Graham and I joked about that forever. But even though we tried to turn it into a joke, it meant the issue was all me. No matter how lavish his sperm count was, they weren’t any good to my uterus. We had sex on a strict ovulation schedule. I took my temperature regularly. I ate and drank all the right foods. Still nothing. We pinched every penny we had and tried IUI and then IVF and were met with unsuccessful results.
We’ve discussed surrogacy, but it’s just as expensive as IVF, and according to our doctor, due to the endometriosis I was diagnosed with at twenty-five, my eggs just aren’t very reliable.
Nothing has been successful and we can’t afford to keep repeating things we’ve already attempted, or even trying new techniques. I’m starting to realize it might never happen.
This past year has been the absolute hardest of all the years. I’m losing faith. Losing interest. Losing hope.
Losing, losing, losing.
“Are you interested in adoption?” Eleanor asks.
My eyes swing to hers and I do my best to hide my exasperation. I open my mouth to answer her, but my mother leans in. “Her husband isn’t interested in adoption,” she says.
“Mother,” Ava hisses.
She dismisses Ava with a flip of her hand. “It’s not like I’m telling the whole world. Eleanor and I are practically best friends.”
“You haven’t seen each other in almost a decade,” I say.
My mother squeezes Eleanor’s hand. “Well, it certainly doesn’t feel like that long. How is Peter?”
Eleanor laughs, welcoming the change of subject as much as I do. She starts telling my mother about his new car and his midlife crisis, which technically can’t be a midlife crisis because he’s well into his sixties, but I don’t correct them. I excuse myself and head to the restroom in an attempt to run away from the constant reminder of my infertility.
I should have corrected her when my mother said Graham isn’t interested in adoption. It’s not that he’s not interested, we just haven’t had any luck in getting approved with an agency due to Graham’s past. I don’t understand how an adoption agency won’t take into consideration that outside of that devastating conviction when he was a teenager, he’s never so much as had a parking ticket. But, when you’re only one of thousands of couples applying to adopt, even one strike against you can rule you out.
My mother is wrong. Neither of us is opposed to the idea, but we just can’t get approved and we can no longer afford to keep trying. The treatments drained our bank account and now that we have a second mortgage on our home, we wouldn’t even know how to afford the process if we were approved.
There are so many factors, and even though people think we haven’t considered all of our options, we’ve considered them many times.
Hell, Ava even bought us a fertility doll when she went to Mexico three years ago. But nothing—not even superstition—has worked in our favor. Graham and I decided early last year to leave it up to chance, hoping it will happen naturally. It hasn’t. And to be honest, I’m tired of swimming upstream.
The only thing holding me back from giving up completely is Graham. I know deep down if I let go of the dream of children, I will be letting go of Graham. I don’t want to take the possibility of becoming a father away from him.
I’m the infertile one. Not Graham. Should he be punished by my infertility, too? He says kids don’t matter to him as much as I matter to him, but I know he says that because he doesn’t want to hurt me. And because he still has hope. But ten or twenty years from now, he’ll resent me. He’s human.
I feel selfish when I have these thoughts. I feel selfish every time Graham and I have sex because I know I’m clinging to a hope that isn’t there, dragging him along in a marriage that will eventually become too dull for either of us. Which is why I spend hours every day online, searching for something that might give me an answer. Anything. I’m in support groups, I read all the message boards, the stories of “miracle conceptions,” the private adoption groups. I’m even in several parenting groups just in case I do eventually have a child. I’ll be well prepared.
The one thing I don’t participate in online is social media. I deleted all my accounts last year. I just couldn’t take the insensitive people on my timeline. April Fools’ Day was the worst. I lost track of how many of my friends think it’s funny to announce a fake pregnancy.
They have absolutely no compassion for people in my situation. If they knew how many women have spent years dreaming of a positive result, they’d never even think to make light of it.