Parent vs. Parent: Infertility

My husband and I had been married for three years when we started trying to have a baby. We knew we were ready; in the five years since we'd met, we had talked endlessly about starting a family, about how we would manage work and childcare, about what we would name a boy or a girl, about breastfeeding and cosleeping and spanking. My husband talked about getting a backpack carrier for the baby, so that when he walked our still-unpurchased dog, he could take our still-unconceived child along with him.

We were ready to be parents.

What we were not ready for was two and a half years of infertility, of failing to conceive on our own, without medical intervention. We were not ready for the stress and the fighting and the scheduled sex. We were not ready to spend over two years second-guessing ourselves and our marriage.

We were completely unprepared for infertility.

During the two and a half years that we spent trying and trying to make a baby, people around us were popping them out left and right. One sister-in-law was pregnant twice in that window. People started to get nervous about telling us that they were expecting, and despite our protestations that we were happy for them, they almost always followed the "We're having a baby!" declaration with an apology. And I always found it weird that these otherwise very smart people would need to tell me that they were sorry about their fertility; it wasn't their fault that I wasn't pregnant, and we were genuinely happy for them.Although I never held anyone else's fertility against them, I did start to doubt myself. I was certain that it was all my fault, and I spent hours thinking about what I might have done wrong: was I unable to get pregnant because I had waited too long? Because I had been on the Pill for too many years? Because my stress level was too high or because I drank too much coffee or because, years before, I had starved myself to be thinner? Or--most frightening of all--was it because I didn't really want a baby enough?

Infertility can make you crazy.

As the months ticked by, I sometimes wondered what it was that I really did want. In our second year of Project Make a Person, my husband and I started to fight. We disagreed about everything, it seemed, from what to eat for dinner to how much longer we should keep trying to have a child. We started to talk about how far we would go to get pregnant, how much intervention we were willing to withstand. We talked about adoption, about social services adoptions and private adoptions and open adoptions. We talked about what we could afford to do. We fought about all of these things. I wondered how on earth we would be able to raise a child together when we could hardly say a civil word to each other.

I felt like our inability to conceive was all my fault, my body's fault, and I drew lines in the sand to protect my self. I told my husband that I wasn't willing to shoot myself full of drugs, to have my eggs harvested, to have IVF. I argued that I had already stopped drinking alcohol and caffeine, had started walking every day and meditating. I ate truckloads of broccoli, which I hate, and passed on desserts. He said, "Let's talk to the doctors and see what they say." I told him to go away, that he didn't understand and couldn't possibly know how hard this was for me.

He said, "You're right." I started to wonder, quite seriously, if my marriage would survive.

In the midst of this, I read an article in the New York Times about the "infertility epidemic" and about the lengths to which couples were going to have children. One couple profiled in the article had drained their savings accounts and maxed out their credit cards to pay for IVF. At the time of the article, they were living in a one-bedroom apartment; their twins slept in bunk beds in the kitchen. I told my husband, "I won't do that. I won't have a child if it takes all of our resources." He agreed, and we started to talk about adoption.

About this time, we lost the lease on the huge, kid-friendly Victorian house we were renting. My husband suggested we take a chance and move into a hip loft in a renovated warehouse downtown. We bought new furniture, including a white armchair and a coffee table with wheels. We got a referral to a respected fertility practice in Seattle. Our first round of tests showed that we fell into the 30% of infertile couples who have no diagnosable problems. Just to be sure, though, I was scheduled for an HSG, a test to determine if there were abnormalities with my ovaries or fallopian tubes. The HSG showed nothing unusual, and the doctor sent me home to think about starting some drugs to stimulate ovulation.

A week later I got pregnant with Henry.

I don't know that I have any great take-away lesson about infertility; every story is different. For me, the most difficult part was not watching my friends conceive easily or bring their babies home. It was living with the doubt and the uncertainty, wondering every day for over two years if we would ever have a child, and if there would even be a "we" in the end.