#atozchallenge - Waiting

Starting a family is all about the waiting.

First there’s the waiting to actually start trying. You want to be sure that you can afford it, that you’ll have somewhere to put a baby, that your car will take a car seat.

Then when you start there’s the waiting for your period to bugger off, waiting for ovulation and then after that the four words you come to hate; the two week wait (that’s occasionally written as 2ww in the acronym language you’ll find on trying to conceive forums). It works on the principle that the average woman has an average cycle of 28 days, with a perfectly average ovulation smack bang in the middle. Of course there aren’t really that many average women around; my own wait period is more of a ten day way, but it doesn’t have nearly as snazzy an acronym and no one on the forums would know what I meant if I started talking about a 10dw.

The two week wait is basically when all your hard work for the month is over; if it’s happened, then it’s happened, if not you’ve got to wait two weeks to find out. At the end of the two weeks you can take a trusty HPT and see whether you’re going to be a parent. If not, you’ve got to start playing the waiting game all over again for another month.

And then when it starts looking like there might be problems in the conception department, there’s more waiting. Waiting for doctor’s appointments, waiting for tests (like the one which has to be taken on the 21st day of your cycle), waiting for results and then waiting for more appointments.

And if, like us, you end up needing IVF there’s even more waiting, though that can depend on where you live. For our area there is a two year waiting list for treatment. As of Tuesday we are halfway through that wait and hoping to get a shot at going private this summer because it’s a very long time to go without trying anything. When the IVF treatment starts, then we’ll get to play the waiting game some more, waiting for more tests, waiting for more appointments, waiting for results. I’m a little bit worried about the idea of my first two week wait in over a year (I’ve kind of given up worrying about them since I was told it wouldn’t happen naturally).

You’d think after all this time I’d be kind of good at waiting. I’m really not. But at least I’ve got plenty of time to practice!