That's why it's noteworthy that I found out today that a couple friends of mine are expecting their third child, and I didn't immediately feel jealousy, anger, frustration and all those familiar emotions that have been showing up almost on a schedule for the last year and a half.
We've spent a lot of time talking about our options, whether we wanted to just remain childless and enjoy our lives without kids (spoiler alert: no thanks, although the allure of taking vacations whenever and wherever we want sure is appealing), adoption, surrogacy, you name it. At times the decisions can seem overwhelming - one minute you're all but picking up the phone and calling a doctor, the next you put the phone down and get questions ready for an adoption agency, and then you find out that someone else is having a baby and you're just sitting there thinking "for heaven's sake, make it stop!!"
So, what to do? Everyone who knows the situation will offer their own advice, but at the end of the day the reason I didn't feel upset at all earlier today is a simple one: we finally made a decision on what we wanted to do, we followed through on it, and for the first time in what seems like forever, there's hope at the end of the road.
Everything you read says that you shouldn't delay in getting help conceiving if you decide that's what you want to do. Much as we might want it to, time doesn't wait for anyone to get pregnant, and the odds only get higher with age. That's not to say that anyone should go running to a fertility clinic after a month of trying to conceive, but intuition is a powerful thing. We knew that something was wrong, and we started from there.
In my case, stupid as this sounds, I couldn't grow a beard. You know those people who can grow a five o'clock shadow by about 11:30 in the morning? I'm whatever the opposite of that is. I knew that wasn't normal, and it was always in the back of my head that there was probably a hormonal imbalance, but it wasn't until my doctor ran some tests to confirm that the puzzle started to fit together: without testosterone, it's tough to grow a beard, and it's also tough to produce sperm, which is a slightly important step in having children.
So I finally got on medication to help boost the testosterone, which worked about as well as anyone could have hoped, and......nothing. Still no babies. Still everyone I know getting pregnant every time someone sneezed.
If you know of a wall, chances are I had banged my head against it more than a few times.
But then we finally made up our mind, wading through the seemingly endless menu of choices, that we were going to go to a fertility specialist (more on this later). That was going to be our plan, darn it. We were going to do everything we could to have a baby, and whether that came naturally or with help, we were committed to it.
Making that decision took the weight of the world off my shoulders. Finally, we have a road map that gets us to where we want to go. It's still no guarantee - in reproduction, very little is - but we're more confident than we ever have been that it really is only a matter of time, one way or another.
The moral of the story? Decide what you're going to do, and follow through on it. Don't let yourself become paralyzed by analysis. The longer you wait, the more that knife in your stomach will turn every time someone tells you they're pregnant. It's not worth waiting - as soon as you're confident in your decision, run with it, and stick to it.
Maybe then you can fix all the dents in that wall.
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