Try Try and Try Again. How We Got To Here: 2 Moms and 2 Kids

Our Fertility Story

As a queer lesbian family, our family building was extremely intentional and planned out. Some plans worked and some did not. I want to share a bit about our story. The joyous parts and the devastating. 

For us our trying started right after getting married in 2011. Or maybe it actually started much earlier. As a fertility acupuncturist I had been charting, peeing on sticks, ferning, looking at my os, doing Maya Abdominal therapy, acupuncture, and herbs for 6 months. You name it, I was doing it. 

We tried our first unmedicated IUI the month we got married. It was a big old negative. However, the next month, I was pregnant! I carried our daughter to term and had an intensely long and awesome home birth. 

My wife was so excited to carry our next child. I was too! She had had a late first trimester miscarriage in a previous relationship and it had been devastating. 15 years later and it still stung deeply. This was going to be healing and it would complete our family. We even interviewed doctors before trying. She would have a hospital birth. We found one and went ahead with trying for our second. First month was a negative, second was too and the negatives stopped when she stopped. The emotional toll it took was really huge for her. We realized that her first miscarriage had never really been dealt with and healing needed to happen at that level. We are still working on that, but now we honor Lily and talk about her. That alone has been so helpful. Emotions are tools, our body telling us something. This one was grief and it needed us to acknowledge it. At some point, she was done trying. She would not try again and she was not going to do advanced testing and medicated cycles. I’m proud of her for honoring her boundaries.

It was up to me to try again. I wasn’t ready for awhile.

A number of months later, we did get to try and it was months of negatives. We decided to do something that we had always wanted to do, foster children! And started classes. We were told that we couldn’t at that time. I was so sad. We strongly felt that another child was coming to us. We just didn’t know when and how.

A number of months later, my wife convinced me to try IUI again, new donor, just 3 tries. Then we would be done. I acquiesced. First try, was wonky, my super regular cycle and ovulation, wasn’t. But you all, we had our first positive in over 3 years! I fell to my knees sobbing. 

And then, cause, I love peeing on sticks, I peed on 1 the next day, and then I went out to other stores and bought a bunch of different kinds, though I know the logic doesn’t validate it, I needed to pee on all the brands, because my positive was no longer there. My menses came late but it came.

I was done done done. But then my wife sat me down and shoved my own words back at me. Fertility can be increased after an early loss. I see it happen quite a bit. So, I sucked it up and tried again that next month. This time when we got a positive, I didn’t trust it. But it stuck, despite my irritability and doubt.

We have 2 beautiful and cherished children.

We had some really easy parts to getting to this place and some challenging ones. We were hot messes one day and strong and positive the next. Thankfully, rarely on the same day. We are very thankful and feel immense gratitude.

4 IUIs, a crap ton of ICIs with 2 different unknown frozen donors.

2 moms and 2 kids.