Depression While Trying to Conceive a Second Child

Our daughter was an IVF baby. Before I got pregnant with her, we tried for a year on our own, then we went through nearly a year of fertility treatments – including 4 failed IUIs, an egg retrieval, and 1 failed embryo transfer.

After I delivered our daughter, I was sure – so sure – that my body knew what to do on its own. I even thought we could be lucky enough to have 2 kids under 2 years of age.

A disappointing start

As soon as we were cleared to be intimate again, we went at it. First off, we hadn't had much sex during IVF or my pregnancy and missed each other dearly, and second, we desperately wanted another child, as close in age as possible to our daughter.

After the first few months, I started to feel disappointed. It wasn't depression, yet, but it was sure a sense of sadness. I thought this would be easy.

IVF would have to wait

At 6 months postpartum we returned to our reproductive endocrinologist, and talked about doing another embryo transfer. It was then we learned I had to be 1 year postpartum before we could go about doing that. That was news we didn't know, something we hadn’t learned in any of our time in this space beforehand.

Somehow, this made me devastated. I was so obsessed with the timeline, with how close together in age my kiddos were, that not being able to return to IVF when I felt like I was ready to be pregnant made me so very sad.

Trying to conceive for months

For the next several months, we went back to ovulation tracking, with the plan that if we weren't pregnant at the 1-year mark, we'd return to the reproductive endocrinologist's office and transfer 1 of the 2 male embryos we had frozen along with our now living daughter.

Not only did I not get pregnant, but COVID hit. And a) it's really hard to be in the mood to have sex when everything negative is going on in the world; and b) we had a friend from Canada who had come to visit us and got stuck in America for several months, meaning finding time and space to be intimate was inordinately hard.

We still tried, but it was definitely not as frequently or wholeheartedly as we would have liked it to be.

The return of depression

Sufficient to say, a year went by after the birth of our daughter and we had no prospect of being pregnant again. This is when my depression started to creep in.

I found myself hiding under the covers, drawing the shades closed, turning my phone off, disappearing into the dark nothingness, not wanting to talk to anyone.

Difficulty conceiving felt like my fault

Again, I somehow felt like this was my fault. My body's fault, and the shame surrounding that is so painful. I think if you're reading this you've experienced this, or you might know someone going through this as well.

You don’t have to have a miscarriage or lose a baby to feel like your body is failing you. Failing to get pregnant is devastating all on its own.