Better luck next time

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As I’ve mentioned, my fiancée and I have been consulting a fertility clinic and a GYN whose practice is more oriented to lesbians. (New York is a strange and wonderful town.)

I’ve also mentioned my fiancée’s constitutional inability to plan beyond dinner and her specific resistance to planning for pregnancy.

However, I have convinced her of the wisdom of planning. And, of course, she has to do it better than anyone. She is planning meticulously and to a fare-thee-well.

To the extent possible, given her age, we’re going to try to have everything ready for our first attempt when we get back from honeymooning.

We are trying to decide on a donor. Given the advance notice, we have a lot of options, including quarantine.

Although it would be wonderful for the child to have some of my genetic material, I can’t ask my brother. We want the child to be hers, so using my eggs isn’t an option, either, at least for now.

We have a friend, brilliant, kind, thoughtful. He’s been my fiancée’s confidante and adviser since he helped her start her business. He’s become my most prized friend, too. I can tell him about anything. He always has a considered, affectionate answer. I know that he would put my fiancée ahead of me, but that’s fine: I put her ahead of me, too. No one has been happier that my Love has found love.

Before my fiancée’s penny dropped, she often said that if his wife died, she would marry him at the drop of a hat. His wife – at least laughingly – told my fiancée that was her fondest wish.

It took us a couple of weeks (and a couple of dinners) to work up the courage to ask him and his wife.

We weren’t ready for the answer: raucous laughter from both.

My dears, he’s infertile.

Oh well. Back to the drawing board.

24 thoughts on “Better luck next time”

    • What fooled us is that they have a son – an honors Physics major who had scholarship offers in two sports. But he’s 20 years old and, we found out, was conceived with state-of-the-art (for the time) intervention. We don’t want to go through that, yet.

      Sigh.

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      • Probably selection bias. I feel like fertile straight people aren’t exactly blogging the play-by-play of their sex lives. And most of the ones I know staring down infertility are pretty less forthcoming than the gays about the need for assisted reproduction, at least in public.

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        • Oh, man, straight people don’t have all the luck! (I speak from experience here… infertility plus loss of our first baby at 4.5 months — currently 5.5 months with our second and hoping to high heaven that this is the one!) That said, when it does work, straight people do have it way easier than gay people, obviously — the old-fashioned way is much cheaper and a whole lot more fun than any of the high-tech solutions. :-)

          Sorry your first hope for a sperm donor hasn’t worked out, and I hope that you identify a great Plan B soon! Our first lesbian friends to conceive also rejected brotherly sperm, ended up going the anonymous donor route, and now have a gorgeous, happy baby who is currently 11 months old and the light of their life. They did run into one major setback (first baby lost right at the end of the first trimester, which was devastating for them), but pregnancy #2 worked out perfectly. One thing the past few years have taught me is that if baby-making is easy for you, you should count yourself very lucky, because problems are much more common (and much more stressful and heartbreaking) than we tend to realize. I’m not trying to freak you out, but I think it’s easier if you go into in prepared for it to take a while, and realize that there’s only so much engineering you can do. Looking forward to updates!

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          • I’m truly sorry for that stupid remark. I should have thought of you.

            Thanks for letting me off the hook gently.

            You straight people are lucky that the mechanics of getting pregnant can be fun. (Or so I’m told.) Even the least unpleasant method for us (the turkey baster) does not sound like fun.

            I also understand the potential heartbreak all too well. I had a sister who died at 4 days. My Mother had miscarriages that she’s never talked about. I was aware that my Mother had gone to the hospital and something awful had happened. But it wasn’t until I started reading your and My Perfect Breakdown’s blogs that I knew what had happened and how horrible it must have been for her. It really hit home when my fiancée and I started talking seriously about children. I’m pretty tough, but a loss like yours would devastate me.

            Thanks for the encouragement. It means a lot. This is something we’ve both wanted all our lives.

            And, yeah, I understand that this problem is less Engineering and more Monte Carlo.

            PS: Best of luck!

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          • So sorry for your losses, Pregnant Physicist, and best wishes for this current pregnancy and your rainbow baby. I hope you’re able to enjoy both as the journey progresses.

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          • Oh, no offense taken at all! And I’m sorry for my implicit assumption that everyone would enjoy the old-fashioned way (more fun for me, but obviously not for you!). :-) I love Lemon Drop’s observation about the shift from her 20s-30s from “woohoo, no accidental pregnancy!” to “shoot, no accidental pregnancy.” It had never occurred to me before that that’s a transition that same-sex couples would make, and right around the same time that I was making the shift from freaking out constantly about accidental pregnancy to realizing how unnecessary it was to have freaked out about accidental pregnancy all those years!

            Truth is, making babies is hard, and for a lot of people, it’s really hard. Some of us have special challenges, yes, but it’s absolutely true that if you’re anything other than a straight heterosexual couple you start off with more baggage, and you know that you’ll get to make some tough decisions from Day 1. I wouldn’t want to deny any of that difficulty!

            Your poor family, and especially your mom, for having to deal with the loss of your sister and what sounds like multiple miscarriages. My heart aches for all of you. Here’s hoping that the universe was saving up all the luck for you, and that things are boring and easy for you and your Love.

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        • Of course it’s selection bias. I shouldn’t be so jocular – See my Physicist friend’s comment below, and My Perfect Breakdown’s story is tragic. Still, as both of them have pointed out, it’s frustrating to be around people who say, “I get pregnant when he looks at me.”

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          • Yes. I count myself and my wife lucky, both for relatively short conception processes, but also that we had only one pregnancy loss. And in a way, I’m very grateful for having had that loss, as it did wonders for my empathy. I had sympathy for others’ difficulties before, certainly, but there’s something about the miscarriage club that changes, if not you, then how you perceive the world.

            I do remember the transition from my twenties to my thirties, however. It was around then that I started thinking about the lack of ability to get pregnant accidentally in a same sex marriage as an obstacle rather than a benefit!

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  5. Lyra/Pregnant Physicist & Lemon Drop:

    No need to apologize!

    I was a stupid, confused, teenager, I tried straight sex to convince myself that I wasn’t gay. So I definitely understand the transition from “woohoo, no pregnancy!” to “shoot, no pregnancy.” I had 15 celibate years in between, but I remember that there was one reason to be happy I got my period.

    No, I didn’t enjoy the old-fashioned way. At all.

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    • There are a few billion men out there …

      The problem with a known donor is our own squeamishness. It took us a couple of weeks to work up the courage to ask our best friend.

      At least we got a good laugh out of it. And a good laugh always ends in fun at home …

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  7. What a bummer! Is the son out of the question as a donor? Would that be weird?

    Good luck navigating this journey. I don’t think that straight people have more luck, it’s just that they are able to put in months of free trying before taking a step toward interventions, and those months USUALLY result in pregnancy. We have to pay so much for even the “simplest” route, that we leap toward interventions much more quickly. I think those leaps classify us into “infertility” when the reality is, we are just as fertile, we’re simply trying to cut out the labor/patience step.

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  8. Bummer! It’s hard but my ex and I did it. We found someone we didn’t know but it’s worked out so far…a beautiful daughter who is nine. I’m the biological mother and my ex is the birth mother. Good luck in your continued hunt.

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