What drives you crazy about TTC?

Hi everyone. I'm the author of Swimming Upstream - a book about the struggle to conceive and how to deal with it.

The moderators of BellyBelly have asked me to write some articles for couples trying to conceive, based on our experience (5 years TTC and IVF treatment) and my research in writing the book.

The first article is up - it's called "Putting on a brave face in a child-centred world". It talks a bit about how when you're struggling to conceive you're expected to just put on a smile and deal with life when seemingly everyone around you is having babies easily. Here's the link: https://www.bellybelly.com.au/concep...ng-infertility

(When you're reading the article, check out the special 20% discount for subscribers of the BellyBelly forum. http://www.swimmingupstream.com.au/bellybelly.aspx.)

Anyway, the reason for posting is I'd like some feedback from you ...

I'll be contributing more articles to BellyBelly to help couples who are having trouble conceiving, but I'd like your feedback as to what issues you'd like to see covered. What would you like to read about? What are the big issues for you?

Here's a list as a starter:

* How men deal with infertility and how to talk to them about it
* Who's to blame for an inability to conceive?
* How do you talk to your parents?
* Fertility myths
* The effect on your sex life

I'd be keen to see what you'd like ... or any other ideas you may have!

Cheers, David Rawlings

Hi David !
Well done for writing about such important topics.
I am a young (25), healthy , active woman TTC, and would like to know why it is that girls are never taught about fertility health and how difficult it may be at an early age? There should be more education to young women in regards to fertility health and conceiving.
For example, Iam the daughter of a medical specialist and have grown up with a substantial amount of knowledge floating around, and up until 3 months ago (when we first began TTC), I had NO idea that I was only fertile around ovulation time and that certain things could help or hinder our efforts. Interesting hey?
:)

Thanks Kristabelle - I'll make a note of the topic.

We actually found FOUR fertility myths when we wrote the book, and one of them is definitely the fact that we can turn our fertility on or off whenever we feel like it.

Try this fact out: around 50% of all births in Australia are unplanned (research done recently). Add that to the number of couples who try to conceive but can't and it pretty much blows that myth out of the water.

But still it persists.