Wishin' and hopin' and waitin'...

Watch the clock. Check your calendar. Take a deep sigh. Keep yourself busy: text some friends, walk the dog, watch a show, read a book, play a game. Watch the clock again. Check your fertility app. Check it again. Confirm the days by counting on your fingers. Remind yourself not to Google anything. Google it anyway. Take another deep sigh. Repeat. 

Welcome to what is colloquially known as the "two week wait," that miserable, hopeful two weeks between ovulation and when you can pee on a stick (or when your period will be arriving, if you're more of a "pee cup half empty" kind of gal). When you want to be pregnant, you both live for and loathe these two weeks. It's the lead up to what could be the moment you've been breathlessly waiting for, but it's also 14-ish creeping days wherein all productive brain space is monopolized by thoughts of what your body might be doing right at that moment and then metathought reminders to not to drive yourself crazy thinking that way. 

In the first few months, the two week wait was full of hope and wonder for me. As most of us knew, high school sex ed doesn't actually teach ya much, and this is especially true when it comes to the details of what your body does in these two weeks of your menstrual cycle. I reveled in learning new things about what the human body does and is capable of. Buttttt after about month four of trying to conceive, it turned into a fortnight of anxiety and PMS symptoms masquerading as what I was sure were pregnancy symptoms, a mistaken identity tragedy on par with a Shakespearean comedy. As it turns out, one of the other things you don't learn in sex ed is just how much early symptoms of pregnancy are pretty much the same as PMS, despite what every movie you've ever seen may have told you. As a few months of trying has turned into eight months, I've learned a few things about keeping myself sane (read: busy) in those two weeks, but it's still far from a pleasant 336 hours (who's counting?). 

The problem is that, especially when it takes this long to get pregnant, this two week wait plays out as this horrific paradox of hope and disappointment. If you don't feel hopeful in those weeks spent waiting for that "positive" to appear, you'll be miserable all of the time. And quite frankly, it's impossible not to have hope bubble up, even against your will, when you want something so, so badly. But it's also this same sense of hope that brings waves of disappointment crashing down on top of you when the test is negative or your period arrives (sometimes in the same day). 

Every month for the last several months, I have told myself that I'm going to keep it together and not get so worked up on that day of bad news. But every month, in spite of myself, I have just felt so. goddamn. sad. It's disappointment, and rejection, and unfairness, and bitterness, and anger, and sorrow, and self-pity, and self-doubt, and all of the worst feelings all at once, no matter how rational you try to be. On those "bad news" days, I typically muscle through my work and commitments, and then sit on the couch, crying intermittently while I watch bad television shows and drink wine (a silver lining I would happily give up to be pregnant instead). I usually wake up the next day with puffy eyes, but full of resolve to try, try again. But that first day is some of the worst heartache I've ever experienced, and it's the memory of this heartache that haunts you each month after in that two week wait. 

As Belle Boggs says in The Art of Waiting, "[...] the problem with infertility is that it is not a patient, serene kind of waiting, not a simple delay in your plans; it happens for many of us in the context of consuming struggle, staggering expense, devastating loss. It's five (or eight, or ten) years of trying and failing, which erodes any feelings of confidence or anticipation of a positive outcome."

She's right. There is nothing serene about second-guessing every single twitch or twinge in your body that you've known for decades. There is nothing serene about triple-checking how many days past ovulation you are. There is nothing serene about glancing every hour at a post-it note reminder to yourself that says "NO GOOGLING." And when you inevitably Google what you think are your symptoms anyway, there is nothing serene about the message board posts you scan of other women feeling the same exact frantic way, dripping with desperation, and just begging for someone to comment, "Yes, I felt that and was pregnant!" You can even see the rejection in the common language used in follow-up comments from the original poster when she gets her period: "I'm out, my period showed up this morning." I'm out. As if we are disqualified, as if we have been cut because of our inadequacies in the race toward motherhood. 

No, these two weeks are neither patient, nor serene. You must simply survive. And then you must resolve to do it all again.