I’d love to take credit for the title of today’s post, but Lisa came up with this when we were looking for a way to sum up the theme of Almost A Father last summer.
It sounds like a line from a Nicholas Sparks book.
Until Lisa said those words, I’d never really thought of our infertility journey as a love story.
The more I let it settle into my subconscious the more I realized how true those words are.
Lisa and I have been crazy for each other since I first saw her at a rehearsal while learning the words to “Addicted To Love” singing lead in a cover band just a few years out of high school.
In walks this beautiful girl with legs that won’t quit and a smile that spoke to my soul.
We started talking, and found we shared ambitious plans for our lives, and found strength and energy from being together.
She had my back. I had hers.
We’ve been through tough times like when we lived in a rat infested apartment in Jersey City, to awesome times like our Maui honeymoon.
I never imagined that having a baby would be a challenge.
When the reality of infertility treatments invaded our bedroom, I was not prepared for how far Lisa and I would drift apart.
We had never needed anyone to help us.
For awhile, it felt as if the passion had been sucked out of us.
Sex was utilitarian.
Making a baby was a clinical science experiment. I dreaded the x marks on the calendar that indicated pending ovulation.
Lisa always says that the hardest thing about infertility was dealing with me.
She felt as if I was constantly fighting her, which I will readily admit is partially true.
The reason I say partially is because I simply didn’t think we NEEDED medical help.
Yes, I wanted us to have baby, just not with a staff of doctors involved.
For awhile, we lost each other.
Lisa was consumed by the grief of each failed cycle.
I was consumed by my fear that we were going to have to travel to some clinic across country and spend thousands of dollars that I wasn’t making to have a child.
Maybe like Job, “the things I most feared, came to pass”.
Or maybe it was just meant to happen that way in our love story.
There were times when I read drafts of Almost A Father, and couldn’t believe I was reading about our life.
The initial chapters, when I was so consumed with myself and humiliated about finding out my spawning equipment was deficient are uncomfortable for even me to read sometimes.
I considered editing them many times. I didn’t like the self absorbed jerk that I was in those chapters.
I couldn’t blame Lisa for falling out of passion with me during those days.
But I guess in every love story, someone has to evolve.
Lisa has always been a strong willed person who lives her life with faith filled action.
Before infertility, I was a lot of big talk, but very often slow to act.
I started finding my way back when we lost Dublin (the name we gave our first positive beta baby that ended in miscarriage 8 days later).
It was the first time in our infertility journey that I had ever felt spiritually connected to any of our creations.
That was a gift from God.
That loss was the catalyst for trips to Nashville where Lisa and I fell in love again.
Much like that band rehearsal, she watched me from the audience as I sang songs inspired by our life together, our tears together, our victories together.
Seeing her smile at me from the audience on the Bluebird Cafe stage, I knew we were finding our way back.
A few years later, I would get to see the beaming face of Lisa on a different stage.
A stage where we would get to tell millions of people that we had not only found our way back to each other, but found our way to our soul baby.
That stage was the set of the CBS Early Show.
Every infertility journey is a love story in the making.
They all start the same.
Two people fall in love.
When infertility hits, inevitably, somebody falls out of passion.
The true beauty, and magic of the story begins, when those two people begin to find their way back to each other.
