assumed that it would work the first time. Heck, we were even looking at possible due dates! We thought that a spring baby would be so exciting.

We found out a couple of weeks or so later that it didn't work.

What's up with this??? It didn't work?? Why not? It was supposed to work. We did it at the right time. What was the problem?

Off I went to the book section of our local K-Mart. I was looking for books on getting pregnant, and found a few. I purchased the one that seemed to give a lot of practical information. I was already doing one thing (taking my temperature) so we needed to know what to do next to help achieve conception.

I knew I could have just asked Shannon, but of course did not want to let her know that we were trying. How could I possibly be the next person to tell her that there was a baby on the way?? She really suffered emotionally every time someone she knew got pregnant and knew that she could always talk to me about it because I was not expecting, nor (to her knowledge) were we trying. I felt like if I told her, it would be like abandoning her, so I just couldn't do that. I had way too much respect for her.

So the next month we tried the pillow trick. After our "session" I slid a pillow underneath myself and stayed that way for about 30 minutes. Surely that would work.

It didn't.