What happened
to us.
We tried to have a baby for almost four years.
Both of us were healthy. The tests all came back fine. The doctors said the same thing every time, in the kind voice they use when they have nothing else to say. Unexplained.
We don't really want to write much about what those years were like. Anyone who's been through it knows. Anyone who hasn't, we're glad for you.
The short version is that we got tired. Tired of tracking. Tired of hoping. Tired of being told there was no reason. Tired of the small private grief every month that we had stopped sharing with each other because there was nothing new to say about it.
By the end, we had mostly stopped trying. Not officially. We just stopped talking about it.
Around that time, a friend mentioned microplastics. We hadn't really thought about it. She had read something about plastic kettles, plastic food storage, plastic in things you heat — how the particles end up in your body, including in places like ovaries and sperm. None of the research is conclusive. But there is a lot of it, and it's getting harder to ignore.
We didn't think it would do anything. We just decided to swap things out — the kettle, the storage containers, the cutting boards. Most of it took a few months to find replacements that worked. Some things we couldn't find at all.
About eight months after we started, she got pregnant.
We're not going to tell you that's why. We don't know that. The science isn't there yet. What we can say is that we had been trying for almost four years, and the only thing we changed was the kitchen, and then it happened.
Our daughter is two. She's healthy. We are still figuring out how to talk about any of this.
