Vodka Yonic features a rotating cast of female writers from around the world sharing stories that are alternately humorous, sobering, intellectual, erotic, religious or painfully personal. You never know what you’ll find here each week, but we hope this potent mix of stories encourages conversation.
Two-and-a-half years ago, I went off birth control with the intention of getting pregnant. This week I’m going back on the pill, even though my husband Andrew and I aren’t cuddling the baby we were sure we’d have by now. The “1 in 8 couples” statistic you hear quoted when anyone discusses infertility? That’s us.
I suspected at the outset that it might take us a while to get pregnant. When I was 20, my doctor told me I had endometriosis. I thought that if it took most couples a few months, it might take us more than a year. But I did not suspect that, after 30 months and two surgeries, I’d have a constellation of laparoscopy scars on my belly rather than a web of pregnancy stretch marks.
My friend Michelle once described the feeling of being a woman trying to get pregnant as being a little boat bobbing on the ocean. When you first take the plunge into trying to conceive, your little boat joins an army of others setting sail toward the same location. The water is smooth and easy, and all of the boats are merrily charting the waters together. The tide is carrying everyone toward the same goal.
But when it takes you a little longer than it took your neighbor or your friend to get knocked up — your neighbor or your friend who got pregnant seemingly just by looking at her husband — your little boat starts to drift. Not far at first. Just enough to create a little gap between you and the bulk of the other boats — nothing that would be noticeable from the shore.
And next thing you know, it’s been a year without success, and when you look around, the fleet of boats has thinned. Lots of those once surrounding you have reached their destinations. The couples you know who were trying to get pregnant have done so, and some already have their squishy little newborns. After all, most couples — 85 percent — successfully conceive within a year. Your boat has been batted into the deeper, choppier waters of fertility struggles.
Even so, these waters are rougher but easily navigable. So it’s a little harder for you — it’s fine. You haven’t even started to explore all your options. Everyone from your mom to your doctor assures you that sometimes it just takes a bit longer for some people. Your boat can handle this. It’s made of tougher materials — it can take a bit of battering.
But the longer you’re on the open water, the harder your boat gets rocked. Every tactic that’s presented to you, from fertility tests to drugs to procedures, feels like a life vest offered in order to save you should a riptide toss you overboard and drag you under. Hanging onto the dream of getting pregnant now means taking on water and fighting desperately against the undercurrent. (Lest this metaphor get confusing, that undercurrent is the dreaded label infertile.)
Lots of the remaining boats navigate these choppy seas, never taking their eyes off the prize of pregnancy, for as long as it takes — years in some cases. Lifeguards will tell you that the best way to save yourself from drowning is to flow with the current, not fight against it. And so rather than fighting the current, I decided to embrace the undertow dragging me away from pregnancy.
I decided to change course.
Any woman who’s tried and failed to get pregnant will tell you that at one point or another, you’re apt to feel like you’ve let yourself down, not to mention your partner and, in a sense, the essence of all womanhood simply because your womb would rather grow cobwebs than a child. I’ve always been the kind of person who makes up her mind about something, then works relentlessly to make it happen. So this failure — and let’s be honest, it definitely feels like failure — has been hard to swallow.
Aside from the fact that I’m not even a good candidate for in vitro fertilization, I was deeply, honestly tired of feeling inadequate every month that I didn’t see those two lines on the test. If Andrew and I could reframe our goal — changing the mission from get pregnant to start a family — it would suddenly seem so much more achievable.
And so we’ve found ourselves knee-deep in the process of domestic adoption. It was an easy transition for us, moving from Clomid to adoption. We decided that if we’re going to put tens of thousands of dollars on the table, we want a better guarantee than what IVF could offer.
We still don’t have a baby in our arms, but with every box we check off on the adoption checklist, it feels like we’re one step closer to our dream of a family. And the process of adoption, while it’s as uncontrollable as trying to conceive, seems like a much smoother sea for our little boat to sail on.
Email arts@nashvillescene.com
