I'm trying to get pregnant.

I'm not telling you this in the spirit of confession. Everyone knows I'm going for number two— my friends and family, many of my colleagues. I'd tell my doorman if he even so much as hinted at interest in the topic. There is nothing to get off my chest here.

I'm also not telling you this in the spirit of exhibitionism. I lack the instinct to share any lurid details about how this want has changed my sex life or my primal urge to bear a child. The physical details surrounding my current state are neither spectacular nor relevant.

The reason I'm telling you that I'm trying to get pregnant is because it's about time we end this taboo of not sharing with one another our attempts to conceive. And what better way to get the ball rolling than to share my own pregnancy-seeking status? Being coy about wanting a baby really makes for way too many awkward brunches in which our best friends act really odd and then, months later, explain why. It also makes what is already a stressful time in a woman's life that much harder.

For one, getting pregnant isn't easy. It requires a whole lot of sex, the frequency of which is charming at first but becomes exhausting around month three. Even the most fertile among us, those with the heartiest eggs and the most robust sperm, have an only one-in-four chance of getting pregnant every month. The odds lower as we age. The commitment to love-making is not small.

Alternatively, a couple can skip the copious love-making and instead opt to carefully monitor the woman's fertility in order to pinpoint the exact time during the month at which she is ovulating. This can be done by taking one's temperature everyday, testing the viscosity of vaginal discharge (yep), or peeing on very expensive, tiny sticks that test for certain hormones that only appear during peak fertility. If these practices don't yield any results, it's off to the doctor, where your uterus is closely monitored, there are pills to pop, and there's also the potential of spending tens of thousands on conceiving with the help of technology. The specter of infertility, which affects of 10% of American women, looms large through it all.

And these are just the physical obstacles. Trying to get pregnant is also an incredibly emotional experience, and not being able to express all those fears and frustrations is really just the worst. For most of us, once we decide to have a baby, we want that baby. This is partially because our instincts to nurture a tiny, smooth-tushed creature have officially kicked in, and partially because we are scared shitless and just want to get the whole thing over with. (This doesn't go away entirely after the first, by the way.)

"The negative sign yields disappointment, but also some relief. These are complicated times."

Because of a combination of biological and cultural factors, getting pregnant and having a baby is still a much bigger commitment for a woman than it is for a man. Thanks to fatigue, morning sickness, or other, more serious, pre-partum conditions, we're likely to slow down at some point during our pregnancy—something that will certainly affect us at work and could even cost some of us our jobs. Then there is the inevitable rapid transformation of our physical selves, and the fear that our body will never quite return to the one we once knew. This is all topped off by the reality of having a baby to care for on the other end, as well as entering the world of intensive mothering in which not breastfeeding until age three and not co-sleeping until age ten is considered by too many to be a massive fail. Add to this the fact that we are living in a country that is not particularly friendly to work-life balance or paid parental leave. When I pee on those test sticks each month, the negative sign yields a lot of disappointment, but also some relief. These are complicated times.

All this, and the custom remains to stay mum about our attempts to conceive. We might speak about it vaguely, as in, "Jake and I are thinking about kids," but rarely do we tell one another, in no uncertain terms, that we are having a lot of sex for the sole purpose of having a baby and spending the last week of each cycle in purgatory, waiting for our fates to be revealed.

One explanation for this taboo is the way in which a woman's self worth is still tied up in the performance of her body. We don't tell one another we are trying because we are embarrassed by our inability to conceive. Not getting pregnant means we are failing at one of our most basic functions.

Considering we now live in a time when a woman's worth goes far beyond her biology, this shame should have long been exposed for what it really is: senseless and bogus. Nevertheless, many of us are keeping up the front, announcing our desire to get pregnant only after the mission is accomplished, with a tiny three-month-old fetus cozily nesting in our uterus, the chances of a miscarriage quite small.

"We aren't allowed to tell anyone how much effort we are putting into this 'all.'"

The fact is, even as we have created new ways in which women can value themselves, we're still stubbornly hanging on to the old ones. The question of having-it-all quietly tells us that we should be-it-all, hot and accomplished, feisty and nurturing, fit and fertile. It get's worse: We aren't allowed to tell anyone how much effort we are putting into this "all."

When I asked my friend— and fellow ELLE contributor Jessica Grose— why she thinks that women still hesitate to tell one another about their attempts to conceive, she said that it probably has something to do with the cool girl mystique. Really, it's no different than the size-twos who say they love pizza, the budding-Sheryl Sandbergs who swear that they put the presentation together in a few hours, or the hostesses who claim that the Spanish-themed, four-course meal was "totally no big deal" to prepare. Because apparently there is nothing worse than a woman who goes after something, save for for the woman who admits to going after something and not getting it.

Now, I understand that there are superstitions surrounding talking about conception, which lead us to believe that by making our intentions known we are somehow compromising our potential babies. I'm no stranger to such old wives tales, having grown up with women who all but call upon the evil eye if you dare say that things are going well. Still, superstitions come with a social cost, and this is one that women nearly exclusively pay. We are the ones who feel lonely during those months when we are trying to conceive; we are the ones regularly peeing on sticks as we prepare ourselves for a potentially life-altering event or devastation should things not go as we planned. The very least we could do is talk about it with each other.

Elissa Strauss Elissa Strauss writes about gender, culture, and having it some.

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