"having fun trying!"

Before anything else I want to apologise in advance to my one IRL friend who knows about, and reads, this blog. In view of his problems at the moment, he's probably going to think "oh cry me a river". So, sorry, BFG.

But this is not an unusual experience among those of us TTC. Well-meaning friends and family who have no idea about what is going on in our lives, have got to the stage of asking Significant Other and me when we are going to have children. My aunts even go as far as to tell me that I'm "not getting any younger" (what? I'm not?? I wish I had known that sooner...). At first we would counter the questions with a casual "oh, we've only been together a year, let's see how it goes" but that doesn't suffice three years into our relationship. So instead we now say "well, fingers crossed..." Which usually leads to the nudge-wink-smirk "Ah, I bet you are having fun trying!" The only socially acceptable reply to that is to laugh and smirk back (Significant Other) or laugh and blush (me).

All the time, of course, we both want to yell - "fun? You think we are having FUN? Sit down, let us tell you how s£x is no longer fun, or romantic or even, quite often, loving. It is now just another stage in our carefully timed regimen of drugs, scans, procedures and testing. There are times when we have to do it, we have no option but to get busy and so we carefully plan mornings and evenings around it. The times when we are expressly forbidden to do it are actually a relief from something which has become a chore. Our baby, if it ever exists, will be conceived either while I am lying on a table in a freezing cold room after a female doctor has injected me with Significant Other's sp£rm, or in a petri dish. We are not having a fun time trying, we are hating every moment of this energy-sapping, money-draining, dignity-robbing, relationship-testing, life-consuming trek."

But we can't. So we make the gender-appropriate responses and move on.