Y'all, this is a long one so bear with me and settle in. This is 1 part of 3. I will be posting My Pregnancy Story and My Birth Story soon.

Conception:

I have always wanted to be a mother. It's the only thing that I have always known I wanted. I've changed majors in college, changed careers 3 times in 2 years, but I have never changed my mind about being a mom. My earliest memory of wanting to be a mom is when I was in preschool and it's probably the only constant in my life. My husband and I got married in June 2017. If he would have a agreed, we would have started trying the day we got back from our honeymoon. I've had dreams so vivid of playing with our children only to wake up and cry because it wasn't real. By March 2018 I had him convinced to start trying. I thought getting pregnant would be the easy part. I had a lot of friends that already had 2 kids by then and I was just 21. After 6 months of trying and 6 months of heartbreak I cried myself to sleep for the first time while TTC. My husband worked swing shifts (alternating nights and days) so getting sex timed out just right felt impossible. On top of that, it seemed like my cycles just got longer and longer (which they actually were). I blamed my husband for us not getting pregnant. I blamed birth control pills that I had taken for 4 years. I blamed myself for not being able to accomplish this one main biological function. I wanted to quit. I was tracking BBT, CM, CP, and using OPKs. I was driving myself crazy. After 9 months of trying I found a lump in my breast. So I took a trip to see my GP. While I was waiting for her to write a referral for me to have my lump checked out, I mentioned TTC. She ordered blood tests for me. And then my grandfather passed away. My last grandparent, and the man who gave me away at my wedding died. It wasn't sudden, but that didn't make it hurt any less. I had always dreamed of being able to tell him he was going to be a great grandpa. He was the man who showed me how I should be loved by watching the way he loved my grandmother. I felt like an orphan after he died. I stopped eating, I had barely any drive to go to work in the mornings. And I still had this lump in my breast. The week after he passed away I had my lump looked at by breast cancer specialists. My mom had gone to the same place when she had cancer. They concluded with 97% certainty that it was a fibroadenoma after an hour long ultrasound and another hour of waiting for a doctor to look at the scans. Benign and just something to monitor for the next few years since I'm high risk. For some reason, finding out that my lump was really nothing at all, it hit a reset button in my brain. I don't know if it was a culmination of the trauma from the past several months or if I had a mental reset due to me as payment from the world, but I hit reset. I quit doing all the monitoring for TTC. I got a general idea of when my fertile window was and instead of telling my husband, I was just going to seduce him on all the right days. And I did. For the next 2 months. If it happened, it happened, if not, oh well. We were still young and had plenty of time. And on March 14th we conceived. We found out March 24th. We only had sex 1 time the entire cycle. I really don't know how long I cried that morning when I saw my 2nd red line. 12 months of trying. 1 entire year. And we made it.