I noticed a thread of posts the past couple of days criticizing celebrity written infertility memoirs.
I have read a few of them, and each one manages to get to the heart of the infertility experience in the celebrity’s unique voice.
I have to applaud the courage it takes for them to reveal the indignities of infertility in a world filled with such caustic and often mean spirited gossip columns and celebrity bashing magazines.
Where these memoirs always kind of fall short of reality for me is when there is no stress about money, a lot of tales about exotic post-failed fertility getaways, paparazzi dodging or high fashion high end celebrity get togethers.
I wrote Almost A Father to be the non celebrity antidote to that.
We never had money flowing in like a waterfall.
No exotic foreign settings, unless you count Nogales (where we initially negotiated for the cheapest fertility drugs) or New Jersey (where we ended up for our 5th IVF) as exotic.
Nobody was clamoring for pictures of us, and we don’t have any stories of celebrity blow out parties.
Just two people, of average financial means, fighting like hell to bring a child into this world with the medical assistance of infertility clinics.
It is not candy coated.
Probably not considered politically correct in many places.
Extremely uncomfortable in others.
Sometimes it casts the infertility profession in less than favorable lights.
But it’s real.
We sacrificed, bled, worried, hoped, feared, cried, failed, crashed, burned, laughed, screamed but never stopped until we got to our biological child destination.
Money didn’t come easy, but we found a way to make enough to do what we needed to do, even if it meant making financial decisions I’m sure Suze Orman would frown upon.
Our ‘getaways’ were not far off exotic jungles, or posh European hotels, but trips to the nearby mountains, sleeping in the back of a hatchback Dodge Shadow to escape a world that was filling with other people’s second and third children while we struggled for our first.
Our get togethers didn’t feature any recognizable names, but the infertility support friends were like family to us during both the darkest and the best days.
I wanted Almost A Father to be a love story about an ordinary couple on an extraordinary journey through infertility.
To tell how we fell in love, out of passion, and found our way back to find our soul baby together.
Just from a guy’s perspective.
I wrote it for all the women like Lisa who know what they want, and are willing to pay the financial, emotional, physical and spiritual price to get it.
I wrote if for other almost a fathers so they get a raw unedited view from the male mind working through the financial, emotional, and spiritual complexities of infertility.
I wrote it for the soul babies seeking their soul parents.