“Do you know when you’re ovulating?” Liz asked, our chairs swiveled to face each other in the open-concept workspace. “Like, can you feel it?”
In that moment I realized not only did I have the wrong answer, but I was utterly baffled by the question.
Tim and I had been trying to get pregnant for a few months, and I had shared our baby-making plans with Liz—with lots of friends—openly, excitedly, unthinkingly, because I was confident that it would happen for us eventually. “Uh, I absolutely cannot feel it,” I said with a jokey lightheartedness that in no way reflected how I really felt.
Liz didn’t necessarily seem surprised, but she told me she could feel it. Unequivocally. Our friend Vickie walked by and joined the conversation; she could feel it too. What was anyone even talking about? The notion of feeling ovulation had never so much as occurred to me. Was it like a snowflake gliding? A pinball rolling? An innocuous ache? The teensiest twitch? Apparently, unbeknownst to me, knowing when one was ovulating was the most obvious thing in the world. I decided it was time to pay attention.
In the handful of months since I’d stopped taking birth control, my periods had become increasingly irregular, which made nailing down my ovulation window significantly more challenging than Liz and Vickie had implied. But that was okay; I would take matters into my own hands. Sitting pants-less on an examining table, white paper crinkling beneath my bare butt, I listened to an ob-gyn recommend acupuncture as a first-line method to regulate my cycle and assist in conception. “Anecdotally,” she said, “it can sometimes help get things going.”
Within days there were dozens of acupuncture needles pierced through the skin of my belly, each silver spear its own question—hello? anyone there?—to which my inner matter responded with a microscopic spasm, again and again, like the sensation of fingers snapping drilled down to the head of a pin. Yes, here! I felt more in control of my body than I had in months.
In those early days of trying, as I engaged in month after month of cycle-charting, ovulation test-taking, and acupuncture-poking, followed by a few nights of strategically scheduled sex, I began to feel my body slip away from me. I pictured my active external self—31-years-old, rosy-cheeked and bright-eyed after a run—as fraudulent, housing a lifeless reproductive system within, a bunch of defunct organs clustered in the shadows, collecting cobwebs. The trust between my body and me, so implicit I’d never noticed it, eroded at the precise moment I became aware of its existence.
