"I cringe every time my friends say they're 'trying for a baby'."

A few weeks ago I met up with an old friend for coffee and she made a peculiar comment about her life that has stayed with me ever since.

After we had finished a few rounds of ‘it’s been too long’ style squealing/hugging/admiring each other’s new haircuts, we settled down in a quiet booth clutching coffees with overly detailed leaf designs in the foam and then proceeded to fill each other in on all the things we’d missed over the months we’d been apart.

After I finished telling her all my big-ticket news items (a work crisis, a near-death houseplant and the fact that I was thinking of making the big change from a side-fringe to a full-fringe) she let me in on some exciting news of her own.

She and her lovely husband had decided they were going to try for a baby.

Except…she didn’t say exactly those words.

In fact, she kind of stumbled and muttered her way through the explanation as her cheeks slowly turned the same shade as the cherry crumble the lady seated in the booth next to us was tucking into.

“Well, we’re trying to….I mean we’ve been trying to….this month…”

The poor girl looked like she was being tortured by a pretty adept big-screen movie villain for a solid five minutes before I finally figured out what she was trying to say and blurted out (very loudly) “YOU’RE TRYING FOR A BABY THAT IS SO EXCITING.”

“Shh!” she scolded me in embarrassment as she looked around at our fellow coffee-goers to see if any of them had clocked my outburst.

(Spoiler alert, they all had. Cherry crumble lady at the next table even went as far as to give my now beetroot-coloured pal a congratulatory thumbs up before turning back to her plate).

Well, what else do you say? Image: via GIPHY

She then went on to complain that she felt oddly uncomfortable about using the term “trying for a baby” and it all linked back to the fact that she pictured her closest friends, family and a couple of random strangers immediately being hit with a slew of graphic mental images of her and her husband in weird and not so wonderful sex positions when she used those words.

Which of course, I hadn’t been, not at all, but now that image had kinda popped into my head and refused to budge.

The whole thing was endearingly hilarious since obviously sex is a way most (but not all) couples make a baby and the thought of being embarrassed about that doesn’t normally enter into people’s heads.

But at the same time, it made her uncomfortable and discounting anyone’s ideas or emotions around sex, fertility or pregnancy is never okay to do.

The whole conversation made me think back to when the first person in my friendship circle became pregnant when we were 19 years old.

It was during this particular friends’ 19th birthday dinner that she confessed to me, right before her mother and grandmother proudly brought out her candle-filled cake, that she felt a little awkward because “every single person in this room now knows that I’ve had sex”.

Again, I hadn’t imagined that myself, but I guess I can see that walking around with your body so broadly portraying something so intimate and personal can make some women feel a little shy and embarrassed.

So the thing is, if you do want to tell your friends and family that you’re “trying for a baby” but you don’t want to use those exact words, what exactly do you say?

I attempted to come up with some helpful suggestions…

You could say “we’re attempting to put a bun in the oven but we’re still working on mixing up the dough.”

Or

“We’re looking to expand our current immediate family team but we’re still in the early stages of the recruitment process.”

Or

“We’re hoping to soon host a family dinner party of three but we’re just waiting on one more formal RSVP.”

Now whenever someone in my friendship group wants to convey that they are “trying for a baby” they try to think of the funniest and most unexpected way to let the rest of us know that they’re trying to make a little bundle of joy appear.

At the end of the day, I’m sure all people who hope to one day be parents would place the most amount of importance of being able to have a happy and healthy child. But at the same time, fertility and the road to becoming pregnant can be a difficult, uncertain and sometimes confronting one.

So it’s important you use whatever kind of language you like and that makes you feel comfortable along the way and maybe you’ll even stumble into a turn of phrase that’s downright hilarious.

What do you think about the phrase ‘trying for a baby’, what would you say instead?