About the time I hit 27, my biological clock started going off big time. My husband had found a decent job (well, really great job, actually. He loves it, and it pays enough, though not as much as if he were working somewhere else), and I felt like it was a GREAT time to hop on the baby train. I somehow convinced him of this, though reluctantly, and I started going to the doctor to fix my cycles, which were screwed up 7 ways to Sunday due to the PCOS.
The doc started me on a few things, and it didn’t really help right away. Finally we got my meds adjusted so that I started ovulating again, and things fell into place. We were having sex more often, but it was “need to get pregnant” sex. That’s not to say it wasn’t good sex, but I was definitely forcing myself at times. However, I do remember the night we conceived, and it was totally spontaneous, and had absolutely nothing to do with charts and temperatures. Isn’t that how it always happens?
So we had a positive pregnancy test. To be perfectly honest, I don’t remember a lot about being pregnant with little K. There was lots of sleeping. I can’t begin to explain how exhausted I was. Thankfully, I had quit my job to persue a photography career that has yet to take off and likely never will, but it gave me lots of time to sleep. Oh sweet, precious sleep, I miss you. What was I saying? Oh yeah. I remember sleeping, and I remember dear husband not knowing a damn thing about how to deal with a pregnant woman.
He has a habit of dismissing things he doesn’t understand. And he couldn’t understand being pregnant because he’s never been pregnant, so he dismissed my sickness and complete exhaustion as if I were making them up. He became annoyed at me for not cooking dinner, or “being lazy”, or whatever, and oh boy, that didn’t make things go very smoothly. I’ll admit that I acted like a complete nutcase in response to how he was acting. What the hell was he going to do when the baby was actually here??? Tack on my complete terror of miscarriage, and we had sex a whopping one time while I was pregnant. And it was awful. My cervix was low, so he was hitting it, and he didn’t know it, and I was dry and there was no lube, and ohmygodjustenditnow. That happened around 4 months, and didn’t happen again for the duration.
And it didn’t get regular after the birth of our sweet, squealing, collicky, up-all-hours-of-the-night daughter, either. I was determined to nurse, through a bad latch that made my nipples bleed, through her waking up every hour and a half to nurse more on my bloody nipples, through her having to be held all day. We had fights about me getting some time to myself in the evenings, beause when husband got home, he needed a break too. And he wanted to play video games, specifically World of Warcraft. He eventually came to realize that it was unrealistic for me to be on baby duty 24/7, and that he would have any time to sit at a computer for anything other than bills, at least for a while. Needless to say, I was thrown into a bought of postpartum depression, from which I couldn’t make myself return for a while. I wouldn’t go to the doctor, because that would mean defeat, that I was a horrible mother, or some such junk. It really sucks to recognize after the fact. I had moments where I wanted to pinch her, where I’d stay up at night crying because she wouldn’t sleep, I’d cry all day because she wouldn’t sleep. I’d put her in her crib, close the door, and scream a blood curdling scream at the top of my lungs just to get it out of my system.
I think around 6 months, I snapped out of my funk somewhat. Somehow, I made it through without doing something stupid (other than refusing to see that I had a problem). I’m pretty sure we didn’t have sex that whole time. Bloody nips aren’t exactly a turn on for me. My husband got me through this time by the seat of our pants. He’s a great father, and really turned on the support when the family needed it.
Life went on, K made us ridiculously happy, but we still weren’t really connecting. After a few years, we decided it was time for another baby, if we wanted them all to be out of the house by the time we retired. That was seriously our motivation. So I started the medication all over again, and vowed not to let myself get thrown back into depression with this one…
I got pregnant after only 2 months this time, and after only 1 day of sex that month. I soon realized that my severe morning sickness was because there wasn’t just one baby, there were two. Soon we found out there were two little boys. My husband was overjoyed… I was terrified.
