I’d been avoiding getting pregnant for a while, citing loss of freedom, burden of responsibility and, mostly, the price tag on it all. But when I lost my job, it’s all I could think about. By Heather Wood Rudúlph

For the past year or so, my husband and I have been planning to think about discussing maybe having a baby. A little non-committal, sure, but I figure it’s what you do when you get married, agree that you both want kids, and then find yourself in your 30s, when clocks are belligerent in their ticking. So we threw out the pill and have been following the “Let’s See What Happens” strategy ever since. For those unfamiliar with the LSWH strategy, let me explain: We live our lives, having sex when the mood and situation permits, do not use contraception, and expect that maybe something will happen. Maybe it won’t. We kinda-sorta want to hit the bull’s eye, but not enough to start buying fertility kits and scheduling coitus in the middle of playoff football just because I’m ovulating.

It’s not that we’re reluctant; we both very much want a little one. It’s just that we’re not yet obsessed with the idea. We’re not letting it take over our lives.

Okay, maybe there has been a tinge of reluctance. I’m a little nervous about throwing a maternity-leave wrench into my career progress. And we’re both not quite out of our selfish phase—you know, using our disposable income for buying cool electronics, making frequent trips to Vegas, and enjoying $50 bottles of wine. The freedom of adulthood is awesome, and anyone who says they’re not reluctant to give that up is lying.

So what happens when you wake up one day and all that freedom is taken away—but not by the arrival of an infant?

Like everyone in this country, the recession has hit us like a ton of bricks followed by a bitch-slap across the face. The mortgage-loan mess made our payments skyrocket, while our property value tanked. Banks started folding and our credit card interest rates ballooned. A call to inquire about my 15 percent interest rate jumping to 22.5 percent yielded this callous response: “Your balance hasn’t fluctuated much over the past year, which shows you are at risk for not being able to pay down your debt.” Right, and a higher APR is going to help me do that? All of our bills seem to be getting bigger and our wiggle-room income smaller.

Then I lost my day job, an all-important security blanket to a writer/editor.

Everything that could fall apart did. And suddenly, I wanted a baby more than anything.

Moms love to say you’ll know when it’s the right time to have a baby because your instincts will tell you. But what if your instincts are being unreasonable? Of all the reasons my husband and I were reluctant to commit to conception, the biggest was the financial burden. It scared us when we had two salaries; it’s downright terrifying now that we have only one. But my instincts won’t shut the hell up!

I went through a month or so thinking the instinct was just my way of finding something to do to pass the time. If I had a baby now, at least I’d have time to devote to it; and making a kid is much more satisfying than, say, taking a pottery class (at least for me; I suck at art). But the truth is, if I peed on a stick tomorrow and that damn thing turned blue (or pink, or whatever color it’s supposed to turn), the news would be as stressful as it would be exciting. The rational, left side of my brain tells me that now is not the time. The right, instinct-controlled side has me reading baby blogs, cooing at strangers’ kids, and researching schools in our neighborhood.

My husband and I have talked about it, and we decided to stick with the LSWH approach that has worked so well at producing nothing so far. I don’t want to put my body back on a schedule of hormones; condoms are sophomoric (and difficult to enforce) for a couple who’ve been together for more than a decade; and we don’t really know when our golden window of opportunity to have a child might close. I’m not willing to sacrifice my shot at parenthood just because it stresses the hell out of me now, irrational instincts notwithstanding.

So we’ve resorted to good, old-fashioned bickering and the stress of our dwindling finances to keep the zygote from forming. That’s the one side effect of unemployment that I hadn’t counted on: Our money woes are working better than a triple-strength condom. I don’t think I could get pregnant now if we really tried.

Of course it’s not intentional. We’re in love and quite prefer when we’re not screaming at each other one minute and giving the silent treatment the next. But when I’m home all the time, he’s working all the time, and the bills keep coming, a mild “War of the Roses” scenario isn’t so unexpected. When we’re both feeling responsible for keeping our family afloat—he by taking extra work to make up for my lost salary, me by frantically pounding the pavement and punishing myself for getting laid off in the first place—it’s safe to say we’re a household on edge. Edgy does not beget sexy.

For example, every day my husband asks infuriating questions like, “What did you do today?” I know the inquiry may sound like sweet spousal support (and his intentions may be just that), but three months of that question when we both know I don’t have a new answer is driving me insane. The question feels like pressure and I hear the subtext of his query: “Did you sit around and do nothing all day?”

Regardless of how much actual work I do—much of which legitimately involves spending hours staring at a computer screen—all I hear in that question is his judgment about the hour I spent reading Gawker, the two hours I spent watching the Food Network and the 20 minutes I didn’t take to make dinner. The end result is me getting defensive, him getting angry, and both of us going to bed—to sleep.

Speaking of making dinner, there seems to be this new expectation that just because I’m physically home all day, I have the time to keep house like June Cleaver. Looking for a job, trying to keep myself motivated to keep writing, and NOT spending three hours watching “The Hills” is a much more involved, much more stressful undertaking than holding down a 9-to-5. There’s little time left for housewifery.

But even when I do make an effort on the domestic front, it leads to conflict. The other day I spent four hours cleaning the house from top to bottom. Yes, it was a way to procrastinate on an editing project, but still: I washed floors, loaded the dishwasher. I scrubbed grout! And as soon as my hardworking husband walked in the door, he raised his eyebrow at a basket of laundry that hadn’t been folded. Granted, it was the same basket that had been sitting there unfolded for three days, but the fact that he zeroed-in on that basket of laundry before noticing our now-otherwise-spotless home made me want to squirt Windex in his eyes. Possible-baby-making sex that night? Not a chance.

Throw in the occasional stress eating, stress drinking, and stress in general and our baby batting average is pretty pathetic.

Now, I’m not turning this into an essay about how I’m now in a sexless marriage. That’s hardly the case. We’re still 100-percent crazy about each other on a daily basis, even if we’re a bit more crazed that usual. And there’s a lot of makeup sex as a result of the bickering. We even put in a good three days of possibilities in Vegas recently, where we stayed in a beautiful hotel suite. (It was his birthday, we booked it months prior, don’t judge.) I don’t need to explain the aphrodisiac-like qualities of a hotel room away from home.

But still, every month: I’m not pregnant.

Those same moms who told me to listen to my stupid instincts have offered me reassurances that we’re just “trying too hard.” They’re certain we’ll get pregnant just as soon as I stop “over-thinking it.”

These are irritating “gems” of advice in the school of “you’ll find your special someone when you aren’t looking,” but medical experts actually think there’s something to them. Fertility doctors at Cedars Sinai in Los Angeles recently found that “trying too hard” can be blamed for 30 percent of infertility cases. Further tests revealed that when stress-reduction techniques were practiced, some women were able to get pregnant when they hadn’t before. And Human Reproduction, an entire research journal devoted to baby-making, has published countless studies yielding this general conclusion: Pregnancy is much more likely to occur during months when couples are feeling happy and relaxed than during months they feel tense.

The news is actually somewhat reassuring. I’d rather stress be keeping the baby at bay than something more serious. So I guess I’ll keep worrying about money, fighting with my husband, and having stressful sex until the economy turns around. My future child—who might actually get to go to college if we keep up this approach until the economy reboots—will likely thank me for it.

Heather Wood Rudúlph is co-founder and editor of SirensMag.com

For Further Reading: Recession Spending, Budget Vanity

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Tags: friends and lovers, marriage, recession, relationships, Sex

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