A look back on conceiving…
It took my husband, Matt, and I 14 months to conceive. As far as infertility stories go, that’s not a very long time, nor did anything overly eventful happen. Nothing weird with my husband’s side of the deal. I had a few late-ish periods and an ovarian cyst that burst, but no major issues. But for someone as impatient as myself, it was a tortuous 14 months, for different reasons. (gah, that sounds like a terrible way to describe newly-wedded life, but hear me out.)
The first nine months of our marriage, Matt and I lived in Grapevine. I got a new job in Fort Worth and he continued working in Dallas. It seemed like it’d be perfect. We were living mid-distance from either of our places of work. However, that meant 45 minutes in the car every morning on overcrowded, under construction highways. Then I’d turn around every afternoon and do it again. And heaven forbid we have a staff meeting that kept me at school after 4:00, or I’d be in the car at least an hour on the way home. (Calling it home is still a little funny to me. Now that we’ve moved back to my quiet hometown, I feel like we have always lived here.)
Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that because I never truly felt a sense of belonging in the city, my body didn’t allow me to conceive while we lived there. (Roll your eyes. Shake your head. But I truly believe it.) Long, rambling story short, I was borderline depressed, if not all out depressed. I would come home, wait on Matt to get home, then it’d be dark and time for bed. I didn’t go anywhere or do anything.
I was three hours away from my family. Aside from two trips to Europe, that’s the furthest and longest I’ve been away from my home. That may make me sound like a baby, but family has always been most important to me. My wonderful in-laws lived very close, and I am so lucky to have married into such a wonderful family. But the city just wasn’t home. My Dotmama wasn’t just a mile up the road. My church couldn’t be seen from my front yard.
Anyway, to save you from my complaining, fast forward to the end of June 2018. I somehow talked Matt into moving to the middle of nowhere (my hometown and the best place on earth) with me and giving up his graphic design job to be a high school technology teacher. (We can get into how amazingly selfless he is later.)
That June I thought I was going to be able to tell Matt he was going to be a father on Father’s Day. (A late period had tricked me again.) Our first wedding anniversary came and went, still no baby. We began running together everyday that July. I had decided the 25 pounds (yes, you read that right) I had gained in our first year—really 6 months—of marriage was the cause of my unexplained infertility.
Three months and 20 pounds lost, and I went to my second homecoming. (How I’ve been out of high school long enough for over 8 years to go by is mind-boggling, but anyway.) I got to see old friends who are all married now and have kids of their own, and it felt like I was being asked by every old classmate and their mom (literally one of their mom’s asked me) “Why don’t y’all have kids yet?”
Can I just pause right here to say, PLEASE STOP ASKING PEOPLE THIS QUESTION. I am a naturally dramatic person, but honestly, I felt suffocated by this question. In the back of my mind knowing that I had an appointment 10 days after that class party with an infertility specialist. Not drinking at said party because I was holding out hope that my period that was due the next day, wouldn’t come. I just smiled and tried to keep it light. (Sometimes I can’t control my facial expressions.) But I went home and cried. (Dramatic, like I said.) But I was angry. It was infuriating to me that everyone I knew seemed to have kids, but I just couldn’t. My body couldn’t accomplish this one basic thing.
That was September 28-29, 2018. Homecoming came and went, but my period still didn’t come. My mom makes fun of me to this day, but I took pregnancy tests daily (I had a box of cheap test strips from Amazon) Monday, October 1, I woke up at 5:00 and took a test, and went back to sleep. I wasn’t expecting anything other than the usual negative. But when I got up for the day, a very faint second pink line caught my eye. I talked myself into thinking it was an evaporation line. I told myself I has waited too long to look at the test. But that didn’t stop me from waking up at 5:00 the next morning to take another test. October 2, 2018, just a bit over 3 months after moving back home, I found out I was pregnant.
Maybe it was random chance. Maybe it was losing the 20 pounds. But I like to think it was purely God knowing we had found our home. ❤️