"Trying"

So many things don't make sense until you're staring it in the face.

I know I can be an annoying know-it-all.  A control freak who won't even let my husband cut a homemade pizza fresh out of the oven with a pizza cutter because I don't like the way he does it.  The way he does it pushes all the cheese and toppings out of place.  There's a certain way to do it to avoid that...here, just let me do it.  It's this idea that you know how things should be.  How things should be done.  What is "proper."  When I think about this personal quality, it annoys even me.  At least I'm self-aware.  But what I'm learning is that what's in your head of how things "should be" loses all credence in the face of what is.

I can also be kind of a prude.  Even after I got married, whenever couples would talk about "trying" to have a baby, I was just kind of weirded out by that whole terminology.  I often had to try to suppress unseemly images my creative brain would conjure up of said couple struggling, wincing, exerting effort, wiping sweat from their brows as they "tried."  Eww.  That's not the way I would talk about wanting to have a baby, I would think.

Maybe it has to do with the word "trying."  Normally it's associated with something precarious and difficult.  Like, something that takes extra physical exertion and mental skill.  I don't associate the connotations of "trying" with doing what it takes to conceive a child.  I mean, really?  It's not that complicated.  And I'd rather not picture people I'm casually having a conversation with "trying."  lol.  Like I said, I can be kind of a prude.

But...(there's always a but), now that the reality of planning to start a family is staring me in the face, I finally see the light.  "Trying" is kind of the only appropriate way to describe that particular circumstance.  I mean, we're all adults here, there are things that you do or don't do to prevent things from happening, and there are things that you start doing or stop doing to allow things to happen.  The most concise way to describe the process of allowing things to happen is "trying." 

I know, it seems like common sense, and of course I knew that people weren't really talking about the act of "trying" but more about their decision to be purposeful about conceiving, but still, it really didn't completely click for me until we began to think seriously about starting our own family.  Not too long ago, I began answering people's inquiries about our future family plans with "We're planning to start trying this fall."  Oh. em. gee.  Did I just use "trying" in the gross, conjuring of undesirable mental images sense?

I'm not a special snowflake.  I don't have a more "proper" sense of terminology or of anything else.  We're just like the millions of other couples in the world deciding when to start "trying" to have a baby.

I wonder if that's a part of what being a mother is like.  What I mean is, if part of being a mother is simply observing your child come to these universal conclusions.