A Child Never Held

We have been blessed with two amazing children.  Our son now twenty, we adopted and he came to us when he was three days old.  Our daughter we gave birth to four and a half years later, she will be sixteen this year.  We couldn’t be happier with how things have worked out for us and our children.

It wasn’t an easy road for our family.  There were many years of disappointment and heartbreak, endless tests and surgeries and doctors appointments.  Days in a fog, sleepless nights and our days and nights were accompanied by frustration and tears.  Eight years of creating charts, tracking temperatures, and negative test after negative test.

There is a connection, an image in your mind, a dream of a future that you have with a child you are trying to conceive.  There are tiny foot prints on your heart and soul of a child that you will never see, that you will never hold, that you will never hear.

We would walk the malls, always aware of every neglected child even if for a moment.   We would look to each other knowing we asked the same question “ How could they take their gift for granted?” .

How often do you notice a pregnant woman walking on the street, in the mall, at work, when you are waiting month to month for a positive result you notice every single one of them.

The silent pain and expected acceptance of others joy with their new additions was heart breaking.  Being invited to baby showers, or worse, asked to help organize, would bring on tears and a pain in the heart you were sure would never heal.   You don’t understand why no one sees your pain but you don’t feel like it’s something you can talk about.   Making kids isn’t a real problem, who can’t make a kid?

“ When are you starting your family?” “ Don’t you want to have kids” “ What are you waiting for?” “ Maybe you should try...”  How those questions cut so deep. They only wanted to know, to help, they had no idea how much those questions hurt.

There is a fifteen percent chance of conceiving a child for a normal healthy couple.  How hard can it be, any idiot can make a kid, kids are having kids.

Why can’t we do this?

There were support groups, but joining and participating was accepting and giving up on your dream.  They say ”there is always a chance”, ”it happened to a friend“, ”I heard of someone that when then stopped trying“.  You try to explain, you know the numbers, you know how often it doesn’t happen, eighty five percent of of the time it doesn’t happen.

We made the decision that we could be a family as a couple without kids.  We could focus on our house and travel.  We could buy a new car every other year.  Even the empty dreaming could never really convince us that a life as a couple without children would be as fulfilling as a family with kids.

We have been blessed with two amazing children.  Our son now twenty, we adopted and he came to us when he was three days old.  Our daughter we gave birth to four and a half years later, she will be sixteen this year.  We couldn’t be happier with how things have worked out for us and our children.

Life became busy and full with our family, those days of struggling with infertility, the unknown and disappointment seems so far away now.  There are moments when we reflect on those days and we are so grateful for the two wonderful gifts we have received.

There was a child in our hearts, in our dreams, who was never born, who was never held, who never had a chance at a future, who never received a name.
There is a child that was loved only in our thoughts,  that will never be forgotten, our child.