Don't have sex, because you will get pregnant and die. Don't have sex in the missionary position, don't have sex standing up, just don't do it, OK?
24.03.16, 12:18 pm

So, we’re trying for a baby. After the glorious honeymoon, and then a standard, booze-filled Christmas, thoughts turned to starting a family. I had two weeks of constant worry about the following things:

• Worry that pregnancy would mean unbearable heart palpitations and ectopic beats to endure for nine months.
• Worry that giving birth with heart problems would be impossible.
• Worry that the doctor would tell me to stop taking beta blockers due to the baby, making palpitations untreatable.
• Worry of losing my everyday life of lots of cycling, walking and weights as I can’t take beta blockers, which stop me from feeling like I’m having a heart attack.
• Worry of becoming neurotic like the days of old, in a hideous 9-month spiral that I won’t be able to pull out of as babies are a permanent deal, usually.
• Worry of being a mother in general.

Eventually, I came to an epiphany of realising that I will never come to a point where I will NOT be worried about my heart going nuts – where I will never be unconcerned about the mix of pregnancy and cardiac issues and will just be totally chill about it all – and so the best thing to do was just to go for it regardless, and trust that I’ll be hardcore enough to deal with everything as and when it came. And so we started trying.

I’ve had two periods since, so two failures. This past month I really thought we’d done it, as I was 5 days late and had had no period symptoms, and then I had ridiculously bad cramps yesterday and it suddenly arrived. And then I felt bummed out for the rest of the day. Without being graphic though, I think it may have been a failed implantation, given what’s come out. Weirdly, this has made me feel much happier, as it shows that I’m at least ovulating, whereas before I was already worrying that there was something wrong with me.

It’s ridiculous, really. All through your 20s you’re terrified of getting pregnant and screwing up your relationship/career/life, so you take increasingly insane safety precautions to guard against it (at one point I made James wash his hands halfway through sex before he was allowed to touch me again, bellowing ‘WITH SOAP’ down the stairs as he trudged to the bathroom). And then it turns out getting pregnant is actually annoyingly difficult. There’s a 24 hour window, which you have to try and predict through day counting and gross mucus checks, and then even if you get it bang on there’s still only a 30% chance of fertilization happening.

Due to my interesting personality of Wanting To Be In Control of Everything mixed in with I Want Random Impulses Now, getting pregnant is a heady blend of frustrating, boring and disappointing. I want to book in the sex like it’s a doctor’s appointment (not v. sexy), find the wait between ovulation times unbearable and dull, and then become angry and worried when I have timed everything beautifully and still nothing happens. You like to think you’re this incredible, fertile goddess that needs no help or encouragement whatsoever, and then when you’re not it’s weirdly deflating. Similarly, when you land on your ovulation window, or whatever nonsense my Period Tracker app calls it with its nauseating floral design, and then bang in some good sex, when nothing but another period comes of it you feel like a total failure. I’m already fretting that there is something wrong with me, because I have a touch of endometriosis and like to catastrophize things that are out of my control, and that we have months of fruitless sadness ahead. This is despite us only trying, as I said, for two months, the first of which I’m pretty sure was mistimed anyway. I fear it’s going to be an exhausting windy road.

Anyway, I talked this all over with James last night, because obviously no one else other than Mel knows about any of this, and he is much more relaxed and unworried and it made me feel better. I’ve also bought one of those made ovulation test kits, where you piss on a stick every day and it tells you when you’re about to ovulate, and this also helps as it makes me feel like I’m at least doing something, and also that it’ll hopefully give me proof that I am ovulating and that things are therefore fine. So yes, lesson of the day: sex education is a total swizz.

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