just relax

I am so tired of well-meaning friends or family thinking that this phrase is actually useful in any way whatsoever to my pursuit of pregnancy. First, there's the obvious flaw: it has the opposite effect every time. Imagine you're in the middle of one of those days where nothing is going right. The washing machine breaks & there's no money to fix it right now. You start to take the clothes to the laundromat, but your car has a dead battery. You come back in, defeated, just to have the water company call to say they never received your last bill. Meanwhile, the dog still needs to be picked up from the vet & you have 6 movies to return to the library. You start to fix dinner, thinking maybe your spouse can take you out to run the errands when they get home, but you find you're missing a key ingredient for tonight's dinner. Your spouse walks in the door just as you're frantically trying to throw together a different dinner than what you'd planned so you can both eat & still make it to the vet's before 6:00. You drop the pan of hot pasta on the floor on the way back from the sink & we all know what expletives come out of your mouth then. Your spouse looks at you and says, "Just relax!"

Aren't you more relaxed already? Oh, gee, thanks hon, I never thought of that.

It's a very popular thought to think that stress causes infertility. Everybody and their sister has countless stories about people they really know (not just on the internet, like your questionable friends) who reduced stress & popped up pregnant. The way they talk, you'd think that if you would just get a homestudy, the first step toward adoption, you'll be pregnant by day's end! It must be the lack of stress, you know, because adoption is such an easy, stree-free process. Everybody likes to be picked apart by social service agencies, have their entire lives up to this point judged by strangers, submit their financial statements, medical records & psychiatric evaluations to people whose job it is to "judge a book by its cover." And of course, since most adoptive couples have to pay $7000 or more before they even start the process, this makes it all much less stressful.

And then, don't forget about the people "they know personally," who tried for years without success, until finally, finally, they just "gave up trying" and bam! She was pregnant. Here's a clue: women who have tried for years don't just bam! end up pregnant. There is not a single woman out there who has tried for years who can't pinpoint her ovulation window within 48 hours. If they truly were not trying, they wouldn't be pregnant. Not trying means preventing. Women experiencing infertility can very conveniently claim that they are "not trying," and most do...many times....over and over and over until they've almost convinced themselves. The only time a woman definitely can't claim that she's "not trying" is during infertility treatments. So if ingesting monthly chemical cocktails, transporting sperm in your underpants to the clinic, being artifically inseminated by a doctor rather than your husband, and partaking only in fertility sex is what counts as trying, with regular sex counting as not trying, then it's hardly surprising that the natural way might be more successful.

It seems that the fertile jury has concurred that there is no longer a thing such as coincidence and that a woman's issue with getting pregnant is not age or health or nutrition or medication, but stress. And more specifically, stress over not getting pregnant.

"Just relax."

"Are you trying too hard?"

"You're too stressed about it."

"Don't worry about it. You're too worried."

And this is the second flaw: what the woman hears is, "It's all your fault."

What's worse is that she hears that it's all her fault and there's actually nothing she can do about it except the vague, "Stop worrying." Not even a suggested action to take.

How effective would it be if I approached a woman exhausted from working two jobs to pay her bills, riding the bus from job to job since her car died and there's no money to fix it, hoping to have something extra to buy her children a gift for Christmas and told her, "Just stop worrying about money! You're too stressed. That's your problem." First, I'd probably get punched in the face. Secondly, she'd probably be pregnant if she wanted to be because getting pregnant rarely has much to do with stress. It's true. It really doesn't.

Do we really think babies are that fragile that they can't survive in the womb of a woman experiencing stress? Seriously? I do believe it's true that stress, over time, can begin to affect our internal systems. And I believe it's good to find a regimen to deal with stress. But that regimen doesn't include hiring someone to call me each day and tell me to "quit worrying." That would be a regimen to induce rage.

Here's what I would tell women who want another baby but aren't getting pregnant as quickly: deal with your stress so you can tell those "well-wishers" to flake off. Have sex with your husband more. And not just fertility sex -- real sex. Take more walks. Enjoy your current family and give, give, give to them so they know they are important & not just players in the sidelines in your game to get pregnant. And meditate, if you can. It can be in the morning, at night, in the afternoon, whenever. Do it with your yoga or with your morning coffee. Not with your morning commute, but anything else goes. Don't medicate your stress with alcohol, drugs, or sugar, and then really do it. Tell the wishy-wells, the know-it-alls, the I'm-so-Zens to flake off.

Remember that everyone likes to rewrite their life story with the most literary devices they can. Irony makes a good story great. So does a fairytale ending. And a nice little moral lesson of "everything happens for a reason." Maybe all those stressed out women really did become masters of their emotions and then out popped baby. Or maybe, that's just the way they like to tell it.