“'She took it pretty hard.'”

"The nurse’s words jolted me out of a daze in the hospital waiting room. I had driven my wife to her HSG test, was waiting for her to be done and for what seemed like an inevitable diagnosis of Infertility. As the weeks and months have gone by since that August day, those words have proven to be the biggest understatement I have ever heard."

"It’s difficult to watch the woman you love struggle with anything, much less struggle with something at the heart of her identity as a woman and her hopes and dreams for the future. When your wife has physical pain, you can buy her medicine to make the pain go away. When she is struggling with the pain of infertility, there’s nothing you can buy, nothing you can do to make the pain go away."

"You watch as every little thing in her life opens the wounds. You watch as kids at the next table over in the restaurant make her realize the possibilities that can’t be, as the children in the neighborhood that used to sound so happy playing in their yards now sound sad and angry. Your journey from stage to stage with her in the grieving process of a loss of something that never was, from sadness to anger and back. Acceptance in this grieving process always seems far off, possibly unattainable."

"Eventually you find a path forward, for us it is the adoption process. In the second year of being a waiting family, we are closer than ever to a resolution to this three year journey but it feels farther off than ever. We increasingly get frustrated over the path, of extra time and money spent on something that comes so easy to so many people. However, we have never been closer as a couple, never so sure that this is our journey to share together, no matter how rocky the road. Infertility will always be our struggle but it will not get the better of us."

- Mark