Tomorrow is likely CD1 for my first cycle of trying again, and I’ve been getting negative tests at 11, 12, and 13 DPO, so not hopeful.
Complaining about timing
So I just asked for some advice on the parenting thread about travel after baby and it seems like it is likely ill-advised before four months. This means I’ll only have four more cycles to try before getting pregnant will throw a wrench into my career plans. It is still very much what I want—and I’m still going to keep trying. I’m just super frustrated that it’s being so difficult.
One of the messed up things about having that miscarriage is that the pregnancy was so damned perfectly timed. I would have had the baby with only deferring my psychedelic program for a year, it was due right at the beginning of summer (June) before I start fieldwork for school (next January) so I could have the whole summer totally off, I’m fully working from home, and I would have given birth before I turned 40. There was literally not a better time for it to have happened. The baby would have been 7 months old before I started fieldwork and a year old by the time I needed to travel. I had all of these dreams of taking the full 12 weeks of leave and just having this idyllic, family-focused summer before having to start (all-online) classes and work again at the end of August.
Now, if I don’t get pregnant by my fifth cycle this try (my June cycle), then (if I get pregnant at all), I’ll have to defer my psychedelic program again, plus be juggling fieldwork that I’ll need to either get done or stay in the program an extra semester, plus at some point, my time is going to run out on 100% WFH (when the pandemic is over and my company’s new building is finished).
Even in my best case scenario—I get pregnant next cycle—I’m going to have to choose between starting fieldwork while on maternity leave or spending an extra semester’s worth of time (and money) in school, and I’ll be leaving a 7-month-old to travel, plus having to go back to a couple days a week on-site for work somewhere in there.
Worst-case scenarios are that either I just don’t get pregnant at all, ever, or that I have ANOTHER miscarriage after delaying the program again, pushing both motherhood and my career further away from me.
I know I’m only one cycle into re-trying, but some days I feel this illogical certainty that a baby just isn’t going to happen for me—that I’m destined to be this childless psychedelic medicine crone—and I should just give up and accept my fate and stop trying, focusing wholly on the thing that I know I can get. I really don’t like the fact that for everything else in my life, my success is just a matter of intelligence, drive, commitment, and competence, but for this one VERY IMPORTANT THING, I can be doing every single thing I can think of to make it happen and can’t do jack diddly squat about when or even whether it will.
This post brought to you by negative pregnancy tests and probably PMS hormones.