I met Cindy (whom I refer to in my head only as “Reedster”) at Blissdom in February. We were both newbies, and well, maybe a little lost. Or at least, I was. We managed to hang out a little bit, at a couple of the parties, but not enough. Isn’t that the way it goes? Since the conference, I’ve fallen madly in love with her writing, and you’ll see why in a minute. She is LAUGH OUT LOUD hilarious. This post about her WAHM wardrobe? Yeah, this post had me cracking up. Out loud. Literally, LOLing.

She just wrote this post that is crazy good, about the so-called Mommy Wars. I know I’ve got my weapon ready. Are you feeling down about your homemaking skills? Go read this. I insist. And then come back so you can read what she wrote for us. You won’t want to miss it.

The unbelievable part? She’s only been blogging since the end of last year. Amazing.

Welcome, Reedster!

WE’RE GONNA GET THIS ONE PREGNANT!

I married later in life, at age 35, after years of lawyering, teaching law, and running my own law firm. I was never one of those girls who babysat every chance she got, never the one asking to be passed the new baby, never the one worrying about my biological clock running out. In short, you wouldn’t look at me and scream: Maternal! (Well, you still might not.)

And so even after my husband Matt and I married, I was in no rush to start a family. Several years went by and I’d check in with my clock every now and then and think, “Huh. Still not ticking.” Finally, around age 38, Matt and I decided, “How about now?” So we started the process of “trying for a  baby.”

Nothing happened. And nothing continued to happen. So I visited an OB-GYN. Someone I had never been to before, since I went to my primary care doctor otherwise for all my annual lady-needs. And he was a champ. He claps me on the shoulder and shouts out at his nurse, “WE’RE GONNA GET THIS ONE PREGNANT IN NO TIME, DON’T YOU WORRY!” Um, we are? Me, you, and the nurse, in some kind of gynecological threesome? Not exactly “the old-fashioned way,” but . . . whatever.

But alas, despite his enthusiasm, that doctor couldn’t “get me pregnant,” so he sent me to a fertility clinic, which I always accidentally called an “infertility clinic”, which I realized they weren’t too keen on. I walked in past what I would deem THE GIANT WALL OF PHOTOGENIC MULTIPLES featuring all the babies conceived by clients of the clinic. The first time appointment turned out to be a group meeting/video presentation on fertility treatments, complete with PowerPoint accompanied by jazzy music. I felt like a loser because I had no idea this was supposed to be a “couples event” and I had come solo, as I tend to do to my own personal doctor appointments. So, surprise! Ten other couples were there, strained faces, graying hair, frown lines. We were getting older and this was clearly our last hope.

But you wouldn’t have known that by the presentation! No, it outlined an alphabet soup of ever-intrusive methods by which we could attempt to foil mother nature and have sperm successfully meet egg. Try Clomid! That didn’t work? Try IUI! That didn’t work, go to the next slide! Try IVF! That didn’t work? Try ICSI! Or GIFT! Or “Assisted Hatching”! Or egg donors!

And then one slide with tiny text flew by that had statistics on how often these methods worked, by age group. Surprise! Pushing 40? You might want to get out your cheaters and read that last slide a little more closely, because you were getting into the single digits, percentage-wise, on some of those. But it seemed like we had so many options before that! I want to go back to the hatching slide! That seemed cool!

Feeling lucky, almost-40-year-old lady? Take your pile of cash and place it on a single number, and roll the dice.

Nevertheless, I was there for diagnosis first, so I made follow-up appointments to look more closely at the plumbing, while I sped a warm vial of Matt’s manseed to the clinic to test him out. (For some reason, he didn’t want to use the clinic’s “production room” for this. Huh.) Turns out, it was “my fault.” (They don’t say that, but you certainly feel it). The tests showed I had closed Fallopian tubes and a “slightly T-Shaped uterus”.  But they were happy to roto-rooter out the tubes! And I left, with a prescription, a video on injecting myself with Clomid, and what I liked to call the Fertility Filofax – a complicated daybook where I could keep track of all my fertility treatments and injection reminders.

I went home and did some more research on this whole T-shaped uterus thing. Turns out, it’s sort of super-high risk to get pregnant with one of those, which they didn’t mention. Also, turns out, I would have to stop taking some medication during pregnancy that is sort of important to me not going crazy. Turns out, they didn’t have a counselor on staff at the clinic to help me talk through the issues of whether getting pregnant at all was such a hot idea for a candidate like me, especially given the low percentages of successful pregnancies in my age group even from the most invasive treatments. And our piles of cash were limited. Let’s just say you wouldn’t trip over it.

So I never went back. My mom was visiting then, and I remember lying on my couch while she and my husband sat in the living room and crying a bit and then just saying, “I can’t be pregnant.” And we nodded all around. And that was that. It was, oddly, kind of a relief.

What about your husband, people ask? Didn’t he want a “child of his own”? Um, well, he has two now, but if you mean a child of his loins, well, no. Our gene pool isn’t such that we thought humanity would shed tears if we didn’t perpetuate it (no offense, families!). He wanted a family. I wanted a family. Being pregnant was dangerous to my physical and mental health.

Thankfully, there was a beautiful option for us, and we quickly and easily embraced it. We could take our one pile of cash and use it in a much less gambling-on-a-positive-outcome kind of way, family-wise. International adoption certainly wasn’t easy – we were fingerprinted probably a dozen times and filled out stacks of paperwork and were home studied and interviewed and flew across the world – twice – to bring home our girls – first from China and then Ethiopia. It was labor, in a whole different way, but if you’ve never flown home 27 hours from Africa to Dulles while both you and your infant have diarrhea and you are dangerously low on wipes, don’t knock it.

Funny thing. Turns out that Fertility Filofax wasn’t covered by insurance. Stupid thing cost me 25 bucks.

* * *

Every woman’s struggle with infertility is different. I personally hate any lumping together of women in categories to try to equate their stories. For many women, fertility treatments are a blessing and a godsend. This is my story only. My reactions to the fertility clinic I visited, my coming to terms with infertility, and my family’s decision (quickly) to move on to adoption as the best choice for us. 

You can follow Reedster on Twitter and over on her blog. Tell her I sent you.