Maybe Baby #2: Blame, ego and the discovery of dignity

This is the second in a series of posts reflecting on our [in]fertility journey and how it intersects with the assumed scripts of life and faith.

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In my last post I discussed the dawning realisation that our journey of starting a family may prove to be less straightforward than we had anticipated. And after a period of avoidance, of thinking it’d happen “when the time is right”, we slowly began to acknowledge that we needed to do something different.

In many respects I think the avoidance was motivated by fear. It felt easier to avoid the current reality and live in hopeful ignorance than to investigate and find out that all is not well. What if it turns out that we have an unsolvable problem? And the more potent question that seemed to hover persistently over my shoulder, whispering subtly in my ear, “what if it turns out that the problem is me?”

Eventually we had to face up to it and booked in to see our local doctor. Before we knew it we had the first of what would become far too many visits to the lab test clinic. There I was, wandering in the door with a little pottle of sperm tucked away under my armpit. I was keeping it warm to preserve the quality, but I was also trying to protect my privacy and dignity. I shuffled to the counter and quietly spoke to the clinic receptionist. “I have a sample” I said under my breath, quickly sliding the small container across the red bench while glancing furtively from side-to-side to see if anyone was watching.

Then we waited. 

The last nine years have seen so much waiting.

Waiting for results. Waiting for appointments. Waiting for outcomes. Waiting for our lives to change, or not. Waiting can be its own form of torture.

The doctor rang me just as I was leaving a work meeting. “It’s not bad news,” she said, “but there are indications that sperm motility is a bit low.” I didn’t quite know what to do with that. It wasn’t conclusive, but it wasn’t a clean bill of health either; it was ambiguous. But it did suggest to me that the whispering fears may be true; it was most likely “my problem.”

So we were sent to the fertility clinic for further tests. More blood tests for Hannah, more investigations into the internal workings of her body, more pottles of sperm, and more people contemplating our situation. Once all the results came through we were booked in with a doctor at the clinic. He sat with us and over the course of our 2 minute appointment dryly recited his script, “everything looks fine, so this is what we call ‘unexplained’ infertility.” 

Unexplained.

A word that evoked a mixed response. On the one hand, it was great to know that there was nothing identifiably wrong. But on the other hand, there was nothing that could be fixed either. And the problem with unexplained infertility in New Zealand is that you don’t qualify for publicly funded IVF treatment in the same way as the “explained”. For people like us, there was a mandatory five-year stand-down period from the time we’d started trying to conceive until we were eligible to be put on to the waiting list (at which point there would be at least another year of waiting). When we found this out we wished we’d told the doctor that we had been trying for much longer; a small white lie that could have cut the waiting time by years. But we waited. “Maybe it’ll just happen and we won’t need treatment”, we said to ourselves.

But it didn’t, and we did.

When we were still a year away from funding eligibility, we decided to try an intermediate step. Before entering full-blown IVF treatment they give you the option of something called Intra-Uterine Insemination (IUI).

At a basic level, it involved a series of self-administered injections for my partner which would stimulate follicle growth. Then, as we came near to the time of ovulation, she would have daily blood tests and they would monitor hormone levels until they felt it was the right time. Sometimes, things wouldn’t go according to their plan so then a “trigger” injection would be required to initiate ovulation artificially. Once they were satisfied that the moment was upon us, I was sent to the special room at the fertility clinic. There was a reclining chair covered with old blue vinyl that was slowly peeling at the edges, a white sheet to drape over it for sanitary purposes, and porn magazines in the 2nd drawer if you felt like you needed some encouragement.

This was the not the kind of romantic baby-making that I had imagined as a younger man.

Once I’d fulfilled my duties, I would skulk out into the corridor and ring the bell on the laboratory door. Fill out a form, show my driver’s licence. Yes, I am Michael Frost. Yes, this is my sperm. Yes, this is uncomfortable.

And so off the little pottle of sperm would go, through the door and away. Away to be washed, to be examined for the most active and enthusiastic swimmers to be selected. Then a doctor arrives, checks with the lab technician, checks that we’re the right people, checks that they’re not about to inseminate my wife with someone else’s sperm. Then announces proudly to the room “I will now insert the sample!”

That was not how I imagined this part would go either.

We went through several months of IUI treatment but apparently the odds were not in our favour. Each month we would wait for an end of month blood test that would tell us if we’d been successful. Waiting for a phone call from a nurse who would tell us, “sorry, not this time.” And although we were “unexplained”, I had a deep and abiding sense that this was somehow about me. It was my body, my sperm, my “samples” that were letting us down. And I felt like less of a person because of it. 

It is such a curious thing, the feeling of being less of a person because of something that you cannot control. Because other than general efforts at being healthy, there was literally nothing I could do about my own body. So why did it make me feel like a failure, like I was less than sufficient? 

Would I really be less of a man if my sperm were not functioning “normally”? Surely not - but it did feel that way sometimes. And the feeling is accentuated when the first thing that a good bloke says to another good bloke when their partner falls pregnant is “well done” or “good job”, as if they’ve accomplished something due to their hard work, skill and application.

I think this is something that many of us are familiar with: we have constructed worlds in which we judge ourselves and others for things we cannot control. Worlds in which our popularity, identity, confidence and status can be shaped by things like height and build, gender, the symmetry of our facial features, the size of various body parts, sexual orientation, the amount of melanin in our skin, the constellation of freckles, the different abled-ness of our bodies, the potency of our sperm, and on and on the list goes. We have even become a society of people trying to slow down the aging process because of our fears of what meaning might be made from the weathering and wrinkling of our skin. All these things that define us, that place us, that tell us and others where we fit and how much we matter.

And things over which we have so little control.

So many of our life energies are spent trying to compensate for these inadequacies and judgements - or spent trying to live up to the status we’ve mysteriously been handed because we meet the right criteria.

But in this kind of world, I find that spirituality and faith have something profound to offer us. In the Christian tradition the word used is grace. There are shallow and distorted definitions of grace, often described poorly as God’s withholding of the wrath that we apparently deserve. But a more deeply sensed grace is about the bestowal of dignity and worth upon each human creature. A dignity that offers us an affirmation of identity and value beyond the various status markers that we so often try to manage and manipulate. This beautiful bestowal of dignity and meaning upon each human life is a radical expression of grace. A grace that suggests to me that I am not defined by all the things that I am or am not, but am defined instead by a deep and profound sense of meaning that includes and then transcends all of my peculiarities, limitations and judgements. 

This is a liberating grace, and one that offers us a different way of being in the world. A grace that can ease the never-ending demands of the ego, something that is so badly needed in the world right now. A grace that invites us to move beyond the unsustainable manipulation of our external image, to move beyond being defined by our driven-ness to accomplish, and to move beyond the definitions and identities that are placed on us. 

A grace that invites us to be ourselves.

Click here to read part 3.