Parents have to strive despite our knowledge that we will fail. Living with this cognitive dissonance is one of the hardest lessons of parenting, and one we can only embrace if we talk about our lives with all the doubt, nuance, and contradiction they actually encompass. Last year, in response to an influx of memoirs […]
Why shouldn’t we have a say in what kind of care we received during this enormous transition? The first time my partner Charlie gave birth was in a hospital. He wanted a home birth, and we hired a skilled, compassionate midwife, someone who was affirming toward our queer family and Charlie’s identity as a transmasculine […]
When they came into the world, I knew I was complete. I always wanted to be a mother. I loved kids and they loved me. In fact, I was convinced that I was born to be a parent. So while my friends planned take-no-prisoner careers, I thought about baby names and nurseries. The only problem […]
Tempting as it may be and logical as it may seem to some patients, the transfer of multiple embryos and any resulting twin pregnancy risks the lives of all involved. By comparing the DNA of NASA astronaut Scott Kelly to his identical twin brother, a study that quickly went viral on social media suggested space […]
For those considering IVF, much like becoming a parent, nothing can prepare you for this journey and everyone’s journey is different. For the first year of my child’s cellular existence, he lived in a deep freezer. We let him multiply a bit, and then stuck him in like a Klondike bar. Don’t worry, he wasn’t […]
I wasn’t sure dating was the solution. What if it didn’t work out? That would leave me 36 years old, still with no baby on the horizon. “Is it hopelessly improbable to find the mother of your children on OkCupid? We’ll see, won’t we. I’ve always wanted to be a dad. I had a great […]
It would still be my body making the baby, it just wouldn’t be my DNA. More and more, it seems that honesty and openness are the keys to finding peace and acceptance. And for many women, infertility is one of those topics that is beginning to come out of a dark, secret place. While in […]
Did you know that the baby you gave to my family would be born into the greatest love? For a long time, I believed this wasn’t my story. I started this letter to you a year ago, quietly and in my private journal. After all, I have two healthy sons with my husband through traditional […]
Wanting a baby can make you crazy—with desire, with need, with jealousy, and most of all, with options. For my 40th birthday, I bought myself a $200+ fertility monitor. No, it’s not a glamorous gift, or one I’m particularly proud of—and it’s definitely not something I’d ever ask anyone else to purchase for me—but it’s a […]
Your friend, sister, or sister-in-law wants to have a child and her best chance is through egg donor IVF. Do you do it? It’s a question you don’t often ask yourself, but when you do the internal debate can last a long time. A friend is infertile, they have had nine cycles of IVF, they […]
Pregnancy is all too often treated simply as a gateway—something to get through on the road to the real event, the baby’s birth; not as a momentous, life-altering, and emotionally and physically treacherous event in and of itself. When I was 14 weeks pregnant, my husband and I flew halfway around the world to spend […]
Through the fog of my grief, I discovered that pregnancy loss is like a secret society you never asked to join. You don’t realize how many members there are until you become one of them. There are some questions almost too big to answer. Or too loaded. “How many times have you been pregnant?” is […]
