You’re Gonna Make it After All

I’ve always been a big fan of classic television. One of my favorites growing up was The Mary Tyler Moore show. If you remember, the theme song, “Love is All Around” talked about how love was all around the show’s heroine, Mary Richards. How nice for Mary. However, if I had a show with a theme song right now, it would melodically inform you that pregnancy is all around me. How annoying for me.

We used to see Mary Tyler Moore enthusiastically take off her beret and throw it up in the air. During my opening credits, you would see me throw up my hands in frustration and promptly storm off to the local grocery store to buy several gallons of ice cream.

I just want one or two days where I don’t hear the word “pregnancy”, “pregnant” or any annoying variation on the word (i.e. preggers, preggo, PG, etc.) Some may say that I’m simply more sensitive to the word because of my current struggle to conceive. Although there’s truth to that, I still contend there genuinely HAS been a scary increase of people who I know who are either pregnant, asking me if I’m pregnant, who like to talk about their past pregnancies or in the case of one my single friends, just likes to talk about pregnancy a lot for whatever reason. Seriously, if I took a shot of tequila every time someone said the “p-word”, I would have been falling down, stinking drunk for the past two months solid (which may or may not have been a bad thing.)

Yesterday alone, a friend talked about how thick her hair was when she was pregnant, a relative complained how she was tired of being pregnant, and a co-worker announced that she was pregnant. By the way, this co-worker is now the tenth woman in my office who is pregnant. Yup, we are having our own little baby boom at my day job. Woop-dee-fertile-doo.

The worst “p-word” incident of the day though goes to a male co-worker who I consider myself friendly with. He has been consistently asking when I’m going to have children for the past year. He’s been jokey about it, blunt about it and at times, even a little insensitive. The last three times he’s brought it up, I took every tact there was to get him to drop it. I was jokey back, I explained to him that things weren’t going well and he should stop asking, and then I was as nice as I could be about letting him know he needs to move on.

A few months have passed since our last conversation on the topic so I thought we all had moved on with our lives. However, yesterday, out of nowhere, he came over to my desk and within ear shot of several other people said, “So… are you pregnant????” Without much thought, I immediately got out my bitch-ray, turned it squarely on him and responded with, “NO. You need to STOP. It’s inappropriate, it’s not funny and don’t ever, EVER, ask me that again! Now get away from me and my desk.”

I can’t help but wonder in cases such as these, is he really that stupid to not understand what I’ve been asking him for the last few months or is he just a total and complete insensitive jack-ass? Whatever the answer, although I rarely use it, sometimes the bitch-ray is necessary for self preservation.

This coming Saturday night, I’m going to my cousin’s graduation party. I come from a big Catholic, Italian family and I’ve been married for almost two years. Not only would it not shock me if every single person there asks me why I’m not pregnant (including my cousin’s dog, Waffles), but it also wouldn’t surprise me if they have a priest come in to stage both an intervention and an exorcism.

This morning, I thought about all of this while making myself a bowl of Peanut Butter Captain Crunch cereal (I threw in blueberries to make it healthy. Go with me on this…). I grabbed the milk and happened to see my left over hormone shots sitting in the fridge. It’s amazing to me that I’m still paying off something that A) didn’t work and B) still reside in my home mocking me.

As I ate my Captain Crunch thinking they should make a cereal called “Infertility-O’s” for women such as myself (the O’s could represent the amount of children I have), I considered inviting everyone over who asks me why I’m not pregnant for one big party. For appetizers; I could serve several hors d’ oeuvres and include the hormone shots. “Shrimp cocktail? Pigs in a blanket? Gonal-F injections?”

Perhaps Sunday, I’ll get a break from the “p-word”. If God rested on Sunday, why can’t everyone else? Please… just one day where no one says it, thinks it, alludes to it or asks about it. I don’t even want to read about yet another celebrity on People.com who’s pregnant. One day people… just give me one day!

As you may know, the last sentence in The Mary Tyler Moore theme song is, “You’re gonna make it after all!” And if Mary’s infectious enthusiasm has taught me anything, it’s to still hope that in the end, it will all work out. So, I’m going to hope with all my heart that not only will I hold my beautiful child in my arms one day, but that I’ll still have a hand free to smack all the people in the face who’ve busted my chops over the years about it.

I’m gonna make it after all jack-asses! *SMACK*