Making Babies, Part One

We've been talking lately about whether or not we want to have another baby. It's been a long, meandering discussion. Much the same way we went about trying to decide if we were going to have any kids at all. Anyway, I'll write about it in more detail some other time, but the thing I want to mention now is that it came out that one of the things holding Orionjob back from being whole-heartedly behind trying again is that, apparently, Linus' delivery was really hard on him and he's not sure if he wants to go through that again.

What? Really? Because, I'm the one that actually delivered Linus - out of my body - and that's not one of the things in my "Cons" column. Not that I'm like, "You know, the thing I could really go for now is active labor!", but the prospect of it wouldn't stop me from having another baby, if that's what we decide. Orionjob, however, seems to bear deeper scars than I do, which kinda pisses me off, a little. Not that I think he isn't entitled to his feelings, and yada yada blah blah, but if I'm ok with it, I feel like he should be too, you know?

It's possible I haven't got the full story out of him yet. He's a still-waters-run-deep kinda guy, and often the first thing you get out of him isn't the whole of it, and you have to wait a bit before he spills the rest and really comes to whatever conclusion he's going to come to. I used to get very impatient with him when we were first together (because Patience is NOT my middle name), but over time I've gotten used to the process. Plus, getting frustrated with it isn't going to make things happen any faster. In fact, the opposite may be true. And, I can't change a rock into a river through force of will. I don't have that kind of power, and probably wouldn't want to even if I did. So, I wait.

Meanwhile, I thought I'd tell you all Linus' birth story, for anyone who hasn't heard it already. So, be warned. I don't plan on going into super, squeamish detail, but still...

It was quite arduous - 54 hours total. Um, I guess I feel like I should first tell you that I was pregnant before Linus. We had decided in about November, 2003, to kinda, maybe, start to think about trying to get pregnant. We stopped using contraception, but we weren't really trying. I mean, we were having sex, so yeah, in that way we were trying, but we weren't taking my temperature every morning, or anything even remotely like that. I had always assumed I'd have a hard time getting pregnant. I'd had really screwy periods until I was about 30. By screwy, I mean irregular. Sometimes I'd go three months between, sometimes 20 days, there was just no telling. Then, sometime in my early 30s, I became regular. Like, phases-of-the-moon regular. But, when we started discussing pregnancy, I'd only had a couple of years of regular, vs. a couple of decades of screwy, so I was still kinda in the mode of thinking, "my cycle is weird and there's no way to predict what may happen", which was totally not true, had I been thinking. Still, I chose to believe that I was perhaps only ovulating once a season. Also, my mother had had trouble conceiving me. She tried for a couple of years, though this was in her 20s and not her 30s. I think she even took some kind of fertility drug eventually, though I'm not sure about that last bit.

These two things, plus the fact that I was 35 at the time and I'm a biologist and know how diminishing-fertility happens, clouded my thinking. This was also around the time when it was a cover story on every weekly news magazine how so many women were postponing having children until it was "too late". Oh, and Or and I had been using a sort of modified rhythm method for about a decade - that is, we used nothing most of the time until I thought it was around the time I could be ovulating, and then we'd use condoms. Now, I know that the rhythm method works for crap unless you absolutely know when you are ovulating. Since as far as I knew, I'd never been pregnant, I assumed that I must not hardly ever be actually ovulating, otherwise I would have gotten pregnant before. Yeah, I know that's some fucked up logic, using a contraceptive method that I assumed would normally fail, but this just serves to illustrate the fact that I seriously thought I would have to TRY to get pregnant. Like, months, possibly years, of data collection, strategic sex, luck, and possibly fertility-enhancing drugs.

So, I got pregnant immediately. That is so like me.

Well, I'd planned on telling one story, and now I'm telling another. I'll get around to the original plan eventually, but first I'm going to finish this one. But not in one post, because this is plenty long already. If you're still reading at this point - thanks.