I’m off work for the afternoon, it’s raining outside, and I’m sat here with a cup of tea reading the various “Truthful Tuesday” posts on Tumblr. It struck me while reading how disarmingly candid some of them are, and felt that maybe I should drop some of the brick walls I’ve built around here.
I can’t have children.
After being married for a couple of years, we started trying for a family, and got nowhere fast. We followed the same course I often find myself reading about with other young families on the internet, and still have trouble finding the words to help them.
After a year of being poked, prodded, and undergoing batteries of tests, the doctors could find nothing wrong with either of us. We ended up using a slice of our 15 minutes of fame taking part in a television programme about IVF, and when given access to all the toys in the scientist’s arsenal, the truth was discovered.
I have a genetic defect. A missing enzyme. Without going too deep into the science (which I could, because we ended up knowing far more about this than most doctors), the missing building blockmeans the chemical reaction that goes on when sperm meets egg doesn’t work as it should. They only found this out when they looked through an electron microscope at the whole firework display going offor not going off in our case.
We broke ourselves attempting IVF three times. We’re still paying the debt off now, five years later. It worked once, and we lost the baby at 17 weeks. My memories of the day spent in hospital are etched in my memory by a laser. I still remember something going wrong in recovery, and doctors running into the room and surrounding the bed as alarms went off. I remember standing in the carpark calling family with updates, delivering as many facts as I could recall while not really dealing with any of it.
I remember sitting at dinner a few months later, and talking about stopping trying, and about adoption. I remember the tears.
It’s good to remind ourselves where we came from. The last three and a half years have been filled with the school run, homework, projects, school trips, shoes, labels, new friends, learning to swim, and endless birthday parties. The couple of years before that were spent being grilled endlessly by social workers, standing in court, and tipping every corner of our lives upside down.
It’s good to remember at the end of long tiring days that once upon a time we got home and had nobody to show us a painting, to share a cake they baked, or to run up and hold our hand just because.
On the way home from school in the torrential rain this afternoon, our eldest gripped my hand (after buying her a chocolate bar), and said “you’re the best Dad in the world”