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.

I wanted to pursue a pregnancy. As Dr. C., my first reproductive endocrinologist, tried to formulate the right cocktail of hormones to help get me pregnant, I wondered, “Why me?” (I wrote the doctor’s name and clinic on my calendar so often that both names became potential baby names.) I tried not to feel sorry for us. I didn’t want to become a victim of infertility, so I slowly began to own it. I decided my infertility was a part of who I was as a person and who Curt and I were as a couple, and it was nothing to be ashamed of. I had heartfelt discussions with gay friends, whom I often found easier to talk to than some of my girlfriends who had children. I guess I thought they would understand how I sometimes felt left out, how my feelings were hurt when we weren’t invited to gatherings that included couples with children. I knew my girlfriends dearly wanted me to experience what they were experiencing, and not sharing more than I did with them saved all of us some pain and sadness.

Curt didn’t want to talk about it with anyone. He felt it was private—no one’s business. Early on, I wasn’t always truthful with him about whom I’d shared our concerns, but not talking about it made me feel as though I was hiding a shameful secret. Of course, my openness had its consequences, including the ridiculous things some people would say and the sometimes insensitive comments from those closest to us. Some people seemed to think that because they’d had sex and gotten pregnant they were experts on the subject. Or those who questioned what our doctor was or wasn’t doing. Some with a more outspoken faith seemed to call my own spirituality into question, as though I would get pregnant if I prayed more—wanted it more. One friend told me she didn’t feel the need to do anything “heroic” despite her own unsuccessful attempts for another pregnancy. Heroic? I didn’t consider myself heroic for seeking help from reproductive experts. I considered myself a parent without a child. I knew that if a child of mine ever became seriously ill, I would do everything I could to get the appropriate help. Why wouldn’t I pursue the best available medical know-how and technology to bring my child into the world?

The funny thing is—those who get pregnant easily may not know what I know. That the heavens open during intimate times with your partner even if you don't conceive. That magical things happen around you even when the spirit of a baby doesn’t enter your womb. I experienced all those amazing moments and didn’t get pregnant. But every beautiful, magical thing that happened in my life was a sign that everything was going to be OK. Because we never gave up. As Curt would remind me, our journey could be over tomorrow, or the next day, or the next.

Many people close to us wondered why we didn’t adopt. Well, we talked about it—a lot. I remember thinking at one point during our struggle, "If this had been twenty years earlier, we would have an adopted child by now." Twenty years earlier—ten years earlier, for that matter—the reproductive technology we were looking into wasn’t available. If couples couldn’t conceive, they adopted. That wasn’t the case today. And in some respects, the additional possibilities made the decisions harder. We knew adoption was a loving way to bring children into our lives—and, if I’d been forty years old at the time instead of thirty-five, we probably would have adopted.

Though I’m open and honest with Curt, I met often with a therapist and spoke of my desire to be pregnant. One comment in particular enabled me to proceed without guilt or feelings of selfishness. “We’ve established that one way or another you and Curt will be parents, which means you may well be grandparents some day,” she said. “If we flash forward to the future, and you and Curt are on the front porch waiting for your grandchildren to arrive, will it really matter whether you’re seventy or seventy-three?” Of course not. So as much as I wanted a child, in the scheme of things becoming a mother at thirty-seven instead of forty was not very important. I could take the time to continue my quest.

But there was much more to my feelings than worries about timing. I have always believed I was meant to be pregnant, and I believed that adopting a child would interfere with my fate, my destiny. Curt—more analytical than I—didn’t share that feeling. He would tell you that we had committed ourselves to getting pregnant and that we hadn’t exhausted all of our options. But, trusting my intuition, I believed in my soul that a pregnancy was meant to be.

I also believed I was meant to have twins. I had felt that even before I tried to get pregnant. I grew up in a twin family. Mark and Matt, my twin brothers, are eight years older than I am, with no siblings in between. (I have a younger sister.) One is an athlete, one is rock ’n’ roll, and I love them both. Growing up in a twin house was very special to me. One night, when I was in my late twenties, I dreamed I had twins and named them Mark and Matt. When I told my mom the next day, she said she’d dreamed—the same night—I was having twins too. “I’ve always thought one of my children would have twins,” she said, “and I think it’s going to be you. I think you’re going to get married later in life, I think you’ll be a career woman, I think you’ll start your family late, and you’ll probably need some help from the doctors. And I think you’ll have twins.”

I said, “Yeah, whatever, Mom.” We laughed about the dreams, and chalked them up to the story about a multiple birth we’d both seen on TV the night before. But part of me believed she was right.

For a year we tried to get pregnant through more rounds of IUI—this time at a reproductive medicine clinic and I was monitored by ultrasound. Each cycle is timed to the menstrual cycle, and we pretty much had a round a month, each incorporating a different combination of hormones intended to increase our odds. The objectives were more eggs, heartier eggs, a thicker uterine lining. Eventually, Dr. C. suggested we move on to IVF—invitro fertilization. It’s the one way doctors can make sure a sperm penetrates an egg. They can see it happen right there in the lab. Dr. C. described it like seeing the “dark side of the moon.”

In 2001, we had two cycles of IVF. Eggs were harvested and placed in Petri dishes with sperm and then left to fertilize. Both times, the procedure netted us four embryos. Both times, the doctor transferred two healthy, high-scoring embryos into my body. Both times, the remaining embryos did not continue to mature in the lab, meaning there was nothing to freeze and transfer during the next cycle—and that meant starting from scratch: More drugs. More injections. More harvesting. Couples going through IVF schedule their lives around clinic appointments. They go to the clinic on the way to the office and time the once-daily injections before meeting friends for dinner. If your mate is traveling, you may ask a friend or neighbor to give you your injection. If you’re lucky enough to become pregnant with IVF, the injections of hormones will continue for an additional eight weeks to help maintain the pregnancy and, in my case, leave scar tissue below the skin’s surface on both hips.
I vividly remember the call about the results of our first IVF. For nine days I prayed that the embryos in my body were doing what they were supposed to—dividing and growing. On day eleven, I went to the lab for a pregnancy test and then waited to get the results a few hours later. Dr. C. reached me via cell phone while I was walking through the skyway. I appreciated that he personally called to say it hadn’t worked. But I also vowed that the next time I’d make sure I was at home to take the call in private. I probably wasn’t in a state to drive home. I was numb.

Our second IVF took place a month after 9/11. I thought about the joy of bringing new life into the world at a time when our country was so sad and wounded. So many people had lost their lives—now maybe one of those spirits was ready to come back. At the same time, I was anxious about bringing babies into such a dangerous world. That morning, we asked the doctor to transfer three embryos, but he wouldn’t because the embryos were of such high quality he was concerned I’d get pregnant with triplets. Though I was home for Dr. C.’s call ten days later, I asked Curt to answer the phone. He didn’t have to say anything. Curt held me as I cried.

The doctor said he didn’t know why I wasn’t getting pregnant. We had already learned—with several rounds of IUI and now two failed IVF cycles—that advanced reproductive technology is a lot about finding ways to increase a couple’s odds. “Why can one person walk up to a gambling table in Vegas and roll a seven after a seven after a seven?” Dr. C. asked, “and someone else can stand there all day and never get a seven?” He told us that he thought we’d been “unlucky.” A humbling word.

But we weren’t ready to give up. A few weeks after that second IVF attempt, a house on our street—a house we’d often referred to as our next home—went on the market. We bought it. We’d decided to step away from the reproductive doctors for a few months. We felt we needed a break. The new house was a little bigger than the old one, and it offered a much larger yard. It was a family house. A home we believed would allow us to put down roots. We took it as a sign that everything was going to work out in the end.

The following spring, we talked about trying again. I’d heard about a new clinic that offered a “warranty” program and met with its staff on June 5, my father’s birthday—another good sign. The program seemed almost too good to be true: For a package price, we’d receive three cycles of IVF, and if I didn’t get pregnant, we’d get 80 percent of our money back. We were told we were good candidates for the program and that we could start in a few months. As we drove away from the clinic, it was the first time we’d felt a pang about the $30,000 we had spent so far. Though we weren’t ready to give up, we didn’t have a bottomless supply of money. And, of course, we didn’t have anything to show for what we’d spent. It was funny how we’d started to feel like consumers. Actually, it was sad. But because so few insurance companies covered IVF, could we consider ourselves patients?

We decided to proceed at the new clinic. Unfortunately, it would prove to be anything but a productive experience. We thought that the clinic was stalling us, that nothing moved forward unless I made a call. We were frustrated and confused. Were we doing something wrong? Didn’t this clinic want us? Eight months after our initial meeting, we didn’t have a formal start date. When, finally, I asked to speak to the clinic director, she was hardly empathetic. Calling from work, I tried to stay calm, but I lost it. I’m sure she thought I sounded like a hormone-charged crazy woman. I was, yet I didn’t care.

What the director didn’t know was that there were two times a year when our feelings were especially raw: Christmas and our wedding anniversary. Each occasion reminded Curt and me that another year had gone by. That day was our sixth anniversary, and as far as I was concerned, this clinic had robbed us of nearly nine months of precious time.

As more time passed, I began to feel like some kind of tribal elder. I was a woman who was about to start at her third infertility clinic and had already been through two unsuccessful invitro fertilizations. I talked to women who’d been trying to get pregnant for six months or a year and who then got pregnant. But I’d also hear from women who had three, four, five, and more IVF cycles, women who’d been at it five, six, seven years. If they could do it, so, I told myself, could I.

By this time, my infertility was old news. My mom stopped asking. “I know you’ll tell me when there’s something to tell,” she said. Curt’s attitude had loosened over time. As he met more and more people who shared their stories, he started to share his. As far as he was concerned, the only information that really mattered was from our doctor and the people who’d been in our shoes.

It was—all too obviously—an extremely stressful experience. But, as my first fertility specialist told me, “Stress doesn’t cause infertility, infertility causes stress.” That would be a truth I’d want to wear across my chest after repeatedly hearing, at least for the first couple of years, that I would get pregnant if I would “just relax.” The idea was insulting. And hurtful, even when expressed with care and concern. As a born take-charge kind of person, I was already having a tough time acknowledging how little control I had over my reproductive system. The idea, or insinuation, that I was contributing to my ineffectiveness because I wasn’t able to relax only added to my sense that this was my fault.

The experts attribute roughly 30 percent of infertility cases to problems with the man, 30 percent to problems with the woman, 30 percent to a combination male/female—and about 10 percent have no good explanation. Our doctors said we fell into the “unexplained” category. Which, on some days, made it easier and on other days worse.

Through it all, Curt was my rock. He helped me keep perspective. Infertility is terrible, he reminded me, but it’s not cancer. Neither of us was dying. We didn’t have a sick child. What’s more, we were a team. Don’t get me wrong—there were times that our struggle caused great tension between us. I wanted to talk about it more often than he did, and often at “inopportune” times. But he was the only person on the planet who wanted the same thing I did. He was the one who held me and told me everything was going to be OK when I would start to believe it wasn’t. One day while I was at work, I felt completely out of control. Curt patiently talked me through it—gave me a good shake over the phone—and reminded me that we were on a “pursuit.” When we hung up, I wrote the word on a Post-it and attached it to my computer, where I looked at it for the next three years. Curt was Gene Hackman to my Shelley Winters in The Poseidon Adventure. (Yes, Shelley Winters’s character dies, but you get the point.)

Looking at Curt also gave me hope. Here was my life partner—somehow we had found each other. When I was single, I wondered who my Mister Right would be. Now I was married to him, lying in bed beside him, listening to him snore. He made me believe that my baby—our babies—were out there somewhere too. And we would find them.

I also had many dear friends and family members who let me cry on their shoulders when I needed to. I had a career I was passionate about, with supportive and encouraging colleagues. I’d had a happy and fulfilling life that both prepared and sustained me during this period.

I did eventually become pregnant. We found a new doctor, Dr. M., at the University of Minnesota. The U of M clinic also offered a package plan. We paid for three IVF cycles and got pregnant on cycle two. I had a feeling—a wish, perhaps—that cycle one wouldn’t work because the doctor had only one embryo to transfer. We really wanted twins. It didn’t. We tried again—our fourth IVF when you count all of our earlier attempts. This time the clinic transferred three embryos.

On the day we were going to learn our cycle-two results, according to our plan, I would leave work early to be home and Curt would take the call. Two hours ahead of schedule, Curt reached me still at my desk. He was crying and could barely say the words: “Honey, you’re pregnant.” Again, I was numb. Could this be happening at last? It didn’t seem real.

Women who take such a long road to motherhood learn a lot about their reproductive systems—maybe more than they care to. They learn, for instance, that it’s astounding that any of us ever gets pregnant. The fact that one microscopic sperm reaches one microscopic egg during one of the roughly dozen times a year that a woman ovulates boggles the mind. I learned that even though I’d always been Miss Twenty-Eight Days and had never had any negative pelvic exam results, fibroids, or troubling reproductive issues, I couldn’t get pregnant. At the beginning, I joked that maybe my system was like that of the giant panda and I was fertile once a year. A friend then suggested that Curt and I have sex every day so we’d be sure to hit the right day at some point.

Actually, we did hit the right day, eventually. In six and a half years, the one and only time I had a positive pregnancy test was July 6, 2004. Three weeks later, we learned we were expecting twins.

What I didn’t expect was, by contrast to our attempts to get pregnant, how relatively easy my pregnancy would be. It did take me a couple of months to allow myself to own my holy grail. I still have messages written with lipstick on my dressing-room mirror—“Mother.” “We Are Pregnant!” “19/20”—that were a daily reminder that this was in fact happening. At seven weeks, when we learned there were twins, we asked how many pregnancies didn’t make it to the critical twelve-week ultrasound? “One in twenty,” Dr. M. had said. I was so afraid we would be that one among twenty, I believed I needed to identify with the nineteen.

But, thankfully, I had no complications. No morning sickness. No bed rest. No preterm labor. I went into my office up until the final two weeks. At that point, I was so big it was a challenge getting in and out of the car. Curt loves to tell the story of his wife walking house to house while thirty-eight weeks pregnant, carrying nearly fourteen pounds of baby, at our neighborhood progressive party two days before checking into Abbott Northwestern Hospital. My OB had offered to induce me earlier, but I wanted to experience labor. And because both babies were in a head-down position, the plan was to deliver them. But after a day and a half of labor, I delivered the babies via cesarean section. For Curt and me, bringing two healthy, full-term babies into the world was the greatest experience of our lives.

Now more than two years later, I’m like countless other busy moms juggling family, work, and social commitments, running errands, staying on top of laundry, and now and then squeezing in time for my husband and me. Lileia and Elinor are the center of our universe. Parenting our precious daughters is all we had hoped it would be. No, better. Curt and I often catch each other’s eye as we watch our daughters do the next amazing thing. I’m pretty sure we know what we’re each thinking.

I said to Curt not long ago, “I don’t think I love my children any more than any other mother. And I’m sure other parents look at their children with a sense of awe as we do. But I wonder how many parents look at their children and think, ‘Wow, it really happened’?”

Jayne Haugen Olson is a Mpls.St.Paul Magazine senior editor.