Too much information?

Who do you tell when you decide you want a child?
Aside from each other obviously, pricking pinholes in your condoms or feeding your pill to the geranium plant unbeknown to your partner really isn't recommended.

Who do you tell about a decision to try to conceive ?

Who do you tell when it all starts to go arse over tit and you have to bring specialists, plastic cups, and stirrups into the equation?

In my naivety, I was fairly quick to tell a friend, and for a while it was a trolley full of humping jokes and willy in a sling gags.

Even when we got to the point where samples were being tossed about the place, there were plenty of black slapping and beer spitting moments to be had.

That's fellas for you.

Then things turned serious, and all that stopped. It was no one's fault, but for whatever reason the conversation rarely, if ever, arose once the complications did.

So we are left with a big infertile elephant in the room.

Deciding to start a family is a huge decision for a couple, and to be honest, once we'd made it, I felt people should notice something different about me.

It's big bloody news, and you burst to tell people.

What you don't realise, is that maybe, just maybe, it doesn't all go according to plan, and you are left with something very awkward.
You are left with people who were willing to joke with you about aching gonads, or were willing to turn a blind eye to your late arrival to, or early exit from dinner out somewhere, but are less able to be the support you need when your dreams are taken out of your hands.

It's this possibility that things don't work out like you planned that would make me say, with hindsight, that you should keep it as much to yourself as possible, and don't go shouting your mouth off, even to one person. It's one less person that you find yourself having to explain to 15 cycles down the line why "nothing's stirring".

If I could change the way I did things, I probably would, but there's no use in crying over spilled man milk.

Trying to conceive is an exciting time, a fun time, one of few times in your life where you can feel grown up and overwhelmingly excited at the unknown at the same time.

Infertility, is a far less exciting time. Reality starts to hit home, time goes by far too fast, and what was excited expectation turns to nervous uncertainty.

You used to see a parent and child in the past and look at each other with the 'that'll be us soon' grin on your faces, now you turn your eyes to the floor and look away, from the scene, and each other.

Acknowledging the sadness you see in someone else's eyes only leads to being reminded of your own.

I'm torn between what seems to be an instinctive urge to be frank and open (or immensely idiotic) about this, telling anyone who has a functioning eardrum, and a new gut feeling, an instinct to shut up shop.

Like closing the curtains for the weekend, or not answering the phone for a day, not telling anyone who'll listen that you are trying to conceive is just self preservation.

At a certain point, that's all you have left.

Now if you'll excuse me, the ice pack down my trousers is melting and dampening my chair.