My wife Jen and I started our journey to have children more than 5 years ago expecting our road to be mapped out and predictable. We’d seen many others have kids and thought it would be easy. Our expectations could not have been further from the truth. In our first year of trying to conceive, I was diagnosed with cancer, a curveball that put our family planning on pause as I endured rounds of chemo and surgeries. Eventually, I worked my way back to full health, but the procedures and therapy cancelled our plans to have kids naturally. As this news sank in, I lost sight of the finish line. For a time I thought there wouldn’t be a joyous end to our efforts and our chances of having a family were all for not. Surviving cancer depleted our energy and it was a struggle to center ourselves on our family planning goals. Having a child was going to be harder than we thought.
After some soul-searching, we pressed on with our journey and tried IVF. The process began with promise, and with some top-quality embryos in hand, we thought we were one transfer away from conception. We hoped and prayed and did everything we could to increase our chances, scientifically proven or not, but nothing came of our efforts expect more heartbreak and uncertainty. It was painfully obvious that we would have to take another route to parenthood.
Jen and I are critical thinkers, and we rarely jump to a decision without processing every bit of information we can. So, for our next steps, it took us a long time to decide on where we were being called. There was no roadmap and a lot of our decisions were made on gut feelings after spending many hours talking. We began looking into foster care and state and private adoptions, all of which were far off my radar of how I’d become a dad. We attended information sessions where we talked to agents and other adoption families about their experience. We spent hours on the Internet researching. We filled out background checks and had our home inspected. Step by step, we thought we were on the track we were intended to follow. But gut feelings can only lead you so far.
It wasn’t until a mentor of ours suggested looking into embryo adoption where the thought of actually raising a child from birth was possible for us. We’d never heard of this form of adoption and decided to give it a go despite the struggles we’d already been through with IVF. Jen and I were in better places, although something called COVID-19 was running rampant around the world. If there was ever a time to try to have kids, we thought it was now. And if this didn’t work, we could always pursue the other forms of adoption we had already researched.
It was hard to get my hopes up knowing our IVF history. I didn’t want to have to endure any more trauma than I already had, and the thought of not being successful—again—gave me nightmares. So, when Jen and I received a call from our fertility clinic with the news that Jen was pregnant after our second attempt, I thought they were joking or had called the wrong family. We were in disbelief. In the middle of the pandemic, where everything seemed to be falling apart and nothing was going right, being told that we would be parents completely shocked our systems.
Last week, I finally had the opportunity to take maternity photos of Jen after years of thinking the day would never come. As I was taking her photos, I chuckled thinking how true the old adage “a photo is worth a thousand words” is, or in Jen’s case, how hundreds of shots in the rear are worth having a baby (maybe not a thousand)! We wanted to share this incredible news in order to inspire you all to never give up no matter how complicated or impossible things are because the harder it is, the sweeter the reward in the end.
We are blessed to have had so many people support us throughout the years to get us to where we are now, a month from becoming parents. To new beginnings, one dirty diaper at a time.
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Follow Jen as she writes about her pathway to pregnancy on her blog Smith Family Grows.