I can remember one time when we were still reeling from the impact of a BFN after an FET.
It was our fifth or sixth embryo transfer in a couple of years, and I dreaded what the next couple of days would hold.
I knew more than likely Lisa would hit the support boards, be combing over our test results to see if we’d missed some detail that would reveal the reason why we weren’t getting pregnant.
Then she’d likely be online searching all kinds of different infertility clinic sites and reading about different treatments promising success rates that seemed suspiciously high given what we knew about the SART reports at that time.
Long story short; we’d be cooped up in our “get pregnant command central” trying to regroup from our most recent lost battle, and gather up the emotional troops to plan another offensive.
I decided it would be better to head out of the command post.
It had been so long since we had done anything spontaneous, so about 11pm one night, when I could see the tears welling up in Lisa’s eyes as she stared vacantly at the TV where another Hallmark ad showing a happy family gathering had just shredded another heart string, I decided to try a new approach.
“Let’s go to Mount Lemmon.”
I normally hemmed and hawed about the heading up to the nearby mountain get away that took us from desert to pine trees in an hour and half drive.
Lisa looked at me and cocked her eyebrow.
“I guess we could do that, but then we have to plan for…”
“No, I mean right now. We don’t have a kid. Let’s go to breakfast and load up on some food to get us through the night and head up to the Mt Lemmon.”
Now she was looking at me like I was crazy.
“Where are we going to sleep? We don’t have any place booked.”
I smiled.
“We’ll bring blankets and pillows and I’ll put the back seats down and we’ll sleep in the back of the car. Maybe make out like we used at the drive in.”
The memory brought the first smile to her face that I’d seen all day.
“C’mon Lisa. I know we don’t have a baby right now, so let’s do something we couldn’t do if we had one.”
As we ate breakfast at IHOP an hour later at midnight, we began to talk about all the crazy things we’d done together since we’d met, late night walks through New York City after we’d get off work, crazy overnights studying for exams in college, all the times we’d stay out until the sun rose just talking and gazing into each others eyes when we were dating.
We held hands as I drove up to Mt Lemmon, and we found a spot where all we could hear was the sound of the wind bending the pine trees around us.
I saw Lisa’s shoulders relax, her eyes lighten, and her breathing become deeper and easier.
We snuggled in the back of that car, wrapped up in a blanket of escape that felt so welcome after all the craziness of the past two years.
I had no illusion that this would drown out the sound of Lisa’s biological clock.
But for just a little while, the pine trees, crisp mountain air, and lack of anything that could be a reminder of our infertility maybe softened the impact of that clock’s ticking second hand.
We found that by embracing each other as a couple again for just a day, we were recharged to begin anew our efforts to add a third member to our family.