I’m pregnant! I’ve got my fairy tale ending at age 41. 🙌 Thanks to God’s undeserved kindness.
Note: The article you are about to read was written in real time (hours after I discovered I was pregnant), but it wasn’t published in real time. As much as I wished I could share the good news with the world in real time, I held off and waited to meet my child first before sharing the news online because I am someone that generally want to see things to the end first before sharing it with the world. As at posting this my baby has been born (born November 23rd, 2022) and gradually counting down to 6 months. I’m happy to share this article with you now so you know the feelings I had in those moments.
1:01am Saturday April 2nd, 2022.
It’s been over 36hours since I found out I am pregnant. And I still can’t believe I am pregnant! 💃 It was 10:09am March 31st, 2022 when I causally picked up one of my many home pregnancy test sticks thinking it was going to be another negative (I had been testing for pregnancy since one month after my wedding) only to be surprised with a strong positive! I was shocked. I couldn’t believe what my eyes were seeing.
Am I really pregnant? How come? Of course I know how come 😊 but it’s just that I’d been trying for awhile and nothing. And while I kept taking steps to help matters and praying I conceived naturally, in one part of my mind I thought it would never happen. As at finding out I was pregnant I was 9 months 2 weeks and 5 days old in marriage. And for that long I had been eagerly trying to get pregnant without success.
I went into my marriage prepared to get pregnant on my wedding night. When my husband decided the wedding should be June 2021, I actually chose 12th of that month because I had thought that I was going to be ovulating that week. Unfortunately my fertile period for that month came a few days earlier than I had expected. But from the next month I was eagerly trying to conceive. And being newlyweds we barely could keep our hands and bodies off each other 😉 So you’d expect that things would happen quicker, but no.
This wouldn’t have been a problem, I mean why the rush to get pregnant right? 🤷 I married the man of my dreams and I was deliriously happy just being with him. In fact I had days in my marriage when I questioned the need to have a child. I felt contented with just having him in my life and I was genuinely enjoying life with just the two of us. I worried about sharing my time with kids and sharing my husband with them. That’s how much I loved our vibe together.
But on the other hand, on most days I desired to experience the love from a child too. The joy of nursing a child in the womb for 9 months and experiencing all that comes with it. The crazy and emotional moment of finally meeting this child. And the overwhelming love that engulfs a new mom and make them want to protect this innocent one against all evils for the rest of their lives. And then the joy and amazement of watching them grow up and blossom into beautiful, smart and intelligent man or woman, and really witnessing the miracle of it all. I knew that at the end of the day my life wouldn’t be whole without having a child.
Also I couldn’t wait to bear a fruit of our love. A physical representation of the man of my dreams and me. I wanted to see how our genes coming together will look like and see the love of my life in the role of a father 24/7. It was what I mostly dreamed of after our wedding. But I must act fast, the biological clock wasn’t on my side. All the medical experts say that fertility reduces greatly after age 35.
Infact according to reproductivefacts.org
By age 40, a woman’s chance of getting pregnant is less than 5% per cycle, so fewer than 5 out of every 100 women are expected to be successful each month.
And I had turned 40 two months into my marriage hence the desperation. And I also want at least two kids. And with just 5 years or less left of my fertility window it was important that things happened quicker rather than later.
What a relief this brought to us, my husband and I. He was worried about this I know, but not really for himself because he was ready to do the work and wait however long it took us, but he knew I wasn’t ready. He knew I wanted it now! Several times I would bring it up to him, out of the blue, “I want a baby”, “I want to be pregnant”, “Give me a baby”. 😟 And I knew each time I said that he must have wished he could make it happen for me right away. It gave him cause for concern just seeing me worry about it so much. We both agreed we were going to take advantage of as many options as possible for us to get pregnant before giving up. And then if it didn’t happen after all that, we would have to accept it.
The first option we looked into was IVF. I told my husband I think one month into our marriage that if after four months of trying we don’t get pregnant we should look into IVF. Normally four months isn’t a long enough time to be worried about one’s fertility as not every woman will get pregnant in the first few months of trying, and it doesn’t suddenly mean they have fertility problem. It just sometimes takes longer for some women/couple for whatever reason. But as I have said before, because of my age, I didn’t want to waste so much time trying before getting help. So after four months in marriage we went for IVF consultation.
We ended up doing a cycle of IVF that failed. After that failed, I told my husband we should take a few months break from IVF. IVF does a lot to a woman’s body. It’s very invasive and lots of injections to deal with. I wasn’t sure I was ready to do it all over again, at least not without trying something else first. So I said let’s go back to trying natural conception, if after another 3-4 months of trying we still don’t conceive then we can go back to do a second cycle of IVF. I found out I was pregnant three months after our failed IVF cycle. 😊 All glory to God.
I was 40 when I got pregnant and was delivered of a beautiful Baby girl at age 41! And she’s added so much joy in our lives. We feel very blessed.