my journey so far...

I'm married. I knew from very early in our relationship that my husband had gotten a vasectomy before we met. At first I thought that our relationship wouldn't be a lasting thing, as I was months away from moving to Japan when we first met, so I didn't worry about it. (He doesn't want kids...no problem! I'm not staying with this guy!) It didn't quite work out that way, and he moved to Japan, changed his mind about kids, and we got married. We spent two more years in Japan, enjoying the potato salad sandwiches, hilarious t-shirt slogans, gracious people, and the convenience of no birth control, blithely assuming that we'd get back to Canada, he'd have the reversal, and I'd promptly get knocked up.

Sigh. There are so many assumptions and decisions that I can question now that I am looking back on them. Should we have gotten married in the first place? Why didn't he get on the waiting list for surgery before he moved to Japan to be with me? Should we have taken the statistics on reversal success more seriously? Is there something else we should have done that would have changed the outcome for us?

We've been back home for nearly 5 years. It took 3 years for him to get the surgery, and another year of complications, questionable test results, and a lot of worry to find out that it didn't work. He has no sperm. There's always the possibility of extracting sperm from him and attempting IVF. But I've felt for a long time, even when the thought of dealing with infertility was just occupying a tiny space in the back of my mind, that IVF is not for me. The expense, the invasiveness, the crazy hormones whose long term safety is still questionable, the low success rate, the heartbreak when it doesn't work...I just don't think it's for me. I have nothing but admiration and respect for anyone who choses that path. But when it comes to me, my gut just says, "No."

So we've decided to embark on trying to have a baby using donor sperm. I still have a lot of questions about this, but I feel like we're getting closer to feeling fine with it. (I'll have to leave a lot of this discussion for another post or probably more like another hundred posts - I have a lot to say about this!)

It has been hard to be positive about the next steps since getting the news that the reversal didn't work. Seems like a lot of people in my life like to spout "The Secret"-type psychobabble at me and tell me I need to believe everything will work out. Well, I already did that - lived for years believing that my husband and I would get to have biological kids together. And it didn't work. I'm feeling pretty angry and not necessarily up to trying to live in hope all the time without doing something to protect my heart if I'm going to get disappointed again. I'm kind of getting there - we're getting close to being able to try, for real, with real live sperm, and it feels good to know that there's a possibility that we can really move on to another phase of this journey. But the fear and uncertainty are definitely still there.

For a long time, I've danced around the whole issue of infertility, mostly because I haven't felt like I really belonged in that community. I feel like I've got it pretty easy compared to a lot of people out there - there's no evidence that I have any fertility issues of my own, my mom and sisters conceive easily and have healthy pregnancies, and I do feel pretty deeply in my soul that I will be able to get pregnant and have a healthy baby.

So do I fit in with the infertility crowd? A couple years ago, I started checking out some message boards on infertility and was totally turned off by the chirpy tone (not aided whatsoever by the relentless abbreviations) and a strong sense that "these are not my people." (Hopefully you'll get a better sense of who my people are as I continue to post and you continue to read. Suffice it to say that I feel a bit rougher 'round the edges than the women who were posting on those message boards.) I quit looking for people who might understand what I was going through and tried to deal with things on my own until a few weeks ago, when I started checking out blogs on infertility. I must have been guided to the right ones, cause I seem to have found my people. I've read and connected with the stories of women (and some men) whose writing expresses so many things I've been struggling with, and whose courage in the face of such tremendous pain humbles and inspires me. I've had so many moments over the past few weeks, reading the stories of years of these strangers' lives, where I've felt connected, validated, understood. And that's just such a huge fucking relief!

So I'm giving it a go myself. I guess I hope that at some point, somebody will read my blog and get the same comfort from my words as I have from those of my brave comrades out there who are trying to become parents and generously sharing their experiences with the world. If not, well, I've already written more in this post than I have in my journal in the past 6 months...