“Trying to conceive.” I’ve started noticing how much is packed into that phrase.
Trying – as if getting pregnant were a task you complete through effort, sustained until it succeeds. You try to lift something heavy, try to finish a project, try to win. Trying implies that with enough application, enough persistence, enough doing, the outcome will follow. And built into that logic is its inevitable companion: if you can try, you can also fail to succeed, no matter how hard you tried. Every cycle becomes, in this framing, another attempt and this tally runs in the background of so many months.
What strikes me is how poorly this framing matches what’s actually happening in the body. Conception isn’t really something you do. It’s something that happens – through processes that are mostly outside conscious effort. It happens on rhythms and timescales the conscious mind can’t speed up by wanting it more. So much of what actually supports this process isn’t pushing harder. It’s often the opposite: settling the nervous system, creating spaciousness, stepping back from hypervigilance, allowing the body room to do what it already knows how to do.
But “trying” doesn’t have language for allowing.
It only has language for effort. And when a process doesn’t respond to effort no matter how much of it you give, that can start to feel like a verdict on you – as though wanting it more, or doing more, should have made the difference. And when it doesn’t, it’s not just the cycle that feels like it’s failed. It’s you.
I don’t think this is anyone’s fault, and I don’t think there’s a tidy phrase waiting to replace “trying to conceive.” Language like this is so deeply embedded that an alternative would likely sound forced, or worse, like another thing to get right. What I’m more interested in is simply noticing – noticing when “trying” has quietly become “striving,” when each month has become another entry, when the body has started to feel like a project with a deadline rather than a process with its own intelligence.
If there’s a different way to be in this, it might start with noticing. Noticing the words we use and the notions we carry and finding small ways to set these notions down. Even briefly, so something else has room to be true too.
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Photo by Amador Loureiro on Unsplash