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Fanning the Flames
Keeping the Love Alive When You're Trying to Conceive By Julie Watson
It was 8:25 a.m. My husband and I had just quickly finished up "doing the deed" in our hotel room so that we could have a specimen for our umpteenth artificial insemination. As we hurried to get dressed, I asked my husband, Matt, where he had put the car keys. (I knew he had just had them since he had just previously packed up the car with our overnight gear.)
"I think they are in my coat pocket," he replied.
"Not there," I murmured while shuffling through his pockets quickly.
"Well, that's where I put them," he said while putting on his shoes.
"Matt, they are not here!" I said, hoping that the worst hadn't happened.
"Let me see. Give it here," he said, jerking the jacket from my hands.
As I quickly blew through the room desperately looking for the keys, my heart began to race. Oh God, please don't let him have locked them in the car! What are we going to do if he did? After all, the precious cargo I was keeping warm between my chest and bra was only "good" for an hour at the most!
"Just CALM down!" he shouted at me. "We'll find them, we've got PLENTY of time!"
"No we don't!" I snapped back, shuffling through the blankets and pillows in the hotel room.
Looking back it was amazing to me to observe how such an intimate scene just two minutes beforehand could have resulted in such a chaotic stressful situation just moments afterward. Our love life had completely fallen to shams. I couldn't remember right then the last time we had made love just for the heck of it. We had become the victims of "sex on demand." Not tonight, honey... it's TOO soon. Not tonight, honey, we need to save this for TOMMORROW.
When we finally got to "do it," there was always the special condom we used to collect the precious specimen, and always there was the deep-seeded fear of "what if?" WHAT IF he couldn't give enough of a sample? WHAT IF the condom broke? WHAT IF the sample wasn't GOOD enough?
