Being an Indian itself is hard enough but being a childless couple after 5 years of marriage is definitely not a picnic in this country. Worse when you are a 30-year-old woman whose biological clock is ticking.

Let's start with marriage. Like an “ideal Indian” woman I had an arranged marriage when I was 23. Within 2 months of my marriage, my mother started to ask me about my pregnancy. I was 23 and scared, I told her as much. I needed some time before I got used to him and got comfortable having a physical relationship with him. After 4 months, my grandmother started to talk about my pregnancy claiming that she wanted to see my kid before she passes away. This was the exact reason why I had to get married in the first place at the age of 23. I'm sure everyone has this character in their life.

Finally, after a year, my dad started to question about my pregnancy, that's it! I lost my patience and told all of them that I'm postponing it at least till the time I turned 25 or 26. After 2 years of marriage, due to a lot of external pressure thanks to the rat race that's going on with our colleagues, I decided to give having a baby a try. It didn't work for the first 4 months. Then my mother being a desi mom pushed me to get a fertility check. We as a reluctant couple went to the hospital that was 45 km away from my home because that gynac was supposed to be the best in the city.

Traveling to that godforsaken place was reason enough for not wanting a baby. Then the doctor asked me to take all blood tests and gave me some vitamins and asked me to come after 6 months as they could not have started treatment for 4 months. And they needed a minimum of 1 year to start the horrible medications. After 3 years of marriage, still nothing. The vitamins didn't help. So she decided to go for follicular monitoring. It is nothing, it’s just to see your egg development and when it's fully grown. The doc will ask you to have sex with your husband (kind of like a professional pimp for egg and sperm to meet).

Then 6 more months of monitoring along with hormone tablets and still nothing. (Please note: Hormone tablets are just 5 mg little tablets that heighten your emotions and make you do stuff like a crazy hormonal-psychotic person.)

After four years of marriage, they decided to get a Fallopian tube test. Now, this is where all hell breaks loose. This is a horrible test where they open your vagina wide open, force an iodine solution in it and check if there is a block and while the solution is in there, an x-ray machine above you will take a snap. After 15 mins of hell - you come out.

My mom stood there sad looking at my face because I was not able to walk properly later. Well good news, I didn't have a blockage. After 4.5 years of marriage, they assumed that my husband and I were over-weight, that's why my pregnancy was delayed. Conclusively, we did everything. Who am I kidding? Something to reduce our weight. Well, it didn't work. We just lost some 4 to 5 kgs, that's it. Then they decided to have an IUI.

After 4.7 months of marriage, I had my first IUI. It's a process of taking the sperm from your husband and inserting it into the uterus, that's all. Not a big deal. Well at least for a man, it's not a big deal. All he has to do is go to a room, lie on a clean bed, just think about his favorite actress and squirt it in a bottle and voila! Your job here is done. But for a woman, 15 days before the process they give a lot of hormones, 9 days before the process they check the growth of your egg daily for another 4 days, 2 days before the process they give a painful hormone injection.

On the day of IUI, you have to be there early morning at 7 AM. By 8 AM the sperm will be ready, 8.30 or 9 am, a young Doctor comes in to inject it into your body. Most cases, she is probably just learning how to do it on your body. There comes a speculum that then opens up your vagina and at that moment, you’ll scream and scare everyone around in the hospital, including that little Doctor. Not sure if all women experience the same pain.

After the sperm is injected, you have to rest for 20 mins, go home and wait for 3 weeks to get a pregnancy test. And for those 15 days, you take another hormone tablet that will "beautifully" induce dizziness and nausea in your blood for all of those 15 days. What more do you want sitting in your office every day without even getting pregnant?

Day 28, you get your periods surprisingly. You know that feeling where you want to pull out your own intestine and die? Yeah that's how it feels after all the trouble you've been through. So then you go for a second IUI the very next month. This time, the pain was the same but my periods came early on my 18th day.

This is when I decided to stop everything. Enough is enough! My body, my rules. I get to decide. So, I decided to take a break. For at least a year.

Why do I have to try and put my body through an awful lot of pain for a baby? Isn't our country 1 billion strong in population? One person less is fine right? But who understands that? Not even your very own mother understands you! Or asks you how you feel? Or what you want? When you explain all the pain you underwent, all they say is "delivery pain will be a lot more painful that this".

Just one question to all the geniuses who said this to me - "At the end of the delivery you get a baby". But at the end of all my pain, what do I get? Pain and embarrassments aside, nothing. Not just the old generations like our parents and relatives, but even the younger generations who have children question us about our baby.

One of my colleagues (a guy) even went behind my back and felt pity for me for not having my own baby. "Oh my god you should have seen her. She looked so dull, she is the only one in our friends' circle who doesn't have a kid of her own."

Parents/In-laws don't care about what you do, how painful it is, where you do it, who helps you to do it, they just want an artificially inseminated baby in your uterus so that they don't have to face the pressures of this so-called spineless society. It's like no matter how much I earn or how successful I become, I will always be a loser in the eyes of my family for not having a baby.

The only person who stood by my side is my husband. He was patient when I was being hormonal and angry all the time. He'd come with me for all my appointments. When I said I wanted to stop the treatment, he didn’t say a word and stood by my side. What more do I need? Getting married and having a baby is not an achievement for me, scoring a good husband is. 

Pregnancy is just a path in marriage and not a destination, it doesn't define me. I define me. This is not just for women, also for men. Calling a man impotent is equally bad. Once you cross the 5 year of marriage threshold, a woman is officially barren and not respected in any auspicious events in our country. My parents have almost the traveled entire country seeking God's help for me.

I have been happy this past year without treatments and hormone tablets. Personally, I'm in a good place but the pressures of the society haven’t stopped. I don’t want to undergo another IVF but my friends and family are forcing me to get one still.

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