Last updated on September 30th, 2021 at 10:15 am
If you follow my articles, you know we went for it. We tried for more after multiples! What on earth were we thinking, I know! Our boys are 2 and a half now and we are excited for a bigger family. We feel we have more love and life to give another baby. But I guess that was not in our cards right now….
We followed the process closely: about 2 months of twice daily injections, medications and patches and almost every other day sonograms and some blood work and everything seemed to look good. No cysts this time, levels looked good and my body was responding nicely to the injections so we went in for the FET (frozen embryo transfer). Then 4 days of bed rest, no hot showers, no heavy lifting, the two week wait and then EXCITING NEWS! It worked!
Everything seemed so easy this time around compared to the years of fertility treatments it took to get the boys. It was so easy! It seemed too easy. And I guess I was right…. For 3 days, I walked around with the excited glow and the extra skip in my step knowing there would be a new bundle or two (we used 2 embryos for the best odds) and that nervous, anxious feeling in my stomach knowing that we would need to get a new car with another row and there would be A LOT more sleepless nights. Everything seemed new again and yet like we were venturing into the unknown.
I told the boys that they were going to be big brothers (on video that I was going to, of course, post on Facebook). We told our parents, we told our close friends. I hadn’t even taken the nursery apart from the boys, we just moved them into their new big boy room. Everyone was excited.
A couple days before Christmas and I was finishing up wrapping presents. The boys were playing cars in the hall. I wrote on the back of a Christmas gift for my husband’s mom “Looking forward to new baby in 2015”….
And then, the phone rang, my doctor called and said it was a chemical pregnancy. My first thought was “OK, so it was a false positive, that’s fine. I can live with the fact that it didn’t work, that I was never even pregnant”. But no, that’s not the case. A chemical pregnancy is actually a very early miscarriage. That’s what broke my heart. Before doing the FET, I thought that since we have 2 happy healthy boys that if it did not work, I would not be lost or upset…. I was only thinking that it might not work. I had not factored in that it might work and that I might miscarry. And I definitely didn’t think I would have that type of response.
I lost my breath. My heart sank. I called my husband at work and acted fine. “I’m strong, I can do this,” I thought. Why does this hurt so bad? I’m fine, I can do this. Go through the motions. Get through this. Fight the tears. Give the boys a bath. Call girlfriend for wine. Cry.
I was heartbroken. I felt like I had put so much of myself emotionally and physically and yes, monetarily into the FET that I had taken time away from my boys, my husband, my work…. We are now in debt even more than we were before. Our loan keeps pilling up larger and larger because of our dream of family. It just doesn’t seem fair to me! I know that “life isn’t fair” but why are there so many people out there that do not even want their own children and then there are so many people that can’t have them? I actually had someone say to me once that she hated being so fertile!! Please don’t tell the infertile chick that you hate being fertile!
I was extremely sick for 2 months and I feel like I missed precious time with my boys. There were nights I would come home so nauseous from the fertility meds that I would have to go straight to lay down and let my husband take over. I missed some bed times and a few bath times… Those are my favorite moments when we discuss our day.
But it is one more experience to make me realize how special my boys are and how precious their lives are. The desire for a bigger family is still there and this has not deterred us in any way. We have decided to take a year and re-group, figure out how to get the financial part under control, and maybe in the meantime get a couple of little cuties potty trained and sleeping through the night in their big-boy beds. Then maybe we will be able to give it another go!
Every single thing we go through on this journey makes us stronger as a family. No matter how difficult it is in the moment, I know that someone else out there is dealing with something so much harder. As long as I can get up every morning and look into my boys eyes and see them smile I am happy. We may not be able to give them everything they want but we can give them lots of wonderful memories for them to cherish. And that is exactly what we plan to do. And as far as our dream of a bigger family, hopefully that will come true one day; but if it does not, we are a happy, healthy family of four.
Mikenzie Oldham is a full-time twin mommy, a full-time wife, a full-time employee, a full-time maid, a full-time chef, and a full-time writer. Juggling life as twin mommy in a kid-centric world, she survives all this with a steady intake of caffeine and wine. She has perfected the phrase “don’t hit your brother” and her main expertise is cleaning mud out of someone’s ear, kissing “owies” and finding four shoes. Check out all her boys’ shenanigans at meandallmyboys.wordpress.com.
