The hardest part of trying to conceive, besides the constant disappointment, is how it impacts your relationship over all.
It consumes it in many ways.
And as a woman it often is an imbalance of labor and guilt on your own end that you feel like your husband never really feels or experiences. In a lot of ways he gets a break that you never do.
Really if all the testing and everything is done your husband only has to be there for one week out of the month and the rest is back to his regularly scheduled program if you are doing just plain old timed intercourse. It is hard to not make the entire sex life of the relationship revolve around this though because after a while sex seems to be a part of a routine. And it can be draining on both people.
But to hear your husband complain about it you feel this quiet rage brew in you…like gee…could you just work with me on this little part? Could you?
Today I began to explain to my husband, in admittedly not the most exciting way that this month I wanted to try the Sperm Meets Egg Plan and I had highlighted on the calendar to make it easier what days we would need to have sex. This is not romantic. A sex calendar. My husband told me “way to put the spark back into our marriage” and in that moment I was delivered back to a nightmare I had the previous night where everyone was pregnant and I was crying the entire dream. At one point one of the pregnant people told me if I all I was going to do was cry she wasn’t going to let me near her baby. At that moment I came and got on the computer to blog all of this.
My husband was joking and he didn’t mean to hurt my feelings. And I was serious and I didn’t mean to make sex more of a chore than it already is for us. We both want the same thing but our approaches just are not matching and neither are our moods.
For me I am willing to do about anything to increase our chances of getting pregnant. I can’t pump myself full of anything much else short of doing IVF at this point which we simply can’t afford. I am trying to maximize the free method for what it is worth. Is trying the SMEP plan really going to change things so much?
All I have asked my husband to do differently is drink more water during the fertile week and try this plan. He takes a vitamin daily too.
I have to go to multiple ultrasounds to make sure I don’t have cysts and suck down a medicine cabinet of supplements and medications and be the reminder of when to have sex. The sex bad guy. The spark killer. I am in charge of all of that. And then after all of that is done I get to ride the emotional Two Week Wait rollercoaster while he watches from below. Sure he sees me and experiences me as I am going through it but I am riding it by myself and only I feel the sickness, twists and turns and dips and highs.
Perhaps he is on his own rollercoaster he hasn’t told me about? I can’t testify to that I suppose. I shouldn’t try to speak for how he feels but that is how it seems to me anyway. That there is still a lot of his world that isn’t about this and this is an irritating side project with ever changing rules.
You know what would be dope to hear from my husband?
“I would love to try that!”
“Great idea, honey!”
Or to even know he has been researching ways to increase our chances to get pregnant and he came home and suggested something to try so we could have a more successful outcomes would feel supportive as well.
Actually this whole thing has sprung into a half of a fight between us. I asked him was he doing anything independently to help with us trying to get pregnant because I didn’t want to assume for this writing he wasn’t? He said he felt the questioning was judgmental and explained why. I don’t feel it was but because I said he was “irritated” by some of the plan changes (which I still do. There isn’t enthusiasm a lot of times when I suggest something new).
Even trying to write this blog and really get some of his ow perspective on this to make sure I am not just living in my own head and being grossly unfair has removed the “spark” in some ways I guess.
It can be difficult to stay connected as a couple in these relationships where you are trying to conceive. It can be difficult to feel supported. And these challenges are just from trying to make a baby which to some people would be really fun but for many of us couples, especially when we have been on the journey a long time, the fun dissipates. The life wafts out.
And then you don’t want to talk about it. Then it becomes that hot button issue you want to avoid or have to mentally prepare yourself for because of all of the feelings. So many feelings.
Hopefully we can come together.
Chasing Baby Mayr 