Infertile Dad Video Transcript

infertility is like being single on Valentine’s Day 365 days a year I mean babies are everywhere they’re bouncing they’re babbling they’re dropping their binky’s the other day I walked by a bouncing baby on the dock at the mill in downtown Lincoln and my heart filled with joy and yet at the same time I thought of how that same sight would have saddened me perhaps ruined part or all of my day before my daughter came

along and I thought about how some single people must feel seeing kissing caressing cuddling couples all Valentine’s Day long perhaps all year long you see my wife and I are infertile but we pushed past it through some heroic applications of technology to get

pregnant after four long years of constant struggle and heartache and often that heartache would come at the coffee shop at the store on the street corner everywhere babies were bouncing babbling and dropping their binkies the thing about it is that my the pain of my infertility doesn’t doesn’t show up you know quite so often it doesn’t lead to the crying fits and panic attacks that used to happen at stores like Target and indigo bridge and IKEA but there remains this dull ache this shadow grief that I’m only just

beginning to understand and I would feel this dull ache at my favorite book store indigo bridge in downtown Lincoln so indigo bridge has this wonderful children’s reading room and in the middle there’s this whimsical tree that stretches from floor to ceiling and it’s

made of cloth and when you see it you can imagine you’re in an enchanted forest when I would see it I would imagine a chair and me sitting in it my daughter in my lap and a new book always close at hand and she would say daddy daddy can we buy this book and I would say yes of course we can sweetie because the I’ve had plenty of time to think about my daddy policies what I’ll say when she asks for this or that and I’ve decided that my answer to books will always be yes now if you want some

plastic toy other than Legos well then go ask your mother and speaking of her mother she has a number of challenging health conditions that have made getting pregnant really difficult for us so polycystic ovaries uterine fibroids a tumor on her pituitary gland I on the other hand have slightly slow sperm the little boys just can’t seem to get motivated sometimes and yet despite this disparity in our health conditions she’s not infertile I’m not infertile we’re a pair the two of us we’re one flesh we are infertile and it’s a condition that we share with one out of seven Americans one out of seven think about

that look around one of seven people in this room may be struggling with this deep desire for something they cannot have and maybe never will my wife and I are blessed as well to be among the much smaller percentage of people who have the financial resources to buy infertility treatments 12k for the first IVF procedure were up to fifty thousand we’ve spent total so far forecasting that we were gonna spend a whole chunk

of change on our babies we wanted to try the free love and 5-minutes approach or as close thereto as possible that 6/7 of the population takes for granted so we started as most infertile couples do with clomid a widely available inexpensive hormone supplement that in our experience with our friends struggling to get pregnant got most of them pregnant but not us so we had to move on to what is formerly called intrauterine insemination and what I like to call the turkey baster method now at this point things get a little uncomfortable for me because I have to tell you about the black vinyl couch and

Corvettes so the black vinyl couch symbolizes how infertility has robbed me and my wife of the intimacy that is supposed to be involved in making children you see my wife and I had a lot of sex when we were first trying to get pregnant but in order to produce our

daughter I had a series of appointments with a black vinyl couch tightly scheduled because the room was reserved every 30 minutes and so we had to keep things going here and in that rather dispiriting room I would be more angry than anything and I was angry at Corvettes and Camaros because they symbolized for me this idea that some unlucky people get pregnant in the back of sports cars and oh how I longed to be so unlucky well so fast-forward through a number of stops and starts and counseling and pursuing domestic adoption and going to a mandatory two day training class taught by a woman who was eight months pregnant at the time and we got to the point where we decided on IVF and the procedure went amazingly I mean we harvested way more eggs than we possibly could have prayed for way more of them turned into healthy embryos than we possibly could have prayed for the implantation went great and then two days before we were supposed to check for pregnancy Jamie’s gallbladder exploded and we’ll never know what happened to that pregnancy fast-forward through more stops and starts trying International Adoption and having a close friend of ours offer to serve as a surrogate mother and our doctor convinced us to try one more time with a frozen embryo transfer involving what I like to call my freezer tots you stick them in the

microwave on 50% power for 30 seconds pop em in my wife and poof we’re pregnant with our beautiful daughter Lillian and at about this time as you hear about my experience and you know that one in seven people in this room have had similar experiences you might be wondering wow have I ever been insensitive to an infertile person you might be thinking have I ever taken my ability to have children on-demand for granted have I ever said to an infertile person you want kids here take mine well I really bet that you have done or said something like that I mean you know how

I know it’s because I’ve been insensitive to infertile people I once said to an infertile couple friends of mine Wow I bet you’re glad you still get to sleep through the night

well no no they’re not they would give anything in the world to stay up with their child seven nights in a row or seventy times seven and they still don’t have their child and I grieve for them and I mourn for them and I’m rapturous with joy around them because when I see my daughter she consumes me and the whole world fades away and in those moments I know that I’ve been insensitive to infertile people in ways I can’t

possibly begin to imagine well these days the grief of my infertility shows up less often more irregularly like an unwelcome house guest and that unwelcome house guest showed up the other month in the parking lot of our infertility clinic we had just been a rapturous with joy as we heard our child’s heartbeat our second child’s heartbeat when

suddenly my wife said our baby died one of them didn’t make it you see we had

again been blessed to have two healthy freezer tots well thought everything was

going great and so we got this case of twin cravings I mean we wanted two more kids bad and that’s crazy to imagine given the energy it takes to chase one spirited youngster around the block and back and around the block again but we wanted them and one of them died he died she died does a shadow have a gender so on the very day that I learned I’d been selected as a TEDx Lincoln speaker I’ve read this quotation from the book Hanna Coulter by Wendell Barry and Hannah writes that grief is not a force and has no power to hold you only bear it love is what carries you for it is always

there even in the dark or most in the dark but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery people call me brave for talking about these things in public but I’m not brave I’m broken my selfish hope is that if I just talk about this often enough I’ll learn to look on my daughter and see her just her not a shadow because god be praised I see my daughter 365 days a year.thank you