Getting Pregnant

You can easily start to feel like the whole world is pregnant except you when you’re having trouble conceiving a child. And it sounds awful, but after hearing so many friends and colleagues celebrate their joyous news – and I am genuinely happy for them, of course – I really wanted to cocoon myself away from all women of child-bearing age and come out again when we finally had some success.

I think that we’ve been particularly unlucky to strike infertility problems in the midst of a time when so many people around us really are having children. It’s not just a misconception (no pun intended); for example, of about ten school friends who I still keep in close contact with, three gave birth in September and the same month, three announced their pregnancies. On top of that, my very own (younger, and only) sister is pregnant too.

But there has to be a positive spin on this. (There just has to be!) One thing is that from my close friends who have new babies, and from my soon-to-be-born niece or nephew, I’m definitely learning a lot about raising a child and all those baby things that you don’t know much about until you have to do it. That’s useful. And the other positive side is that my husband and I always tell each other that when we finally do have a child, we’ll be so excited – if it’s possible (and we think it is), even more excited than all our friends and relatives who’ve had children because we’ve had to wait extra long for ours.

Getting on towards six months after we’d started trying to get pregnant, we were starting to wonder what was going on. And that’s when the wave of pregnancies began around us.

Many colleagues of mine started announcing pregnancies or  going on maternity leave. Since a large proportion of my colleagues are women in their 30s, this is probably to be expected and not statistically unusual, but what bugged me is that most of them had got pregnant almost immediately after they’d started trying, in some cases before, and in one case, when they weren’t trying at all.

Friends and my husband’s colleagues started announcing pregnancies too. Same as above: nobody else had to wait long.

And then, with the topic so obviously in the air, everyone started asking us when we were going to have kids. At this stage, I was still evasive, because I had an easy and believable answer - “We’ve only been married a year, so give us a break!” Of course, inside I was wondering the same thing and didn’t feel too happy after being grilled about this topic week after week.

What I’ve learnt, at least, is not to ask people this question, not unless I really know them well and can talk about it properly. And if you’re reading this I want you to learn this too: don’t ask random couples when they’re going to have kids. You never know what’s going on behind the scenes and how much you might upset them. Even if you mean it well, it’s just not worth the risk.