Week Twenty Eight
Born This Way
"You have to stick it in!"
"No way. No absolute way."
"Honey, it's the only way."
"Um... I didn't think it was going to be so large. Can't we call a doctor or something to make sure it's right?"
"We've gone over this, stick it in my butt! Make it quick!"
I should probably back up a bit. Like all the way back to Christmas of 2013. Lindsey and I were in Paris enjoying dinner at a small bistro just south of the Place de la République when the topic was first approached. To be honest, I'm not sure who brought it up. But it was super-poetic and full of drama - a world changing moment. And it went something like this:
"Do you want to have a kid?"
"Ok."
And that was it. We'd been married for a few years. We were getting older. We were finally financially stable. It just seemed like the right time. So below a deluge of French rain on a cold Christmas night, we decided to start a family with about as much fanfare as a parade featuring only one person playing a kazoo. We figured becoming parents would be easy and by the following Christmas we'd have a little one running around. But we were so very wrong.
---
The cup sat on my dresser for the better part of three months. Marked with a biohazard symbol and sealed in a sterile plastic bag, it was a constant reminder that not only would I have to do something rather gratuitous in a public place, but that my manhood was simultaneously being called into question.
We'd tried for a kid for over a year without any sort of success. Calendars were created. Plans were formed. But nothing seemed to work. So we made the decision to look for medical help. And before they could begin, they needed to run tests on both of us.
And this is how I found myself in a very small room a few weeks later, holding that very same cup, while a nurse informed me of all my different pornographic options. When I pictured conceiving a child, I expected it to be in a moonlit cabin standing over the tranquil waters of the Seychelles, not in a cramped room in Greenwich, Connecticut looking at the rolling hills of Polly Peaks while a group of nurses and my wife stood outside the door.
Left to my own devices, I was quickly nauseated by the realization that I wasn't the first to be alone in this room. As such, I didn't touch a thing. Videos and magazines were left in their drawers. I avoided chairs and walls. I even opened the door handle with the bottom of my shirt when it was finished.
Once all of that was over, my worries flooded in. Had I produced enough? ("produced" is the medical term, which adequately made me feel like a rubber chicken factory.) And most importantly, what if I was the problem here? What if my count was low? What if the one thing I'm supposed to be capable of I'm not actually capable of? So I silently handed off the cup to a nurse who looked like she'd heard every other joke made by every other nervous wannabe father, and met my wife in the waiting room.
"How'd it go?" She asked.
Now, this is a question that needs to be answered delicately, not unlike when a woman asks you if their outfit makes them look fat. Responding with a positive can come across gross and pervy. A negative would have been cause for concern. So I went with the first thing I could think of:
"It was voluminous."
Hair is voluminous. A body of work can be voluminous. But sperm in a cup should not be voluminous unless you're working with horses. Lindsey shook her head in a way that most wives who've come to understand the absurdity of their husbands often do, and we left the building.
---
Between the day of my - ahem - deposit, and the day they gave me my results, I took a long hard look at how I live my life. Should I keep my iPhone in my pocket where it can radioactively fry my testicles? Is there a way to blame this on my brother for kicking me in the balls as a child? Could my years spent wearing spandex and unisuits for rowing have inadvertently suffocated my sperm?
It turns out no. I was fine. My boys can swim. But the problem is, Lindsey was deemed fine, too. There's nothing medically wrong with either of us. And so we had to live with the very unscientific diagnosis of, "sometimes it just doesn't work."
So this, in turn, begs the question: was the universe trying to prevent us from having a child? Would our kid turn out to be the next Hitler? Were we brute forcing something that cosmically shouldn't be done - like drinking orange juice after brushing your teeth or listening to a Milli Vanilli album in the 21st Century?
But the good news was - and by "good news" I mean "let's deplete our life-savings because medical insurance won't foot the $30,000 bill" - we were ready to jump into the fun and exciting world of In Vitro Fertilization!
---
This brings us up-to-date. We'd been given instructions by the very patient nurse in our fertility doctor's office on how to administer the shots. They'd be daily, they'd be in Lindsey's butt muscles, and the gauge of the needle would look like a German railway gun.
Quick tip: don't go for the Pulp Fiction method of slamming a needle into anything, especially your wife's ass cheeks. You aren't trying to jump-start her heart after a heroin overdose.
So, on our first night of Progesterone shots, and once we determined that yes, this was the correct needle, I knelt down next to my wife's backside and stabbed her. Did I say, "Fuck fuck fuck!" while I did it? Absolutely. Did the act make my teeth hurt? Strangely, yes. Did Lindsey take it like a champion? 100%.
I will say that this process got insanely easier as the days and weeks went on. So much so that it became less of a tense horror film and more of a day-to-day occurrence like brushing your teeth or watering your rhubarb.
---
We were about six weeks in when we were told the pregnancy was going to fail. We'd put a lot of time, money, pain, and above all, hope, into this thing, and finding out that it wasn't going to work was incredibly defeating. We named the kid "Justice" just so we could say it was a "miscarriage of Justice" and hide our pain and frustration with humor.
But this made us confront a scary reality: what if this didn't work out? We only had three viable eggs, and the first one didn't take. What if the other two didn't either? Would we be comfortable being childless? Would Lindsey let me take the funds we would have used toward a college education and buy a Ferrari?
So... we took a few months off. We let Lindsey's butt recover. We let our hopes recover. And we tried again.
---
"Are we out of the woods yet?" - T. Swift
This song lyric kept echoing through my head each day since our second implantation. We'd made it past a few hurdles. The kid seemed to be doing fine. And Lindsey was beginning to accept the fact that she was about to spend the next nine months being pregnant.
Eventually, we realized we were out of the woods and headed toward a successful pregnancy, but then again, with a kid you're never actually "out of the woods." It turns out everything in the world can kill your child, and the only way to be truly out of the woods is to seal them up in a bubble.
---
Malin was born in the early morning hours of October 25, 2016. Healthy, happy, and perfect.
It took us almost 3 years to go from an idea to a fully-functional baby. Lindsey was a rockstar not just through all of the IVF, but the pregnancy and delivery as well. She's proof that women are stronger than men, and she gets 100% of the credit. Well, she gets 99% of the credit. Maybe 98.5% if we're being honest. I guess our fertility doctor gets some credit too. So she's at like 68.5%. Dr. Witt is about 30%. And I'm giving myself a hearty 1.5% for being an excellent butt stabber and/or public masturbator.
