Jess Tennant
I have written this essay multiple times, each time dissatisfied with how it unfolds. I have told my story of involuntary childlessness over, and over, and over, and this time I did not want to get stuck in the minute details. I don’t want to take you down the sad and winding road, curve by curve, inch by inch, into all of our cycles and losses and innovative protocols and donor gametes and two years of being continually passed over for domestic infant adoption.
I’d rather tell my story like this:
Seventeen years ago, two people found each other, entirely by chance, on Match.com after their first marriages imploded (or exploded) spectacularly. Early on they had a conversation about male factor infertility uncovered in his first marriage, and that having a baby would not be achieved easily, so to continue was to acknowledge this fact.
I remember that moment, on the flagstones of what became our patio, and thinking, “do I love this man more than the possibility of future children? Could I be content with a life of incredible love and no children?” and deciding YES. Yes, I could. But I never imagined that this romantic notion would be put into practice. Sure, we’d have trouble, but we’d overcome because that’s how happy endings work, right?
I was convinced that medical technology would cure us of childlessness. To ensure success, I did all kinds of nutty and desperate things, like steam my cervix by squatting over a pot of boiling herbs; doing a protocol involving the dreaded progesterone-in-oil shots, twice a day, until I had to do it in my thighs because the 1.5 inch needle in my butt had caused nerve damage; doing a protocol where I took Benadryl 5x a day while appearing to be a functioning human in hopes it would calm my system; drinking wheatgrass every single day in hopes of increasing my egg quality.
None of it worked. We were never pregnant for more than a few weeks, and more often received the “I’m sorry, your test was negative” call. I met every setback with an insane fervor – two pregnancy losses? Fine, it must be my eggs (it wasn’t), so we’ll do egg donor. Egg donor doesn’t work? Fine, we’ll switch clinics and try sperm donor. After exhausting everything within our decision-making tree for infertility, having multiple canceled cycles in a row due to damage to my uterus that made it inhospitable for transfer, and lying on a table receiving the news that yet another cycle was down the tubes without anything to salvage, we stopped. And jumped right into adoption.
It seemed a reasonable jump. If infertility treatment doesn’t work, move on to adoption. Clinics even posed adoption as the “next natural step.” I plowed through the adoption paperwork and training to get us “into the mix” as soon as humanly possible after our last cycle, which in retrospect was not the best move. This thinking doesn’t acknowledge that adoption is a completely different process, with different traumas involved. Or that parenting through adoption has added layers of complexity, including navigating open adoption and separating your own feelings about parenthood from your child’s desire to know more about their origins or why they were placed. I’d like to think that I would have been up for the challenge. I did so much research and read and talked with adoptees to get their perspectives, as scary as it was to rip the fairy-tale veil off the idea that parenting would be just the same and there would be no complex feelings.
But that didn’t work either. I thought we provided evidence of our stable and loving home. Everyone said what great parents we’d make. We set up a fully functional (and adorable) nursery so we’d be ready when that moment came, and I would sit on the floor and imagine reading books or doing tummy time with our mystery baby. Despite crafting a profile book that I thought did a great job of painting our life as worthy of raising a child and sensitive to the difficult choice to be had, we were profiled just six times in two years and chosen just once without our knowledge in a “blind” profile opportunity, which was just as well because the expectant mother changed her mind. We were told once that we “came in second.” We had an opportunity where we had to go to bed knowing that if we were chosen we’d be picking up an infant the next day, POOF, sudden parenthood. When my husband asked “do we want to pack a bag, just in case?” I retorted, “Absolutely not, I do NOT want to UNpack that bag.” I got the call that we were not chosen while teaching. I tried so hard to be a normal human-like substance during that time, and my facade just chipped and melted away with every heartbreak until I couldn’t do it anymore.
When we ended our journey to become parents, it was in the most dramatic of ways – I ended up in the emergency room, with stroke-level blood pressure and the possibility of a heart attack, all because of steroid treatment for an eye autoimmune disorder and intense stress. In a way, I waited until there was really no sane choice but to stop. It took a month of talking and brainstorming and recovering to make the final decision. Dismantling a nursery and donating the contents remains one of the most painful memories I have from this time. We then waited to tell most people until it was irrevocable, not that that stopped people from interrogating us on options we didn’t pursue as if we never considered them.
It is now six years from that time, when we went from childless but hopeful, to childless not by choice, forever. In the beginning I spent a lot of time facedown on the floor. I was gentle with myself. We made a plan and reimagined what our life would look like without children – what would we pursue? How would we live our life? I have a spread in a bullet journal with all of our thoughts and plans, and we revisit it every January.
I never thought that I would never be a mother. It was incomprehensible to me. I drove myself into the ground over, and over, and over again in what proved to be a futile quest. Because it was so hard to see myself as NOT a mother, I pushed harder than was reasonable to make it happen. When people would say things like, “Well, I didn’t do as much as you did,” or “You are so persistent!” or, “at least you know you did everything you could,” I felt like saying (and often did): “I am not inspirational! I am a cautionary tale!”
But my story is my story, and I am glad that it continues with a life without children that I can be proud of. It’s not that I don’t get sad and I don’t feel my losses (at some times more than others), but it is just part of me, not all of me. And, it is ever-evolving. I used to wish for a “happy ending,” but that has a finality to it that isn’t realistic. Our life has evolved to a full and happy life filled with music, and books, and the outdoors, and cats, and love. To me, it feels like a happy evolution. There is still so much more to come.
Photo by Jacob Kiesow on Unsplash