Does she or doesn’t she? Or, how I got here.
Oh, go ahead, just ask already.
When you give birth at 40 for the first time, the question on many people’s minds is whether you got pregnant with the help of fertility treatments.
Those who don’t know me often assume I’d been trying for ages, because they think having a first baby at 40 is “late.” And those who do know we got married just two years ago might wonder as well.
So, just to put my own experience out there, because I don’t see the point in a blog that doesn’t, I suppose you can say I got lucky – but it wasn’t quite as easy as that. We returned from a long weekend on our first anniversary and learned I was pregnant – exactly one year after we’d begun trying to conceive.
Six months after trying to get pregnant, I hit 39 and marched myself into a fertility clinic for the usual workup: blood tests, the monitoring of my ovulation and hormone levels, a sperm count for my husband. Six months isn’t long, but I was impatient – and worried.
Everything looked fine, but I still wasn’t getting pregnant, and the ticking of my biological clock was deafening. “You’d better hurry up,” one of my aunties said a month after the wedding, “you don’t have much time.” (Hey, thanks, I didn’t realize!) I saw a naturopath to assess my diet. I gave up most caffeine. And I tolerated a lot of unsolicited advice.
“Don’t eat garlic.” “Stay away from ginger.” “Avoid all dairy products based on cow’s milk.” “Give up sugar and white flour.” “Just don’t think about it.” “Don’t stress.” The list was endless, and occasionally, ridiculous. Read more…