How to Have Fun When They Say You Can’t Conceive

Over 40, three miscarriages in, and assigned to the five-percent-chance-of-conception club, I kept on plugging the only way I knew how.

Illustrations by Ayun Halliday

March 17, 2009: The Beginning

I’m on top. It’s not the recommended position for conception — that would be missionary style with my hips elevated to retain precious seminal fluid long enough to let nature take its course. But I like to be on top. I say something like, “Let’s make a baby.” Jay laughs. This is foreplay.

It’s been eight months since the miscarriage — the third over the course of our almost nineteen-year marriage — but only three months since we started trying again. He was gone on deployment in the Navy during the miscarriage and didn’t come home until three months later. That pregnancy had been a fluke — a four-day weekend together in St. Augustine and I’d turned up pregnant at forty-one. The odds were phenomenal, really. But the odds of getting pregnant were always better than the odds of staying pregnant. So he’d been gone when the bleeding started, and was still gone when the damned doctor at the naval hospital — “Dr. Austin, like the city…