It’s usually awesome to share news of pregnancy and birth. While dark tales of recurring baby failures and failed treatments is a tricky subject to talk about, due to the nature of it’s… ahem.. darkness. Unfortunately, the emotionally, financially and physically draining pursuit of “baby making” is a reality for many. Statistically speaking, 1 in 8 couples suffer from infertility. As I write our personal dark story I am faced with an internal conflict. I have been eager to climb the highest mountain and scream “we’re pregnant” when, and only IF we are successful. The journey to have our one and only precious boy was long and painful, so we kind of had a sense of what we were getting into when we made the decision to further expand our family. The conflict exists because there’s too much stigma around infertility and secondary infertility. The world is over populated, existing babies need loving homes, and it’s hard for infertile couples with no babies to understand the struggles of couples trying for the second or third time, understandbly so. In a world, where people are getting pregnant so easily – some don’t even have sex, they merely look at each other and get pregnant! Some are on birth control, have sex ONE time, while on their period and use condoms AND get pregnant. You get it. We thought if we could have one baby we would be satisfied forever. But here we are again, desiring another baby and failing immensely. It does not make us selfish because we aren’t pursuing adoption, and we want to add another life to the 7+ billion and growing. Furthermore, as a professional, It’s extremely difficult to talk about this stuff because I feel the focus of my work may be questioned. My co-workers might read this and doubt the quality of my work. I can assure all, I meet my work deadlines just the same, whether or not we are undergoing fertility treatments. I was a programmer long before the treatments. In fact, my work actually improves after a failed cycle and becomes an outlet for me to keep my mind off the personal failures. Also, I’m one of those lucky people who gets gratification from their work. Now that’s been settled let’s move on to the failures, it needs to be spoken about because it needs space. It can be really isolating to go thru negative experiences and keep it all in. The reality is women reproduce and lactate and menstruate and therefore need support. So, for those reasons, I’ve decided to openly share our sad story of failed attempts at baby-making.
But first I will go into why we want a second baby.
Our first and only child was the result of a long journey of painful and expensive treatments. When all hope was lost, our prayers were finally answered. Indeed, we were blessed and pregnant. Our little miracle safely arrived into this world over two years ago. We were on top of the world. As challenging and exhausting, not to mention expensive parenting is, we LOVE it. We love our freshly painted walls getting written on, we love being woken up several times throughout the night, we love planning our weekends around swings and slides, we love being in bed by 9pm, we love watching Thomas and Friends, Elmo and Disney movies (yeah, right?!). Our boy’s innocence, laughter and sweetness brings immeasurable joy, more than we could’ve ever imagined and we wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. So, for all those reasons we want to have another one!
Earlier in the summer, we went into IVF treatment with a ton of hope and excitement. This was our third cycle, overall, and it failed. Even though it was crushing we were left with a frozen embryo, a chance to do another cycle, a cycle without painful and incredibly expensive injections. Another hope to fulfill our dream of giving Castor a sibling and completing our family. Sadly, it was not in the cards for us. Yet Another Fail. Beyond Devastated. Crushed. It’s really hard to congratulate our friends and family who are getting pregnant for the second and third time and their toddlers will have life-long friends to grow old with. After the last failure, we will re-group in the trenches, we need to get our bearings back on before we can even conceive another attempt, because, oh boy this process will burn a deep hole through your bank. And that’s not even the worst part. It’s the emotional turmoil from failing at a perfectly natural biological process that everyone else *seems* to be so great at! People struggling at it have a hard time talking about it because the society has deemed topics of infertility and miscarriage shameful, embarrassing and trivial. Once you share, it also attracts well-intentioned, but hurtful unsolicited advice. If you must comment, here are some examples of how to respond in a helpful manner, “sorry to hear that”, “that sucks”, “good luck for the future” NOT “at least you have one child, some have none.” “have you looked into adoption?” “IVF is so expensive, at least you have money to afford it.” Grrr..
Yesterday, I came across an article that gave me some courage to share our personal painful story. Dwyane Wade’s wife recently shared her story of infertility and shed some light on this topic. I was very glad to see it because her voice carries so much more weight than mine. Her speaking up makes it less shameful for people like us when we talk about this painful subject. Far more celebrities talk about their pregnancies and child birth than the other side of the coin. Famous and rich people go through these experiences as well but keep it in just like us. We need more voices!
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