Strollerderby

Anything to Conceive

Cindy Chupack tried visualizing sperm with her husband’s face on them. She tried standing on her head. She tried electroacupuncture, which involved attaching spark plugs to the needles. She tried going on vacation with her husband and just enjoying sex for a while, you know, like they used to before they started racing her biological clock. She tried IVF, suppositories, hormone injections.

She tried an all-red meat diet, and then, when she read somewhere that red meat actually hinders pregnancy while she had a steak on the grill, she ate her stale gingerbread house in her frustration and hunger.

Like many women, Chupack, who recently wrote about her conception adventures for O Magazine, began the whole procreating process relatively late. It was not until she was 40 that she fell in love with the right man and had real longings for children—which was just fine by her, but not so fine by her body.

But, also like many women, Chupack will not give up trying. If you think that the gingerbread house incident put her over the edge, well, you’ve probably never tried to conceive.

Image: John Cuneo/O Magazine


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Comments

 

Yatesie said:

no offense.. but this article feels rather.. unfinished.

September 17, 2008 1:52 AM
 

Arrow Tech IV said:

What was the point here?  Why do you as the author want me, the reader, to care?

And...?

EXAMPLES OF BETTER CONCLUSIONS: She had a baby...She didn't have a baby...She painted herself blue and reinacted ancient Irish battles and discovered wode actually makes you ovulate...She is currently adopting a baby...She's just another example of a trend that ______ .......

September 17, 2008 12:15 PM
 

Maeby said:

Did she try adopting? That might work.

September 17, 2008 3:16 PM
 

Hannah Tennant-Moore said:

Unfortunately, I cannot invent conclusions to other people's lives.  The author of the article to which I am referring left the ending up in the air.  For all I know she may have adopted, had triplets, or divorced her husband and moved to New Zealand.  She simply wrote a funny, moving look at a very human struggle, and it's worth a read.  

September 17, 2008 5:29 PM
 

The author said:

I think the author (me) left it up in the air because every piece I read about infertility ends with the happy ending of how the author finally, after all that hardship, got pregnant or adopted or somehow got her baby, and I wanted to write about how hard it is while I was STILL going through it, before I had my happy ending, for all the women still going through it, unable to visualize exactly how they will get their happy ending.  Like I said in the piece, I know how this story will end, we will eventually adopt or use donor eggs or kidnap a baby (I'm kidding about that last option...), but the point is, it's hard to be in the grey area, in that space where you still hope you'll get pregnant even after you thought you finally let go of that hope... so this piece was written for all the women who are still in that grey area.  Hannah, thanks for posting this, and thanks for getting it.  Here's to all the happy endings yet to come, for me and all the women still waiting for theirs.

September 19, 2008 3:33 AM

About Hannah Tennant-Moore

Hannah Tennant-Moore is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best Buddhist Writing (2008); The Sun; Guantanamo: Inside the Prison, Outside the Law; Tricycle; Turning Wheel (as the winner of the Young Writers Award); and elsewhere.

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