Parental Consent

I was asleep in the guest house when Leah told her parents of our diagnosis and asked for help. We made a special trip down to Tucson to tell them after we went through our IVF seminar at the Fertility Treatment Center. We went down with our bags and our little folder stocked with business cards and a largely uninformative PowerPoint presentation.

She told them that the procedure would cost $15,000.00 and asked what they could do. They told Leah (as I found out later on the drive back) that they could help with artificial insemination but couldn't do anything with in-vitro. I took this as a financial consideration and not a statement about whether her parents wanted anything of me taking up semi-permanent residence inside their daughter.

When I finally came into the house for breakfast, the conversation was over. Leah had slid the folder back into her bag and the conversation was largely over.

Leah was at work when I spoke to my parents. I told my father first.

My father had just retired and was trying to find ways to spend his time. I came over one Friday afternoon after I'd finished working and sat him down and poured myself a glass of wine.

"Leah and I have been trying for a while now to make a child," I said. I watched his face and his eyes crinkled because he thought he knew what was coming next. "And we've gone through some testing and it seems like we can't have them."

The first thing that he wanted to know was whether there was something wrong with him. I tried to put him at ease. It was weeks before he figured out that there was not anything wrong with me. I'm physically healthy. It was just the way I was. I've done everything I could to improve the situation but nothing had taken.

He took it well. He was disappointed, and it took him some time to process, but I think he eventually figured things out. He said that him and my mother were an unusually fertile couple. He said that he could look at my mother and she would get pregnant. Eventually, he quoted Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives and asked if this was because I masturbated all the time.

Maybe it wasn't a terribly comfortable conversation.

I told my stepmother the same thing when she came home from work. She took it a little better. She had suffered a series of ectopic pregnancies in her first marriage and then after the married my father. She finally realized that it was my stepbrother who was the "fluke," and that she's just made a certain way. She asked how Leah was doing, and how Leah's parents had taken the news.

A week later I sat down with my mother and grandmother. I told them about the diagnosis. My grandmother took it really well. She could tell that we had been frustrated for months, and was happy that we were working on a solution. She had experienced problems when she and my grandfather had just married. She said that her fallopian tubes were closed, and that the doctors "went in and opened them up and a month later" she was pregnant with my mother. She asked after Leah. She asked if we'd thought about adoption.

My mother started crying almost immediately. I have never known what to do when my mother cries. She did not like the idea of us going through artificial insemination. She wanted us to take some time to think things through. She wanted me to see more doctors. She had a friend who was a naturopath that I could see.

I tried to tell her that this is what we are doing, and that we wanted her to know. Please don't tell my siblings.

The struggle for me is not about asking for help. I know that all of our parents love us and would support us however they could. I also know that this is a medical issue; there's no virtue or vice associated with our infertility. What I worry about is our infertility defining our life and our relationship. I don't want to be asked every month how we're doing. Leah does not want so many people to be disappointed if things don't work out. Even if it kills her to hear it, she wants to be told about the celebrations in the lives of others when they are successful.

It took me four months to tell my parents that something was wrong.