Oh Baby!

I'll say it - trying to make a baby can really put a damper on your sex life.

Everybody always giggles when a couple says they're 'trying' to get pregnant. "Well, at least the trying's fun," goes the joke.

News flash - it's not. Really. NOT.

Sure, people want to believe that trying to get pregnant is just a matter of having enough sex. "Just have a glass of wine, or two, relax, and enjoy it," a co-worker told me, a mischievous look on her face. Her doctor (thirty years ago when she was 25) gave her that sage advice, and it worked for her.

Well, wonderful. But I'm not 25, and believe me, for a long time, I was trying to take that approach. But as I tick ever closer to 40, it's a little hard to do that.

What nobody wants to talk about is that trying to get pregnant turns sex into work. I've peed on so many ovulation tracker sticks, I almost need one in order to go. My personal favorite is the one that shows a digital smiley face when the hormones in your urine show your ovulation time is imminent. That damn smiley face mocks me.

It mocks me because just like peeing seems to have no purpose without a testing stick, sex has no purpose if ovulation is not detected. Honestly, if B starts heading in that direction any time other than a double-line day, I get confused. I'm not ovulating. Why the hell would I want to have sex?

And when it is detected, frankly, that's almost worse. Stereotypically, my wonderful husband is not so into the foreplay portion of the program, whereas I......am a woman. I don't need candles or flowers or soft music, but I do need some action between my butt hitting the mattress and him hitting, well, me.

Add to that the fact that my hubby loves nothing more than crossing chores off a list, the feeling of accomplishment he gets from getting things done, and it's a recipe for disaster.

B, it seems, has a whole new outlook when it comes to babymaking sex (as opposed to sex for pleasure). Gone are weekend days spent in bed, spontaneous pre-dinner interludes, even pre-company quickies. Instead, sex has become something else to cross off a list. He can't help who he is, and I don't want to fundamentally change him, but come on! I knew this was going to be tough when, after my first positive ovulation test, he said to me in exasperation "It doesn't have to be good, it just has to be workmanlike," invoking a lawyer's term which amounts to meaning good enough to accomplish a particular purpose with no extras.

We've fought over sex these last months, and that's never happened before. Who fights over sex?

Apparently, we do. He gets agitated when I can't go from 0 to 60 in two kisses and a tweak, and I get agitated that he gets agitated. Once, we both got so angry we not only didn't have sex, we didn't speak for almost 24 hours.

But sometimes, when all is right, the purpose of the babymaking efforts - our love for each other - outshines the babymaking efforts themselves. His kindness, his humor, his capacity for love make me remember all those qualities of his that I hope I will see in our baby. And ultimately, though it's not been a perfect process, any shared goal, especially this one, brings us closer together.

It's a good sign, I think, that this hasn't been easy and we don't give up, on our goal or on each other. I know when we raise this child I hope for, we won't always agree on what needs to be done, or how. But we do agree on what's important, and in the end, we love and trust each other more than any other person. There's nobody I'd rather disagree with.

So now it's time for bed, and there were two lines on that stick tonight.....where is that man?