fear of pregnancy

I wish I could write comprehensively about pregnancy, loss, infertility, secondary infertility, and death of a child. Not that I wish I had endured all of these, but that’s a basic range of the female reproductive experience. It’s our sisters, our friends, our acquaintances. It’s the ladies we see on the subway that we don’t know struggle, and the ones sharing their journey with the world. I wrote about the thin space of being pregnant a few weeks back. Instead, I can only write authentically about my experience, one that’s ordinary and run-of-the-mill, and, in many women’s eyes, ridiculously lucky. I experience fairly textbook cycles. Charting and planning and abstaining when avoiding to conceive has “worked” for us insofar as our kids haven’t been surprises. When we’ve been hopeful for another pregnancy, the baby’s been there. It’s my reality, and my journey, and I feel guilty often about it. The guilt goes two ways: for my ease of conception and carrying to term, and for my sharing anything about the struggle of hyperemesis–all day sickness//all night. It’s like shut up that you’re pregnant again combined with shut up that it’s hard to be pregnant because, see part 1, you’re pregnant again. There’s no way out of feeling bleh about both spaces, so please forgive me if both annoy the heck out of you. That being said, I can share my/our trepidation about another pregnancy, given those parameters. Fear of pregnancy is something I hear from women a lot. Women I don’t know well, women…