Day One

Sunny. A perfect winter day.

Today is special! Before I started keeping track of my cycle, month by month, I'd always thought of getting my period as being the end of a cycle - my body's way of saying, well, you didn't get pregnant (of course, how would I have?!) so we'll scrap all that and start again in a few days. However, as the fertility charts count it, the first day of your period is the first day of the new cycle, a definitive new beginning. Somehow I've swapped over to that way of thinking, which makes today the first day of the cycle in which we might, MIGHT, make a baby. (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!).

Partly I think I've swapped ways of thinking because of my joy each month over the way that ovulation shows up with all its miraculous temperature shifts and fern shaped patterns on a microscope slide - it means that the excitement is all over by about Day 14 and then it's just about waiting for my period to come so that I can start a new chart. Also, I can see the emotional benefit of understanding it as a new beginning, rather than marking the end of a failed attempt, once we are actually trying to get pregnant. It's a bit kinder on your feelings that way, I guess.

I've been thinking a lot about how it might feel to see 'not pregnant' turn up on the little tester stick thing. The odds are not in favour of getting pregnant first time, apparently. Dr Google seems to say that you have about a 1 in 4 chance each time of getting pregnant, with the reasonably common complication of miscarriage still to add into the equation after that. Another way of looking at it is that on average it takes six months of trying. I'm never sure how to feel about these numbers. Six months is not a hugely long time in some ways... It's only six tries, after all, but then any baby-making site, anywhere on the Internet, has story after story of people who do not get pregnant despite good health and best efforts, month after month, and the people who are telling those stories seem BROKEN by the accumulation of those negative pregnancy tests.

Will I feel broken too, if it takes a while?

My aunts tell me that I come from a line of "one fuck wonders". (Not my words!). I hope I inherited that!

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