Pursuit

One in six couples struggles with some form of infertility or difficulty conceiving a baby. I didn’t think my husband and I would be one of them. But as the months and then years—six-and-a-half years in all—slipped away, I watched my sister, friends, and coworkers get pregnant and have babies, and I thought, “Oh, my God, it’s going to be us, isn’t it? We’re the ones who aren’t going to get pregnant.”

When does it become clear to a couple that they are stepping into the one-in-six category? Doctors start to take a couple a little more seriously after they’ve tried to get pregnant—on their own—for a year. But we live in a culture of immediate gratification, so when we decided to start trying, I, like many women, began getting nervous after about three months. I made an appointment with my primary-care doctor when we still weren’t pregnant after six months of trying.

Curt and I were married on Valentine’s Day 1997. He was just shy of his thirtieth birthday, and I was a few months from thirty-three. By the end of that year, I thought we should start trying to have a baby. Curt said, “What’s the rush?” Though I agreed that the timing was not ideal—we were newlyweds, we’d just bought our first house, and we were committed to our careers—I wasn’t naive. I’d read the articles. I’d watched my friends. I knew my clock was ticking.

“But what if it takes us a while?” was my response. I had no idea that the rest of my thirties would be nearly consumed with our quest.

During those years, we met many couples in the same “club.” We all shared a dream—a desperate desire—to become parents, and we were all having trouble getting there. It didn’t matter much why: low sperm counts, egg quality issues, inability to maintain a pregnancy. There wasn’t even a need to discuss the details of what we were going through. It was just nice to connect with others who got it. Who understood.

We watched with hope as many of our “friends in fertility” became pregnant or adopted—or both. I respected the couples we knew who, after doing as much as they believed they could or wanted to, decided to abandon their quest. I understood from my reading and conversations with people trying to have babies what lay ahead—and that we might eventually choose to step away too. But we weren’t ready to consider that yet. We didn’t even want to think about quitting. I simply refused to accept the idea that I might not get pregnant.

I would also discover allies in unexpected places. Charlotte, Kristin Davis’s character in Sex and the City, for example. She preferred the term “reproductively challenged” to “infertile”—I loved that. I cried with Charlotte and fell in love with Harry, as she did, because his role in their shared dream of a baby reminded me of Curt. Charlotte gave me hope.

So did Brooke Shields. I remember racing home from the Uptown Lunds with her People magazine cover story following the birth of her first child after several invitros. The lesbian couple played by Sharon Stone and Ellen Degeneres trying to conceive with donor sperm on If These Walls Could Talk 2 gave me hope and a sense of what a struggle this was for so many people. I would learn, while spending time in the waiting rooms of reproductive medicine clinics, that infertility cuts across age, race, religion, and sexual distinctions.

My own journey began with a pill—Clomid. But not until after my obstetrician-gynecologist guided us through a battery of tests, which yielded only encouraging results: a regular ovulation cycle, clear fallopian tubes, acceptable levels of cervical mucus, adequate sperm count, and no concern that my physiology was fighting off our best attempts to get me pregnant. Clomid is a kind of superovulator that boosts what you’ve got—possibly even creating more eggs. In simple terms, it makes you more fertile.

I took Clomid for three months, and we continued to try to get pregnant the old-fashioned way; then we tried three months of Clomid paired with interuterine insemination (IUI), a form of artificial insemination, in an attempt to make sure the sperm was getting as close to where the eggs are as possible. (It drove me nuts when I would update friends and family on our efforts, and they’d look at me in a befuddled way and say, “Oh, you mean like with a turkey baster?”) In hindsight, I wonder how the doctors knew how many eggs I was producing while on Clomid. I wasn’t monitored with ultrasound to see exactly how my body was responding and how many eggs I was producing. What if I super superovulated and produced six eggs and each fertilized? When I hear stories about couples pregnant with four, five, or six babies, I think, “They weren’t being monitored.” That doesn’t happen when a couple works with a responsible reproductive medicine clinic. Which, after our failed six months, is where we went next.

The next five years was a rollercoaster ride involving doctors, clinics, books, dietary changes, alternative medicine, tests, pills, injections, and tears. Through it all, Curt and I lived our life. We changed jobs twice each. We moved. We took a few trips. And, of course, we kept trying to get pregnant the familiar way, joking, “Hey, if it happens at this resort, we’ll call the baby Westin,” or, “If we conceive in Italy, she’ll be Florence.” There was an odd upside to our infertility: With so many of our friends home with their new babies, Curt and I went on hundreds of dates and lived a life of spontaneity. We lived minutes from downtown Minneapolis and took full advantage of it. There was rarely a social function we missed. We even asked ourselves if we really needed children in our lives to be happy. I’m sure many people who knew us assumed that we’d chosen not to have kids.

But always the heart-to-heart discussions came back to our profound desire to be parents, to create a family. Though we were having a great time together and enjoying successful careers, we wanted more out of life. We wanted family ski trips. We wanted a fourth generation to experience the cabin my grandparents built. We wanted to have children and grandchildren around the Christmas tree when we were old and gray. We wanted to have our parents involved in our lives not only as our parents but as our children’s grandparents. Curt and I were on the same page about this, which was critical to our staying the course. And though our voices and opinions carried equal weight, Curt encouraged me to take the lead in seeking medical intervention, because, he said, I’d bear the greatest emotional and physical stress.