Almost Pregnant
On urging the universe to knock me up
BY MOLLY THORNTON
It’s Monday morning and I call my wife Ange. As the phone rings I step outside and pace around our backyard. It’s early spring and I know the birds are getting ready to nest. Last year, a pair of house finches built theirs in the eaves of our covered patio. I can hear them gabbing in the surrounding trees as I wait.
The finches are chatty and familiar, and we loved seeing their roost on our porch. The problem was, they didn’t love having their eggs in our crosshairs. Anytime we opened the back door, they would flit away to perch at a further distance. Eventually, we saw tiny heads reach for food once or twice, but they never flew the coop. I’m convinced mom and dad were disrupted by our presence—constantly fleeing their jobs warming or feeding to evade us.
Knowing I can’t make them believe they’re safe around us, I’m relieved the eaves are still empty. As the call goes through, I remind myself that I need to find something to wedge up there to stop them before it’s too late.
“What’s up my baby,” Ange half-whispers on the other end of the line.
“My LH surge is here,” I say.
It’s Day 15 of my cycle and I’ve been stalking my LH since Day 10 or 11, peeing on a stick every day in case it comes. LH, meaning luteinizing hormone, is one of many acronyms I’ve learned while TTC, that is, trying to conceive. Luteinizing hormone surges in the body a day or two before ovulation, so testing for it helps identify your fertile window.
When I started the tracking process, I used fancy digital tests that light up with a happy face when your surge is surging, and cost almost two dollars each. But after eight months of obsessive testing, I’ve switched to a bag of cheap paper strips that you dip in a cup of pee and interpret yourself.
For my pee science project, I chose a plastic cup leftover from a friend’s wedding, a favor with the couples’ names and wedding date written in green digital script. It’s not an insult to their union, it’s a symbol of fertility. She became pregnant and gave birth to a beautiful baby before they got married, and now, two years later, she was pregnant again, glowing in her tan beach-dweller skin, tummy protruding in Instagram photos. The cup would be an omen urging the universe to knock me up.
This morning when I conducted my experiment, the second line was bright, dark, obvious.
As we speak, Ange stands off to the side of a red carpet where her film’s cast pose and talk to the press. She arrived at her destination yesterday, a film festival for work. I will fly out to meet her tonight ahead of tomorrow’s premiere, and come home before her Wednesday morning, fingers crossed that this will allow us to have our cake and eat it too. That is, to both be present for the monumental achievement of her movie’s premiere—and conduct the next step of building our family. Back when we purchased flights we could only bet on where my ovulation day would fall. This round, luck is on our side. Wednesday will be my best day for insemination, I will be home, and the sperm vial is in tow. In the battle of FedEx vs. my body I’m up a point.
By now, I have become accustomed to the complex web of logistics that determines whether I get to try to get pregnant every month, and costly overnight shipping lies at the center of it all. One thimble-sized sperm vial—enough for a single attempt—travels cross country in a large nitrogen tank that looks like an old-fashioned metal milk jug. The journey takes a day, the shipping costs four hundred dollars, and the tank can stay cold for a week. For an extra fifty dollars, it can stay cold for two weeks. Once my LH surge starts, I need the vial about a day later, and the surge can come within almost a two-week span that varies every month.
Add in a three-hour time difference with our cryobank and the dueling open hours of their office and FedEx’s shipping and you have the hard level of the game from which there is no escape. Another acronym applicable to trying to conceive might be: FFS.
As we talk fertility appointments, Ange’s side of the conversation is disguised like she’s doing a movie deal.
“Before I tell Laura,” our tattooed, chunky-glasses wearing midwife, “Is it okay to schedule early in the day or do you want me to make sure you’ll be back in time to come with me?” I ask.
“Let’s go ahead with first avail, no need to wait.” She replies.
This was a hurdle we had already mentally faced—the potential need for me to do an IUI without her. When we started this thing, we had agreed that we both had to be there for the making of our baby. But over the preceding six months we had learned that this pledge was just one more wrench that could easily be thrown into the battle of FedEx versus my body. Having me, the sperm vial, and the midwife in one place at one time with my free thinking, devil-may-care ovulation day impending was enough of a miracle, adding the presence of my partner was one too far.
“Okay, I’ll let you know what she says,” I say. “Love you.”
We get off the phone and I pad back inside to email our midwife about scheduling. Ange immediately texts me to convey the giddiness she had concealed on the phone.
“I LOVE YOU.
I’m so stoked for our baby.
I can’t stop smiling.”
I had explained this potential conundrum to one of my best friends a few weeks earlier. She lives twenty miles away from us on the other side of town but offered to take a sick day and come with me for the IUI at a moment’s notice. I held her hand across the table and cried.
When it came to it, even that was impractical. My flight would land at LAX at 9:30 Wednesday morning and my IUI was scheduled for 11:30, allowing just the amount of time needed to deplane, drive home, pick up the sperm tank, and drive to the birth center.
I had forgotten to check in to my Southwest flight the morning before, relegating me to the last boarding group on a sold-out flight with a carry-on suitcase. Flight staff warned over the loudspeaker to gate check our bags because there wouldn’t be room for every passenger’s luggage. I clutched my suitcase tighter. For all I knew, my egg could be sitting there already, only hours away from vanishing without a chance of fertilization. I could not spend another half hour at baggage claim risking my fragile timetable.
Besides, this was the last IUI vial we had purchased. When we first bought sperm months ago, we purchased four vials. At over a thousand dollars each—not including storage, shipping, and insemination costs, all out of pocket—this was no small investment. Like many, our health insurance doesn’t cover fertility medicine. Even if it did, most LGBTQ+ people don’t qualify for their insurance’s definition of infertility necessary to use the benefit.
If this try wasn’t successful, we would have to restock and recommit another several thousand dollars to vials, not knowing how many more we would need, and playing the waiting game of vial availability. Choosing a donor is not a guarantee—they can donate, or stop donating altogether, whenever they want, and you are prey to an unpredictable supply. After we had decided on our donor we had waited months before vials became available to purchase.
We would again have to weigh the risks of not stocking up because of the expense, against whether there would be availability later. It was a continuous game of not knowing when a try would be successful yet hoping not to spend more money than we had to. Besides money we had been able to put aside, we had exhausted help from my mom who paid for most of our first batch of vials, and we were counting on Ange’s parents to help us with other expenses for a second down the road.
If this failed, it would mean the savings we had would all go to another set of tries and if one of those tries was successful there’d be no cushion for the expenses to come, leaving us to accumulate debt for baby prep, labor, and prenatal care—if we were lucky.
I board the flight and shove my pink bag into an empty spot mid-plane with grateful flourish and continue to the back. I watch someone maneuver into a middle seat in the furthest back row by the bathroom between two disgruntled strangers. Two rows ahead of me, an aisle seat appears empty next to a woman and her son. When I ask if it’s taken, she shakes her head no and I sit. A blessing.
When we land, I hustle off the plane straight to my car and drive through traffic to the house. I pee, drop off my suitcase, shove a handful of trail mix in my mouth, and wedge the giant box into the passenger seat. I pull up to the birth center with my adrenaline pumping, a few minutes early. After so much imagination and mental walkthrough of this day, it is really happening. I’m here.
*
The IUI is short, sweet, breezy. I’m glad I haven’t made a big deal about needing company for it. It’s a cold metal speculum briefly in my body, the news that my cervix looks fertile, and a pinch that is the beginning of the sperm’s journey. The midwife tells me that no studies show you need to lay with your pelvis raised to help the sperm swim, confirming what I had read too, but I lay on the table for ten more minutes just to ritualize the moment.
I text Ange the play by play, the paper sheet across my lap, the validation that my cervix came to party. I tell her our midwife says if the egg is there waiting, sperm can meet it in mere minutes.
*
Five days after the insemination I come home from a volunteer shift planning to start on household chores and prepare for the week like usual. Instead, I’m so tired I take a full nap and then stay in bed scrolling my phone. I lose the entire afternoon resting, and then the evening. I manage to shower and get a simple dinner together and watch TV on the couch with my wife until bed.
Evidence of the previous days’ activities are scattered around the house, still packed bags from a beach bonfire and sunscreen and snacks I brought in from the car are perched on various surfaces. A pile of half-dirty clothes, unsure whether to go in the hamper or be worn another day, are falling off the small bench by our closet and have been for days.
I go to sleep with everything undone. The next day, I’m still exhausted. The piles fester. I keep losing my words halfway through a thought in meetings. It takes all my focus to muster the bare minimum of completion at work. I know I’m not tired from my weekend activities. I suspect pregnancy.
Throughout the week I scan Reddit and various baby blogs for answers to the same string of search terms, “Pregnancy symptoms (insert number of days post ovulation).” One thing is for sure, I’m fatigued, and this is at the top of every list.
On an average day, my brain runs on two tracks. On one track, I attend to the task at hand, planning and executing what’s in front of me in real time. On the second track, I anticipate, multitask, I remember and scheme. The second track is how everything else gets done. It’s the line of thought that makes mental lists of groceries to buy, texts and phone calls to return, items to take to the post office, library books on hold, birthdays, travel to book, household honey dos, and that the laundry needs to be moved to the dryer in half an hour.
Even when I’m reading, my brain gets bored, and the second track looks for something to do. I play crossword puzzles and solitaire on my phone while I watch TV. I make dinner while I listen to true crime podcasts and daydream.
All week, the second track is turned off. Outside of what’s in front of me, there’s silence. No buzzing anxiety or next move planned. It takes me five days to sit down and think of a to-do list for the week that is now mostly gone. I don’t even have the feeling I’m missing something. I’m not grasping at anything I forgot to do or meant to remember. My mind is quiet, calm, peaceful, compelled to rest, and satisfied to sit in silence doing close to nothing without a desire for change.
After much googling, I surmise this must be the progesterone. I wonder how long this surge of it will last. If this is what pregnancy feels like, I’m in. Sure I feel tired, but I’m relaxed, almost floating. I’m into it.
I memorize the process of fertilized egg to implantation and how many days it can take. I try to recall what the difference is between a blastocyst, a zygote, and an embryo and who is what when. My symptoms persist. My basal body temperature, the number I track every morning to chart my cycle, stays high. I have the smallest amount of spotting, I have nausea, food aversions, a metallic taste in my mouth. A small amount of cramping.
By Thursday, I’ve learned to cope with the new normal—keeping my mouth shut in meetings until I’m sure I have a complete thought, and making my face appear attentive even when I’m lost in space. I schedule a last-minute acupuncture appointment to support implantation. When I tell the acupuncturist my symptoms that week, she agrees I’m probably pregnant.
On Sunday I tell a friend, “No matter what happens this week, if I get my period or not, I know something happened. Whether or not I test positive, whether the pregnancy is progressing, the egg was fertilized. My body started the process.”
I have never felt my body feel this way before. Whether or not I can prove it to anyone else with a plus sign or a growing belly in coming weeks, I know that this is different.
Wednesday will be two weeks to the day of the insemination. I have plans that night to see a friend who recently experienced pregnancy loss and so Ange and I agree we will wait until Thursday to take a pee test. This will ensure I’m not overflowing with optimistic baby hope on the day I intend to be present for a friend experiencing the opposite, and puts us squarely past the two-week mark, certain that we aren’t being too hasty and will get an accurate result.
My cycles have been hovering around 29 or 30 days, so I know that those days, Monday and Tuesday, will be the hardest to get through, right on the edge of my average cycle length. It’s like senioritis, the closer you get to graduation, the more unbearable each day seems. Monday morning my basal body temperature drops half a point, scaring me a bit. It’s still just high enough to match some other temps in my luteal phase, but I’m nervous because my temperature drop is the biggest telltale my period is coming most months. It usually begins with early morning cramps that wake me before my alarm, and then a flow starts around the time I get up to pee and the toilet paper comes back red.
This morning I have some light cramping and nearly panic, but calm myself down with a Reddit thread of people with babies who say they were certain they were starting their periods because of cramping but turned out to be pregnant. By this point, every hour feels like a day.
On separate couches over coffee, I’m adding bump-friendly floral print dresses and maternity bike shorts to my wishlist on a clothing rental app when Angela interrupts to show me some preppy nursery design photos she has saved. We are both secretly, silently, stewing in our own hopes. We have never been this close.
Putting up my mug in the kitchen, movement outside the backdoor catches my eye and I go outside to check. Stepping outside, my fears are confirmed. I see the first threads of a nest being constructed, not on the structurally sound eaves as I had worried, but balanced precariously on top of our outdoor curtains, surfing the rod and crinkled fabric. A tiny brown bird flees the scene with a piece of teal thread in her mouth as I approach.
“Oh no,” I moan.
“What?” Angela asks, following me outside.
I point to the nest. “She’s done so much work already.”
All I can think about is the effort of her weave, hauling one perfect strand at a time to build up a foundation. I think how hypocritical it is to take down the layers she has built when we are so desperate to do the same.
I imagine my uterus working much like her, each cramp or twinge a sign of accommodations being laid. Thread by thread, stick by stick, funneling blood and yawning wider, nutrients and layers building in preparation for a season of gestating.
Ange has barely shifted the position of the curtains before the twigs begin to disassemble and fall to the ground.
*
By Monday evening, I am pleading with my body. “We can do this, we’ve got this, come on, hold on till Thursday.”
Tuesday morning, I wake up with light cramps and continue my silent persuasion. At first, I think it’s Wednesday, “One more day,” I promise, and then remember I still have two. The anticipation feels worse than it ever has and seems worse than knowing.
I attempt to sleep another hour and don’t rise until my alarm finally goes off. My temperature is the same as the day before, hovering in a limbo state I still can’t interpret. Walking to the bathroom I have the slightest sense that my underwear is wet. I strip off the light purple briefs and glance at them out of the corner of my eye, scared to look straight on, repeating my pleading mantras.
In my peripheral vision, a huge dark spot interrupts the lavender cloth. It’s over. My hopes are sunk. My anxieties are sunk. The answer is here, and it is the wrong one, and there is nothing that can be done. Sitting on the toilet I have one last desperate attempt at hope, contemplating whether or not I should take a pregnancy test just in case. I remember that the best pregnancy test pee is the first pee of the day and mine is now sitting beneath me diluted in the toilet bowl.
Quietly, I walk back through the bedroom to my dresser for a pair of clean black underwear. I place a pad in them and pull them on. I rinse my bloody underwear in the sink and set them on the side of the tub. My actions are mechanical, automatic. My mind is blank.
At some point I turn on the coffee maker, brush my teeth and wash my face. I even put SPF on my face. I dress in sweatpants and my wife’s sweatshirt that looks like the GAP logo but says “GAY.” I climb back in bed beside her where she is still asleep and say it.
“I got my period.”
She opens her arms to me, and I don’t even cry at first. At least, I’m not aware I’m crying. My nose is clogged, and I lay there having no thoughts that make words. I feel liquid cross the bridge of my nose and hit my other cheek. She says she is sorry, and I say nothing. She offers to spoon me, and I roll over against her and tell myself not to avoid the feelings. I hear myself crying, and I promise myself I will feel better later if I cry, I have to let the bad feeling come. I could stay in bed without speaking forever. Eventually I want to drink coffee and put a heating pad on my aching pelvis. I don’t have any words for the feelings. All I can think to say is what is ahead.
“I think I would feel better if we had more vials stocked, and I could at least know that we could keep trying. I’m kicking myself for the days I got an alert that there was availability, and we didn’t buy.”
“We can’t think of it like that.” Ange says, and I know better, but it’s impossible not to go there sometimes.
“I’ll just be diligent about watching for the alert emails.” I promise. “I can check now but I’m pretty sure there’s not any.”
In fact, I was one hundred percent sure because I had recently gotten an alert for availability and every time that had happened previously, our donor’s sperm sold out in one day if not one hour, minus a couple of less desirable vial types. It felt more like Ticketmaster than medical care. If I wanted IUI vials, which I did, I had no idea how many months that could add to our wait. We’d be dependent on whatever magic or need for spending cash sent our donor back to the bank.
“I think when we can, we should get three more.” I say.
“Let’s get five,” she says. “And then we’ll just have them.”
We hug and kiss and tell each other we love each other in a dazed dance in bed, across the kitchen, in the living room, passing each other getting ready for work.
Standing in the kitchen she asks me if I want to keep trying.
“I don’t know. I mean, yes, of course.” I say. “I’m just, not in planning mode.”
Our conversation turns to the birds. I have an idea. I want to buy the scary looking plastic bird spikes I saw online to create a barrier in the small eaves we know the birds would regret nesting in, but I also want to provide a place for them to peacefully nest. We can buy a birdhouse and attach it to the fence deeper into the yard where we won’t disturb them.
We trade our phones back and forth showing each other different bird house options. I’m attracted to a cedar weather resistant model built by Amish people and Ange finds one with ventilation features and a small inside ladder to assist fledglings with their launch. I want the birds to have the best odds at life so she orders that one and I click buy on a set of clear spikes.
Together, our spikes and our bird house will show the birds where they can nest and we would try to do a better job cohabitating with their needs. What else could we do with this irreversible destruction of our own fragile nest? We could only apologize for the undoing of theirs and offer what we hoped would be a better chance for them.
Bird guilt sorted, I open my phone and search for the last notification email I received about our donor’s vials. It’s from seven days ago. The baby picture of our donor pops up on his profile and my brain says, “There’s our baby.”
I have grown such a comfort with the idea of him. I have grown such gratitude for him and such certainty that he is the donor we want. I have also had a glimpse of how little the donor suddenly seems to matter when you are a gestating parent. In the days of pregnancy symptoms as I grew ever more sure that my body and I were now working together to sustain the tiny starts of a new life—that growing thing became mine. It became ours, entirely, the beginnings of what could be a baby, who I would have equally with my partner, but who physically, for now I had an eclipsing powerful drive to covet, to feel connected to alone. Any resistance I could feel to having a stranger’s semen put inside my body was an ancient forgotten thought. Whatever had come of that act had been subsumed by my uterus, the result of it was the beginning of something, someone, who I had no distance from, no separation.
I scrolled to the bottom of the page where you add vials to your shopping cart like bird houses and concert tickets. I half-looked at it the same way I had side-eyed my underwear, trying to know and not know. Unexpectedly, I found it safe to look. The vial types did not say “none available,” nor even, “limited availability, call for more information,” which historically means I’m too late.
“It says there’s vials available. Including IUI vials. Should I buy them now?”
“Really? Yes.” She replies.
“The price went up, they’re about thirteen hundred dollars each now. We have five thousand in savings. That won’t cover five, should I get them all anyway?”
“Yes.”
In our stupor, we carry out a plan that had been half-hatched this morning, but really, has been set for a long time now. We know that the savings we have been building through monthly contributions and our tax return is going to our family planning one way or another. We know that we will continue to spend thousands of dollars at a moment’s notice. It doesn’t fill me with buyer’s remorse, regret, fear, or joy. It is just what we have signed up for. If we want to see the end of this, we will keep putting money in until we hit the jackpot. Yes, we are playing the lottery, but gambling is the only path.
*
I remember reading that a high percentage of eggs are fertilized but don’t implant, and that a high percentage of fertilized eggs that do implant end with a period too. These are not miscarriages that you hear about— those occur for people who missed a period, who are six or eight weeks or more along.
These are almost-pregnant moments that most people don’t have on their radar. Most people are not fulfilling the science credits they evaded in school by conducting full scale studies on their own bodies in hopes of conception. It’s just that your period comes, you are not pregnant.
I check to find out if I remembered this right and see studies reporting that these near misses account for about half of all fertilized eggs. Depending on who you ask, it’s thought that roughly 30% of fertilized eggs don’t implant, another 30% implant but aren’t successful beyond that. On the other side of a missed period, 10% of pregnancies end in miscarriage, and just 30% of all those once fertilized eggs go on to become a bebe.
I wonder if these never detected pregnancies are a good indicator for successful pregnancies to come, like known miscarriages, in that statistically, people who have had a miscarriage later go on to have a live birth. Often, a miscarriage means the pregnancy was not viable for some reason that’s totally out of your control, but if you got that far—your body and the ingredients you added to it have the right stuff.
I don’t know how to prove the findings of my latest trials, but I know that the egg was fertilized. Where it failed, I don’t know. I want to have a debrief with my uterus. Where did things go wrong, team? I thought we had this? Thoughts about my age slip in. I have a vague knowledge that all the basic statistics I read are worse for people over thirty. The number of pregnancy losses, failures to implant, defects that contribute to miscarriage, chances of getting pregnant at all, it’s all statistically worse for me at thirty-six than the average numbers I base my comforts against.
Despite this, I wonder if I have bettered my odds for a winning pregnancy. Can a fertilized egg that doesn’t make it past a missed period stand in as an almost pregnancy in my bucket of numbers, and make me more likely to land in the successful 30% next time? Manipulating the odds to make the next round of game play tipped in my favor is the only thing that feels remotely good right now.
*
It’s now nine fifteen am and I am wearing mascara and a bra, and Angela is in the car headed to work. The day is forging ahead despite our emotional states. I slog through my morning meetings and try to think of something to bring me comfort. Nothing sounds good. I fuck off from work and crawl into bed to watch a soapy Netflix murder miniseries and I don’t even want that. I drive to the library and pick up a book I put on hold and two bestseller beach reads to try to sop up what’s left of my brain.
I have been eating like a saint. I leave the house to go to the library, but it is really because I want tacos. I order three at the drive thru plus a large soda and I have not a fuck left. I eat them all and leave hardly an ice cube in the cup.
I haven’t had a sip of alcohol in weeks. I think about getting drunk. Ange offers to bring home something good for dinner and I contemplate asking her to bring me a bottle of wine. It does sound good, but my mental health is such a fucking triumph these days and drinking when I’m down is the enemy of my evolution. I even quit therapy because I don’t do shit like that anymore. Being healthy is so annoying.
*
On Thursday, two full weeks have passed since the insemination, and there is no optimistic baby hope to conceal nor need to take a pregnancy test. I have forgotten that this is the day I was holding anxiously in my mind.
I check the yard again and see wisps of a nest accruing in the eaves again, in the spot where the finches built last year. The materials returned to the ground earlier this week are being reused in a new place. The spikes will come too late. I can’t stand thinking of it now. I wonder if we can move the nest or if it’s true they abandon it if you do. Instead of finding an answer to that, I read that moving a nest is illegal by both federal and state laws. But I want to know, if I break the law, will the birds be okay or not?
Finally, I find a perspective that makes my question moot. I read that before they lay eggs in a nest, they’re not very attached to it. Finches make quick work of building and will just go again. In other words, who cares if you knock down a few twigs (besides the law); the birds don’t.
Realization hits me in a full body wave. Despite the skilled, delicate genius of initial construction—the nest is not a rare event, and disturbance is not unexpected. Periods of building, brooding, and new life occur over a matter of days and can all begin again quickly whether the last round resulted in loss, hatching, or a bit of both.
My own desperation over the nest weaving we undid, I see now in a different light. Nature’s work is not possessed with anxiety over sunk-costs or frustrated with efforts that don’t yield exact results. The bird will weave her nests and lay her eggs because it is time, because it is what she does, because it is what she can do.
My body’s cycles carry on their dealings distinct from my will and emotion too. My cycle will continue, preparing a small nest and releasing a mature egg every month until it is out of eggs. If the egg is fertilized and the cells grow well, it will sustain them and make the nest grand. If not, it will let them go. It will not hold grudges or worry or tire of its work. Whether I am ready or reluctant, patient or anxious, my cycle will turn every twenty-nine days. I will only ever be two weeks away from an answer, or another chance at trying.
But in my vulnerable human form I will worry—how good are my eggs, when will they come each month, and will they create viable life within the confines of finances and time, logistics and laws that threaten to restrict my chances?
I will bargain with my body, with FedEx, with anything powerful and potentially swayed by prayers. But I will not get good at winning the lottery, and I will not get good at getting pregnant. I will be at the mercy of nature and at the feet of its abundance, yet I’ll continue to make small attempts at mastery, knowing it does not exist.
