Cry me a river

I'd never seen my husband cry. Not even a chin quiver. During our first years together this bugged me, not that I wanted to be with a softy, but I would have liked to have seen some sort of emotion.  After nine years, I’ve now accepted that, though my husband has buckets of love for me, his tear ducts are a desert.

But even he's not immune to the incredible force that is infertility.

When dealing with infertility, especially at the beginning, you’re undergoing lots and lots and lots of tests and trying to handle all the new terminology that is being thrown at you. Not to mention that you’re still in denial that any of this is even happening to you. I still find it hard to believe we’re one of those couples. But boohoo we are.

The hardest part was dealing with the dreaded insurance company. I hate to say anything is evil but they truly make it so hard to do anything!  And sometimes the nurses make it hard too. They just parrot to you what it says in their protocol book. (So here’s the part where I’m supposed to say, nurses are amazing people, who give so much and get so little in return, blah blah blah… except when they are bored and see patients like you hundreds of times a year.) At the beginning, getting a straight answer from one of them was near impossible, especially about insurance matters.

So there we were, drowning in this new world, frustrated and overwhelmed by it all, sitting in the parking lot of one of the reproductive clinics when I saw it for the first time, salty, clear liquid come out of my husband’s eyes. We were fighting- yes, that happened a lot at the beginning- about the insurance and I suddenly broke down because, hey, who cares about the insurance right now, I’m having my body poked and prodded and analyzed to tell me if I’m still a real woman and I am trying to come to terms with the fact that my main function as a woman may be broken and you’re yelling at me about insurance forms! I yelled all that at my husband and that’s when his tear ducts burst open (they’d been dormant for so long I’m shocked we didn’t drown). At first, my chin dropped to the floor and Inner B* burst forward, doing back-flips and double fist pumping, Husband can cry! Husband can cry! 

But that’s when I realized, this is hard, REALLY hard. For both of us. And as awful as it is for me, it’s awful for him too.

After that moment, his tear ducts went dormant again, but the memory of that day will always be bittersweet: bitter because it showed us how hard the road of infertility is, and sweet, because it was so sweet to see that my husband is a real man, tears and all. Woot!




*Inner B is my subconscious- she's not shy to say it how it is, good or bad, right or wrong.