'Is this sex-sex or sexy-sex?' my boyfriend asks. 'Sexy-sex' is the sex we have when we're trying to get pregnant, and 'sex-sex' is the sex we have for no other reason than we want it. He likes to know which one we’re having, mainly because when I first started timing our sex for optimum fertilisation, rather than just telling him ‘we need to have sex this evening’ I’d try and act like the urge had just come over me. He saw right through it, I’m not that great an actor and apparently I don’t normally want sex during the advert break of The Great British Bake Off. Now that foreplay is me peeing onto a stick and our lubricant features a babies face, you can see why we call it 'sexy-sex’ - without sarcasm the whole thing would feel far too earnest for either of us.
We've been trying for a baby for a while. I don't want to say how long exactly, except for the fact that it's been long enough that we could go to the doctors. In honesty, as the mother of a cheeky three-year-old boy l know my fertility story is a blessed one, no matter where the next few years take us. l don't profess to know the struggles or emotions of infertility, but what l'm becoming very well acquainted with is trying-for-a-baby-sex. The kind of sex where you throw your legs up the wall straight after he's 'finished'. The kind of sex you know you’ll be having twenty-five calendar days before hand. The kind of sex which begins with the come hither sentence 'Can we do it before the Vietnamese arrives? I'll be too full afterwards.'
As anyone who has ever tried for a baby knows, your life becomes very cyclical, you live period to period. The days between ovulation and blood are the strangest. They are the days I am allowed to imagine that I’m pregnant. They are also the days when there is nothing I can do other than swallow supplements and try not to drink. Very few things in my life are out of my control. I don’t garden, I rarely have to use the words ‘let’s wait and see’. But with trying for a baby, you pee on a stick, you have the well timed sexy-sex, you pop folic acid and you wait. During these limbo days I try to picture what is happening in my womb. Like trying to see through a wall it’s a completely pointless exercise and I’m left feeling a tad ridiculous that I’ve been trying to telepathically communicate with an organ.
In the days leading up to my periods due date I spend a lot of time staring at tissue paper looking for the smallest trace of blood, holding it up to the light in windowless office toilets. Rather cruelly my period starts spotting about 9 days after ovulation and I am so bored of Googling ‘implantation bleeding vs period blood’ yet I do it each and every cycle and for another two days lie to myself that this time it’s the former. I watch YouTube videos of women taking live pregnancy tests and I scroll through pages of inane forums on Mumsnet where other deluded women are trying to convince each other that their ‘symptoms’ - heightened sense of smell, sore nipples, a morning headache, even a false pregnancy test - mean they are pregnant. It has made me realise how often in life we look for things we want to see and ignore those we do not.
Lately a line from Sheila Heti’s book Motherhood has been circling my head, ‘A decision in the mind is pretty small, it doesn’t make babies. If a decision in the mind doesn’t make babies, why do I spend so much time thinking about it?’ Although Heti’s protagonist is debating whether or not to have a child, rather than how to get pregnant, when I read this line so much made sense to me - of course, I can’t just decide to have a baby.
I could become obsessed, but if I let wanting another baby affect my current parenting, well that seems like a daft path to take. Perhaps it's self protection, maybe it's knowing when to appreciate my lot (especially when your lot is a fabulous, if a little loud, three-year-old) but the wait has been making me question whether this is something I really want ‘do I not want it enough, is this why it’s not happening?’ It’s also making me realise the gender imbalance of the ‘trying’ period - it’s me that clocks my cycle, pees on sticks, knows how many days post ovulation I am, it’s me who is sat alone in the toilet when I realise that it’s not happened this month, it’s me that buys the tests and scours the forums. All he has to do is have sex. Literally. So I’m stoping the obsessing, the sticks and the forums at least for a while. I’m going to concentrate on decisions that I can action rather than wishes I have to wait on and I think we’ll follow the advice people love to dole out, ‘just relax and it will happen’ and have more of the sex-sex and less of the sexy-sex.