In fertility

In the fall of 2020, nearly one year after my husband Dan and I started IVF in the hopes of creating a sibling for our daughter Sidney, our fertility clinic gave us the green light to do our first embryo transfer. By this point, Sid was nearly three years old, the age gap between her and our future child growing by the day, with each miscarriage, complication and COVID-19 delay putting ever more distance between them.

The feeling after an embryo transfer is very strange. You may have just gotten yourself knocked up. You feel every twinge in your body as if it’s a signal of something. 

Even though you know, intellectually, that putting an embryo into a uterus is kind of like placing a poppyseed into the sticky middle of a peanut butter sandwich, you wonder if going pee or coughing will cause the embryo to fall out. Your skin might break out, you might be nauseous, you might be tired, but you know that these pregnancy symptoms might only be side effects from all the hormones you’re on. 

Dan was extremely anxious after the transfer. He followed me around the house, hovering and doting. He would appear behind me in the bathroom as I was washing my face, beside me in the kitchen as I made breakfast, at the front door when I pulled into the driveway. At first it was cute. Then I felt suffocated by the pressure and the anticipation. I told him as much, in the nicest way possible. Before I spoke with him, I reminded myself that while it’s inevitably harder to be the patient going through IVF than to be the partner, Dan was finding it difficult to be so physically removed.

Nothing was happening inside his body, so he became obsessed with what was happening in mine. The only window into that was through my communication. Even when I had nothing to report, he needed to know there was nothing to report. He needed to know that I wasn’t cramping. That I hadn’t bled. 

We had made it this far in our fertility journey without much in the way of arguing, moving in lockstep with each decision. I was on anti-anxiety medication and had for years joked that he had meds coursing naturally through his veins. This was really the first time in our relationship that I saw him as human on the mental-health front. He, too, was capable of being paralyzed by anxiety and debilitating rumination. He had been patient and supportive of me through my anxious bouts. It was my turn to be there for him, without being judgmental or snippy. IVF for us was a lot of this. Taking turns.

We knew that a pregnancy likely wouldn’t be detected by an at-home test until at least a week after the transfer. It was impossible for us to wait that long. On Wednesday, November 1, six days after the transfer, I peed on a stick. “Ugh I couldn’t help myself and did a test,” I texted my sister. “And zero line . . . Hoping it was just too early … Going to try to wait until Sunday for the next one. I really thought we’d get a faint line.” We tried to keep distracted over the next few days. Also impossible. As it happened, we had our friend’s second daughter’s first birthday on Saturday; I would have been pregnant at the same time as her, had we not had a loss in early 2019. We were supposed to have had our second kids around the same time. Now she was celebrating her younger daughter turning one and here I was not even pregnant yet, or at least not knowingly.

The birthday was at a park. For some reason, Sid, who was not quite three years old, was worried the helium balloons would lift off from the ground. I explained that the balloons were attached to ribbons on a little weight, so they were tethered to the ground. She wouldn’t relent. She wouldn’t stop worrying. I could relate. Things that seemed unlikely to happen seemed to keep happening. A little while later, Sid came running over to me, sobbing, pointing upward. One of the balloons—a light pink one—had somehow detached from the weight and floated off into the clear blue sky.

I wish I could say the transfer stuck, that our road to a baby was straight from that point onward, that the balloon floating off into the distance wasn’t a foreshadowing of our dream drifting ever further from our grasp. 

Several years and failed IVF cycles after that birthday at the park, someone who overcame infertility told Dan and me to be open to a total miracle. I remember being deeply annoyed. By this point in our journey, I was all but done with hoping, all but resigned to the notion that it was over for us.

I had a while prior adopted the mantra One day, one way. But I had started to despise those words. My mantra became It will happen or it won’t, and either way we will be happy. I had to start letting go, even if we kept going. It wasn’t necessarily about doing less; it was about letting less of the pain in.

Years later, I thought back to that phrase—total miracle—and smiled. I was holding not one but two babies in my arms. Two brothers for Sid. Born just four months apart.

Against all odds and to our great surprise, our journey had culminated in a total miracle.