Flash Back Friday

I know I'm not being original with my title but for the next few Friday's, I'm going to take a trip down memory lane. For those of you who know me, these stories won't be new. For those of you who don't; I hope this is an opportunity for you to get to know me and my family better.

I didn't start this blog until Reid was already 3 months old. That is something I regret as I have never had the opportunity to share about our family before he was born or when he was born. Since this is his "baby book" of sorts, I'd like to take you back a couple of years ago and fill you in on the missing details.

Del and I were introduced to each other at the end of October 2003. I was 29 and he was 33. We were set up on a blind date (and I mean blind! we had no clue who each other was) and made the people who were setting us up come on the date with us.

Things went well and we were engaged in April 2004 (6 months later). That went really well and we were married July 24, 2004 (3 months after that). I was 30 and Del was just shy of his 34th birthday. So in 9 months total I met a stranger and married him. It was a good decision!

In our whirl-wind romance we did talk about starting a family. We talked about how we'd wait for a couple of years and then try. The funny thing was though that pretty much immediately after we were married the baby conversations were happening a lot. I guess it has to do with our age, but we also felt that we were really ready to start a family. So about 9 months after we were married we started trying to conceive. We read all the books, listened to advice from family and friends and waited excitedly for it to happen. Month after month then turned into year after year. The emotional roller coaster was terrible. The kind of terrible that you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy.

Fertility issues are a pretty secretive club that no one wants to be in. No one really discusses fertility problems I think in most part because of the fact that you feel like a big fat failure for not being able to do what is supposed to be so natural. I think a lot of people who have issues keep from being open about it because it's just so sad. To top it all off you live your life with people asking when you're going to have kids, if you want kids, "you'd better hurry up-Mother Nature is calling" and other hurtful comments that leave you raw. Then there's the other side of society who spend a lot of time whining and complaining about their kids. Wishing this or wishing that so that they could just have some peace and quiet. Maybe they're the people who became parents too soon. Who really wanted that job/career/travel/etc. but ended up becoming parents instead. Those people just seem to some days be oblivious not only to the amazing gift they've been given, but also to the fact that people around them may just be crying out for the chance to have their life.

Anyway. Back to us. The other problem with our fertility issues were that medically, there were no issues that could be seen. Both Del and I were given clean bills of health and told that our diagnosis was "undetermined infertility". But even with that we were given less than a 1% chance of conceiving without intervention. There never was a more hopeless day.

to be continued...