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Keeping the Gumball Machine in Good Working Order

I wish I had read an article like Tera Schreiber’s years ago, long before I was ready to start a family. Tera writes this month about how women can protect their fertility so they are able to conceive when the time is right for them.

I first decided I wanted to have a baby at the least optimal time in my life: while working as a staff writer covering criminal courts at a big-city newspaper. I was 34, not over-the-hill by any means. Still, my best years for conceiving were nearly behind me, and I was working long hours, eating (not the most nutritious food) on the run, and operating in a very competitive environment under huge amounts of stress. But I had always achieved what I’d set out to do. Surely I could have a baby.

Wrong. After a year or so of trying, I sought the help of a fertility specialist. And so began my seven-year trial of examinations, surgeries, crazy-making hormone injections, expensive high-tech procedures and, finally, a bad miscarriage. Calling it quits in my attempt to have a biological child was, perhaps, the most difficult decision of my life. But it was the right one because my story has a happy ending. At the age of 40, I became the mother of the most beautiful baby boy I’ve ever seen. My husband and I adopted, and to this day I can’t imagine loving a child more than I love my son. I just wish I could have spared myself the seven years of pain and anguish.

In the midst of my attempts to conceive, I remember feeling angry and frustrated. It seemed I could control practically everything in my life — except my body’s inability to become pregnant. What I appreciate most about Tera’s article is her underlying message that we can, in fact, take control of our fertility if we take the right steps earlier, rather than later. I, for one, cannot emphasize enough how important that is.

I recently read a cute novel called Dating Big Bird, by Laura Zigman, in which the main character refers to her ovaries as a gumball machine running out of gumballs. How sad but true. Only so many healthy gumballs and only so much time. But, as Tera points out, we can take steps to protect our fertility as soon as we become sexually active. We can have protected sex to avoid not only life-threatening sexually transmitted diseases, but also those that damage fallopian tubes and the cervix. We can strive to live a healthy, balanced life that includes a nutritional diet, exercise and enough sleep.

All of these things we should do anyway. Motherhood may not be on your agenda now, but it could be someday. And when you’re ready for it, having a baby should be a natural and happy occurrence.

Karen Reed-Matthee
Editor

©March 2008 Caliope Publishing Company