Infertility is an insidious monster. It sneaks up on you, taking a bite here, a nibble there. It feeds on your life, and on your relationships. And if you aren't careful, it will devour your marriage. For a long time, I didn't recognize the monster. But one day, I saw it—in my reflection in the dresser mirror. It stared back at me through the dullness in my eyes, the stress lines around my mouth, the droop of my cheeks. I didn't always look like that.
My gaze dropped to a photo that sat askew on the dresser. There, my husband and I grinned from the confines of the silver frame. Bryan's arms looped around my shoulders. Behind us, the ornate doors of Notre Dame rose to the top of the picture. Paris. It had been beautiful that May. And we were two young lovers walking its streets hand-in-hand. We were innocent, in love, and looking forward to a future filled with the promise of giggling children and vacations that would take us to Disneyland instead of Paris. But that was B.I.—Before Infertility—and those days were gone.
Gone too was the beautiful, s*xy, loving wife my husband married. Instead, I felt like a baby-making machine that wasn't working right. As a result, our love life had become sterile and mechanical. The purpose of intimacy was no longer to share our love, but to produce a baby, no longer to enjoy each other, but to accomplish a goal. We made love based on the reading on an ovulation predictor stick, and according to the instructions given by our doctor.
On the proper day when the stick read positive, I'd call to my husband, "Today's the day," and later that evening, whether or not we felt like it, we'd do our duty, all the time with our thoughts focused on the baby we hoped to conceive. Discussions became focused on babies and procedures. Times together turned into arguments about how he wasn't supportive enough and how I was too emotional. No more romance; no more laughter or spontaneity or passion or fun.
A First Step toward Change Every month that passed as I found out I still wasn't pregnant, the monster grew stronger. Every day it chewed up a little more of the love between Bryan and me. Somehow we'd forgotten each other in this pain-filled journey through infertility. We'd forgotten how to really see each other, to rejoice in what we loved about the other. Instead, we'd become so focused on the goal of having a baby that we'd become blind to everything else.
We needed a change. I needed a change. Somewhere inside, an attractive, fun-loving woman still hid. I just had to find a way to let her out again. A week later, the day came when the ovulation stick again read positive. But this time, I was determined to make things different. That night I dressed in my best, black velvet gown. I curled my hair, put on makeup, and fastened on the special sapphire earrings my husband had given me three years before. I bought a bottle of wild, new perfume and dabbed it on my wrists and ears. Then I looked in the mirror and smiled. It was a forced smile at first, but at least it was a start, a beginning to recapture the woman of fun and romance I'd once been. ...
