Baby, Baby, Baby
Do you remember the wedding I didn’t go to last year, because of the whole Bestie drama? Well, she’s pregnant. The Facebook announcement came and went, and so did the gender announcement too. I’m deliriously happy for them. I really am. I don’t like him, but I have nothing against her at all. She’s just not my kinda person, y’know? She’s a square and I’m a circle. We just don’t fit.
They’re a decent couple though, something I can happily admit now I’m slightly over the hump of bitterness. What happened … well, it wasn’t right. But I have to admit that I could have communicated a little more. I could have tried a little harder. I pushed Bestie away just as much as he pulled away. More so, in fact, I think. I miss him. I really miss him, and in some ways, little ones, I miss them as well – the newly married and now with-child couple.
It makes me think about my own baby battle; one that I haven’t talked about half as much as I want to, on the blog. In fact, I’ve written stuff down a few times, but I just can’t seem to piece everything together in one blog post. I don’t really know what I want to say. Or how I want to say it. Maybe this is a great starting place? Right here, right now?
Fuck it.
Six months ago:
What would you do if you realised you hadn’t been taking your contraceptive pill for almost a year, you’d had quite a lot of sex in that time, and you hadn’t gotten pregnant?
It was before Bear and I moved in together that the pill-taking started not being as regular as it should have been. It’s not something I’m proud of, but my contraceptive has been a pain in the ass for some time now. I changed my last pill because it wasn’t working to regulate anything, particularly my periods, so I certainly didn’t trust that it would control whether or not I would get pregnant. And then there’s the my-chronic-disease business. I’m sick a lot sometimes. Trying to keep pills down, any of them, is a daily struggle. There were days where I would take a pill and then throw it right back up. I’d take a second pill, just in case, and I’d throw up a second time around. I can’t even take Paracetamol. Pill-poppin’ is not easy for me. That’s why I don’t take any medication for my chronic disease business. Fuck that. Fuck that in every single way.
I guess, somewhere in between meeting Bear and moving in with Bear, my contraception didn’t really seem that important. We talked about it. I’m not a crazy bitch who goes around deliberately trying to get pregnant with random men. (Obviously: I’m 31 with NO babies.) We kinda decided something together …
I would deliberately not take my pill.
As in, not just forget to take it, or puke it up, or take two just in case I threw it up, but just not take it. We wouldn’t be deliberately trying to get pregnant, but we wouldn’t be deliberately avoiding it either.
“Shall we leave it up to fate?”
“Yes, fate!”
The suspected dementia business then came up. It wasn’t the right time to have a baby, so we planned to be super careful. Using an app on my phone, we managed to figure out when I was ovulating so that we could AVOID baby-making. He made a conscious effort to pull out like a horny 15-year-old too. Sometimes. (*I’m aware pulling out is not effective contraception.) We weren’t exactly vigilant though. I tracked everything on the app, mostly because when I AM ready to have a baby I want to be damn ready, but we were NOT careful. Not at all. Despite saying that we would be, we were far from it. He forgot to pull out more often than not, and it seemed that I was horny as fuck when I ovulated. I don’t know what happened really, but it just seemed like whenever sex wasn’t allowed to be on the table, it was well and truly on the fucking table.
(Or on the floor. Couch. Bed. It didn’t matter. Anywhere would do.)
It was during a stoned conversation that the baby thing came up again. Bear asked if I’d gone back on the pill. I said no. He said, “Oh.” There it was: both of us acknowledging the fact that I hadn’t gotten pregnant. We went back over the app and then realised that we’d essentially been having unprotected sex since we moved in, and probably even a bit before that, with all the delightful vomming.
“Shit, do you think I should get myself fertility tested?”
“Nope, you’ve got three kids already. After what my uterus has been through, it’s probably my bits that are broken, and I’m pretty sure they won’t test for anything until you’ve been baby-making for at least a year to no avail. We haven’t exactly been baby-making, have we?”
“No, but you know I want to have babies with you. I’d do it right now. I’m both disappointed and slightly worried that it hasn’t happened already.”
And that’s the truth: we haven’t been trying to have a baby, but we haven’t been trying not to have a baby either. It wouldn’t have been the worst thing in the world to happen. Maybe the best thing? The plan was to be “careful” for a little bit longer initially, to give us enough time to find a bigger place and get a little more financial stability. We had to wait and see what happened with his dementia assessment first. But we weren’t careful. We said we would be, but we weren’t.
So… What’s up with the zero pregnancy business then? Maybe fate has been telling us it wasn’t the right time? Maybe my body is broken? Maybe it hasn’t been long enough to say and I should really get a grip on myself?
I’m not really worrying about it yet. It’s not like we’ve been actively trying to have a baby. We barely managed to have sex at all, for some of those months. I don’t know? Maybe I’m just being paranoid. I mean, it’s not like we’re actually ready to have a baby. Can you even be ready to have a baby? I just had some stuff to say. I wanted to talk about it. That thing I’ve been avoiding for so long. I just wish I could put some of it in some sort of order that makes sense, but at least I’m trying. I don’t know what is wrong with me lately. But I do know that having unprotected sex for close to a year without a pregnancy doesn’t make me feel very good at all. Would I even want to know if I were broken??
I’ll start worrying in a few months or something.
