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The start

This isn't really the start.

I'm not sure where the start point is.
Maybe it was when we decided to stop using contraception and be "not trying, but not not trying". If so, that was around 8 years ago now.
Maybe it was more like... when I visited a doctor about something unrelated and she said  "You've been trying to get pregnant a really long time, that must be getting really devastating"...  and I thought - no... it's not devastating... because... I'm not trying... I just not not trying... 
Maybe it was after that conversation, when I realised, yes, seriously, it had been a very long time.
Maybe the start point was when I officially tried to get us timing sex. Whenever that was.  You might be able to gather I wasn't keeping track too well. 
Maybe it was when I saw that all my friends were falling pregnant within a few months of stopping contraception, and it dawned on me that... oh... that's normal. What was happening for us was not normal. 
Maybe it was the knowledge of my pending 35th birthday that got me to get out of my little daze of denial and see a fertility specialist.
I know that something definitely started when we made that visit to the fertility specialist and we were told...  your "infertility" is unexplained and you're probably going to need to do IVF.... wait what??  No... surely we just need to time sex a bit better. Ah, my friend denial likes to stay close.

But then again, I feel like it all started at some point far less definable...  when I simply had an idealistic notion in the back of my head that this is how it will all happen... one day I'll just be able to fall pregnant, and it will be from passionate spontaneous love-making with my partner. It won't be timed half-hearted intercourse. It certainly won't be from weeks of injections, surgery to remove eggs, and incubation of embryos in a lab. No, it won't be like that because I won't really have to deliberately force anything, because conception will be an inescapable consequence from all the love taking place... and it will be all be a smooth process, so easy and natural. And I'll have a glowing belly radiant with life. And when the time comes I suppose the baby will just glide out of me and I'll be a perfect parent.

If I am honest with myself, yes. I think I really might have believed that at some level.

But that vision has gradually eroded from the reality of our situation.

So I don't know precisely when this "journey" started. But I definitely know that today is a start of sorts... it is the start of a new cycle, my first day of round 5 IVF. And the start of this blog.
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