In an Unexpected Place

I’m not quite sure how the hell I wound up here.

In this place of perpetual sadness. In this place where pure, unadulterated jealousy makes me want to spit at every pregnant woman I see. In this place where my husband stands there, constantly watching for signs that all the pain and frustration and hopelessness are finally going to make me implode.

R and I started out in that happy place where all couples begin when they’re first trying to start their families. We naively thought this would be easy. We even planned what month we would conceive, when we would make the announcement to our parents that they are grandparents-to-be, what birthstone the baby would have. (Think amethyst - I love purple.)

Of course it would work that way. Why wouldn’t it? After all, that’s just the way the universe revolves, right? And besides, I’d spent eight years on birth control pills, certain that if I forgot to take one tiny little pill, we’d wind up with a house full of kids overnight.

Yeah, well. Three canceled IUIs, one joyous pregnancy followed by a pre-Mother’s Day miscarriage 15 days later, one more canceled IUI, and four completed but failed IUIs later, there we were last week. Ready to move on to IVF.

Then the news came. High percentage of sperm DNA fragmentation = baaaaad, low percentage = good. It’s the one time a sperm-related number being low is good. And R’s sperm showed an extremely high amount of fragmentation, more than double the amount that is considered acceptable.

So now we’re on a doctor-ordered nine month break to see if things can be improved on the sperm front. It’s not our only IF problem, it’s just the latest one.

But I refuse to wait 18 or 20 or 24 more months to become a mom if I can help it. So we’re moving on to adoption.

And now here I stand, in a place that I wouldn’t have expected to find myself even just a week ago. But finally, God willing, it’s a true path to motherhood.