This weekend was a special time in my family as the first of the generation beneath mine got married. Both she and her now husband are in their mid-20s and have been together for number of years, much like my wife and I were a good decade ago.
The weekend is, of course, celebratory, but it’s also a stark reminder of how innocent we were to the infertility struggles we were going to face. At the time, I joked that a baby was in our “five year plan” as we figured that our having a child was going to be easy, just as it was soon going to be for our friends. Sure, we had a couple relatives that had gone through miscarriages and half expected it ourselves, but never would we have thought that we’d go through such a struggle – 6 years total – to have our daughter.
As I write this before the wedding, thoughts of mine go towards a hope that my cousin, who I remember holding when she was just a week old, doesn’t go through the same struggles we did. It’s hard to not have this hope for everyone coming up in the next generation, though the statistics say that of the bride, groom and attendants standing up with them, one, two or even more will have a defined struggle with infertility.
Unless they’re extremely lucky, my cousins will face the question of “when are you going to have kids” or have an allusion to that in a toast or two. Hopefully their answer to that question won’t be as complicated as it was a decade ago for us.
__
Jon
Leave a Comment