Today I am seven weeks pregnant. Technically, it’s only been five weeks since Axe Man’s sperm did a breaking-and-entering job on my egg but here in the States we count pregnancy from the first day of your last period and not from when you last ovulated. This MAKES NO SENSE but reflects the fact that we don’t trust women to know when they ovulate, only when they bleed. I could get all uppetty on the subject but given my own history, I suppose I should let it go; ten years ago I had so little knowledge of my own biology that I thought I could get pregnant every day I had sex. Which actually wasn’t that often because my love life was at a serious low-point. But that’s a different story.
A more relevant story is the time when I came home to my poor mother and - as she was pouring my tea - suddenly burst out that I might just have become a teenage statistic. Kudos to her for not immediately losing her shit (I was fourteen) but instead sitting me down and asking me to carefully explain my concerns. The not-so-sordid details were that I had spent the night with the son of a family friend and his sperm may have touched me at some point. Mother wasn’t concerned (not least because I had just started bleeding heavily that day) and immediately put my mind at rest. But we didn’t go into detail and so I was in my thirties before I discovered just how short the potential window is for getting knocked up.
You’re acting all cool right now but I know that a small army of you are silently yelling at the screen: “Dear God..what? I can’t get pregnant all month fucking long??”
And no, you cannot, so let me graciously enlighten you.
The first five days of your period you’re all clear. So go for it; you do you (or him) sister. However, if Day 1 is the first day you bleed, then as soon as Day 6 rolls around you can’t be as happy-go-lucky as you have been, even if you’re still using those tampons/pads/Thinx. Bleeding doesn’t mean there isn’t other stuff going on.
The trick is to learn when you ovulate. Some women are “lucky” enough to feel it physically (apparently it’s a kind of cramping in the ovary area) but the rest of us have to rely on other methods (taking your temp, ovulation strips, etc) and my favourite method is to pay attention to my cervical fluid.
I get different fluids before and after but when I’m ovulating I have either an egg-white stuff that stretches at least an inch or so (yes, I play with it) or a runny, pungent fluid that I can smell all day long (and am always paranoid others can smell too). That fluid has one job and one job only - it’s there to protect any sperm that ends up in your vaginal canal and to keep it alive until you ovulate. Why would you need such a fluid? Because your vagina is basically hostile territory for those lil wrigglers. It’s acidic and that makes it a sperm-killer, so the these fertile fluids wrap up the sperm in a cozy alkaline blanket and keep it warm and happy for up to five (yes FIVE) days until you lay an egg.
Ovulation always occurs around two weeks(ish) before you bleed. So if your cycle is 28 days long then you probably ovulate around Day 14 or 15 and your fluid most likely shows up around 1 to 3 days before that, which means that from Day 11 onward you’re in the possible-pregnancy zone. But wait! What if your cycle is only 25 days long (which has been heard of) and your fluid shows up five days before you ovulate? Well, that means you become fertile somewhere around Day 6. Yes, you heard me, Day 6. I told you that even the bleedy-time wasn’t always safe.
The good news is that once you start to know your patterns (which I’m gonna say can take up to a year), you can start to extend the number of “safe days”. If your cycle is a typical length and fairly regular then these days would include several during and after the bleed and then a long stretch of time after you ovulate (because the egg only lives for a day or so). That means all the days after the egg dies until at least your next Day 5 you’re good to go.
“Now wait”, I hear you say. “Do you really expect me to take family planning advice from a woman who carefully tracked her cycle for three years and STILL got blind-sighted by a surprise pregnancy??!?”
To which I would reply: “Good point. Feel free to ignore me. Imma gonna keep on napping and eating entire jars of pickles."