Our Almost Children

and our decision to stop trying

Just because your path is different doesn’t mean you’re lost.” — Gerard Abrams

It started innocently enough: I think I like kids a lot more than I like dogs,” I said standing between my husband’s knees as he sat on the couch. Our girls were trying to convince us again that we needed another pet. When he asked if I really meant that, at the time I really did. 

“Aw, come on, Mom. Aren’t they so cute?” my younger daughter asked, turning her phone towards me with more puppy content on screen–this time Bernese Mountain Dogs. It varies, sometimes it’s German Shepherds, sometimes Huskies. 

“But they won’t stay little and cute,” I counter. 

At this point, it’d been twelve years since our younger daughter was born. Ten years since the urologist sat across from us and said, “Once we do this, it’ll be permanent. It isn’t reversible.” The first time we had this appointment, my husband wasn’t ready for a permanent birth control fix. But this time we were ready. We were more than okay with permanency. We loved the spontaneous sex in the shower on a random Tuesday morning and the romps in our child-free bed where I began to sleep without bottoms. We wanted to put birth control methods away and out of mind. 

At the time, we lived in a tiny house; one daughter slept in a jail-cell-sized room, my husband’s office was squeezed into the basement next to our ever-multiplying laundry pile, and where our dying washing machine clanged constantly. My husband’s business was turning a decent profit, and I had finally finished my degree and began teaching at the local high school, dedicating the hours after storytime with our young daughter to grading essays and planning lessons. Our older daughter was in the throes of high school, finding her way in sports and academics. 

I was twenty five; their father was twenty seven. For ten years we buckled down with our two kids, worked hard, and saved some money. First, we converted the six-by-eight nursery into my husband’s office. And then our daughters shared the larger bedroom. Our older daughter did homework and watched tv on our bed when her little sister had to go to sleep early on school nights.

When we needed room for my husband’s expanding business, we bought a bigger property. It was much larger than our first home, and people began joking that we should fill the five bedrooms with some more kids. They said it’s the perfect place to raise a family. My mother-in-law said she could imagine the pitter-patter of little feet upstairs when we sat for coffee during one of her first visits.

Our now college-aged child remarked that we had waited for her to move out to get a bigger place. The other was managing middle school. The big house echoed when I came in and said ‘I’m home’ after work. 

Our family of four. Our daughters are now 19 and 27.

Our desire to nurture continued. We cultivated the garden, we snuggled our cat in the evening, and, coming from a large family, my husband desired for more. More kids, more love. And it sounded really nice. Isn’t that how it goes sometimes? Our kids grew up great; we had the means. And my mother had me later in life after raising my older siblings which seemed to work out for us. I was in.

So we consulted a urologist, we spent thousands of dollars in savings to have the vasectomy reversed, and we told no one our plans to have more children. I started hiding prenatal vitamins in my dresser drawer and charting my periods. And we thought it’d be easy. 

We traveled for our fifteenth wedding anniversary that September, and it was prime time for baby making. But it didn’t happen that month. And it continued not to happen for several more months despite dipping ovulation strips and taking my temperature daily. By the following spring, the gynecologist referred us to a reproductive endocrinologist because I was already over thirty five and wanted to have two kids back to back if possible. Looking back this sounds so naïve, but this is exactly how we thought it would go for us.

I had all the tests, spent lots of time with my feet in stirrups, and had many ultrasounds of my empty uterus. A year passed. But my period came every month. And John would give me a big squeeze, I’d take a deep breath in private, and we’d go about our public lives. We started cycles of IUI, insemination; insurance would pay for that. Refrigerated boxes showed up, and we hid our red sharps containers in the back of my closet and stored the fertility medications in my husband’s mini-fridge in the mostly-empty basement. I watched videos on how to inject a three-inch needle into my buttock.

And still nothing to show for it, except my normally regular menstrual cycles began to play games, sometimes showing up ten days early while on a camping trip, sometimes coming five days late causing me to take several trips to a dollar store where I stocked up on pregnancy tests. My head ached constantly, my face broke out, my hair turned curly, and my nails grew strong.

Our fertility specialist told me to back off my workouts, hold off on my running, keep track of my heart rate, and steer clear of alcohol and preservatives. I swelled from the combination of missing exercise and the hormone injections which my husband watched me inject after dinner many evenings alternating places on my body. I was going through this, and I wanted to have him there.

After a while of planned intimacy, even sex became a chore when charted and timed.

I had more appointments with legs in stirrups. There was a warning that saliva ruins the quality of the sample when semen collection needed to be done. After two failed IUI--attempts to bring my husband’s sperm closer to my eggs--we began to explore the in-vitro fertilization (IVF) process. I read all the statistics: over thirty-five and having had two miscarriages before our second daughter, and it didn’t look favorable. But my gynecologist was optimistic–also paid to be optimistic, if I’m being perfectly honest–we pursued this course of treatment. I discussed it with my closest friend. My husband and I talked about it nightly, finally deciding to do just one IVF cycle. At this point, we thought maybe we were pressing our luck.

Just one of many injections

I was able to administer them myself rather than drive to the office for my shots.

I managed several rounds of medicines, shots, and other therapies. Then back to the office for a procedure. My egg retrieval was successful: eleven eggs extracted, eight fertilized. Good news. We hoped for twins, getting the pregnancy over with so we could get on with the business of raising these second-chance children.

The day before the big day of implantation, I woke up early. My uterus ached, and I was sweating. When I got to work, I took a bathroom break. My digestion system was backed up, but that was not alarming. I texted my husband about some cramps, now up into my sides and back. By the time the second hour of work was complete, I was using furniture to hold myself up. I stood over the trash can, a wave of heat and nausea came over me. Too embarrassed to say anything, I went into the hall and slid down the wall unable to stand. 

I texted for help with cold, numb hands and lips before blacking out. A colleague woke me up and suggested calling an ambulance. I asked her to call the fertility clinic and my husband. The nurse at the clinic told me to take an OTC pain reliever and wait. The effects of retrieval can be very painful. “Painful” was the understatement of the century.

The pain was worse than my daughters’ labors. I was sure I had a horrible infection and was going to fail the process. I began to weep openly.

I clutched my colleague as she helped me into a wheelchair from the health center, and she gave me acetaminophen. I shook and breathed slowly trying to concentrate. When my husband arrived, he called the clinic back saying there was no improvement. The nurse said wait longer, at least sixty minutes, for the medicine to work. 

As my husband drove me home, I squeezed the door handle, my knuckles locking in a claw. When we got home, I hobbled to the door like the Hunchback of Notre Dame because I couldn’t stand upright, then I laid on the couch sipping water and watching the tv on mute. Eventually I slept, and eventually I moved my bowels. The next morning, we left a note for our kids that we’d gone to get breakfast and to run errands, but we drove to the clinic to “get pregnant.” 

The ultrasound showed my ovaries were the size of baseballs, not their regular grape- size, which had caused all the pain. The nurse gave me a photo of our bioplasts, little future fetuses. They were grade A, perfect; I thought they were gorgeous little clusters of cells. As my husband sat next to me, we watched on the tv screen as a dark cloud filled the small triangular area of the uterus. The technician checked the tubing to make sure the microscopic clusters were in my womb. And they were. 

Our blastocysts: two embryos with fluid-filled sacs several days after fertilization

During the ten-day wait for bloodwork, I read every article on the internet about IVF, and I hung around in chat rooms where women shared their earliest pregnancy symptoms, none of which I had. I drank my one cup of watery coffee a day, avoided alcohol, and took only lukewarm showers. My blood test was scheduled for February fifteenth. 

On Valentine’s Day morning, I took one of the spare pregnancy tests  and watched the tinted fluid pass through the window leaving a bright pink line, then another. Two pink lines. And I teared up. I made out my husband’s card and told him to look in his nightstand. Nothing says I love you quite like a pregnancy test stick full of urine. When he saw it, we embraced for a long time, still in disbelief.

The pregnancy hormone blood tests were promising: 226 then 1025. Everything looked great; the internet charts showed a high chance of multiples based on these early pregnancy hormone (HCG) levels. After weeks of fatigue, constant headaches, and nausea, it was time for our ultrasound. 

My husband watched the screen with his best poker face, then I saw a flutter on the screen, then another. Twins. Identical. Heartbeats of 146 and 143: perfect. We reviewed the results with the doctor and got several pictures of our little blobs in inky circles. 

First pictures of the twins.

They share an embryonic sac and made the pregnancy even higher risk.

At eight weeks, my jeans and work pants stopped buttoning, so I stocked up on tunics and leggings. At ten weeks--on my birthday--we told our daughters the news, giving them t-shirts announcing “big sister again,” and “big sister finally.” We told my in-laws because my belly was getting too big to hide. I told my coworkers. At eleven weeks, days before my scheduled ultrasound, I had some spotting after sex, nothing unusual. I’d had that with the other pregnancies too, but being Rh negative, I needed a shot of Rhogam to protect the fetuses. The nurse scheduled me for an ultrasound just in case.

I was excited sitting in the waiting room since I’d get an extra view of our little ones. The tech slathered my belly with goo, then waved the wand against my belly. She couldn’t get a good view, so she did an internal exam. I felt a flutter in my chest, and I clutched the sides of the vinyl table. Two tiny blobs on the screen, and they were completely still. I watched as she clicked the measurements, but I knew it was bad news. The doctor couldn’t explain. He said that these things just happen sometimes. It’s more common with twins. It’s nature’s way. You can try again. I got my Rhogam shot and scheduled a follow up. 

In the meantime, there were lots of tears. I texted my boss. I asked that she please tell the department and tell them no flowers, no cards. I told our daughter that afternoon right after she asked how the babies were doing today. I called our other daughter--in her senior year of college--with the news. We all wondered why.

I was waiting for natural miscarriage but had to schedule a procedure to move things along, to move on. 

After surgery, I laid on the gurney under the scratchy white sheet feeling both bloated and empty. 

Later, my husband laid in bed saying maybe we could do nothing to prevent another pregnancy and let “the big guy” decide. And I laid next to him saying we should use condoms until we decide for sure. I’m too old for “accidents.” I was thankful I had a month or two to rest my mind and physically recover before trying again. 

I’ve read all the success stories and after our bad news everyone was quick to tell us about so-and-so who tried ten times and finally had triplets and other such stories.

But it felt too late. It wasn’t in the cards for us to have more. So we made the difficult decision to give up trying, to be satisfied that we’d had it right years ago when we’d decided to have a little family with two girls who were growing up way too fast, to not tempt fate. So I saw the doctor for the birth control pill like I did when I was twenty. 

Now, instead of using our money--five hundred plus dollars a week in daycare costs for twins–we traveled to Costa Rica and Hawaii and put in a pool. My husband bought a muscle car. We enjoy our time with our nieces and nephews, and we look to the future when our grandkids may come along. Since my October due date, and the anniversary of that miscarriage has long since passed, we focus on our daughters, on our marriage, on ourselves.

I’m not saying it’s always been easy. I have cried in the bathroom at a baby shower and when a friend announced her second pregnancy and her giggly daughter wore a pink “I’m going to be a big sister” t-shirt, I left the cookout with watery eyes. But that was years ago now, so here we are. Some days I think of how different our lives would be with five-year-old twins playing in the yard and getting ready for kindergarten, but we are raising chickens instead of more children. We have another cat, but occasionally the conversation about puppies and more pets begins again. With each change in one area, another space opens for something else. We have the space, the finances, and the love to share, but for now I’m just writing. 

Thank you for following along this journey with me. This was an emotional piece, and I appreciate you for reading to the end. If you’re on this path, I wish you love and light in all your decisions. ~DBD