DEAR ABBY

It turns out that for Philip and me, making a baby is not so simple as just having unprotected sex (someone should tell my youth pastor). Given our difficulties, I receive (unsolicited) advice all the time on how to conceive. People say, just relax and it’ll happen, just get drunk, just stop trying. On the other end of the spectrum, I’m encouraged to try much harder — do yoga, get acupuncture, change my diet, have sex more often, stand on my head (I’m not even joking), go to the doctor, get some tests done.

Now, for your reading pleasure, here are three of the strangest pieces of advice I’ve received.

1. My mother-in-law, bless her heart, sent me, for the first time, some literature about improving fertility. I had been warned this would happen, and I actually felt a small rush of glee when it actually did. Inside the envelope, sent via the U.S. Postal Service, was a photocopied magazine article from the year 1980, and she had highlighted and underlined various passages about how vitamin B6 is basically a miracle drug when it comes to cervical fluid and implantation. The story advocated taking 500mg a day … but didn’t mention that this amount is 38,461 times the recommended dietary allowance of a mere 1.3mg. A moderator on tcoyf.com called vitamin B6 a "shot in the dark" and said taking it could result in a "lost opportunity," but I don’t know what’s more reliable — a message board or an article that’s 32 years old?

2. A good friend gave me two pieces of advice: Philip should stop eating yellow curry, and I should avoid tap water. Evidently, yellow curry can have a negative effect on sperm, but luckily, Philip eats yellow curry about zero times a week. I however, drink tap water all the time, which is bad, because the theory holds that there’s enough birth control in the water system to cause problems for some women. I did try to stop drinking tap water for about a day. I gave up when I went to a casual sit-down restaurant and ordered bottled water, and the server looked at me like I had three heads. He brought it though, with a glass of ice made from — you guessed it — tap water.

3. Another friend has been promising to bring me a book about feng shui, which will explain how to align the energies in my house to promote fertility. It’s all something to do with identifying a certain zone and filling it with stones and houseplants (and removing elements like fire — you know, candles and such). Since I don’t have the book in my hands yet, I have yet to try this one, but it seems simple enough, and it can’t hurt to set up a little fertility shrine, right?