Why They Picked Us
My husband David and I had always dreamed of a family. It was one of the first real conversations we had, back when we were dating, sitting on the hood of his car in a grocery store parking lot at two in the morning the way you do at that age, talking about everything and nothing, and I told him I wanted to be a mother more than I wanted almost anything, and he told me he wanted to be a father, and I think we both knew right then that we’d found the person we were going to build that dream with.
We married young. We were sensible about the rest of it, the way you’re taught to be. We waited a few years, got ourselves established, David in his work as a high school history teacher and me as a nurse at the regional hospital, bought a small house with a yard and a spare bedroom we didn’t talk about too directly but both understood was waiting for someone. We did everything in the right order. And then we started trying, and we assumed, the way you do, that it would simply happen.
It didn’t happen.
Five years. I won’t linger on those five years, because anyone who has lived them knows the shape of them without being told, and anyone who hasn’t can’t really be made to understand no matter how many words I use. The tests. The specialists. The treatments that cost more than we had and worked less than we hoped. The monthly cycle of hope and grief, hope and grief, until hope itself started to feel like the enemy, like the thing that kept setting me up to be destroyed all over again. The baby showers I smiled through. The spare room with the door I started keeping closed.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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