It’s no secret that I am not the most patient person. When I want something and have to wait, I get antsy and fidgety, unable to focus on anything other then the time I have to wait. Patience is a weakness of mine.

Which is why when that little stick didn’t turn blue on month one I was a little anxious. On the one hand, I was slightly relieved–one more month to prepare myself mentally, financially, and physically before being a mom! But on the other hand, once I’ve made a decision I hate waiting around before doing it. This stems down to a few of my personality traits. I’m a little controlling, OCD, and prone to anxiety. But I’m also a go-getter and a highly motivated little worker and I don’t like pushing back deadlines! I had to remind myself the percentage of people who actually get pregnant the first month. That helped. The anxious feeling went away.

But then month two came and went with no pregnancy. And then the next month and the next month and the next month….

I started stressing. Why wasn’t this happening? I turned to the internet. Oh, the internet. Note to self–going to Google when you’re worried about something isn’t always wise. It just adds to your stress. But I learned a few things and we started tweaking our routine in basic ways. I took my temperature daily. We modified our diet. I took ovulation tests. We timed things differently. Still nothing. And it started to get to me.

Every month, I’d start feeling different. And I’d convince myself, oh my goodness! This must be it! This is that feeling that women intuitively get and they just KNOW they’re a mom now. I’d convince myself that I was late and that my aches were early signs of pregnancy, that nauseated feeling was a little baby setting up shop in my body. I would get so excited and take a test, only to be immediately let down with an abrupt “Negative.” And nearly every time, the day after taking a test my body would give me the ultimate message that I wasn’t pregnant. Way to kick me when I’m down.

No girl likes their period. (Yes, I’ll be talking about my period. Brace yourself, that will not be the most “TMI” thing on this blog.) I despised my period long before I started trying to get pregnant. But once we started trying, every time that Monthly Visitor came, I would break down into tears, bawling over the proof that it still hadn’t happened. And I started blaming dear Aunt Flo.

My periods have never been regular. They’d come without warning and wreak havoc. Every month the cramps were insanely painful. It was not unusual for me to come close to collapsing the first day, puke uncontrollably for the first two days, and be miserable throughout the full seven days. I knew they were irregular but once I started tracking them to get pregnant, I realized that they were extremely irregular. They say a “regular” cycle is 28 days apart. Mine were no where near that. During the time I tracked my periods we saw that my shortest cycle was 34 days and my longest cycle 52 days, with most averaging around 40 days apart. Hmm. That can’t be good. Could this be the problem? Was my body, was I, the reason we weren’t having a baby?

Doctors say you shouldn’t worry about your ability to conceive a child unless you’ve been trying for over a year. Most won’t typically even see you to check for any problems until it has been a full year. A year really isn’t that long of time in the great scheme of things, but when you have 12 months of rejections, a year can seem endless. Each month more stressful and disappointing than the last. But all we could do then, and what we are still doing today, is wait.