I Have Anxiety: Conversations I've Had with My Partner as We're Trying to Conceive

Jun 4

I’m an anxious girly. I used to be a medicated anxious girly.

I’m extremely thankful to be married to a partner who helps me calm my anxiety on the regular rather than adding to it so I can be a much more calm and collected girly who is no longer on medicine for anxiety.

But as we’re working toward the time in our life when we want to try to have a baby, the anxiety control-freak of my past often tries to turn me into a full-blown swirling tornado of emotions.

As any anxious person knows, we can’t really plan for every contingency–no matter how hard we try. And now that we want to become parents, I realize that there is so much out of our control…and a lack of control is frightening.

We’ve had hundreds of conversations in preparation for becoming parents. These conversations have helped me keep my anxiety low and even helped me stay excited about this next huge, amazing chapter of our lives.

We made a decision about how we will handle it if conception is not possible for us.

The reality is, we don’t have any real idea how fertile we are. Doctors won’t test either of us for anything fertility related unless we’ve been trying for over a year with no success conceiving.

It is also reality that fertility interventions are expensive and emotionally and physically taxing. We discussed all of these things in detail and decided how we will deal with it if we are not able to conceive naturally.

We discussed how we will prepare ourselves physically for conception.

We both started taking vitamins and supplements months before we started trying to conceive. I started taking a prenatal vitamin pack with folate. He started taking a men’s multivitamin pack.

I started adding in new vegetables to our weekly meals. We now love zucchini, sweet potato, and lettuce. I also started adding more fiber: whole grains, beans, high-fiber tortillas, etc.

We both started to exercise in a way we each enjoy: I started CrossFit again; he started doing pushups and walking daily.

We know that his physical health is crucial to how the pregnancy goes for me and how our baby develops in utero (including the placenta), and he has made every effort to improve his health for conception.

We talked about how we will handle my physical care during pregnancy, what things I want his support in, and how he will advocate for me if needed.

I am considered “overweight” on the outdated BMI (or Bullsh*t Man Index) scale. That is considered a “complication” in pregnancy. I am also going to be over the age of 35 at the time I would be giving birth and will therefore be a “gereatric pregnancy.”

As a recovering people pleaser as well, we have discussed how we will approach conversations with my doctors and how he will help support me in those conversations. We will ask questions like:

Is my baby in any medical danger?
Am I in any medical danger?
What physical signs–which of my vital signs or test results–tell you that it is medically necessary for me to do what you’re suggesting?

We will then decide together based on the answers to those questions whether or not a medical intervention they suggest is for us.

We discussed labor and delivery in detail.

Of course there are millions of unknowns here, but we at least discussed a large portion of things based on which pieces of labor and delivery we can control, such as how we prepare for it. We talked about:

Will we create a birth plan?
How will we handle delivery if we’re getting pressure to do something we don’t want to do?

We will ask the same questions above:

Is my baby in any medical danger?
Am I in any medical danger?
What physical signs–which of my vital signs or test results–tell you that it is medically necessary for me to do what you’re suggesting?
Is this medically necessary to preserve life or is it just hospital policy?

If there is no medical need for an intervention during labor, we may say no.

I also asked him the question: How will you advocate for me and our baby? And: Who will we call to help if there are health issues that cause me to be separated from our baby in the hospital?

We discussed the first few months with the baby in detail.

Again, so many unknowns here, but these questions and conversations helped give us a baseline for what we want to do and laid out or expectations of each other:

How will we handle the first few months with baby?
Who will handle the household chores?
How will you support my physical recovery as well as our baby’s development?
Will we utilize things like Target 360 delivery for groceries and baby supplies?
How will we handle meal prep and planning?

We discussed the kind of parents we want to be.

This was key for me. I waited until I was almost 35 to even start trying. I know there are many aspects to who I am now that are better suited to being a good mom than who I was in my 20s. But even with that personal development, I know I have to keep how I want to be and who I want to be as a mom in the forefront of my mind so I don’t fall back into old patterns by accident.

We asked questions like:

What is important to us to continue from our DINK (Dual Income No Kids) life into our life as parents?
How will you help me not lose myself as a mom? How will I help you not lose yourself as a dad?
What are our expectations for personal time once we have kids?
How will we handle the mental load when it comes to life with kids?

As a person who has struggled with anxiety, I know it is detrimental to my mental–and even my physical–health to have to take care of everything on my own. I can do it. I have done it. But it puts me in survival mode and I choose to live in thrive mode. Our discussion about how we will share the mental load was extremely helpful in allowing me to explain my needs and for us to have clearly defined expectations before we are in the situation.

We discussed how we want our life to look in 5+ years with kids.

Again…we know we can’t control the exact timeline or how things will go. But we are always allowed to have ideas for how we want the future to look, and being on the same page with those ideas is crucial.

We talked about our jobs and what we want to be doing for income in 5 years. We discussed how we want things to be different, which helped us begin to plan things like building my coaching business and saving money for our emergency fund.

And simply knowing we are on the same page with our long-term goals and our vision for the future is a huge comfort.

Clearly communicated expectations about household labor, childcare, working and income, time alone, time together, who we will trust with our child, etc., gives us peace because we know we won’t have to have the conversation when a situation arises that is complicated by our emotion–or the “heat of the moment.”

We know we can’t plan any of it out 100%, but by having these conversations before we get pregnant, my anxious mind can relax knowing we are on the same page about how we plan to handle any issues that arise.

Are you trying to conceive? What conversations can you have with your partner to make the process easier on your mental health?

Coach Kate