The Thing About Timing

As I sit here in the TWW I keep thinking about the issue of timing. I read almost all of the NW posts every day in addition to trolling other forums. The one issue that is underlying almost all of the posts is timing – “this happened with my CM,” “My temp did this,” “The doc saw this,” “I felt that…” The end of those introductory statements results in a question about timing.

I’m constantly reading about average times – “this happens at 24 hours, this at 12 hours, that from 36-42 hours, the egg lives for this amount of time, the sperm for that amount of time, etc, etc, etc.” So I asked myself, “JUST HOW AVERAGE IS MY BODY?” If the average woman ovulates 24-36 hours after the first +OPK that means there are a lot of women on either side of that window. How do I know if I’m in the window without spending a lot of money and experiencing a lot of heartbreaking BFNs?

Although I’ve spent a year obsessively thinking about and planning my TTC journey I’ve only inseminated twice. Once, several months back, I started the clomid and had to cancel the cycle. I finished out my five days of clomid but I never triggered or inseminated. The one thing I did do was continue to temp and monitor my body (although I know I’m not supposed to).

So, last month I got my first BFN with all kinds of new and confusing symptoms coming from a body I thought I’d grown to know. The entire time (during the TWW) I questioned my timing, believing that I’d inseminated too early. After the BFN I went back and obsessively reviewed my charts – temp, opks, cm. I finally concluded that I’d inseminated too late and that I would inseminate a little earlier this time. I was supposed to wait at least 36 hours after trigger, I made it to 20 before inserting those tiny little swimmers. Why? Because my EWCM was early.

With 11 more days of my TWW I wonder how many of us move around our insem times in order to fall into that magical window?