A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Parenthood

As I alluded to in my last blog post, our path to parenthood was not easy. You’d think the hardest thing would be deciding you’re ready to become a parent and the rest would be easy peasy. Not so much.

I wasn’t one of those woman who thought a lot about kids. I like kids and figured I wanted to have some at some point because that seemed like a natural progression in life, but I didn’t feel like it was something that had to happen for my life to be complete.

We were in our early 30’s when we got married and while our parents may have been ready to become grandparents again immediately – my father-in-law was talking about grandbabies at the rehearsal dinner – we were not in an immediate rush to go down that path. We had a pretty good life. We had a great group of friends we hung out with and were able to travel a lot. We were cool to wait a few years.

We decided the time was right for kids about two years after we got married. Afterall, by that time I was getting close to my mid 30’s and it seemed like the choice needed to be made otherwise the window of opportunity might close. The choice was made; we were ready for kids. Then months went by, then a year…and nothing was happening.

Then things got complicated. We had to figure out why nothing was happening. What was wrong? Who was the culprit? Was it my issue? My husband’s issue? Both? Temperatures were monitored, tests were taken and surgical procedures were done. There were four rounds of artificial insemination, none of which worked. The next step was in vitro fertilization; however, we never went down this road because we were told the odds of it succeeding were very slim due to the results of blood tests I had prior to undergoing the procedure. Our best shot, we were told, was getting an egg donor.

The concept of egg donation was not foreign to me, as I had a friend who was in a similar situation. But it was very costly, and none of the process was something that insurance would cover. So, we had to think long and hard about it. That’s where we put the process on pause for four years.

By this time, we were in our early 40’s and we felt it was either now or never. Either we would try this, or we would just give up on having kids altogether. So, we started the process of getting accepted into the egg donor program. As part of this, we were given a list of women on the donor list and their characteristics, such as nationality, age, eye color, hair color, education, etc. It was a little weird looking over the list and trying to decide who you wanted to be your baby mama. We even had to go to a psychological assessment where we were screened to see if we would be good candidates for the program. Don’t get my husband started on that process. We “passed”, but he is still bitter about the process.

A few days after said psychological assessment, I slipped on a patch of ice on my way in to work one morning and broke my wrist. I swear this is relevant, so hang with me. Rather than wear a big heavy cast for six weeks, I opted for a surgical procedure to repair my wrist. As most women of a certain age know, if you have a surgical procedure, there is the obligatory pregnancy test prior to surgery. I thought nothing of it. Been there, done that.

While waiting to be brought to the operating room, a nurse asked us if we had kids. Not an unusual question; we’d been asked that before. What we didn’t know, however, was the question wasn’t asked because of an effort to make small talk. Oh no; our answer to that question was about to change. This person knew the results of the pregnancy test, but was unable to share it with us. Shortly afterwards, a nurse came into the room and told us the pregnancy test was positive. What?? They then did a blood test which confirmed the result. The running joke was that if I had fallen and broken a bone sooner, maybe it wouldn’t have taken eight years to get pregnant.

When we got home from the surgery center that day, we had a message on the answering machine that we’d been accepted into the egg donor program. As fate would have it, things had changed, and that was not the route we were going to take to parenthood afterall.