It’s Time to Retire the Phrase ‘Trying for a Baby’

May 10, 2024

By Nell Frizzell

Am I trying? Why, yes. Some people find me very trying indeed.

Now, I feel about privacy the way other people feel about exercise; it’s something I’m increasingly aware I need, the older I get, and yet I still forget about quite a lot of the time. Which is why, since taking my coil out at the beginning of the year, I haven’t quite known whether I wanted to write about trying to get pregnant or not. Was it—to use two equally awful phrases—TMI or relatable content? Would I be sharing something too private or discussing something fairly universal?

The truth of the matter is that, after six months of unprotected sex, I am not pregnant. Sometimes this has made me extremely upset; at other times I have felt ambivalent about the whole idea of being pregnant ever again. Then, last month, I had the best pap smear of my life. There’s a phrase you don’t read every day. The nurse was kind, informative, genuinely enthusiastic, and interested by her work. She gave me time, had excellent eye contact (I mean, not the whole time—there are limits), and it didn’t hurt at all. After the speculum and swab section of our microdate, I mentioned something about wanting to get pregnant. And so this 20-something nurse did something fairly predictable; she asked me if I was tracking my periods.

My friends, I was not. As usual, I was treating my body like an out-of-control tractor on which I was sitting, occasionally pushing buttons or wiggling a steering wheel, without any idea of how to actually drive, never looking at the instruction manual, while clods of earth and uprooted turnips flew around in my dusty wake. Sure, it’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s one I think of often. Like many people, I know less about the actual functioning of my individual biology than, say, how to drive a Massey Ferguson MF610. I’d been having sex, sure. Sometimes. But with no real sense of when I was fertile.

That evening, I downloaded an app and started tracking my periods, with all the accompanying concerns about data, privacy, the commodification of women’s bodies, information control, and AI that such a move entails. Since then, I have actually tried to have sex during the five or so days during which I am probably—and I do stress the word probably—fertile. That is what I mean when I say I am trying. In fact, I’ve always found the term “trying for a baby” rather annoying. What do we actually mean here? Sex on holiday? Doing it at 4 am because a £150 app has told you that this is your most fertile day? Borrowing £10,000 from your mum to do IVF on your own? Begging your sleeping husband for a quickie, or starting to put red dots in the corner of your diary? To try for a baby looks different for everyone, depending on their sexuality, gender, fertility, relationship status, and all the other big ticket items.

There is also another matter, hovering in the background of this point, like a tall cousin in a wedding photo: menopause. My mother was 40 when she went through menopause. At least, she was 40 when her periods stopped. The other symptoms had probably started a few years earlier (to say that her memory of it is hazy is a bit like saying the sea is damp). And so, at 38, with sore breasts, my hair falling out, waking up in the night soaked in sweat and a vague sense of not feeling like myself, it is quite possible that I am in the run-up to that particular hormonal long jump myself. Who knows? As I say, I haven’t been keeping a very steady eye on my body over the last five years, meaning that my periods are about as predictable as thunder.

According to the charity Tommy’s, one in three women who are having sex “every two to three days,” or timing sex around ovulation, will conceive within a month. However, at my age, about half of women will conceive within a year; more than nine out of 10 couples will get pregnant within two. So, statistically speaking, I am absolutely bang average. The strange thing is that, after so many years of desperately wanting to have a baby, arguing, cajoling, begging, worrying, delivering deadlines, seeking counseling, crying in the bathroom, and bleeding into my pajamas, I am now in the lap of the gods. I might get pregnant. I might not. And even if I were to get pregnant, who knows if that pregnancy would actually result in a baby? That is where I am, and so are millions and millions of others, all over the world.

In my own small way, I might be trying, but I still don’t have any control.