Neurodivergence And Trying For A Baby

I have been trying to get pregnant for a long time.

When we first started trying, I researched every single book I could find on getting pregnant, pregnancy and childbirth. It became my special interest and suddenly my hyperfocus could not lend itself to anything but learning about human reproduction.

Most of them… were utter shite. Medicalised, westernised, patriarchal BS focused on controlling pregnant people, removing all agency from them and putting the foetus above them at every turn. I couldn’t believe the level of chastisement, judgement and outright harmful advice given by these supposed ‘experts’. This was before I had embarked on my journey of decolonisation and neuro-embodiment, and I was unaware of how deeply colonial norms penetrate every area of life, especially reproduction! I won’t bother listing the crap books I read (they are the most popular ones…) but while we’re here I will give a shout out to Expecting Better - a book written by an economist which lays out all the data you need about every step of the journey. It’s genuinely helpful and seeks to put you in control of your body and your decisions, without judgement.

What I couldn’t find, were any books written by neurodivergent people who have gone through the process of trying to have a baby. When you google ‘Autistic and pregnancy’ you mostly get a series of studies trying to establish what a pregnant person ‘did’ to ‘cause’ autism in their offspring, in addition to scare-mongering articles from dangerous groups such as Autism Speaks - an ableist organisation that promotes Autism ‘cures’. I’m not even going to cover what happens when you try to find information on being Trans and pregnancy. The world is too transphobic right now for that to yield anything but pain.

There was nothing telling me how to cope when pregnancy suddenly becomes your special interest, but you don’t get pregnant right away. That when each month that your period turns up, not only are you having to cope with the crushing disappointment of not being pregnant, but in addition you have to manage your mindbody wanting to track every single element of your cycle and your sexual activity even though you know that pregnancy is more likely to occur when the process is not being scrutinised. That all your neurodivergent hacks for managing your sensory, cognitive and emotional regulation will go out the window, because the game has changed.

The predictability and certainty that soothes the neurodivergent brain (and most human brains, but often NDs have a strong need for this) is non existent. My periods aren’t regular - they can happen every 4 weeks, every 5.5 weeks or anything in between. This is annoying when you aren’t trying to get pregnant. When you are, it is exhausting. The longer my cycles are, the fewer chances per year I have to get pregnant, a fact that rings in my AuDHD ears over and over. The only way to predict when my period is coming, is to track my ovulation. Tracking ovulation, or introducing any kind of measurement, opens the door for special interest and hyperfocus, meaning that these details can become consuming and dysregulating.

For two weeks of every cycle, you don’t know if you are pregnant. This window, called ‘the two week wait’ is an emotional and psychological rollercoaster. It begins with hope and excitement, and quickly graduates to symptom spotting. The internet is teeming with forums of people exchanging stories of symptoms at different DPO (days past ovulation). That’s another thing, the only places where people are talking about their lived experiences are also dangerous places to be trans enby. Places full of TERFs such as mumsnet and the like. Here, people speak almost exclusively in acronyms that go from innocuous - DPO: days past ovulation, BFN: big fat negative (pregnancy test), BFP: big fat positive (pregnancy test), to cringey - AF: aunt flow (period, also referred to as ‘the witch’), DD: dear daughter, DS: dear son, DH: dear husband, to painfully repressed - BD: baby dance (apparently this is less uncomfortable than the word sex??).

After symptom spotting comes desperation to test. Sensitive pregnancy tests can detect pregnancies from about 2 days after implantation of a fertilised egg, which could be up to 6 days before a period is due, sometimes even earlier. Not testing keeps the hope alive longer, but testing gives some temporary relief from the limbo of waiting. However, seeing a negative test that could be wrong, is torture. When you’ve been trying as long as I have, you have experienced this specific kind of pain so often that you no longer test early. These tests are also very expensive and are the most popular among people who are trying to conceive, a great opportunity for the exploitation of vulnerable people.

The day or two (or sometimes week) before my period, I am usually very low, with decreased executive functioning, sometimes full shutdown. Sometimes I struggle to get out of bed. When my period comes, there is crying and catastrophising and melt downs.

And then it starts again.

So how do I cope? How do I manage the constant dysregulation, emotional and physical pain, detrimental hyperfocus and cycles of hope and disappointment without completely breaking down? Through neuro-embodiment. I am completely, 100% open and honest about what is going on. I have written before about how I no longer engage in small talk - I just do real talk, because it was harming me to perform this type of social norm. When people ask me what’s happening in my life, fertility struggles are always top billing. This person may be a friend, a family member or a person I’ve just met at a social gathering. It doesn’t matter. This doesn’t mean I trauma dump on people - trauma dumping is when you share details of your trauma with people who have not consented to and may not be equipped to hear/read/manage it with you, often with the intention of liberating yourself from your burden without considering the needs of the recipient. I don’t task people with helping me with my pain, I simply tell the truth about what is going on. Why put myself through the pain of neuro-performing on top of what I’m already going through? And how will we ever normalise fertility struggles, and more specifically, neurodivergent fertility struggles, if we don’t talk about it like it’s normal?

It doesn’t make everything OK, but through normalising my experience and talking about it as openly as people would talk about anything ‘happy’ going on their lives, I feel less alone - because inevitably someone else will be going through something and will open up in response. Or they just get real about their stuff, whatever it is, because it’s hard not to be real when you’re faced with nothing but realness. And there is something comforting in the simple and meaningful human connection that happens in those moments. And there is something comforting about wearing your pain in plain sight.

So I’ll keep being real while I move through my fertility journey.

Because while it is painful, it isn’t shameful.

— AJ

Today’s Neuro-Embodiment Prompts:

Suggestions and questions to help you engage with mindbody decolonisation:

• What are you going through that needs to be normalised? Where do you have opportunities to be open and real about your experiences?

• Where can you challenge stigma and misinformation around reproduction and neurodivergence? Or reproduction and transness? How can you help to interrupt colonial narratives around these issues?