The sperm has been purchased. The clinic is ready to get my feet in stirrups. My mom is going as my moral support. I am at the launching pad of this crazy adventure. But, as usual, things never really go as planned in my life. Last month was supposed to be my first attempt at insemination, but things didn’t go well for me… at all. There were some factors that played a major part in why I wasn’t able to even try.
I told myself a couple of months ago that I would start the insemination process in September of this year. At the beginning of that month, I bit the bullet and bought my first vial of sperm. I had narrowed down the selection of donors to one that is, according to the nurse practitioner I’ve been working with, a “perfect biological match”. I sent the email confirming my choice and literally sat in silence for about five minutes afterwards. It was, as I’ve been saying a lot, very surreal.
In August, when I started back up at work, I was getting some major cold feet. I was questioning whether I could actually hold down my job and all of its responsibilities, along with being a single mom. It’s really daunting to think about, and I started to freak myself out. The thing with the beginning of the school year is that it’s always hectic. Getting back to my regular schedule, making those beginning of year assignments, and adjusting my life back to teacher mode is always overwhelming. Add to that the fact that I was not on campus for over a year, and I was super stressed. Eventually, after some long pep talks with myself, I remembered that the beginning of the school year is always fucking hard, and that it would get easier in a couple of weeks
I was prepped and ready to go by September, but my campus was hit hard by the viral TikTok devious licks challenge. The week that I was ovulating was crazy. Students vandalized several bathrooms, other teachers had things stolen out of their rooms, and there was a day when the fire alarms were pulled three separate times, as well as two giant fist fights breaking out at lunch, followed by racially motivated social media attacks students were making towards each other. Because of all this crazy shit, teachers were asked to take on more responsibilities such as monitoring our huge campus during lunch, walking around during our prep periods to make sure kids weren’t ditching or hiding, and to attend a last-minute staff meeting to come up with solutions to these problems. To say that my school is a mess right now would be putting it very lightly. We don’t have enough subs, so they want teachers to cover classes. I literally get asked every day if I can cover a class. I’m standing firm in my decision to say no almost every time. We don’t have enough campus security, hence the monitoring during lunch and our preps. We have a new principal who, I’ll be nice, is struggling. Needless to say, I was super stressed.
This is why I was unable to even attempt during September, because the stress fucked with my hormones, and I didn’t have a strong enough ovulation period. Basically, you pee onto a stick like a pregnancy test, and it shows whether or not you are ovulating. But, different from a pregnancy test, you get two lines during ovulation. The hard part is that the two lines (one is the test line, one is the line that detects hormones) need to be the same color. My lines were not the same color, which means that I wasn’t producing enough hormones for a healthy ovulation. I was super bummed because I had gotten myself all psyched up, only to be let down by my body.
I’m not letting it deter me, but I’m learning from this. I can’t control the universe. I can’t control teenagers that are acting like little (or big) assholes. I can’t fix things that my higher ups should be fixing. And, I for sure can’t let work overwhelm my mental health. What I can do is try to remain as stress free as possible. To try to not overthink things, something that I have struggled with my entire life. I can make sure to take time every day to relax and decompress. I can dedicate enough time to my job, no more and no less than needed. I can meditate, go for my walks, watch movies that make me laugh, and just, in general, take a deep breath. There’s a new ovulation period on the horizon, and I’m ready to jump in the deep end. Let’s just hope that I get two lines of the same color in October.
