The Truth About Baby Making

I’ve welcomed and amazing woman and soon to be mother to share her story today on Modern Mommyhood.  I hope you’ll take the time to read this entire post since it has opened my eyes to the struggles some women face while trying to conceive.  I can’t thank her enough for being brave enough to tell it like it is and share her journey!    – Morgan

Bella in Bindyland
Bella in Bindyland

Hi!

My name is Belinda, well I would prefer it if you called me Bindy!  I am a 24 year old ‘house wife’ who lives in gorgeous Australia.
I come from a wonderful & loving family, I married my best friend and together we have 4 beautiful fur babies (2 dogs, 2 cats) and I am currently pregnant with out first baby (due October 2013).

This time in our lives is a wonderful whirlwind and I’m so grateful to be almost a Mum. Pregnancy for us it didn’t come as easy as we hoped though and for no ‘real’ reason. Writing this post on our ‘journey to pregnancy’ was a little daunting as writing a blog at times can be tough, because how do you gauge how honest you should be? But I put it all out there, I figured my blunt honesty may help someone else and to me that outweighs the fear of being ‘too honest’.

If you would like to check out my blog which includes my pregnancy updates please click HERE.

The truth about baby making.


This post maybe the hardest thing I will ever write but if  this post helps one woman or couple not feel so alone I will be happy & this will be worth it. To that one person this may help, this is for you.

**Parts of this maybe slightly too much information, too detailed or even the way I describe how I felt, you may not agree with, if you don’t like it you don’t have to read it.**

Baby making.  It’s something you think of as such a straight forward procedure.

You fall in love, get married & have sex & hey presto, there is a baby.

Well, that’s how I pictured it in my head.  And that theory is such a crock of shit, I want to be the person to put a big “MYTH” stamp on that theory.  Baby making would have to be the least fun thing & possibly the most heartbreaking & difficult task I have ever been through.  Yes, I am aware that there are those people who have sex once & magically fall pregnant in the world.  But surprisingly some women don’t fall pregnant after one quick night of passion.  I am writing this post, not for your pity but to make other women know that they aren’t alone.

There are certain aspects of my life I don’t mind ‘sugar coating’ or keeping sweet on social media, but this isn’t one of them.  I don’t want me falling pregnant to make another woman feel less than she is, or give off the notion that it happened so easily for me – this is one thing I need and want to be very open & truthful about.

So this is my story.

Before our wedding we knew we wanted kids, gosh we knew we wanted a family when we were dating.  But we had our goals in place; get engaged, have a solid income, buy a house, get a responsible car, get married and then we could try for a baby.  And that is exactly what we did & in those steps.  Everything was going quite smoothly with our check list.  We were that naive to think that the final step would happen easily.  I was somewhat realistic & had done my research knowing that it can take a few months to fall pregnant & that’s all I expected, a few months.

But still I wanted it to happen NOW. Not in a few months. Then a few months suddenly went a bit past a few.  And honestly after a few months of ‘trying’, sex gets a bit overrated.  Because the reason you do it is in hope of having a baby & you have your doubts that this month ‘could be it’, because every other month ‘wasn’t it’.

It’s not that our relationship got bad, we remained together & still so in love.  But there was that pain, that feeling of “what if I’m the problem” “what if the other persons the problem” “what if we can’t have kids”. “What ifs” are the worst type of thoughts.  They get in your head they make you question everything & they cause tension.

Honestly, the whole process of trying so hard & getting nothing every single month was killing me, I hated it.  I got mad at myself, at the world & at God.  I was mad at myself because obviously this is what women are designed for & I felt to be the only one who couldn’t have a baby.  Why me?

I was mad at the world every time I saw some welfare dependent mother sucking on a cigarette neglecting her tiny poorly dressed baby crying its eyes out at the local shopping centre.

I was mad at God because why the hell did that girl who sponges off the government get a baby, why did the girl who drinks & smokes all through her pregnancy get a baby, why was everyone but me getting a baby?!  Why did horrible parents have babies, but not me?  Why not one of my friends who I knew desperately wanted a baby?  Give one of us a baby!

Trent and I did struggle a bit, we have completely different styles of dealing with hard times & strong emotions.  He is a lot more reserved, where as I am much more emotional & have a bad temper.  But we pulled through, because that is what strong couples do.  You have an obstacle and instead of throwing your hands in the air and running you decide it’s worth fighting for & keep going.

After a year of trying with no success, we made an appointment with our GP. We did the standard fertility testing and it all came back perfect.

So we were young, healthy, fit, fertile – so why the fuck didn’t we have a baby?  Honestly the results made me mad. Having a problem would at least explain why I wasn’t a Mum, but instead it felt like a slap in the face.

Then I had the thoughts that I shouldn’t feel this way, there were women out there who did have problems or who were going through IVF & they were the stories I always heard & read. I rarely heard of couples like us who were fertile & that were having a hard time falling pregnant, because to me it seems this is the story no one talks about.  IVF & fertility problems are often talked about, but not ‘just having trouble for no good reason’.

It was heartbreaking to me, I was almost 24, I had a goal since I was a teenager to be a Mum by the time I was 23, just like my Mum was.  That goal was seeming more & more unrealistic.  I felt like such a failure, so useless.  I felt like I was letting my husband, my parents & myself down.  Not that it was necessarily my fault, but that is just the way I felt.  I also felt really alone.  I had one friend who was going through a similar struggle as me, and that’s it, I was so lucky to have her to lean on – she got it.

I could also talk to my Mum about it, but honestly she was one of those magical women that fell pregnant by just thinking of a baby.  I call her the ‘pregnancy unicorn’, she fell pregnant easily 4 times, had 4 perfect pregnancies & had 4 natural births with 4 perfectly healthy babies.  So it was hard for her to relate, but I knew she was there 110% for me.

So I turned 24, I wasn’t pregnant.  This sucked.  I think this is the only time I’ve only ever really dreaded ‘getting older’.

But towards the end of October 2012 something wonderful happened.  I just had a feeling that I could be pregnant, so I took a pregnancy test.  And there was that magical second line, it was faint but it was there.  So I took another & another.  Then I went out to the chemist & bought more pregnancy tests & took them all!  I was pregnant!  This was it, I couldn’t believe it.  I told Trent that night & then we went straight over to tell my Mum & Dad.  I was so excited but there was something in the pit of my stomach, something that tried to mask that excitement, almost like my body telling me not to get too happy.

I went to my GP, I took the normal HCG level blood tests over a course of 3 days and those tests came back good.  That Wednesday I had my first ever obstetrician appointment, he couldn’t see anything on the scan but he said that could be because it was so early (at this point I was about 4 weeks).

That following day my Mum had a serious neck & spine operation in Brisbane, she ended up in the ICU because she lost a lot of blood.  My Dad & I stayed in Brisbane and cared for her that night.  She was so funny when she woke up because all she would talk about was the baby, I had told her she wasn’t allowed to tell anyone until 12 weeks but considering she was on some pretty decent pain killers she couldn’t stop saying things.  It was sweet to see her so excited, I also think having something good & positive to look forward to really helped her recover.

Three weeks later I was at my parents house for dinner, I went to the bathroom and noticed I was losing a very light brown discharge.  Which can be totally normal for some women during pregnancy.  I had a doctors appointment with my OB the following day.

That morning when I woke up, the brown had turned to red.  I felt sick, I knew what was happening, I just knew it.  Trent & I went to the OB appointment, the doctor tried to reassure me saying that some women bleed regularly throughout their pregnancies and have healthy babies, but something inside told me this wasn’t the case for me.  I laid down on the table & he tried to do an abdominal scan that didn’t work, so he did an internal ultrasound (and for the record I am a fairly private person with my body, having one of those scans while bleeding is fairly humiliating – well for me it was) and just like I had thought, there was no heartbeat.  What should’ve been there at 6 1/2 weeks wasn’t.

Our doctor sat us down & explained that these things happen, there is nothing that could be done and it was natures way of perhaps removing something that wasn’t quite right.  He gave me one of those specimen jars where I was meant to “collect any tissue that came away”.  All I could think of was “what the hell am I looking for, how will I know what is what”?  I was sent for blood tests to check if my HCG levels were decreasing, they were.

I was so worried, I had read all these horror stories on miscarriage where ladies wake up in a pool of their own blood, of women bleeding through maxi pads or extreme stomach cramps.  Nothing I was experiencing or experienced was like that, it was just like a period.

2 days later on the 9th of November in the morning I felt this strange urge just like I wanted to go to the bathroom, I just felt weird, I wiped and I felt something ‘come away’ from me.  Looking down I saw something on the toilet paper that was unlike any clot I had ever seen, it was like a small firm marble with a teeny tiny tail.  It had happened, I had officially miscarried our first baby.

Trent was asleep because he had night shift the night before, I went and woke him and we just cried together. Why us? Why after trying for so long would this happen to us? Why didn’t we deserve a baby? What was so bad about us?

I called my Mum and we also cried together over the phone & then Trent and I had the painful & humiliating task of taking our tiny little baby (I know it was in the very early stages, but to us it was still a baby) to the doctors and handing it over.

Our doctor once again did an ultrasound & said everything seemed to have come away naturally but the ’tissue’ that I had bought in still needed to be sent away to be assessed to make sure that it was complete. If not I would have to have a curette (D&C, I didn’t need one). The thing that struck me as odd was my doctor told us not to have sex until the bleeding had stop, I instantly thought “who the hell would want to have sex after this?”

Trent & I went home and just felt numb.  I couldn’t believe this had happened to us, I thought we would fall pregnant so easy – that didn’t happen.  When we finally did, I didn’t think our luck could be that bad that I would lose something we so badly wanted, something we prayed so hard for.

To make the day a tiny bit harder, we had Trent’s Christmas party that night. We weren’t going to go, but we ended up going because I thought it would be better than sitting at home being sad.  I just couldn’t be alone over thinking everything.

Before the party I went to my parents house & I spoke to my brothers, I wanted to tell them, I wanted to be honest with them.  They didn’t know I was pregnant, I was actually planning on telling them on their birthdays at the end of November.  They were really supportive for teenage boys & so kind to me.  I honestly felt better after telling them & I’m glad we have that sort of sibling relationship where we are there for each other through the tough times.  I don’t think they will ever know how much there support meant to me, I am so grateful to have such wonderful young men as brothers.

I would’ve loved to have been able to speak to my sister about this, but we don’t have that sort of relationship & honestly telling her would’ve just been giving her something else to be hurtful to me about.  So my family knew & I knew they were there for Trent & I, they are all I needed.

After we lost our baby I felt like my whole world was mocking me, it seemed every girl I knew on my Facebook was announcing they were pregnant as I was dealing with losing my baby.  I was still happy for them, but I couldn’t help but feel envious of them & there healthy pregnancies.  If I had remained pregnant I would be due around the end of June 2013.

I didn’t tell anyone about losing our baby apart from a few close friends & my family.  I just couldn’t.  I realise maybe a few friends suspected something had happened thanks to a few sad quote pictures on instagram that I posted, but when I was asked about them I just said I was a bit sad.

I eventually opened up & told a few more friends after a month or so had passed.  It is such an awkward & hard thing to tell people.  I know my friends love me, but some of them have a hard time understanding because they haven’t dealt with this before, but I was glad they knew & I did feel better after telling them.  There are still some friends I haven’t told, because honestly it is so hard to tell some people, especially those who are at very different stages in life than I am, it’s not that I didn’t want to tell them it is just so hard.

I am very grateful though for those friends who were there for me & knew what I was going through & were understanding even when it was hard for them. (I am especially grateful for one friend who has been with me from almost the beginning – thank you)
Trent and I spent the rest of the year healing & just being together.  We really learnt how strong we are & how much we also need each other.  The positive from such a sad occurrence I guess was we became even closer, it was a test & we didn’t fall apart we stayed strong.

For Christmas Trent gave me a turquoise Thomas Sabo charm bracelet.  He also gave me a tiny little angel wing charm that had a little diamond star attached, that would have to be the most special & meaningful gift he has ever given me.

We were told not to try for a baby for 2-3 months, so we didn’t.  After New Years we figured we would, we thought that it had taken us well over a year to finally fall pregnant & then lose our baby so we were expecting another long process, we did not expect at all to fall pregnant in the first month back trying.  We actually were just having sex just because, not with a purpose.

I did suspect again I was pregnant & this time I didn’t take 12 pregnancy tests, I didn’t want to get to overly excited but this time I felt different.  I felt slightly more confident. (If you want to read more about my first few months of pregnancy, please click HERE).  But still I was so scared, I had the 12 week scan & I wanted to tell the world but reading up on pregnancy is a dangerous hobby.  So I was worried about everything.  We waited until 13 weeks until we told ‘our world’ & made it Facebook official.  Even up until recently I was still worried if my baby was ok, I was scared that I wasn’t feeling any movement.  I read about tons of women feeling movement at around 15 weeks and I hadn’t, I now do feel some movement, but it feels like my brain is so programmed to be worried.  But I am trying to teach myself to relax, if I do my best & stay healthy that is all I can do.  Everything else is out of my control.

I know I didn’t struggle with infertility like some women do, I am thankful for that. I know that I did eventually fall pregnant & at this point it seems I am having a perfectly healthy baby & I am so grateful that our prayers have finally been answered.

But not everyone who struggles to fall pregnant is infertile, some couples for no reason at all have trouble.  I understand how frustrating it is to be told nothing is wrong, to try & do everything right but still not be getting the result you want.  You put your heart & soul into trying so hard and when it doesn’t happen it is devastating – I get it.

When I was looking for a blog post or a similar story to mine I couldn’t find it, so that is what inspired me to write this. Not for pity, but just to say to someone who was like me “yeah, I get it – this really sucks” to briefly write honestly on how a miscarriage happens & what it feels like, because a lot of my friends have asked what it felt like, what happened etc and mainly because I didn’t want someone like me to feel so alone.

We struggled for no good reason, God only knows why, maybe it was because our timing wasn’t right (like I was repeatedly told a million times by every well meaning friend, at the times when I was told this I wanted to scream, but now it does make sense) but really there was no reason, it just didn’t happen & then it did.  I am so grateful we finally got what we prayed for, but I just wish our path to this point had been a lot smoother.

If you are going down the same road as us, I pray for you.  I pray that you remain strong, that you know it’s ok to be mad at the world sometimes & that everything eventually gets easier for you.

Bella in Bindyland

Bindy Signature

 

16 thoughts on “The Truth About Baby Making

  1. Vanessa Salas says:

    Wow, Thank you for sharing your story. I don’t know what that’s like, I am one of those “think about a baby and get pregnant” There have been so many times that I have prayed and thanked God for my blessings. It hurts my heart to know so many woman struggle with this. You truly allowed people like me into your world by sharing the graphic details. I believe this was a test, a test of your marriage and your own personal strength, God was only preparing you for what’s to come….many blessings in disguise like this one.. Congratulations and most importantly on behalf of all the woman who are in similar shoes as you ….. Thank you for being so brave to share your story!

    • Belinda says:

      Thank you for enjoying my post. 🙂
      I also believe that this journey was a test, but I am so glad I finally (well in October) will have my sweet baby!
      B. xo

  2. Heidi says:

    Thanks sooooo much for sharing this!! It took us a year to get pregnant with our first. It is difficult at a young age when you start thinking there is a fertility issue. After our first was born we had an “oopsie” and found out we were pregnant again! So we were blessed and obviously there wasn’t a fertility issue. We were so lucky and had two beautiful children—two uncomplicated easy pregnancies. I decided to be a gestational surrogate and carry a baby for an infertile couple. 🙂 this was a truly wonderful experience! (—-since then we suffered two miscarriages :/ and then had two more beautiful babies. 🙂
    Congrats mama! Prayers to your and your family for a healthy pregnancy and baby!

    • Belinda says:

      Thank you so much for your kind words, you are a beautiful person for being a surrogate – that is such a kind & generous thing for you to do…
      🙂
      B. xo

  3. PJ Greetings says:

    Your story is touching and I felt your pain… I have learned that nothing worth having is ever easy.. my sister-in-law had 5 miscarriages before she was blessed with a son.. then 2 years later got her twin girls.. they are all gorgeous and very loved and cherished.. They also went through an adoption which the girl changed her mind after she saw “Nora” (the name she was given by my sister and brother in law).. what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and much more grateful.. congratulations on your baby.. you deserved it!

    • Belinda says:

      I agree 100% with your thought that ‘nothing worth having is ever easy’. This journey has shown me that!
      Your sister-in-law sounds like a very strong woman!
      Thank you for reading my post 🙂
      B. xo

  4. Ashley says:

    I am in the midst of this storm as I type this. No miscarriage but two perfectly capable beings struggling to conceive their first child. It has almost been a year in August. I am now at a peaceful point but with no one around me that have experienced this it was so comforting to read your story. Thank you for stepping out. Congratulations and I wish you and your husband and baby blessings!

    • Belinda says:

      I am glad you found my post in the midst of you trying… I know how very lonely it can be & frustrating when everything seems ‘perfect’. I hope your prayers are answered soon.
      All the best.
      B. xo

  5. Mrs. K says:

    Thank you so much for opening up to us about the pain and loss you went through, You were writing to me Bindy!!!
    My husband and I have been married 3 yrs and trying for 2 yrs for a baby. For no good reason it hasn’t happened yet. But God has practically dropped in our laps an adoption of a beautiful baby girl (I say baby but she’s almost 4 now lol). (we’ve always wanted to adopt but never imagined it would be our first child, but God’s plans are far better than mine!) :).
    I’m so thankful for my best friend and roommate from college who I’ve been able to lean on and vent and she gets the whole infertility thing! 🙂 She and her husband have finally conceived and are expecting their first baby in Nov. 2013 after trying for 4 years (she got married a year before I did), and I’m so very happy and excited for her and I can’t wait to meet her sweet baby!
    I have felt the same feelings you experienced of being mad at the world and questioning God. And just like you said, for the longest time now everybody I know seems to be having a baby, and I’m over here like, “dude! send me some of your water or something! lol I’m not even asking for twins or multiples, just one would be great!!” And I suspect I’ve had at least two miscarriages but I can’t say for sure because it would have been in like the first 2-3 weeks (but my PTs were always negative, not enough HCG yet) and then my period came, but my body just felt different. But I know in God’s perfect timing He will make it happen for us, He is the author and giver of life and not me 🙂
    Thanks so much for sharing your story and Congratulations on your beautiful baby in October! My adopted daughter was born in October too 🙂

  6. Danielle says:

    So excited for such a beautiful outcome!!! 🙂 I’ve just recently had baby fever smack me in the face ha! I’ve had cancer since the age of 15 and will be 28 next month. I’m constantly thinking that I’ve hit the infertility jackpot and tell my husband that all I want to do is take test after test both pregnancy and fertility. It’s hard playing the waiting game while, as you stated, all of your friends (and my younger brother and sisters friends) are on babies 1,2, and 3. We’ve chatted about adoption and worse case scenarios….it’s just a lot to think through and a lot to handle. Your story was very uplifting and shows that all it takes is a little patience, a heap of faith and a lot of love 🙂 Blessings to you and your family!!!

  7. Casey says:

    Wow, your story is something that most women wouldn’t share and I thank you for that! I know the struggles of taking time to get pregnant and worrying and you are an amazing strong woman! Congratulations on your little blessing!

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