“Trying”. When you use it in the context of learning a new guitar chord or language or even pushing the boat out with something wild like an evening pottery class, it sounds positive, proactive; full of hope and promise. It sounds like something you’d gleefully share with a friend over a glass of wine or shout out to your handful of social media followers, happily awaiting the cheers of encouragement that were bound to be dished back. 84 likes and three “OH MY GOD I AM OBSESSED WITH CERAMICS” comments will keep you warm and smug for at least two days. Use the word “trying” in connection with a baby and the volume at which you declare it rapidly decreases the longer said trying goes on. In fact, some people won’t even admit they are trying; for fear of waking a vengeful, cruel fate who goes around snatching unborn babies from optimistic bellies, like something out of a Greek tragedy. Being secretive and enigmatic about it all somehow seems preferable to opening up about the quietly crushing guilt you carry; how you know you should be grateful for what you have and patient for what might be, but some days it’s just so fucking much, that you’re so keenly aware of your eggs running out like a macabre hourglass and that you’re genuinely afraid you’re ‘due’ a miscarriage because it’s so common, isn’t it? But that would be too messy. So we smile instead and change the subject.
I know all this, because we’re knee deep in trying.
Unlike the open-hearted dabbling that comes from trying a new hobby, trying for a baby becomes strangely arduous – a Sisyphus boulder-push up a hill where you are seemingly surrounded by millions of other people conceiving, willy-nilly, all over the shop. Every bulging belly seems to make yours feel even more empty and memories of raging heart burn, heart-wrenching anxiety and the unwelcome ability to smell a bin from miles away are glossed over with amnesia-style efficiency. The thing is, you’ll start out saying you’ll never be that couple who take their basal body temperature (or BBT for super fans) or let the words ‘cervical mucus’ go anywhere near the bedroom, but you also tend to operate on the naïve presumption that you’ll get pregnant the minute you want to.
As screamingly privileged and ungrateful as this sounds, I sometimes wonder if we were a bit cursed having it all so easy first time around. Just under three years ago, we barrelled into the parenting game almost entirely unprepared; our knowledge of conceiving scant and our comprehension of what couples go through to make it happen, limited. We’d recently moved back to the UK and almost all of our friends who’d made the baby leap were in another hemisphere – far away from honest chats about the darker, murkier realities of parenting that needed face-to-face holding and more than one bottle of wine to divulge, not a group Whatsapp chat or the occasional Skype. In our small group of fun-loving, inherently spontaneous, oh so slightly wild friends here in London, we were the first by miles, and my fertile window (why does reproductive terminology have to be so brutally scientific and UNSEXY sounding?) collided spectacularly with a sunny holiday in Sardinia which, as married couples who may be long past their hedonistic, early days of multiple shagging and more confined to Saturday mornings or Sunday afternoons know, is prime bonking time. (Admittedly, it was also a holiday full of barely-midday cocktails by the pool, but so far that doesn’t seem to have affected our child. Fingers crossed…) So, it happened first time round. Easy peasy. And I was nearly two months in before I realised I should be taking folic acid and pregnancy vitamins. Whoopsy! Silly me! Breezing through pregnancy like an irritatingly fertile baby deer. I’d always thought (again, naively – there’s a theme emerging here) that I’d have two children, two years apart. Just like my brother and I. When the time rolled around that we’d have to be prepping for another one I didn’t feel anywhere near ready. And not because Edie was difficult (well, any more difficult than a 15 month old will be), more that I felt like I’d just got my old life back. I’d spent months in a cloudy fug of baby hormones and no sleep and now I was back at work feeling motivated and energetic. Plus I’d got back into running again and wanted to do a marathon. I wasn’t ready to give that all up. Not yet. So we both agreed that we’d give it six months or so. I did the marathon, I got a new job and I established and rooted myself and felt fulfilled in all sorts of warm and fuzzy ways. After that precious and necessary six months, I was ready to let my stuff sit on the side lines for a while and invite another little person in to our lives. Thing is, when you’re ready – you’re ready now. In the great, grand scheme of things, we’ve been trying for about five minutes. I have no right to sit here and whine and wail about conceiving when there are people in the world who have been gritting their teeth and trying every single month for years; when there are people who are on their second, third, fourth round of IVF; when there are people who’ve been on adoption waiting lists for an eternity and are begging for a glimmer of hope and a chance to become the parents they’re so desperate to be. I know I’m being selfish and narrow-minded but trying MAKES YOU CRAZY.
If ‘trying’ for the very first time is lucky enough to be a glorious shag fest, then trying when you have a toddler in tow, ready to burst, noisy and curious, into every quiet moment you sneak, becomes virtually impossible. At nursery she obviously plays sweetly and contentedly on her own, or with a friend, all day long. Take the exact same child and place her at home with us and it’s “Mummy, Daddy, STOP”; “NO, Daddy”; “Mummy CARRY; “Daddy what doing?” from the moment she opens her eyes to the minute she closes them again. And once she’s gone to bed and is sweetly silent you both crash on the sofa and look at each other, exhausted, and the idea of tearing each other’s clothes off seems far less fun then actually Netflix and chilling.
It is very, very, very hard to be spontaneous and stare-into-each-other’s-eyes-all-sexy-like when you both know that you have a very specific goal; a six day window to make a baby, of which your chance of succeeding is only 25%. When you tell people how shit that is, they tend to say something sensible about surely having sex lots, every day, for six days. Listen. I get it. Bonking yourselves silly for six days sounds joyous and fun – the veritable cherry on the boner-shaped cake that is making a human being. But somehow, it ends up feeling like a computer game that you only skim-read the instructions of and are now stuck on the same fucking level, trying to beat the boss but getting killed every time. And you know that the more you think about it the more you pile the pressure on; that stress is the absolute worst, least sexy thing, but you still mentally count up what nine months from now would be and then hold that month very close to your heart: a March baby. Yeah. We’ll have a March baby. Only for your period to cruelly force you to pretend that you’d much rather have an April baby anyway. Each month is a tiny death; a bloody punishment for failing to try harder, better.
People talk about the incredible transformation that relationships undergo when children are thrown into the mix. In infinite ways, it’s made my husband and I closer. We’re bound forever by the very tangible fact that we made a person together. Whatever happens to us, wherever we are; that fact is perpetual and powerful. But having a child is also a very fracturing, immensely stressful, highly demanding strain on a relationship. Even when you’re “ready” (which no one is, not really) it’s a violent upheaval which is both dizzyingly lovely and absolutely terrifying all at once. A newborn requires so much attention and focus that your spotlights, which were always so firmly trained on each other, lie only on them. When you finally emerge from that sticky, exhausting, early phase – which can take anything from six months to when they finally move out to go to Uni – you have to find your way back to each other. The ease which you moved around each other becomes fumbled and forgetful, like you’ve started all over again. And I think that’s what’s actually hardest. Not the making time and space to “try” with wild abandon. It’s having the grace and humility to admit that you lost each other for a bit, that you got so good at operating independently that you unlearned how to operate as a team, and now you need to be gentle and kind and patient. So amid the storm of nursery drop off and pick up, raising our child, busy working weeks, commuting chaos and the million other tiny distractions that make up our life, we’re not just trying for another baby; we’re trying to be the lighthouse which guides each other home.