Pregnancy Postponed: Chloé Caldwell on Trying (and Failing) to Conceive

On the sidewalk outside the boutique where I work on weekends, there is a chalkboard sign that reads, LIFE CHANGING PANTS. All day, people, mostly tourists from New York City, Connecticut, Boston, and Philadelphia, sometimes from San Francisco and Seattle, come in to ask about the sign.

My friend works down the street, and we text each other what customers say about themselves. If you thought body positivity was alive and well, work one day in a shop that specializes in pants.

“The fit wasn’t great for my weird body.”

“I did a lot of grief eating over the winter.”

“I wouldn’t like how I looked in a picture.”

“When I lose ten pounds I’ll come back for them.”

“These belts are the same size, right? Not for fatties like me but I’ll lose the weight.”

“I look too slutty.”

“I haven’t been a size small since 2008.”

“Do I have camel toe?”

“Do I look too slutty?”

“Size XL is a scary term.”

“They’re probably not life-changing for small Asian women like me.”

“I’m roly-poly so they’d never fit me.”

“You have to be tall to wear these.”

“You have to have a long torso to wear these.”

“You have to have a short torso to wear these.”

“I have no butt.”

“I have no hips.”

“I have no boobs.”

“If I wear all white, I look like I’m getting ready to give someone a Pap smear.”

“If I tried on the white ones, I’d look like a big fat ice cream truck.”

“I have a huge butt like JLo.”

“I have the weirdest torso.”

This negative body talk really weighs on me, my friend texts.

I’m drained by it at the end of the day, I text back.

Just try them on, I tell everyone. One day I want to count the number of times I say “try” but it’s too many.

I think about changing the sign from LIFE CHANGING PANTS to LIFE CHANGING PANTS (IF YOU KEEP AN OPEN MIND). It isn’t my store, though, so I can’t.

If the store didn’t have cameras and the owner couldn’t see me, I’d definitely bring the life-changing-pants sign inside each day, probably in the afternoon when the burnout begins. You try convincing someone a pair of pants will change their life all day.

People say stuff is “life-changing” all the time: brands of moisturizer, suitcases, shoes, candle warmers, headphones, tarot cards, at-home eyebrow tint. It reminds me of one of my students, who used to be addicted to crack and who told me she notices how often people say, “It’s like crack,” about everything. Dairy-free ice cream, popcorn, cereal, a certain type of cracker, granola, cheese, kombucha, chocolate. “Well, it’s good…but it’s not like crack,” my student said. “Only crack is like crack.”

The fertility clinic should swap slogans with the boutique. What if the boutique’s sign was INNOVATIVE AND AFFORDABLE PANTS and the fertility clinic’s hold recording and slogan was, “Life-changing ways to create your family”?

*

I stroll into a gift store, only to be assaulted with mom phrases. The necklaces read:

MAMA

WORLD’S OKAYEST MAMA

C-SECTION

MAMA BEAR

MAMA-TO-BE

My favorite is the martyrish tote bag: NOTHING IN THIS BAG BELONGS TO ME. Mom Life.

Then put something of yours in the goddamn bag. Throw a ChapStick in there, a water bottle, a pen. There you go, now something in there belongs to you.

*

An acupuncturist refuses to work on me postovulation because if it’s in there “you want it to stick.” Another acupuncturist tells me the previous acupuncturist is wrong. An acupuncturist tells me to stop drinking coffee. Coffee tightens you when you should be flowing. An acupuncturist tells me if I’m really a “stress ball” but not telling him, then I won’t get pregnant. Another one says to keep your midriff and ankles always covered. All the acupuncturists tell me my pulses are great and getting pregnant won’t be a problem. The acupuncturists say to eat warm food, to keep water on the counter and not in the fridge. To eat wet breakfasts. I already knew this, though. My whole life my mom has said the phrase “room temp.” One acupuncturist lives up the road from where I grew up. I see it as a sign that she is the person who will get me pregnant, but then she goes to Nepal and decides to stay forever. Another acupuncturist tells me to stay warm and drink bone broth. Another tells me to always keep my ankles and midriff covered. My mom pays for my acupuncture; it’s a pity pay, I think, though I still appreciate it. We both thought this would have ended by now.

The acupuncturist who moved to Nepal tells me that since I write books I know how to bring things to fruition. That is fertility, she says. She tells me to make a shrine with a candle and things from the natural world. I have some driftwood and add some stones I’d collected. She also says to deliver the shrine warm milk every morning.

“Nah that’s too weird,” a friend says when I tell her about the milk, and we laugh.

*

The new acupuncturist I jibe with. She’s a twenty-five-minute drive into the woods and specializes in the menstrual cycle and fertility. I see her for a year and a half and then she discloses to me that she is pregnant. “It’s hard to tell my clients this,” she says.

“I’m happy for you,” I say, because I am, and because it is the thing to say, and because I know, intellectually, that one person’s pregnancy doesn’t take away the chances of another person getting pregnant. This is what happens in life! People get pregnant!

Nonetheless, I fall apart when I get home. She is twenty-four weeks along when she tells me. It feels like the scene in Mrs. Doubtfire when Sally Field’s character finds out Robin Williams has been masking as Mrs. Doubtfire.

“The whole time?”

“The whole time?”

“The whole time?”

I didn’t notice because whenever I walk in she is sitting at a desk, and then I immediately lie down on the acupuncture bed and see only her face.

Still, before she told me, part of me knew. She is of a certain age. I want to say of course she is pregnant; she’s an acupuncturist. But my childhood best friend, the one also experiencing the trying of it all, tells me her acupuncturist has had multiple failed IUIs and, like me, doesn’t want to do IVF.

She seems pretty defeated, she writes.

*

A few years ago, I was in Sayulita, Mexico, for a friend’s fortieth birthday. She wanted to go paddle boarding in the ocean. I am not athletic at all, but I decided to challenge myself. Friends kept telling me I’d be good at it since I have good balance from yoga. I made it to the ocean with my paddleboard, then panicked the minute we began trying to get on our boards. There were sharp rocks and waves. I wouldn’t even try. I gave up before anyone else did. A similar thing happened the first time I tried kayaking. (Why, for both of these activities, was my first time in the ocean, not on a lake? Or a pond? Water that is still instead of unpredictable?)

My friend paddle boarded every day and ended up with sea lice all over her hands and feet from the moldy board.

So.

*

In the trying-to-conceive forums online, people call the vaginal ultrasound wand “the dildo cam.” One day I google “dildo cam” in hopes of reading funny stories. It doesn’t occur to me that searching “dildo cam” will bring up loads of pornography, and that now my phone will serve me related ads.

Later, the dildo cam will become an anecdote I can tell not-super-close friends over cheese and wine, when we are speaking of Pap smears and women’s health and doctors. They won’t know the reason I’ve had it so often. I will be able to hold court and the friends will burst into laughter together, having no idea of everything that’s underneath. Anecdotally, it’s funny. In my reality, it’s a tragedy.

Sometimes I forget that the Reddit trying-to-conceive community isn’t called TTC since so many other forums are. I remember, though, as soon as I type it in and it brings me to the Toronto Transit Commission.

__________________________________

Excerpt from Trying: A Memoir by Chloé Caldwell. Copyright © 2025 by Chloé Caldwell. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press.