A Look Back On The Last Decade

In 2010, Chris and I had been married for a year and a half—and trying for a baby just as long. We still had that enthusiastic view that enough sex would eventually lead to a pregnancy—so we weren’t all that worried. After all, it took my mom seven months to get pregnant with me and three years for them to get pregnant with my sister. Infertility wasn’t a blip on my radar. It was just taking some time. I remember that year as being the “easiest.” Telling everyone we were waiting to start our family because both of us were still in school. Which, to be clear, I’m glad we didn’t get pregnant right away. Nursing school, at this point was over, but I was working weird home care hours and Chris spent most of his evenings locked away in his office working on finishing up his MBA. The timing, as it was, wasn’t right.

In 2011, we bought our first house, after pressing pause on what was now cycles of Clomid and the horror that was timed intercourse. This house was more than we could have asked, a home screaming to be filled with kids. It had five bedrooms…perfect for two kids. Hey, maybe even a third and the biggest room could house bunk beds. The reality is that two of the three upstairs rooms remained storage units for the first four years.

In 2012, we knew the time had come where we were going to need a little help from a fertility clinic, and so for one last “hurrah” we took a trip to San Francisco. It was a vacation away from the stress of trying to conceive. I started a blog, called “Who Shot Down My Stork?” a name that made me snort-laugh the first forty-five times I read it. Also, I was really becoming tired of tricking my husband into bed because the timing was right, the smiley face had appeared on the ovulation stick, and I was definitely tired already of the first IUI cycle we were going through.

My world was rocked in 2013 when we were hit with that first box of IVF meds. Syringes. Vials. Injection pens. Bottles of pills. That sharps container. I was ready. I made my IVF calendar. I did everything right. And the first and only pregnancy I had with my own eggs came and went, silent and fast, and after that, IVF could go to hell.

2014 brought a trip to Colorado, again, one more hurrah before the third and final IVF using my own eggs before we had decided our next move would be donor eggs. When that failed, we took that crazy leap and ended up in Texas, across the country where we had a new clinic, a new doctor, and a new treatment plan. And again, it didn’t work.

Of course, in 2015, was the year of Olivia. That final donor egg cycle where we would do the unthinkable and put an end to our infertility treatments if this one didn’t work. But it would work. And it would also give us three frozen embryos for a future transfer. Olivia was born towards the end of the year, making it the year I’ll always remember as the one where we beat my infertility.

2016 was filled with a whole lot of squishy baby. It was wild. I didn’t know exactly how to be a parent, but I knew how to be infertile and I struggled. I felt like a fraud like I cheated in getting this perfect little baby I didn’t deserve. I was overwhelmed with motherhood and while infertility felt far away from me, those three embryos weren’t far from my thoughts. Thinking we would one day go back and do it all over again filled me with hope and dread, all at the same time. I wanted to be a mom, and I didn’t want to be infertile anymore.

2017 brought us a spirited two-year-old. She talked incessantly, but I was the only one who could understand her 95% of the time. We hiked. Day trips out to parks to walk the trails took on new meaning for us, because we were doing it with a little girl who was the result of countless injections and tears. She was our miracle, the baby we’d fantasized about when we would hike alone years ago. “Just think, someday we’re going to be doing this with a kid,” we’d say to each other.

I fought those feelings of hating infertility again in 2018. We had been saving for this next cycle as we raised our three-year-old. I was going to have to stop nursing. I didn’t want to go back to the shots, the doctor appointments, the uncertainly and absolute hell that is fertility treatments. We took our last vacation as a family of three, and before I knew it, we were back in the warmth of Texas again, to transfer 1 of our 3 embryos. It was the one with the highest quality, the one that we were pretty sure would stick around and we could go back for kid #3 in a few years. But it didn’t work.

But 2019. 2019 was a good year. I mean, they’ve all been good years. But that was the cycle that completed our family. That gave us Emelia, a spitting image of her sister. That brought an end to an era of infertility. Her birth, while traumatic in her own way brought an incredible amount of healing for me.

I will start off 2020 as a family of four. With my two daughters. Even writing that down gives me a warmth that spreads through my body. My daughters. This decade was a beautiful complex mosaic of injections and baby blankets. Of ultrasound machines and fuzzy little heads. Of loss and grief and indescribable thankfulness. It was both fighting tooth and nail and submitting in the humblest of ways. 2020 brings with it a new beginning. Of saying goodbye to ten years of trying for the family we have now and being both incredibly sad and happy about it.

So I guess we’ll see where it takes us.