Let's Get to Know One Another
Learning MyselfI'm a west coast transplant making a life in south Louisiana. After becoming a widow far earlier than anyone should, I met the man of my dreams and settled in nicely. Is that really what you want to hear though? Naaaah. What you want to hear is how I arrived at becoming a science experiment for the sake of having a baby, right? That's what I thought.
The irony of the whole situation is I never wanted children. While I was watching my little friends play teacher and try to feed dolls with plastic faces, I was always thinking "Uh uh. No way. Not me." I seemed to have consciously made a decision as a kid that I didn't have any desire to be a mom. I wanted to be a grown up, run the show myself, and buzz around the world seeing new things every day. I watched families change over time, as I'm sure you did, and I think that shaped my idea of what I wanted (or didn't want) for myself. Weekend visitation? Splitting holidays? Two birthday parties? Well, ok. That last bit didn't sound too bad, I have to admit. But it just never struck me as anything I'd want to handle. Things change though. People change. We morph from irresponsible, flighty little things into people with answers and solutions. We learn how to navigate difficult places life takes us and come out changed, hopefully for the better. When I met my husband, I was emerging from mourning my first husband and our failing marriage and becoming the me I would be forever. The more time we spent together, the more I saw how we complimented each other in a way I had never looked for before. We put one another first without ever thinking about it and I began to see who I was with him. It wasn't that I didn't want children, it was that I was waiting to see whether Gd would place me with someone I could raise worthy children with for a lifetime. Once He did, it became my focus. |
The Two Most Infertile People Ever Decide to Have a Baby...Me: I didn't realize until my mid-thirties that I wasn't ovulating. My body was just faking the reproductive processes every month without actually doing the work. Everything seemed ok for the purposes of just walking around, being a woman. But when I started to need those processes to produce a little person, things didn't seem on track. It turned out I had a glamorous case of PCOS (Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome). I have no idea what caused it, only that it has made baby-making extremely inconvenient. Just like most women, I had very few things on my To Do Lists before working on a baby: Partner I adore? Got one. Desire to be pregnant? Check. Ready to be a parent? Yep. Ovulation. Uh oh. Well, three out of four ain't bad, right?
Him: Things were pretty clear with the hubs' fertility picture. A vasectomy years ago dictated how we were going to get the swimmers to the pool. The hard part? Surgery to get the swimmers on the block. We (or rather he) powered through it like a champ and we kept our eye on the ball. Once that was done, we were in baby making business - sort of! |