“When are you going to try for another?”
As Søren grows older this is a question that we find ourselves having to answer more frequently. I don’t know what answer people are looking for when they ask, but we’re not. Not many people realize that it took us years to get pregnant with Søren. Two painfully quiet years. And while that doesn’t sound like a big number, or a long time, it was two of the longest years of my life. My heart ached for another child so badly that I could barely stand to congratulate my friends on their pregnancy or new baby.
What made these years so excruciatingly long I think is that we weren’t just, “Oh, let’s have a baby!”, trying to have a baby. We knew something was wrong almost immediately because of some mild complications. I was diagnosed with PCOS and was told that it would be near impossible to have another child. They weren’t even sure how I managed to get pregnant with Aiden. And I wasn’t the only one with fertility issues.
Life when facing double and secondary fertility is really hard. We were drowning financially in a sea of infertility treatments, ultrasounds, injections, monitoring and nothing worked. We still didn’t have a baby. Aiden still didn’t have a little brother. I was constantly torn between the guilt of one child not being good enough and the agony of not being able to have another. Every time someone asked if we were trying for a baby I’d tell them that we would have one when we are ready. It was an easy way to avoid unsolicited (and infuriating) advice about how if we just didn’t stress about it things would just work out on their own.
As we dwindled ourselves near financial ruin we decided to explore other options. We considered adoption but it seemed very daunting and just as expensive as the track we were on at the time. In order to give our wallet a break, we decided to try more natural and alternative methods. I don’t know if it was just our time or if the herbal supplements actually worked, but we finally ended up with our Søren, a baby we had been wishing and caring for long before his birth.
Since then we’ve had quite a few serious talks about adding to our family, and although we are happy right now with just two, we would pursue adoption for any future children.
Have you ever dealt with infertility? Do you know anyone who has? Would you ever considered adoption?
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