“Not trying, not preventing”

Grappling with the anxiety of the uncertainty of this stage of trying to conceive

I recently re-read my visit notes from my physical in July. I thought before I started my first session with a new therapist (it’s been about two years since my third stint in short term therapy and I made the decision to start therapy again right after Christmas) it would be helpful to remember how I described the panic attack I had one Sunday night last June a few weeks after the fact. While I was reading my notes, I saw that the doctor had written that we were “not trying, not preventing” but were content with our current family size. At the time I probably did say something like that because my feelings on having another baby fluctuate and seesaw often. But my husband and I both have had trouble in the last few months with feeling that we could be truly content with our family of three.

I am 38 years old, and my husband will be 41 in March. Our daughter Hannah is 6 and is in kindergarten at a private Christian school in our area. Those facts alone give us pause when we discuss the prospect of having another baby. Our age, starting over when Hannah is in elementary school (and the fact that we have tuition costs that we decided were worth it because we decided to prioritize sending her to Christian school/we were used to paying more for childcare than we do now), and our inability to get pregnant the last three years are all considerations. I have had three miscarriages (two since Hannah was born), and the possibility of having another miscarriage if I actually manage to get pregnant again greatly increases my anxiety about our plans.

We had decided that for the good of our marriage we had to stop actively “trying to conceive” after 2024 ended and we still hadn’t succeeded in getting pregnant on our own. We were noticing that sex was feeling more obligatory, and it was not good for our relationship to have that feeling. So 2025 was our first experiment in a while with trying to reframe the mindset to “not really trying” (although of course part of not trying while also not being on birth control means that the natural inclination to want to have more sex around ovulation could still result in a pregnancy). It has seemed to improve our overall feelings around sex, and I have definitely felt better about that aspect of our relationship.

We are still in the “not trying, not preventing” mode technically, but I can tell through my discussions this past month with my husband that his younger brother having a new baby boy has reignited his interest in the possibility of us having another child. And I have told him that I still really wish it would happen (Hannah continues to pray for her baby sister Sarah and has even been asking more questions about what trying to get pregnant means because she’s trying to figure it all out). But ultimately I still have anxiety about the uncertainty of this stage of our lives, and I continue to have no intentions of doing anything differently than what we are doing now- fertility treatments continue to be off the table as they have been since Hannah was born. If we do eventually have a family of four, it will be because it was a spontaneous conception (a second miracle after our first miracle Hannah who was spontaneously conceived the cycle after our 4th failed IUI attempt). I don’t know how to deal with all the feelings that come up for me around this topic, but I am trying to approach it with a time will tell mentality where I wait to worry until something actually changes.