This year National Infertility Awareness Week runs from April 22 through April 28. Click HERE for more information.
The following is an excerpt from Disaster Flambé and my own account of dealing with infertility. It took 2+ years to conceive Broadway, and Iraq came after an even longer "dry spell." The Skink was an amazing little surprise, like punctuation at the end of my baby-making career.
An “F”
In Conception
I’ve never
understood the whole “Birds and Bees” thing. Perhaps I missed a story somewhere
about some strange intra-species love affair, but if not, I fail to see the
comparison of a bird or bee to anything having to do with human conception.
To my
understanding, first a bird finds a partner, makes a nest, has a little fun and
lays some eggs. After sitting on the eggs for a few weeks, mom and dad bird
spend their time flying about looking for food. In a few months it’s time to
fly south, and they all part ways to go on vacation. The following year, mom
bird finds a nice new bird partner and the process starts over.
Bees on
the other hand are a completely different story. There is but one queen. The
queen does nothing but lies in the hive and pops out thousands of eggs. She has
a husband or two, but all the rest of the bees are drones. For those who are
not heavily into insect social structures, drones are mundane little workers
with no other purpose than feeding and maintaining the hive. If you are born
(or hatched) as a bee, there is very little chance you will have the luck to be
a queen or one of her trysting partners. You will probably be a boring little
drone, running about with pollen on your feet gossiping about the bees down in
Honey Production not keeping up with demand.
Humans are
different. Not to say some of them don’t find a new mate every year like birds,
but it’s not the generally approved method for creating a family. And of course
like the bee, some people are so focused on work they forget to have a family.
But other than a few freak similarities, our mating habits are completely
different.
Through
our younger years we do what we can to prevent a family. We won’t even hug our
own parents in public… we wouldn’t want anyone to think we actually liked
those people! Then as young adults, we court, but try not to conceive or marry.
If we are intelligent young adults, we utilize good birth control methods and
leave nothing to chance. We eventually find the person we hope will be Mr. or
Mrs. Right, settle down and wait until everything is perfect before conceiving.
Once we
realize that nothing is ever perfect enough to have a child and that our
biological clocks are ticking so loudly they’re keeping us up at night, we
decide to stop preventing a family. For those that did not conceive by accident
prior to this time, most will conceive within a few months of “not preventing.”
And then
there are the rest of us - a small group who, after not preventing for a year
or so, actually start trying. And trying. And trying. And when that doesn’t
work, we seek medical attention. And thus begins the baby obsession.
The
hardest part about belonging to the group of those “trying to conceive” or TTC,
is that while we’ve finally made up our minds that we want a baby (bad!), all
our friends seem to just pop them out like toast. In fact it frequently happens
that a fertility-challenged woman will be surrounded by co-workers who get
pregnant by accident, and complain about it incessantly. Fertility challenged
women just love hearing about how pissed off a co-worker is about not being
able to sit in the hot tub at a friend’s party last week! Love it.
Eventually
we start to see the irony in the fact that we were so careful in preventing a
family for so long before we were “ready.” We did the right thing, right? We
were the smart ones, right? Oh, what we wouldn’t give to have the “luck” of
those unsuspecting high-school girls who, whoops, get pregnant seemingly from
just looking at someone of the opposite sex. How do they make it seem so easy?
It is simply not fair!
And why
does it always seem to be that the people who want babies the least seem to
have the most? We have to watch the news with stories of little Joey and his 23
brothers and sisters being put in foster care when it is found that their
34-year-old mother has gone on vacation without them… for a year.
Perhaps
from these experiences we become better parent material. We spend years wanting
what we can’t seem to produce for ourselves, and dreaming about what we’d do if
we had just one baby. When we’re lucky enough to have our own or adopt
one, no-one in the world could make us treat that bundle of hopes and dreams in
a less than wonderful way – ever! Our children will always know how much we
wanted them and needed them.
Then,
after experiencing the sheer joy of parenthood, we simply must have
another. And the whole process starts over again. It doesn’t matter what they
look like. It doesn’t matter if their skin is the same color or their eyes the
same shape. What matters is that incredible bond between parent and child – that
pure and overwhelming love that comes over us like an ocean wave.
I admit
it. I value the lessons I’ve learned through the years I yearned to be a
parent. Perhaps I don’t react so harshly when little shoes show up caked in
mud. Perhaps I’ve made less silly rules than I would have had this gift from
God come easily to me. In my house, “Don’t touch!” was replaced with “Let’s
hold that together so you can see it better.” “No!” was replaced with “I’m
worried you might get hurt if you do that. I want you safe because you are so
important to me. Mommy would cry if you got hurt.”
I don’t
know how birds handle infertility. Do they count their eggs before they’ve
hatched? I don’t know if queen bees long for just one more larvae in the hive.
Either way, we as humans are cursed with the knowledge of and longing for what
we don’t have, and sometimes without the understanding of how much we’ve
already got.
Such was
the case for my husband and me. It had been almost two years since we had
“stopped preventing.” It had been at least a year and a half since we started
making charts, graphs and taking temperatures... sexy! On a number of
occasions my husband had left work early, telling his commanding officer that
his wife might be about to get pregnant, and he wanted to be there when it
happened.
I had read
all the books and knew enough to realize that I was somehow not quite “normal.”
Instead of the neat little twenty-eight day cycle women were supposed to have,
mine seemed to be all over the chart. Sometimes it was as short as thirty-four
days and sometimes as long as fifty-six days. I knew I was supposed to ovulate
fourteen days prior to having my period, but as these were the days before
ovulation detection kits, I had no earthly clue when that might be on any given
month.
As the
months came and went, I almost always felt sure that “this was the month.” My
breasts felt sore, I felt grumpy and tired and my period was late. After two
years I finally had to understand that those symptoms were just the normal PMS
symptoms I got, every stinking month! Like taking a bite of food in a
restaurant will signal the wait staff to come ask you a question, for me taking
a pregnancy test always brought on “Aunt Flo.”
In August
of 1994 I was feeling particularly bad. I was considering getting my hopes up,
but then made that regularly depressing discovery in the restroom. Of course I
did what any other warm-blooded depressed, monetarily challenged woman would
do. I went shopping. How else could I keep my mind off my failure? On the way
home I stopped and picked up a home pregnancy test out of habit.
I realize
that sounds totally and completely idiotic. It was, yet it was also a
compulsion at this point in my TTC career. I cried as I took the test, just
knowing I was about to get another “F” in conception. As with every other
month, I immediately tossed the soggy stick into the garbage and then grabbed
it out again and sat staring at it while the wetness slowly soaked it’s way up
the material inside the plastic. I closed my eyes, prayed, cried and lost all
hope. I opened my eyes and witnessed the most beautiful sight I had ever seen.
There were
two perfectly clear lines created by my very own pee-pee on the test stick. Two
of them! I cried even harder, prayed even harder and had two years of hope
overcome my entire existence in that moment.
Throughout
the rest of the day I planned how I would spring the big news to my husband for
this was going to be one of the most important days of our lives. I didn’t have
a pretty watch box and a gift would only raise his suspicions when I wasn’t
supposed to be spending any money. I’d just have to hold it behind my back.
As he
entered the house, I held both my hands behind my back and begged him to “pick
a hand!”
“I’ve had a long day and I’m not up for games right now!” he said, pushing past
me.
I positioned myself in front of him again and asked as sweetly as I could,
“Please just pick a hand. Any hand!”
“You don’t even have dinner on yet?” he snapped at me. “I am hungry and tired
and I am not up for games!”
I was so
used to accepting this kind of treatment that it bounced right over my happy
little head. I brought my arm around to my front and proffered the stick to
him.
“What the hell is this?” he grumbled, taking the stick from my hand and then in
horror he asked “Did you PEE on this?”
“I sure did!” I exclaimed proudly.
The slow realization of what he was holding finally worked its way up to the
stony expression on his face.
“Oh my God! Oh my God!” he stammered.
I then received one of the nicest and happiest hugs from him in the history of
our marriage.
Later on that evening on our way back from a dull army function, my husband
stopped in at the local pharmacy.
“What are we doing here?” I wondered aloud.
“I’m getting two more tests to make sure you didn’t mess the first one up and
get my hopes up for no reason.” He said as he closed the car door.
Both of those tests showed positive results too, much to his consternation and
my glee.
Though all
the tests showed I was pregnant, as I mentioned before, I had also gotten my
period. The bleeding came and went, as did my concern over the tiny life
nestled deep inside of me. The doctors were a bit befuddled and told me simply
not to get my hopes up. Like hell! After over two years of wanting a child with
all my heart, I wasn’t losing this one! I truly believed that nothing in the
world could have brought me down from my wondrous cloud.
*
See this? This is my good eye!
