Allyson's Story
I want our pregnancy journey to be positive, not filled with shame, risk and judgement
My husband and I have been together for nearly 10 years and have just started trying to conceive our first child.
When we met at 21 years old, both us were confident that children would not be part of our future. Neither of us wanted children (or even liked them that much!!) and our stock response whenever we were asked about having children was that we would get a cat and hot tub instead. Over the years our response developed from, “No way, never”, to, “Not in our 20s’, to, ‘Yeah maybe, give it a few more years’. It’s only been the last couple of years that I decided I wanted children. We’ve been talking more seriously the last few months about whether its something we are going to do or not and we had to have some very hard conversations about whether we were on the same page and would be having children for the right reasons. I was very worried that we would make a decision to have children which my husband would later regret, or that he was just doing it for me. I wanted to have children between 30 and 35(ish), personally. I didn’t want to be having children late into my 30s or 40s so it was getting to crunch time and we needed to decide - now or never. A few days before Christmas, Dan presented me with a pack of folic acid and vitamin D tablets and said he wanted us to start trying to conceive. We gave ourselves a couple of months to have a bit of health kick, hopefully get through the worst of COVID and pay off the Christmas spend on the credit card. I came off the pill on 1 March, purchased ovulation and pregnancy tests, downloaded ovulation tracker apps and started following pregnancy pages on Instagram. We’ve also been watching the workshops from the TTC Pack as we very quickly realised we know nothing about getting pregnant or having children, so its been a steep learning curve the last few weeks!
It’s amazing to think that we are starting this trying to conceive journey, but looking back at how long it’s taken us to get here, it already feels like we’ve been on a massive journey. Now we are here, I have a million questions and worries about what happens now. My experience with GPs has not been good over the years. I am overweight (clinically obese from BMI measures) and whenever I have been to the doctors for anything, including earache, I have always been told its because of my weight and I needed to lose weight first. Thinking about having to engage so much with GPs once we are pregnant fills me absolute dread. Although we are both overweight, we cook everything from scratch with clean fresh ingredients, don’t eat processed food, go for long walks, don’t have any medical issues like diabetes or high blood pressure and generally live a very normal life with our weight not impacting our lifestyle at all. However, explaining this to doctors is often met with disbelief and I want our pregnancy journey to be a happy and positive one, not one filled with shame, risk and judgement. I am following a number of fat-positive and plus size pregnancy pages which have given me some confidence in how to tackle this and I am working on an opening speech for my GP when we first go in to explain this and set my boundaries and expectations.
My best friend her partner are also trying to conceive and we have been really open with each other about our journeys so far. I lost my mum very suddenly in January 2019 and her parents have moved abroad so we don’t have a strong family network to support us through this. Even so, I consider myself very lucky to have someone, apart from my husband, that I can share this with. We are hoping we will fall pregnant at a similar time so we can have our maternity leave together. We are already planning soft play dates and going to mother and baby groups. I know we are long way off, and the TTC journey can take a while, but its nice look forward to the things we will enjoy, for me, it makes all the concerns and worries slightly easier to think about.
Written by TTC Diaries blogger, Allyson
I'm Allyson, I'm 31, I live in Essex with my husband. We've been together nearly 10 years and have just started trying to conceive our first child. I love travelling, eating out and the theatre and can't wait to do all those things as soon as lockdown is over.
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