For four agonizing years we tried to get pregnant. Since the moment we got married, that very night of our wedding, Theo and I had tried to make a baby.

I’m not sure why we decided to start trying right away, instead of spending time as a married couple … but we both just knew that kids were what we wanted and so we took off running.

We’d gone through the phases of trying. The initial excitement, the hot sex … the knowing that our lovemaking might possibly produce a child. It was sexy, but it was also primal and compassionate. We wanted to extend our family by the physical act of making love.

And then came the first disappointments. The three or four months of getting my period when I didn’t want it to come. The negative pregnancy tests. Theo shrugging his shoulders with an encouraging smile sayings things like, “it’ll happen when it’s supposed to,” and, “we’re young, we have all the time in the world.”

Then came the eight month mark, and the day we sat down and tearfully talked about how we still weren’t pregnant. That came with the fear that struck my heart about going to see a fertility specialist.

I remember the day I told Theo about the cyst on my ovary that was discovered when I was thirteen. How the doctors had told me that it wasn’t salvageable. That I had one healthy ovary left. I remember his face, an expression of shock and hurt at not disclosing this fact to him in the six months we’d dated, or the six months we’d been engaged.

From there came the six cycles of IUI, or intrauterine insemination. That came with hope and then spiraling misery each time the doctor’s office called to tell us we hadn’t conceived.

Then began the shots. The endless shots. Hormones and medications and mood swings and the loss of intimacy in our marriage. What husband wanted to get sexy with his wife after injecting her with large needles and causing her pain? I felt like an animal of some sort and was so bloated and pissed off all the time that it was no wonder we began to grow apart.

But the in vitro fertilization process was nothing compared to that first miscarriage.

How elated had we been after two years of natural and medically-assisted trying to find out that we were pregnant? I remember the day the doctor called. I’d been in the grocery store, picking out plums, and I nearly collapsed in the middle of the produce section. I’d actually began to cry tears of joy and left my cart right there in the middle of the store to walk out and drive to Theo’s office.

He’d met me in the parking lot, and the minute he saw my face, he began sprinting toward me, a wild grin on his face.

We lost the baby at twelve weeks, right before we could begin announcing the pregnancy to friends and family. It was surreal, now that I look back at it. One minute we’d been sitting on the couch, eating breakfast sandwiches on a Sunday morning, and the next, I was bleeding all over the living room rug.

The part of my brain that needs to preserve my sanity has blocked out most of that day, and the weeks after, where I was in a semi-catatonic state. I will never be the person I was before that day; the loss of our baby changed my makeup. That kind of loss, the kind that rearranges your brain cells and guts half your organs … a person cuts out a part of themselves to recover from that kind of tragedy.

It took almost a full year for Theo to convince me to try IVF again. And we went through two more cycles, to no avail, before I finally told him that enough was enough.

It wasn’t bad enough that my body was the one that couldn’t do exactly what it was intended for. It wasn’t just that I’d been put through the worst kind of physical and mental torment. No, the worst casualty of our infertility was our marriage. I knew that, deep down, Theo blamed me for our troubles conceiving, and that only made me resent him more.

Which was why our marriage was over. We would never be the Imogen and Theo who had originally met five years ago. Yes, he was going to play his part in helping me take my rightful place in my family’s company. He was going to be the better man, fake it until I made it, and then go quietly into the shadows.

The divorce papers waiting in the wings for the day my parents gave the go ahead. I was crushed and dying inside, but I could numb myself. I think I could get through life like this if I really have to.

So how the hell, a month after I decided to end my marriage and leave my husband, am I pregnant with our baby?