Matt and Cheri Appling have held on through five years and countless treatments. Here’s how they’ve done it.
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You are “ready” to have your first child. Are you ready to work for it? For most couples who are serious about starting a family, pregnancy and babies come easily, the way we were told they would if we weren’t careful in fifth grade sex ed. But for a significant number of couples the process doesn’t go according to plan.
Despite how prepared we may feel to start our families, no matter how much we have planned and scheduled, an estimated one in eight couples is going to have trouble conceiving.
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Despite how prepared we may feel to start our families, no matter how much we have planned and scheduled, an estimated one in eight couples is going to have trouble conceiving. That means they have been trying for a year with no success. In addition, 25 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage. The truth is that infertility is more than a medical issue. It is a whole life issue. You cannot escape it by going to work. It is going to affect all aspects of our marriages, our friendships, our finances.
An impatient “fix it” mindset could be adding unnecessary pressure to your wife who could already be feeling insecure. Your priority is not to “get this over with.” It is to keep your marriage as healthy as possible, no matter what the outcome of treatment. – –
Guys, our wives do not need us to play second fiddle. They don’t need us to abdicate our role as husbands. Infertility is not a women’s issue; it’s a couples’ issue, and we are not sperm donors along for the ride. Our wives need equal partners in this pursuit. They need us to be invested, if not with our bodies, then with our minds and hearts. Help make decisions. Manage the money. Never say,“Whatever you want, honey.” If you don’t even know what kind of treatment your wife is undertaking, you’re doing it wrong.
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If I could go back, I’d tell myself to stop being such a coward. I’d crank down my pride. I’d skip a few days of work to go to more specialist appointments with my wife.
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If I could go back, I’d tell myself to stop being such a coward. I’d crank down my pride. I’d skip a few days of work to go to more specialist appointments with my wife.
Finally, we all know that it is easy for a new baby or a toddler to completely dominate a marriage. We all know a marriage can get completely swallowed up as the adults seem to lose their identity outside of being parents.
My wife and I went through 8 years of trying. My sperm was slow. We went up and down an d all around. Keep in mind that my wife’s career choice was to be a full time mom. Coming from a family where I had seven siblings, I thought it would be like falling off a log … Not. Year 8 we gave up. started adoption through the state. While at the office, a few hours before our first interview, my wife called me from the doctors office … she was pregnant. Turns out that it wasn’t as much me… Read more »