Having kids in not for sissies. Almost every couple wants to start a family at some point, or at least the THINK they do. They visit with friends who have babies or toddlers, or they have nieces and nephews that they love and feel close to, and they see how great it all looks from the outside. So at some point, most couples decide that it's time to start a family and commence the baby-making process.
My wife and I went about it in what we thought was an intelligent, reasoned way. We waited until we were settled into our respective professions, had good jobs, some money in the bank, and a had house that would be a good home to our prospective crop of children. We thought we were prepared.
What we didn't know, of course, that being prepared to have have children is abject bullshit. It can't be done. Sure, you can put all the pieces in place, wait until you're financially stable, decorate the baby's room, start a college fund, and move to a place in a good school district, but this is all just window-dressing for the carnage that's to come.
In the beginning it's kind of fun. You have all these great ideas and visions of Sunday mornings in bed watching cartoons, their college graduation, their wedding, and grandchildren on your knee in your later years. This is how I know, to a moral certainty, that there is a God and that he has an amazing sense of humor.
We started the baby-making process in earnest in 1994, and, like all great adventures, the beginning was filled with promise, optimism and a LOT of sex. Unfortunately, while a lot of sex is fun, we weren't having much success with the getting pregnant part. We tried everything. Different positions, sex during the day, sex at night, sex in the afternoon, yet nothing seemed to work. Worse yet, sex was beginning to feel like work. I remember being at work, in the board room with all of the senior executives from all over the world, in the middle of a critical meeting. The phone in the room rang, and the receptionist asked for me. My boss, who answered, handed me the phone with a quizzical expression and went back to the table. It was my wife. "Come home NOW, I'm ovulating". I couldn't interrupt the meeting to speak with my boss so I passed him a note, "Pam's ovulating, I have to go!" was all it said. He looked at me, smiled, and gave me a thumbs up. Then he turned to the assembled executives and said "Tony has an urgent matter to attend to, so he'll be leaving in 5 minutes, but I expect him back later this evening", and off I went. My wife monitored her temperature, drank herbal concoctions guaranteed to make her lady-parts fertile ground for baby-making, meditated, ate crazy foods and exercised. But, try as we might, month after month, no seed would take root.
After a few months we decided that seeing a fertility specialist might be helpful, although I'm pretty sure that by that point we had the mechanics figured out pretty well. So my wife, always good at the details, put together a list of perspective doctors that we could go see. Now being of Italian ancestry, the first thing I looked for on the list was a doctor with a last name that ended in vowel. Unfortunately, not one name on the list met my criteria, so I went to the next best thing, a Frenchman.
In my experience, if you want advice on sex, you gotta go to a guy with a vowel at the end his name, or, failing that, someone from the country that invented a very popular sexual activity. So, seeing a doctor named Pierre on the list intrigued me, and we made an appointment.
On the day of our first visit to the fertility specialist, I was ready with my questions, prepared to sound like I knew what I was talking about, and even had some notes that I thought I would refer to during the visit. We went into the office, and I was not disappointed. Pierre had a thick French accent, a big nose, and the kind of glasses that make you look intelligent. He looked so French that I half-expected him to light up and break out the brandy.
Not only did that not happen, but I was subjected to an hour of clinical descriptions of the male and female reproductive systems, with diagrams and photos. Now I personally am a fan of the lady-parts, but the pictures he had were completely devoid of artistic merit, and the lighting was so harsh they reminded me of autopsy photos. I think I almost threw up in my mouth when he pulled out the close-ups.
He then informed us that he needed to run some tests on each of us, to ascertain what, if anything, was preventing us from getting to the pregnancy promised-land. I felt a little bad for my wife, who had to have her legs up for 20 minutes, followed by MRIs,an ultrasound, and an X-Ray. Also, she had to pee in a cup. I, on the other hand, had but a single task to complete, and it involved porn and a plastic cup, so I figured "Hey, anything for a good cause" and agreed to do my part, trying not to sound too eager.
At the end of the first meeting he wrote out the scripts for the tests we were to take, and asked if we had any questions. My wife, being the detail-oriented one, had a two-page, double-spaced list that she went through, taking copious notes and making references to journals I thought only doctors and research scientists at NASA read. When it was my turn to ask the probing, thoughtful and intelligent questions I pretty much drew a blank. That's when I saw the video tapes behind his desk. So, without really thinking about it, I blurted out "Can we see the breast self-examination tape?". Pierre didn't seem fazed by my question in the least. He thought about it for a few seconds, leaned forward and said "when you get her pregnant, I'll GIVE you that tape". So I had that to look forward to.
After the tests were completed (Side note: fertility clinic porn sucks, so bring your own or be prepared to be there a while) we met with the doctor again. He told us that there was nothing seriously wrong, and that my wife had a mild case of endometriosis, which is an inflammation of the uterus. He wrote her a prescription for that, and for some fertility drugs, and off we went to restart the procreation derby once again.
If you've never seen a woman on fertility drugs, I envy you. Every month, when a woman gets her "lady time", a number of changes take place in her body. Not the least of which is a hormone dump that signals it tampon time. Now some women go through this every month without a hitch. I've never met one, and I think you'd have a better chance of finding a unicorn in your garage than finding one yourself. My wife had terrible "lady time" episodes, like the time she flew into a rage because she walked to the mailbox and the mail hadn't come yet. This was the baseline that I was dealing with.
I don't know if you know what's IN fertility drugs, but let me tell you, it's a hormone bomb. One minute everything is coming up roses and the next minute your at Def-Con 5 running for the underground bunkers. The next several months were a roller-coaster ride, lots of shots, lots of sex, lots of yelling and screaming (but not during the sex) and still no luck.
Eventually we grew tired of the stress, so we decided to take a break from the hormones and the pressure. We were spent, stressed-out and feeling dejected. I suggested a weekend getaway, a hiking trip in Shenandoah National park. It was beautiful July, not too hot, we hadn't had any real fun in eleven months, and we needed to get away from sleeping in the "bed of disappointment".
We left on a cool Friday morning, hiked up into the mountains and put the entire experience on hold for a couple of days. The weather was beautiful, the scenery was breathtaking, and we began to feel ourselves again. What we didn't plan on was how early it gets dark in the mountains, even in the middle of summer. So when we pitched our tent, ate dinner and finished cleaning up. It was about then that we discovered that there really wasn't much to do once the sun went down.
Well, the WAS one thing...
Our daughter Kate was born nine months later.
Just a short note to those who've been following along: Thanks for reading! I started this blog for friends and family who've enjoyed hearing the stories and for my daughter, who wanted something a bit more tangible to share with her friends. I had no idea so many people would be interested. Please feel free to share the url of my blog with anyone you think might be interested. You can cut and past from the top of the browser or here: http://www.beingtony.blogspot.com
Thanks again for reading!
Tony
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