I played dolls and house and all the things when I was little, but I was never the girl who had the life goal of being a wife and mother. In fact, even in college I maintained that I wanted to be a career woman, wouldn’t marry and didn’t want kids. I see this posturing now for what it was — my defense against recreating the home life I grew up in.
But you know how it is. God laughs and all that. So along came Chris and the subsequent marriage, kids and family we created. I did not experience an instant “I’ve met the man I’m going to marry” moment with him. We were in college and again, I was firmly in the not-getting-married camp at the time.
Our path to marriage was more of a slow and steady journey. We lived together first, and after a few years I came to realize that I could not imagine my life without this person by my side. That he made me better, he made me happy, and he actually made me want to get married.
From there it was a short trek to craving babies. I had officially left my no marriage/no kids self behind.
I was not worried about getting pregnant. An abortion after a drunken college road trip night had almost made me feel smug. We knew the plumbing worked, so to speak, so I had entered the quest for motherhood with the naive confidence of a newly mobile toddler.
But after several months of trying to no avail, we were getting a little frustrated. After a year, we were worried and officially into the “time to investigate and see if there’s an issue” zone. And there were some issues - with both of us.
Chris’s sperm count was low, so he had to stop riding a bike, taking super hot showers, and soaking in hot tubs (not that this was even a thing for him - this wasn’t the 70s). I had a little bit of endometriosis and had a surgical “clean out” to handle that. But months after these interventions and with no other identifiable problems, we still weren’t pregnant.
First came pills. I took an ovulation stimulating drug that had me tearing off my clothes while doing laundry or walking through the house when a major hot flash would hit. The drug gave me an all access pass to a sneak peek of menopause. But after several months of these decidedly unsexy impromptu strip teases, still nothing as far as my uterus was concerned.
Next came artificial insemination. This involved daily injections and monitoring of hormone levels, frequent lunch hour runs to the fertility doctor for blood draws, and Chris jerking off into a cup at the doctor’s office. But after only one try, it worked. We were expecting.
Until we weren’t.
I started spotting about five weeks in. I had read all the books. I knew there could be harmless spotting, so I tried not to panic.
I panicked.
A trip to the doctor’s office confirmed my fears. No heartbeat. No baby. We had told everyone we were expecting, so now we had to tell everyone we weren’t.
Many months later, after multiple new rounds of artificial insemination, we were thrilled to be pregnant again. We anxiously marked off the days until we got past the point when we lost the pregnancy the first time, then anxiously marked off the subsequent days after that.
We were almost to the end of the first trimester when my grandmother was diagnosed with a very fast-moving terminal cancer. I got to tell her that her first great grandchild was on the way. But shortly after she died, it wasn’t.
The blood was the same color the second time as it was the first. But the loss was more familiar. Less shocking but maybe more frightening. This was no longer a fluke or anomaly. It was both a pattern and a problem.
Like the first time, we discovered there was no heartbeat before my body did the work of actually expelling the pregnancy. I was instructed to save the fetus if possible so that it could be tested.
After several tortuous hours of cramping and contractions, I used a plastic cup to scoop the mess out of the toilet. A white fleshy blob with no form or features was attached to what looked like a bloody stone. I remember showing it to Chris. I don’t remember what we did with it after that.
I felt hollowed out and bloated at the same time. Both.
A few days later, I’m on our back deck sanding down a piece of furniture I’m going to repaint when the neighbor two doors down who happens to be repairing something on his roof yells out, “Is that for the baby’s room, Leslie?”
“Lost the baby. Had a miscarriage,” I yell back over the fences.
“We just found out we’re pregnant,” he shouts back.
“Congratulations,’” I yell.
I immediately want to flee and retreat indoors to let the impact of this punch to the gut subside, but I will myself to continue on with the task at hand, at least for a few minutes, before making my escape from my own backyard.
As our friends got pregnant and gave birth to their first and even second babies, our infertility battle slogged on. There’s nothing quite like the roller coaster ride of hormones, fear, frustration, despair, anxiety and hope when your singular goal is to become a parent, but you have no control over the process or guarantee of success. Every failed cycle is at least another month of waiting to try again. Even longer when the body is healing from miscarriage.
When friends announced pregnancies or invited us to baby showers, we were truly happy for them, but still these moments stabbed and stung. And we never knew whether or not to accept their invitations. Would our absence make it seem like we weren’t celebrating their joy? Would our presence cast a shadow over the festivities and bring everyone else down?
We did round after round of artificial insemination. Then we moved onto the big guns of IVF. After our two early pregnancies and subsequent miscarriages, nothing worked.
So after more than four years of doctor appointments, surgeries, injections, side effects, drained savings, friends’ babies and a swirling tornado of emotions, we waved the white flag. We let go of our pregnancy dreams like we were dropping the rope after losing a game of tug-of-war.
We turned our focus to adoption. There was a learning curve about the options and the process involved. Everyone knows “how the sausage is made” when it comes to having babies, but it takes some research and education to figure out the path to adopt.
It was a lucky gift that one of the most reputable and established adoption agencies in the country happens to be in our city. I had actually done some writing work for the agency, so I had a basic knowledge of its services. But when we attended our first orientation meeting, we were shocked to be one of only a handful of local couples. People were there from all over the US and even as far away as the UK and Australia.
We knew we were in the right place when the first thing the agency director told us was that unlike with the infertility journey we had been on, there was a 100% success rate at the end of the adoption rainbow. The process would most likely take way longer than a pregnancy, but the outcome was eventually guaranteed.
There’s a shift that has to happen between letting go of one dream and grabbing on to another, but after talking with other families created through adoption and sitting with saying goodbye to a biological child, we were all in. We were ready to dive into the lengthy and complicated process.
There were forms upon forms upon forms, health evaluations, interviews, fingerprinting and background checks, home visits and character references. There were hoops to jump through and financial maneuverings to complete. We were exhausted by the new kind of slog toward parenthood and excited for the first time in a long time. Both.
Only a few months after completing our application requirements though, we were thrilled to be “approved and waiting.” Waiting was the key word, and we were warned that this would be the slowest and hardest part. After years of trying to have a baby, we were horribly tired of waiting, but wait we would.
Through a crazy, surprising and unlikely turn of events which warrants its own story, we became matched with a birth mother only a few months later. We were expecting.
Then, remarkably, we were expecting again.
I was a dance teacher and would always stop and practice my pirouettes in the big open space between our kitchen and dining room. I noticed one day that spinning had started to make me feel kind of “ick”. Eventually I had to stop and sit for a minute after my turning sessions. Finally I had to pull the plug on my daily pirouette practice.
I hadn’t really allowed my brain to go to the pregnancy place. No, we hadn’t been using any protection, but we hadn’t been for years and had never gotten pregnant - even with all the rounds of intervention and treatment. So I didn’t even dare to hope. And I hadn’t said anything to Chris about my dance fueled queasiness.
But one day after visiting my beloved Grandad in the hospital (he had fallen and broken his neck while making black eyed peas, which is yet a whole other story for another day) and without thinking much about it, I stopped at a drug store across the street from the hospital and purchased a People Magazine and a pregnancy test. I then sat and had lunch at a nearby Greek restaurant, read my magazine and tried not to think about the EPT that was now practically screaming at me from the car.
I went home, peed on the stick and was incredulous to find out I was pregnant. I called my infertility doctor, who we were no longer in treatment with, and he told me not to get too excited until they could confirm both that I was pregnant and that it would be viable. We didn’t tell anyone, and we tried to focus only on the baby we were adopting in the meantime. But a couple of days later, the doctor confirmed that we were indeed expecting, there was a heartbeat, and unbelievably, I was already past the point of both prior miscarriages. In fact, I was almost through the first trimester.
The testing I had undergone after the second miscarriage had revealed an immune disorder (antiphospholipid antibody syndrome, if you want to google it) where my body reacted to a fetus as if it were an invader and basically starved it of nutrition through the formation of blood clots in the placenta. So even though I had made it almost through the first trimester already, I had to give myself daily injections of blood thinner for the duration of the pregnancy.
Our bigger concern at first though was that the birth mother of the baby we were already expecting would no longer want us to adopt her baby since we would now be having a biological child of our own. What is hard for people who haven’t been through adoption to understand is that even if your baby isn’t formed from your genes or growing in your uterus, it is still your baby. We had the exact same dreams, hopes and envisioned future for our adopted child that was on the way as we did for our unexpected biological child. Although we weren’t physically attached to that first baby, we were undeniably emotionally and mentally connected just the same as if it were growing in my womb.
We didn’t want to tell anyone about our miracle pregnancy until we were all the way through our first trimester, and we wanted to tell our birth mother before anyone else. After living with the constant worry of whether or not we could get and stay pregnant, it was surreal to now live with the worry of two actual babies-to-be making it to the finish line without things falling apart.
When we nervously told our amazing birth mother our news, the immediate words out of her mouth were, “But you’re still going to take my baby, right?!” We were overjoyed. And we were now officially expecting two babies. Both.
One was born in March, one in June. They are three months apart almost to the day. I call them my twisted version of twins which seems appropriate given the long and pretzel-y road it took to get them.
There are many stories to be told about raising two children three months apart. (Here’s one about all the ways my kids tried to maim each other growing up.) And there’s a whole book to be written about the surprises, synchronicities and struggles that made up our journey to parenthood. But the most important part of the story is this: Those two souls were meant to be together. They are ours, and we are theirs. Raising them has been the most profound privilege and my life’s biggest purpose.
The thing I thought I didn’t want to be ended up being the thing I was born to do.
Here’s one final twist though. I would not be the mother I’ve been if I hadn’t weathered the storm of uncertainty, loss and heartache that led to my kids. I didn’t have the luxury of taking motherhood for granted, so I’ve always been acutely aware of the gift that it is. I’ve been fully present and engaged which has helped me be the best mom I could possibly be. So I hold deep gratitude for the pain of infertility and the sacredness of being a mom. Both.
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I'm happy you finally got what you wanted.
As a mom of twins I can’t imagine! 🤯 It’s one thing to be on same exact routine. Another to be only three months later. Superwoman! Also this happened to a friend. She was approved to adopt to very young boys from Haiti when she got pregnant. All are blessings!