I started writing our story to channel my energy and thoughts, to let off steam, to find some sense of sanity and balance as I progress through the journey of trying to conceive. If you are trying, I hope this gives you some comfort, maybe even some advice, but I didn't start writing with any consciousness that anyone was really out there, or that it would mean anything to anyone else who isn't floundering through the hopes and desperations of this same journey.
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We've been trying for six months now, deliberately, although we never actively tried to prevent it before, and we will be married for 3 years come December. I don't know if I had really tried or even hoped before that, part of me was tied to my job, my cooking, my youth, my lifestyle and conscious of the fact that my husband had just left the military and was trying to find a new job.
The process of his career has lately been as tense as he is easy-going and for a while, I put aside my own family plans to make his and him the priority of our married lives. How I regret not waking up earlier and realizing the frustration that would come from being more than ready, by the time we begun!
When we first started to try, I already had a suspicion that it would not be easy. I'm not sure where I got this notion from, maybe it was premonition, maybe it was my mother's offhand warning that she had a hysterectomy after my younger brother and was early menopausal "so if you leave it till too late, and you are like me, it may be tough", maybe it was that my husband's family has a history of obesity and diabetes and I didn't feel that either of us were particularly young nor fertile, maybe it was that we had been married for awhile and it still hadn't happened "by accident".
Still, I was nonchalant, still at the age where I was surrounded by Fertile Mrytle friends, more than half of whom who would conceive the very first month they tried and I thought, surely, it would be similarly soon.
A month passed, then two, then four, then six, punctuated by some months where we or I would travel. Once you became so acutely aware of time passing, each year didn't seem to have enough months, or that many chances.
My calendar slowly started to fill up with circled dates and for the first time in my life, I could tell you, back to the start of the year, which date my period had come on, every, single, month. The months themselves are starting to feel not like months, but like two-week replays.
Writing this down is both about trying to live within that measure and, in equal part, trying to let go. Trying to find that belief in the bottom of my gut, that we are meant to have a baby, that it will happen for us if we just want it enough to jump through the hoops, to get there.
I first thought of naming this story "The Search for Alpha" because Alpha is the 'risk-adjusted measure of the so-called active return on an investment' and this certainly is turning into an active, abnormal, inefficient, erratic investment through which risks and gains only seem measurable. Alpha is also the first letter in the Greek alphabet and this somehow feels like my search for a beginning; some intangible, first, special, value.
