I don’t handle pregnancy announcements very well.
Within the past couple of months, three good friends have told me that they’re expecting a baby in the winter. Each time I heard the news, I felt panic, anxiety, jealousy, and most of all, a sense of failure.
My husband and I have been trying to conceive for the past year and a half. Initially, I wasn’t ovulating due to hypothalamic amenorrhea, which means that my body had decided to shut down its reproductive duties because it thought I didn’t have enough body fat to sustain a pregnancy. (I strongly disagreed with my body on this matter, but my ovaries didn’t seem to much care.) I went through a couple of difference treatments to force myself to ovulate, including one cycle of Menopur, an injectible drug (I like to think of it as Red Bull for the ovaries), and Clomid. At the same time, in an effort to convince my body to start working again on its own, I stopped exercising, gained about 15 pounds, and bought a lot of new pants.
After those two cycles failed, I had decided to take the month of December off of treatment. I didn’t want to deal with the near-daily ultrasounds and blood draws during the holidays. Then, of course, I became a cliché by becoming pregnant by accident after I’d (temporarily) given up trying. (As much as you can call it “an accident” when you’re having sex without using birth control and are hoping to became parents.) I had no idea that I was ovulating at all, and was shocked, thrilled, and scared when I saw the positive pregnancy test.
About three weeks later, I had an ultrasound, and we discovered that the baby wasn’t viable. I had a D&C a week later.
Now, whenever someone tells me that they’re pregnant, I can’t even see past my own situation to be happy for her. All that I can think about is that I should be pregnant. I should be due in this month. I should have a cute belly now and not be able to drink this glass of wine that’s in my hand.
But I’m not.
And that makes me feel like a failure. Because I failed for so long at getting pregnant, and then when I finally managed that, I failed at staying pregnant. I know, intellectually, that it wasn’t anything I did that caused the miscarriage, that there was most likely a chromosomal problem with the embryo. Still, at some level I wonder things like, was it the yoga that I did that one day? Or that one Diet Coke that I had because I was so tired at work? Or maybe it happened because I drank alcohol (once, on New Year’s Eve) before I knew I was pregnant.
Seeing friends that are pregnant when I’m not feels like a rebuke, somehow. It feels like they’ve succeeded at something I haven’t. That they’re ahead of me, and I’m behind. That I can’t figure this out. That there’s something wrong with me.
I know that five years from now, it’s likely that I will have a child, or even children, and it won’t matter that some of my friends had theirs six months or a year before me. Every time I see a cute, pregnant belly, I tell myself that. Sometimes it helps. Sometimes I need a margarita.
