Family Planning

B had some coworkers/friends over this past weekend for a BBQ. It was fun, and - inevitably - at one point, the conversation turned to kids.

One of the guys there (who has been married all of two months) was discussing his family planning. They want to have a baby next year, he said, so they're planning to get her pregnant in March. Just. Like. That.

It was so sweet to see his optimism, his total faith that since they want it to happen in March, it will. Actually, I suppose it's likely that it will, or at least soon after.

Sometimes, I forget that most people will conceive fairly soon after they decide to start trying. I had to remind myself that it's inappropriate to scream "No! Try NOW so you'll know before March if there's a problem!!". Yeah, I'm that cynical.

And a little jealous. B & I knew before we got married that we'd probably have problems conceiving. We knew that we couldn't control when it happened. We couldn't even control if it happened.

Still, I persist in trying to 'plan' our family. Really, I should stop that. I don't have the best of luck in this arena.

When I was very young, and very naive, I had an idea of how my family would look when I was grown. I'd be a young mom, with a large family of closely-spaced children. My reality is a bit different. Ok, it's a lot different. None of those ideals fit my family. Eh, I'm flexible, I've adapted to the fact that while other people can plan out what they want, our reproductive organs (and the travel demands of B's career) have the final say in any planning .. but a girl can dream, right? Right.. and here's my dream: I want a baby who is not born in July.

A small request, and one that probably seems petty to most people, but it's really not. See, there are four grandkids in B's family. They all have birthdays in the last two weeks of July. Call me crazy, but I'd like to be different.*

Given my history, it shouldn't surprise me that B's schedule for work is complicated enough that our next possible insemination is... October. (yeah, do the math. with an October conception, a July birth is likely) Well, we've still got November. (only, two of the four July kids were due in August and arrived early just to make the July cutoff). And December. And that's it. If we don't have a successful insemination by then, we've got a deployment interrupting our "family planning". Again. I'm not so sure I want to pin all my hopes on December, so we'll probably go ahead with an October attempt, even if it's not what I want... because, yeah, none of this is what I want, so what's one more thing?

And people wonder why infertility is so stressful. For a control freak, it's sheer hell.

.. not to mention, October seems so very far away.



*Maybe it's because I remember trying to plan Grape's first birthday party around everyone else's birthday schedules. Maybe it's because I remember my nephew being pissed that he might have to share his birthday with a baby brother he most definitely did not want. Probably it's because I remember the stress my sister in law had to go through to schedule the birth of said sibling so that she would not be giving birth or be in the hospital on her older son's birthday because it really was that important to him.