There are a dozen reasons why, according to nobody but me, I shouldn’t have had trouble getting pregnant. Sure, I was old. But my mother had been too. She was 36 when my sister was born and 40 when I was born.
Shouldn’t I somehow have inherited my mother’s fertility? I’m not sure exactly how of course. Through osmosis, photosynthesis, something. I mean we were pretty close, I looked just like her, and we lived in the same house for 18 years. Clearly the dominant fertility gene should have rubbed off on me somehow. And my sister and I were both born in the sixties. Haven’t our lifestyles and technology and our environments progressed so much in forty plus years that our reproductive systems should have been more durable? (Yes, I AM aware that not one of those is rational but there you have it.)
In fact, I should have been MORE fertile than my mother. I’ve always taken pretty good care of myself-eating right and exercising…never drinking..never doing drugs. My mother was a heavy smoker and never did a lick of exercise. So of course she decided to get pregnant and did and I had post-marital sex with my husband for a year for no apparent reason and then spent somewhere between 3,000 and 20 million dollars on fertility treatments.
My husband is exactly nine days older than I. We met about an hour and a half before turning 39 (at a gay Hanukkah party no less. Doesn’t everyone meet that way? No? Unless you’re a gay Jew, I suppose not–Well, another post another time.)
I had no intention of ever going for fertility treatments mind you. No one does. But I was different. I had a plan, you see. I figured, being older than many, I would simply do the Readers’ Digest version of courtship and then magically have children the soap opera way. Get married on Wednesday, pregnant on Friday, give birth the following Tuesday to a baby who would morph into a precious six year old by the end of the month.
So when I met my husband-to-be—you’ve heard of speed dating—This was dating on Speed. “It’s been nice talking with you. Do you think you might like to go out sometime?” “Not now. Do you have a tuxedo? Our wedding’s on Sunday.”
I know a few women who heard the clock ticking and married whatever at the eleventh hour as their last egg was emptying out of the hourglass and their uterus was about to turn into a pumpkin. This was not the case for me. I found the right guy but my age…and the age of our parents…definitely encouraged shorter pre-marital phone conversations and less movie going and more meeting relatives and trying on white dresses (okay…off-white–I was 39 for crying out loud).
But that’s the rub of infertility isn’t it? You can rush to get pregnant under the wire as we did and it can happen twenty minutes after your first post-nuptial “ooh baby” or not after a year of trying like with us …but really…you just never know. Could I have had fertility issues all along, even when I was 25? Like I said…You never know. That’s infertility for ya.
Lori Shandle-Fox 49, is a former professional stand-up comic, humor writer, and infertility survivor. Her blog and book, Laughing IS Conceivable: One Woman’s Extremely Funny Peek into the Extremely Unfunny World of Infertility have been read and recommended by thousands of top fertility experts and patients. They are designed to de-stress infertility sufferers, their partners, families, and medical teams. Lori can be found at: http://laughingisconceivable.com.
Her story goes something like this: Lori met her husband two months before turning 39. Got married at 39 1/2 +, went for fertility treatments at 41. She had four IUI (artificial inseminations) that didn’t work out. One egg retrieval. One transfer with 4 fresh eggs that didn’t work out. 3 frozen eggs were transferred back in and they all took. She and her husband now have biological triplets -two girls and 1 boy. They are 6 1/2 years old.