Everything I Wish I’d Known Before We Tried (and Mostly Failed) to Make a Baby
You’re in a pivotal life moment. She’s going to lose mind and start a war with her body. You will not know how to help her unless you listen to me now…
Adam, can you let go of your penis a second and listen, please?
It’s Future Adam here, with an important message. I know you think, standing there, trousers around your ankles in this depressing, windowless room in the Fertility Clinic, jacking off to Lesbian Vampire Academy is going to be a one-time, funny anecdote you’ll tell at parties, but you’re very wrong.
You’re actually in a pivotal life moment. The start of a year-long ordeal. You will get to know these terrible lesbians very well. You and your girlfriend’s fertility problems are about to consume your life and push your relationship to its breaking point. She’s going to lose mind and start a war with her body. You will not know how to help her. You will not survive IVF unless you listen to me now…
1. You do really, really want a child.
Like many men, you will never admit this to anyone else, or even yourself. Because the more you admit you want something, the more you can be hurt if you don’t get it. Look at Mick Jagger, you’ll think. He was still banging out kids in his seventies. I’ve got plenty of time.
No, Adam. You don’t.
Just because a truth is awkward, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pull up a chair and sit with it: you were ambivalent about having kids until you met her. You don’t want a child, you want her child. So, you have exactly the same amount of time she has, and not a second more.
If you believe otherwise, you and her diverge. Solving infertility becomes her project. She’ll be the one knowing the things and making the appointments and consulting the doctors and scheduling your passionless sex. You will become merely: The Sperminator.
This fertility project is going to be very heavy; please don’t make her carry it alone.
2. No One Who Hasn’t Been Through It Will Understand
There are eight billion people in the world, and there are credible rumours that they all started as babies. Therefore, how hard can it really be to make a baby?
For most people: not hard at all. For them, having a baby doesn’t require medical interventions, financial strain, and the shiniest science. If anything, it actually requires less effort and less restraint than not-making a baby.
Not for you two, though. But here’s what you don’t know: many men around you have also had fertility issues, they just won’t talk about them unless you do first. And if you do? They’ll open up about how they also felt like failures. How their relationship barely survived. And you’ll all feel less alone. Do it. Offer. Share. Shame is a vampire, it needs the dark. Your job is to let the light in.
3. The Desire for a Child is Not Like Other Desires
Over the next year, everything will feel unbearably high-stakes, and yet you won’t fully understand why. Here’s why: If you don’t get your dream job, you take another job. Colleagues, projects, e-mails, meetings that should have been e-mails — it won’t be as good, but it won’t be that different either.
If you don’t get the apartment you want, you take another apartment. A kitchen, shower, a bastard landlord that doesn’t return your calls about leaks in the kitchen and mould in that shower — it won’t be as good, but it won’t be that different either.
If you want a child but can’t have one, you…???
The desire for a child is an existential wish. It is a yearning to no longer be the most important person in the universe. It is the hope to set your identity on fire. It is the noble goal to build something much bigger than its parts: a family.
There’s no substitute for this. No second choice. No back up plan. Or so it will feel. And that’s why people without this wish won’t understand your suffering, and why several of them will suggest that if it doesn’t work out, you can always get a golden retriever.
4. Yes, that feeling, it is grief
Many feelings you’ll have during the next year are confusing and hard to name. When she gets her period each month, the lowest dip on a rollercoaster made entirely of plummets, you’ll feel a sharp, spiky sorrow that will last three to five days.
You know how, on a birthday, there’s this extra special joyous kick to existence? Everything just pops? These days are the exact opposite of that. They are UnHappy NonBirthdays. Ironically, during them, you will still eat a lot of cake, often while thinking, it feels like I’m grieving. Can I be grieving? Doesn’t grief need loss? But nothing is over yet. There’s always next month. Always something else you can try. Another IVF nuke you can fire. What have we lost, exactly?
Potential, Adam.
Every time it fails, that little pile of potential becomes smaller. Potential for what? Why, only the chance to experience the most profound, terrifying, life-altering love on the planet: parental love.
It is grief that you feel. Don’t judge yourself for it. Don’t dismiss it. Don’t shove it down. Emotions are like toddlers, ignore them, and they throw incredible tantrums.
When you feel grief, grieve.*
5. Just Because It’s Not Happening in You, Doesn’t Mean It’s Not Happening to You
Throughout the whole process, you will keep telling yourself how much worse she has it. After all, she’s the one injecting herself with hormones, harvesting eggs, and feeling the monthly failure inside her person. You will decide that since she’s suffering so much more, you should shut up about your suffering.
Don’t do that, Adam.
That only widens the divide and contrary to popular belief, silence isn’t actually noble. While your experience isn’t equal, you will share it. Just because you’ll do less, you’ll do plenty. Just because you’ll feel less (they won’t pump you full of hormones), it doesn’t mean you’ll feel nothing. You will be made to watch the person you love most in the world suffer intensely. And that, my friend, is shitty. You might as well just be honest with yourself, her, and everyone else about that.
6. Go to Therapy, You Stubborn Moron.
In the coming weeks, she will read books and a million academic papers and go to support groups and do therapy and form networks in that wonderful way women do, collecting resources and knowledge and coping strategies like they are limited edition vinyls.
You will do nothing, and try to pass that off as stoicism. Men, honestly, sometimes it feels like we’d rather fail alone than have to succeed together.
When she suggests therapy—either alone or as a couple—don’t say, “I don’t think we need to spend any more time thinking or talking about our fertility problems.”
Because there is a difference between thinking and talking more, and thinking and talking better. Therapy is better.
Fortunately, she knows you well, and even if you don’t take all this wonderful advice, you’ll still get lucky twice. Firstly, because she’ll force you to go on a ten-day silent retreat where after a particularly torturous session on day four, you’ll run crying into the woods, punch a tree, and talk to a worm which talks back, scaring me so much that you furiously murdered nearby ants, get a confusing erection, and have many realisations—about how your mind works, about how much you want a child, about why you suppress your emotions.
Then, you get lucky again: IVF works, and just in time. You will have a daughter, and fortunately, she will be mostly her mother, and so, magical. You’ll be able to sit down years later, from within your Happily Ever After to write this, ostensibly to yourself, but, really, to all the other Adams out there—standing in a clinic, pants around their ankles, completely unaware of what’s coming.
And to those Adams, you’ll say: don’t do what I did. Do better.
*I’ve always felt the Five Stages of Grief should be gender separated, and that men’s are: Anger, Alcohol, Denial, Denial, Denial.