Ranty.

Right now, the reason I don't have a baby is because I am silly enough to be scared shitless of IVF.

At least, that's what all the Fertiles boil it down to.

"So many people do it now!"

"Trust me, after you have a baby you'll realize that these procedures are no big deal!"

"But it will be sooooo worth it!"

Thanks for this, Fertile. You can sit there, with your babies and your ovaries and your happy little swimmers, and tell me that it's easy. Let me clarify something. I don't care how many temperatures you took or how many sticks you peed on. If you got pregnant without any intervention, then you don't know what you're talking about when you talk about IVF. This was easy for you. You who only had to throw on some lingerie and get pregnant. You, who had nobody involved in your sex life except your husband and maybe some random porn. You who got pregnant in your bedroom or your kitchen floor.

Tell you what, let's try an experiment. I'd like you to go in to a doctor and tell him every last detail about your sexual history and sex life. Then have your husband do the same (Hey, Fertile, think you know everything about your husband's sex life? You don't.) Then go in to the doctor's office and drop your pants as frequently as possible for exams, to the point where your doctor sees your vagina more than your husband does.

That's OK with you? OK, then try this: How about you wait til the day your period starts, then go for an ultrasound. That's right, go in there all crampy and bloated, and make sure your bladder is so full you feel like you could burst, and then let an ultrasound technician jam a wand up there and poke it around. See how sexual you feel after that.

And your husband doesn't get off the hook. He gets to drop his pants and get his penis and testicles inspected too, critiqued like at a dog show. Then, send your husband in to a sterile room, with sterile porn, so that he can jerk off into a cup and have some technician tell him dispassionately that his wad looks funny.

Then, after this, after all these procedures, after you're told your chances of conceiving naturally are 5%, then try this. Try going on the birth control pill, then injecting yourself with hormones every day, hormones that feel like the worst PMS possible. Then go in for more ultrasounds, more bloodwork, more humiliating tests surrounded by people who just say "tut tut, there there, dear". Spend more time with these people, people whose business it is, whose work it is, to process you as quickly as possible so that the clinic can make their $10,000 off getting you pregnant, spend more time with these people than you do with your own friends.

Then get all nice and hopped up on a series of drugs and lay on a gurney with your legs spread and have a team of doctors retrieve your eggs from your gut, your eggs that are supposed to be travelling quietly down your fallopian tube in the silence of your bedroom and meet your husband's sperm after sleepy, quiet, easy sex. Have the doctor fish around in there in the cold, harsh antiseptic light, pierce your uterus and retrieve these precious eggs. Have your husband jerk off in another cup. Then go home to sleep off the valium on the couch. Then wait. Wait as if your life depended on it, wait.

Tell you what, Fertile. You go through this, then come back and talk to me. OK? Until then, please don't try to convince me to go through IVF. Please don't try to tell me how "worth it" it is. Please don't talk as if becoming a mother gives you an opinion over what I should do with my body. Please don't behave as if you don't know what I'm "waiting for". You've never had to deal with forcing your body to do something it obviously doesn't want to do. You've never had to invite half a town into your sex life. You don't know what you're talking about. So please, don't talk about it. Thanks.

Barren.

This blog is dedicated to me - and those like me. Those of us who have inhospitable wombs. Who have gimpy swimmers heading up the canal towards a hostile uterus. Those of us who are surrounded by mothers and fathers with babies, who have to live with the sympathetic looks and the "don't worry, it'll be your turn soon"s.

This blog isn't to disparage them, but it is a place to give me a voice. A voice that I don't otherwise have, because I don't want the entire world to know that my uterus is gimpy. I don't want my mother fretting in my ear, or my mother in law telling everyone about why she doesn't have grandchildren yet. The voice I can't use when someone tells me they're pregnant and then they kindly say, "I hope this doesn't upset you". The voice I can't use when people act surprised that I don't visit their website, when all they talk about is baby gear. That voice. That blunt, probably rude voice that otherwise comes out at home in a long, foul rant to nobody but myself.

That voice will fill these pages.