This has been something on my mind for a while. And it's really an attempt by me to answer why... Why us? Why me? Infertility is a crisis. A crisis for a couple and a crisis for both a man and a woman. I don't think this crisis can really be understood by anyone who has not 'been there'... Close your eyes and imagine for just one moment... how it feels to find the love of your life, that someone who is so like you in every way... someone who is your best friend... someone who loves you for who you are... someone who you want to share everything life has to offer... someone with who you plan your life together - talk endlessly about your dreams: getting married, buying a house, travelling the world, having a family. But having a family doesn't happen. Not the way it seems to happen for everyone else. We love each other, we are young, we are healthy, we are good people. But we are not fertile. Why aren't we fertile? What have we done to deserve this? All we want is to be parents. To have a child together. Why can't we? What have I done? What have we done? We don't know and the answer is probably nothing... we haven't done anything. We are just on the road less travelled. Shane and I tried to fall pregnant for about 8 months until we sought 'help'. We thought given we were only in our late 20's that we would pop some pills and voila - 9 months later we would have Baby E. Well 5 IVFs later... including one ectopic pregnancy and the removal of one of my fallopian tubes... I could not face any more... and to be honest what I couldn't face was the look on my husband's face when I told him, once again, I had my period. We needed a break from the appointments, the injections, the pain and the disappointment. I needed some relief. We turned to adoption pretty quickly. Interestingly, we had always talked about International Adoption as being one way we would form our family... we had always said 4 children, 2 biological, and 2 through Intercountry Adoption. We had discussed this even before we knew having biological children would be difficult for us. It very quickly became an obvious choice for us to become a family. And suddenly we were faced with 'when' not 'if'. We seem to have always been on a road less travelled. We got married in solitude on a beach in the Whitsunday Islands of Queensland, Australia (read - we eloped). We were so much more interested in being married to one another, than having the cars, and the dress, and the cake and all the attention. We didn't tell anyone we were married until a week after the fact - including our parents.Our friends travel to Europe or Asia and stay in 5 star hotels. Our preferred trips are to remote places living 6 weeks on the back of a truck - sleeping under the stars in sleeping bags.We buy 200 acres and move to drought ridden Australia to start the life we have talked about for as long as we have known each other... building a country homestead in a small, country town where everyone knows our name. ... And we apply to the People's Republic of China to entrust us with one of their precious daughters (or sons... I have always thought that our road less travelled will bring us to one of China's sons - and of course we would be thrilled).
The wait is much longer than we anticipated... we will be first time parents at an older age than we thought we would be. But we are living the life that I know was laid out for us. We are living a life that only a few get to live... we are living the road less travelled. And I am grateful.
Lisa xxx