Becoming the Mammy, part 3

By Contributing Writer on Thursday, August 19, 2010 - 15:36

[Editor’s Note: This article was written by the team of Gaelick.com, an award-winning Irish website for LGBT-news.]

Charting and ovulation predictor kits and checking cervical mucus be damned. I think we missed ovulation.

I was working and I got that distinctive cramp in my side. I’d also had a tell-tale temperature drop that morning. I rang our donor but he was busy that evening. We made plans to go ahead a bit early and go the next morning. However, if I actually ovulated when I felt that pain, the next day was far too late.

It seems the consensus is that the egg, once released, will last 6 – 12 hours. Rhythm method people will warn you could still be fertile for 48 hours afterwards, but on the pregnancy trying end of things, the recommendation is to inseminate before ovulation or right when it happens. We were 24 hours later. So unless I have particularly long-living eggs or on the off chance my ovary released two, we’ll be at this again next month.

It’s not a big deal. We have enough friends who have tried for years that we’re certainly not surprised by the learning curve and won’t be surprised (but will be disappointed) if we get a Big Fat Negative in a couple of weeks. It’s all trial and error. And when you find yourself syringing a bit of pre-seed into a specimen jar and handing it to a friend, you can be forgiven for not knowing exactly what you’re doing. They didn’t teach this in school.

We did, however, take a bit of time to ourselves just after it all, and I can’t tell you how much that helps. Sometimes it feels like I’m doing this myself and maybe she feels like I’m going through it alone too. I tend to live in my head a little bit. But just taking some time out to be together is just what the doctor ordered. After all, if this all goes to plan, we’ll have a little one in our family. And that little one will need us to be as happy and sane as we can be.

Since we’d timed it all wrong, we had a hotel room booked for the wrong night. So we enjoyed a night in a hotel, ordered room service, watched telly and just relaxed together without any of the distractions of home. We’d planned to be so civilised about it. Hotel room, some relaxing, the lot. I won’t go into how the whole thing actually went down, but if a child has been conceived, it will make for a great (and mortifying) story many years from now.

Anyway, that night, Friends was on the hotel telly. It was the episode where Rachel has her baby and Joey doesn’t really propose, you know that one. Well it’s also the episode where Monica and Chandler decide to start trying for a baby. They sneak into a hospital room and as they start things up, Monica stops and says, “Oh, wait, do we have a condom?”.  It’s funny ‘cos it’s true.

One of the strange things I’ve found is trying to get my head around ‘trying to get pregnant’. One of the impressions teenaged girls (and it’s not like that was yesterday) are given is that it’s very easy to get pregnant. Too easy. I think we are very well programmed as teenagers (well, some of us are) that pregnancy is the worst thing that can happen to you. Pregnancy will ruin your life. Whatever you do, don’t get pregnant. And it can happen really easily.

And, well, some of that programming remains. I expect it will stop as I realise just how hard it is to get pregnant. It just might take a while.

Oh, and we ended up using the Soft Cup method after all. Dead easy. When I practiced with water I used way too much. I’m in the middle of the 2 week wait right now so we’ll know soon if we got lucky this first time. I’m not optimistic, but next month I should be able to anticipate ovulation better than I did this time around.