The process of trying to be pregnant felt incredibly strange to me, and has for many of my friends. As women with athletic dreams, we spend most of our teenage and adult lives trying not to be pregnant, so the moment when you try to be pregnant feels a bit like whiplash. Traditional sex ed will tell you that any time you have unprotected sex, a baby is a likely result. This is just absolutely not the case. The chances that sex (or an IUI or IVF cycle) will result in a pregnancy are actually not that likely, which makes it amazing that 1. The human race continues and 2. People actually do this on accident!!
I quickly realized that there were things to learn (re master) about trying to conceive.
As a lifetime athlete, I’m good at working hard: it’s like, kind of our thing. I know that no outcome is promised, but I do know that I can stack the deck in my favor. How do we stack an athletic deck? With hard work. Discipline. Consistency. Doing all of the little things right so that on race day the big thing is simply an execution, not a long shot. From the information I was both actively and passively consuming, conceiving a baby seemed like a very similar process: I couldn’t ensure the outcome I desired, but I could stack the deck in my favor. In other words, I wouldn’t necessarily win, but I would try my hardest (aka the hardest), just like I always had.
So I downloaded period tracking apps and read studies about what types of food promote fertility. I tried temperature charting and swabbing my cervical mucus (yes, this is a thing). I diligently waited for my most fertile days and then anxiously waited for my period. I wanted to be the best at getting pregnant, just like I’d wanted to be the best at every stage in my sports career.
But it wasn’t working. My husband and I had sex on the right days, I ate lots of fish and got lots of sleep. I constantly scanned my body (and the internet) for signs that I might be pregnant. But every month my period would come (insert google search: can I still be pregnant if I got my period?). It also wasn’t that fun. Stressing out about scheduled sex tends to suck some of the fun out of it, and turning it into a goal oriented endeavor is a strange and tricky thing to navigate.
Fertility is a hot topic these days. The trend of encouraging people to make their own healthcare decisions has people thinking about having children inundated with information and an unlimited amount of ways to spend money. There are countless products and services that essentially promise to give you more choices: freeze your eggs now and you’ll be able to decide about having kids later. Or, take this 12 step test to determine how worried you should be about your fertility. A super duper early pregnancy test that you can take before you take the regular pregnancy test. Extra genetic screening and testing to help you decide whether to use IVF and if you should control for certain risk factors. Special pee sticks to determine when is the optimal moment for baby-making sex. The limit truly does not exist.
In most ways, these advances are incredible, and really do give people more choices around their decision to have, or not have, children. However, all of these services and products also work together to give the illusion of control over a process that cannot be controlled. The danger of this illusion, other than making us spend a ton of time, money and energy when perhaps we don’t have to or shouldn’t, is that it can make us feel personally responsible for a negative outcome. It can make us feel like if only we had bought the right supplement and used the right tracking device, then we would be pregnant. Or if we had tried earlier or harder or longer then we would have a child. It can, and does, make women feel badly about themselves and their bodies: like they are failing in something they “should” be able to do with little to no effort.
It seems like a trivial comparison to bring this back to sports, but I think there are lessons we have learned in the sports community about control that we haven’t quite yet acknowledged in the fertility space. When we have prepared everything perfectly but on race day fail spectacularly, we seem to have reached an understanding that sometimes there isn’t anything we could’ve done differently: it was just a bad day. We seem to acknowledge that the preparation and the outcome are related, but the first is never a promise of the second.
Realizing this helped me loosen my grip on the outcome of trying to conceive. It did not mean that I stopped being a pretty particular over-preparer, but I did include meditation alongside the period tracking, and got off social media. (If there is one action I wholeheartedly condone in the pregnancy process, it is this. Please do not play the comparison game on social media with this process. It just has so little benefit and so much potential harm.)
In the end, I did get pregnant. I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who might say, “See? You got pregnant when you stopped trying so hard!” No! This is the whole point! I didn’t get pregnant because I started, or stopped, doing anything. I set myself up for success and then got lucky. Also, I would be remiss to finish this piece without specifically mentioning the type of luck that comes with being in a heterosexual relationship. When I say, “set myself up for success” I mean having lots of sex. There are, of course, difficulties with this method. (See above about it not being that fun sometimes to turn your love life into work.) However, it is free and readily available and did I mention free? I have friends and family members who have gone through IUI and IVF and I can’t imagine the extra pressure that thousands of dollars per attempt puts on the outcome. On top of the money, there are hormone shots and so, so many appointments, and the chances of success are far lower than you’d think.
So. All this to say: yes x1000 to giving people more options, choices and information around fertility. Yes x1,000,000 to helping female athletes take control of their parenthood journeys. But to anyone going through this process, be kind to yourself. Do not believe all the sleek marketing that tells you you can control this outcome: you can’t. Just like with sports, try to set goals for yourself that don’t have anything to do with your result. And also like with sports, there’s a true community of women out here for you: you never have to do any of this alone.
This blog is part of An Athlete’s Pregnancy, a personal multi-part series chronicling one athlete’s experience navigating pregnancy after an elite sports career.