Who, Me?

I know I'm lucky. My daughter was conceived easily, I had an unremarkable pregnancy and a birth that went mostly as planned. I was never especially concerned about any of the possible complications that could have arisen. I took my prescription vitamin and went to pre-natal yoga classes and stayed away from oysters.

I was blissfully unaware that there was much of anything to worry about. I was the first of my group to have a baby, and I was much more concerned about how to manage life after the baby was born than anything that might happen before that. My friends would ask what I was going to do about stretch marks and whether or not I wanted to have an epidural. It all seemed so mysterious, but I never thought of it as fraught or perilous.

The very idea of infertility was so peripheral to my life that I didn't really wonder why I wasn't pregnant again until years had passed. During that time my mother-in-law had become very ill and my husband had to split his time between work and flying home most weekends. Then I was rear-ended by a school bus and could barely move for months. Actually doing any of the things required to get a baby going was completely out of the question. By the time I finally asked my OB if we should run some tests or something, my daughter was five. We had never used birth control.

Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I knew something was wrong. Even though my OB was sure it was just a matter of hectic scheduling - she sent me home with an OPK and said I'd be pregnant in a jiffy - I was beginning to suspect that the second time around wasn't going to be such a cakewalk.