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Illustration by Marley Allen-Ash
In the Peanuts cartoons, everybody knows what happens when Lucy holds the football and invites Charlie Brown to come kick it. Why he keeps falling for it, though, is a mystery – or maybe a metaphor.
I’ve wanted to be a dad my whole life, ever since I can remember. For my wife, a decade younger than me, the desire arrived more slowly but with no less force.
But we were late finding each other. I was 45 the day we got married – just over seven years ago – and I’m not blind to the rules of biology or mathematics. I knew what the statistics are regarding couples our age who try to get pregnant.
If you’d asked me then, I’d have said seven years was plenty of time for doctors to diagnose a problem, prescribe a fix, and send us on our way to a baby-filled happily ever after. Put another way, though, seven years is approximately 91 28-day menstrual cycles. It’s half that number, or fewer, if the cycle isn’t regular. Now factor in the delays required to get a medical appointment. You think it’s tough seeing your family doctor, if you have one? Try booking a specialist. Then a follow-up at the fertility clinic. Now try all this during a pandemic when half the staff, it seems, has been transferred to help with more urgent matters elsewhere – like COVID-19 patients on respirators.
And yet we considered ourselves lucky. Neither of us was sick. We had our jobs, and we had each other. Nonetheless, we wanted more, and so we kept trying. But trying gets harder as the failures pile up – hence the Peanuts metaphor. To be honest, I’m not sure how we kept going, or how we stayed even a little optimistic. I do know that the experience changed us, that over time there were things we just stopped talking about, subjects we learned to avoid – like not asking friends about their own kids, or changing the channel when a TV show even hinted at a pregnancy plot.
Navigating the medical system can be a challenge, and to keep track of everything we had charts – oh, so many charts. Plus, more pills and injections than I could imagine, and more unsuccessful frozen embryo transfers than I wanted to recall (I stopped counting at six). Add to that the endless months between appointments that grew harder and harder to book while an invisible clock kept ticking, my wife’s uterus grew older, and the two of us grew more discouraged.
Eventually, we reached the last stop of a very long road: a Hail Mary in the form of intravenous immunoglobulin, or IVIg, a two-dose experimental therapy that, combined with yet another pair of embryo transfers, offered our last reasonable hope.
Two weeks later when the first negative result arrived, I held my wife. Again. And we wept. Again.
The second dose was delayed – because of course it was. Initially, by the discovery of newly formed polyps lining her uterine wall, and then again when we couldn’t book a date for corrective surgery.
But here’s a piece of information you won’t find in any baby book: Six months later – after the surgery and the recovery and the final dose of IVIg and the transfer and the waiting … when the long-awaited wonderful news finally arrives, there is no explosion of relief that obliterates all the previous hurt. There is no sudden change at all, really, only an odd sense of disbelief, accompanied by two facts.
We’re having twins. I am going to be a father.
I know I’m supposed to be elated. And I am. We are. But even as every doctor we see continues to give us the thumbs-up, I’m finding it hard to comprehend. Like Charlie Brown, I keep waiting for Lucy to yank the football away. After all, it was seven years. I’d grown used to the numb ache, the constant sadness. I didn’t like it, but I could cope. And while that may be an awful thing to admit, it doesn’t make it any less true. Even now, 31 weeks into this pregnancy, writing about it feels somewhere between transgressive and defiant.
So, what do you do when old ways of thinking no longer apply? You find new ones.
Our little house is slowly being decluttered. We’re putting together a nursery, and acquiring things like bassinettes and cribs and an enormous stroller that I can’t imagine will ever fit through the front door.
But we’re also making space for something else: hope.
Most evenings, my wife likes to relax and get as comfortable as possible on the living room couch. Sometimes, when I need a dose of faith, I kneel on the floor beside her, wrapping my arms around her growing belly and squeezing as tightly as I dare. After a minute or two, when my heart rate has returned to normal, I lift up her shirt and put both my hands on her abdomen. Then I lean in close and I kiss the skin, strangely cool to the touch. “Hello in there,” I say. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
The other night, as if in acknowledgement, there was a distinct flutter beneath the skin. It felt – at least to me – like someone kicking a football.
Kleo Mitsis lives in Chelsea, Que.