[Reprise] What I want you to know
It's National Infertility Awareness Week. Here is our daughter's origin story.
Brian’s note: I first wrote this three years ago, before a lot of you were here. It’s National Infertility Awareness Week, and since we are living at a time in history when Republicans across the nation are doing everything they can to take IVF away from couples like me and my wife, to make it so kids like my daughter don’t exist, it feels right to share it again. Check out Resolve for their great resources. If you have questions about IVF, please don’t hesitate to reach out. And please don’t support politicians who don’t think my daughter (who is now 13) should exist.
We’re in a room in a medical building on the outskirts of Syracuse.
It’s a Wednesday morning in January of 2010. My wife is sitting up in a bed. I’m in a chair next to her. We’ve been in so many rooms like this in the past three years, but this one feels different. There’s optimism. There’s hope.
Dr. Robert Kiltz walked into the room. We’ve got two lovely embryos ready, he tells us.
We’re ready. We’ve been ready.
A week or so later, on Feb. 7, 2010, my wife wakes me up at 6 a.m. on a Saturday morning, a smile unlike any other on her face, holding a pregnancy test in front of my eyes.
Peter Parker had been bitten by the spider. Captain America had gotten the shot of super-soldier serum.
Our family’s origin story was complete.
If you know us, or if you’re a longtime reader of Sports Media Guy, you know that Ellie, our now 10-year-old daughter, is an IVF baby. My wife and I are among the 1-in-8 couples who have dealt with infertility. Someone else in your life has dealt with it too without telling you.
When our daughter was younger, this felt like a huge part of her story. Her origin story mattered so much. But as she’s gotten older and grown into the person she’s growing into, it feels like it matters less.
Which is why weeks like National Infertility Awareness Week, which begins today, are so important. They make us pause, even for a day, even for a moment, to reflect on and remember just how much of a miracle our daughter is.
The theme of this year’s National Infertility Awareness Week is #WhatIWantYouToKnow. So here are some things I want you to know about our experience:
It’s not a one-time thing.
IVF was the end point, not the beginning. We did years and years of other treatments, including IUIs. It’s a long, grueling and emotional process. If someone tells you about their journey, please know that it has already been a long, hard one.
It’s an all-or-nothing thing.
Trying to have a kid through infertility treatments is not something you can do halfway. It’s not something you can casually do. Both partners have to be 1,000 percent in. It’s physically and emotionally draining for women (and couples, but let’s not pretend my experience matched my wife’s).
After our daughter was born, we started the cycle again to try to have a second kid. But we quickly realized that our collective hearts weren’t all in. So we stopped. The only way to do this is to be all in.
We’re still paying for it.
Until recently, infertility treatments were not covered by insurance. We paid out of pocket — on a grad-school student’s stipend — for IVF and all the medications before, during and after. It’s worth it, of course. But there’s a reason we’ve always joked that we spent our daughter’s college fund making her.
It broke me from the Church
I’ve never talked about this publicly before. I was raised in a very Catholic family, and I grew up with a very real, very deep faith and belief in the Church.
That faith has been shattered.
This is not easy to write about, especially for someone who will work at a Catholic university starting in August.
Quite simply, the Catholic Church does not believe my daughter should exist.
From the US Conference of Catholic Bishops: “One reproductive technology which the Church has clearly and unequivocally judged to be immoral is in vitro fertilization.” There’s more, but I won’t link to it. I won’t give it a platform.
To look at my daughter’s existence and see it as anything but an absolute, capital-M Miracle — the hand of the Divine working through skilled human minds and hands — is unthinkable. To see the Church that I supported and believed in, the Church my father served for years, the Church in which I was married and in which I buried my mother, call my daughter’s very existence “immoral” has been devastating.
My wife is a goddamn superhero
You all know this, already. From my essay a few years ago:
Her single-minded determination is among her best qualities. Through it all, through every misstep and every false start, every early morning and late night, every tear and every fear, she held on to hope. She never, ever let hope die. Our daughter exists primarily because of the otherworldly single-minded persistence of my wife.
Talking about it makes it easier.
For years, I wrote an annual essay at Sports Media Guy about our experience. Every year, my wife and I heard from a friend, a friend-of-a-friend, a family member of a colleague, who has their own infertility journey.
Infertility is hard to talk about - especially for women, given the personal nature of the issues and the way motherhood is elevated in our culture. My wife got through our journey by having a friend who went through it herself as a sounding board.
If you’re going through this or need to talk, we’re here. Talking about it makes it less scary. At least you know you’re not alone.
It’s all worth it
My daughter is 10. She has big plans to be a Broadway star. She wears holes in the heels of her shoes. She’s obsessed with the Percy Jackson universe. She loves puppets. She insists on wearing mismatched socks every day. She’s learning the ukulele. She is a really good writer. She hates math.
The day-to-day of life doesn’t stop. Days turn into months into years. Memories get fuzzy, get blurred together, get fused with the story we want to tell. Sometimes, only one time, my wife asked me not to tell it, just because it felt heavy again that year. We get further and further from that comfortable room on the outskirts of Syracuse.
As we should.
Peter Parker didn’t linger over the spider bite, and Cap didn’t think about that injection of the serum.
The origin story, after all, is just the start.
The start of something remarkable, joyous.
Miraculous.
Thanks for reading this special edition of Sports Media Guy. To learn more about infertility, please check out Resolve.