In the Beginning...There Was Us
I'm sitting on our front porch in Larchmont looking out over the water, sipping on a glass of wine (okay, maybe it's my second), feeling a surprisingly cool breeze in the air. It's August 31, nearing the end of a typical hot, sticky Virginia summer, but we've had an unseasonable reprieve the last couple of days. Although there will be a few weeks more weeks of oscillating between brutal and bearable temperatures, tomorrow is the first day of September, which signals: fall is coming.
I'm not really here to talk about the weather, but the advent of fall seems like as good a place as any to start telling this story. Not this fall, but last fall, when my husband, Ben, and I decided that after 13 years together, 9 years of marriage, 7 apartments/condos/townhouses/houses, 4 cities, 3 states, and 1 career change, we were finally ready to expand our family beyond the menagerie of pets we've had over the years (a total of 5 ferrets, 3 cats, and 1 dog, while we're doing math) to include another human.
Although we got married super young at 22 and 23 (I simultaneously cringe every time I type that, thank my lucky stars that we are still together, and cross my fingers that our future child won't endeavor into such a huge, lifelong commitment at that age - not because it hasn't been good for us, but because we understand that the odds were not in our favor - and that if (s)he does, that (s)he'll be as lucky as we were...but I digress!), starting a family was not even close to being on our radar. In fact, we spent a few years in our early/mid-20s emphatically responding to anyone who asked, "So when are you having kids?!" that we. weren't. interested. Not then, maybe not ever.
We had so many things we wanted to accomplish and experience first, including my unplanned and unanticipated change of career from teaching to engineering when I was 25, complete with a 3-year stint in college (on top of the previous 4 I had spent getting a BA and MAEd) for yet another degree. I also started running around that time and quickly found a passion in long-distance running and triathlon. I spent the majority of my 20s training nearly nonstop for one race or another, starting from a 5k and peaking at multiple marathons, multiple Ironman triathlons, and an ultramarathon.
But Ben wasn't just sitting on the sidelines while I was doing all of that. After his first job out of college left him unfulfilled, he took a chance with a small start-up company that has turned into a now 10+ year tenure. As their most senior employee, he currently serves as director of R&D. And as if his full-time job didn't keep him busy enough, in 2013 he started using his programming wizardry for good by volunteering for our local chapter of Code for America, a volunteer group that connects local government with much-needed (yet often unfunded) technology.
I say all of this not to too either of our horns (okay, maybe a little - mostly Ben's though), but to drive home the point that when we said we weren't interested in starting a family, we really weren't. In addition to all of our individual professional and personal accomplishments, we also did the things that were most important to us to do together. We traveled, including seeing baseball games at 16 out of 30 Major League Baseball stadia - going to all of them is something we've been talking about since we were first dating. We lived in the city for 2 years, right in the heart of Washington, D.C., something we dreamed about since I first went back to school. But most of all, we did all of it together. Every step of the way, every challenge. Always together. Just us. Me and Ben. Together.
Two years ago the tide started to turn. After a nomadic near-decade, we moved back home to the Norfolk/Virginia Beach area to establish roots. We went from "Not now, maybe not ever," to, "We'll make up our minds when we're 30," to making up our minds at 32 and 33. Last year we bought our dream house, and 6 months later, we were ready to start our family.
October last year was our first cycle trying. We weren't even 100% sure we were ready (is anyone ever?), but it was as exciting as it was scary, and we were shocked to see two pink lines on a pregnancy test on November 13. It felt almost unbelievable. Maybe I'll write about the details of that pregnancy one day, or maybe I won't, but it ultimately ended in a miscarriage on December 30. The next several months were some of the hardest, darkest we've ever endured, both individually and as a couple, but we kept trying - and we kept being disappointed. In June we again saw the two pink lines we had seen in November, but less than a week later, they were gone.
And, now, it's August. And it's still just us. Or, well, not exactly. Because after our second miscarriage in June we decided to seek help from a fertility clinic, so now it's us, and doctors, and nurses, and nurse practitioners, and a whole army of medical professionals helping us figure out why we can't stay pregnant, and how to fix it. And that's what I'm really here for - not so much to talk about where we've been, but to talk about where we're (hopefully) going.