Chapter 3: Living In It

Wake up Sheila. 

It’s time to go to work. 

You have responsibilities. 

You can’t lay in bed all day. 

It was 2011 and everything was blurry. All I remember about this time in my life is blurs of memories. Key moments. Usually painful moments. 

The first clear memory I have is of me in the fetal position in my closet sobbing uncontrollably. 

I had just ruined our date night with a serious breakdown. We were driving to a theater to watch the new Avatar movie when a friend texted to say she was in labor. Now all those pregnancy announcements I saw last year were coming to be. 

She gave birth that night and I lost it. I was screaming, THIS SHOULD BE ME! THIS SHOULD BE MY CHILD! I was so hysterical that Justin turned the car around and took me home. He wasn’t happy about it. He tried fighting with me the whole way home, but I was too distraught. I couldn’t get out words. I could only sob uncontrollably. I knew I was being unreasonable. When we got home I ran into our closet, shut the door and collapsed into a mess. In the darkest corner I could find. I just wanted to disappear. The pain was too much. 

A few minutes later he came upstairs and just held me, right there on the closet floor. Who knows how long we sat there together just holding each other. Just for a moment, I felt warmth and comfort. Maybe I will be ok. Maybe we will be ok. Maybe in this moment we are ok. 

In May of 2011, Justin took a huge leap and left his comfortable but frustrating engineering job of 10 years to work with a relatively unknown engineering firm closer to home. 

In June of that year I also decided to quit my position as a corporate fitness manager and become a real estate “tycoon.” So you can see how neither of us are helping this already very stressful situation. 

In his new job, the pay was great, but he would be doing a lot of traveling and his paid time off would be lowered significantly. We figured this new position would get him out of a rut and into bigger opportunities later on. Losing his paid time off was a big hit to his stress level. My husband works hard for his PTO. He works to live, not the other way around. He takes every second of that paid time off to rebuild himself and have fun. He had several hobbies to maintain as well, including skiing, learning to snowboard, mountain biking, triathlons, starting a triathlon coaching business, and a plethora of other activities. He never stopped. His hobbies kept him sane. Work wasn’t something he enjoyed spending more than eight hours a day at, so if he could help it, he didn’t. He took pride in his work/life balance. 

He was training for his third ironman as well. That included about 10-15 hours of exercise on top of his job duties. He was gone all the time. Looking back, I can see that all of these hobbies were his escape from our situation. 

This new job and his training was pushing him to the edge. Me quitting my job and starting a venture that makes only commissions didn’t help. Especially since it took months for those commissions to start coming in. He would travel between one and two weeks each month. He would come home and we would fight. He would have a “tone,” so I would become defensive and say something offensive to which he would blow his top over. He was a yeller and an arguer. I was a quiet, passive aggressive stewer. When I would complain that I couldn’t handle him yelling at me, he would explain that he was just having a loud conversation with me. 

“I’m German! I talk loudly to get my point across!” 

I wasn’t buying it. I grew up in a quiet household. I was the loudest in my home but still quiet. My parents never fought, they stewed for days.  

To Stew: Ignore person you are angry with until they comply. This could take days or weeks. The moral of the “game” is to silently break the other person down until you win. Winning is key. 

Every argument we had ended in me crying huddled in some corner of the house and him fuming. Our arguments never seemed to be resolved and we always seemed to be fighting over the same thing. 

Me: “You keep yelling at me!”

Him: “Well you aren’t even listening to me!” 

Me: “I won’t listen to you when you YELL!”

Him: “THIS IS HOW I TALK!” 

Every argument was about nothing and everything. We had tried a couple of therapists that year. Marriage Therapist. Sex Therapist. Christian Therapist. We just weren’t getting the answers we needed. How the hell do we resolve this tension?

Therapist: “Why do you think you are arguing?” 

Us: “Isn’t that why we are paying you?” 

Looking back, I know exactly why we were arguing. Our lives weren’t moving forward in the family department. We weren’t having children. We did not have a common goal to work toward. We were two ambitious people that needed to get to the next step. We were working toward the next step separately in our careers, but not in our marriage. 

Our Friends: “Having kids doesn’t fix a marriage.” 

Us: “I think in our situation it does.”

I started to think my friends were right. What if we end up having a child and we still can’t get along? What if we then get divorced and that child has to be split in two? Maybe we shouldn’t have children until we get our marriage sorted out, but at this rate, that could take years. Could we live as a couple without children?

I couldn’t imagine not having children. I couldn’t imagine not having children WITH Justin. My husband. I couldn’t imagine NOT watching Justin playing baseball with our kids. From the day we were together I imagined what kind of father he would be. I couldn’t imagine myself without him. He challenged me in ways I never expected in a man. He pushed me to be better. How can we get through this rut in our lives? What can we do to bring us back together? 

I contemplated what it would be like to get a divorce and have children with someone else or even on my own. How would that look? I couldn’t even imagine it. What would divorce look like? Where would I live? I have no job, no savings of my own, I have nothing without Justin financially, physically, or emotionally. At least that is what I thought. That made me angry. Every bit of this made me angry. If we could just have a child, I could stop job hopping and do what I was meant to do: be a mother! I don’t belong HERE! I am a mother, I know I am! But to who? Where were my children?

I honestly didn’t know where Justin stood in all of this. What was he thinking? He was so distant emotionally and physically, I just assumed he was along for whatever ride I took him on. 

I am ashamed. Not because of my infertility, but because of what I’m about to tell you. 

That year I became more distant than ever from my husband. I was alone, remember...I was suffering alone. I wouldn’t let anyone else suffer with me. So I started creating a fantasy life. I began thinking lustful thoughts about other men. Other men that I knew and saw on a daily basis. I started having emotional affairs. I began sending and receiving emails and texts that were inappropriate. I never let it get further, but what does it matter? I had checked out from my relationship. I had checked out from my partner. I feel sick to my stomach thinking about that year. I could have ended our marriage at any moment. I thought about it, what if I just slept with this guy or that guy. I was only an offer away. If I physically cheated, then Justin could just leave me with no guilt. Then it wasn’t infertility that broke our marriage. It was me. He would be free to start again with a woman who could have children. This went on throughout the year. I was emotionally cheating on him. It’s no better than physical cheating. 

I was abandoning him. I hadn’t even considered that he might be struggling too. We spoke, but we didn’t speak from our hearts. We used words, but we didn’t listen or understand. He wanted children as bad as I did. He wanted us to try fertility treatments, I refused. My irrational thought was this: Maybe God doesn’t want us to have children. If he wanted us to have children, we would be pregnant. God is all knowing and all powerful. If He wanted me pregnant, it would happen. But it didn’t. Going against what God wants will be fruitless. Wasteful. 

Justin had no one to talk to. Do men even talk to other men about things besides sports? I’m not sure, but he was on his own in this moment. I know he had to feel helpless. Now he was in an unfamiliar job surrounded by unfamiliar people. I can see that now. But then, all I saw was a man who was no longer connected to me. I saw a man who I couldn’t connect with. I didn’t know how or what to do. 

He was there physically and I was there physically but neither of us were there emotionally. We had both checked out. It was too hard to be in it together emotionally. Our emotions were too intense and too confusing to talk about. 

In a recent therapy session, our therapist explained that often times when a couple has experienced the death of a child, each of them turn away from one another. They turn away from, not toward, one another. They are both hurting so much that neither can hold the other up. Neither can see the others grief because theirs is too great to handle. Any more could quite literally crush them. But we hadn’t experienced death. Or had we? 

I look back and I can see that it felt like we were crushing each other with our frustrations and grief. The pain of grief is more than you think, more than you could ever bear. The pain of grief is all consuming. It is in every part of your body. Every word you speak, you know people can see it spewing out of you because you can feel it. In every possible thing you do, grief is there. You physically feel like you are dying, but you aren’t. Death would be welcome. I could feel my heart being crushed every single day. 

You want to blame someone and yell at someone. I had Justin to scream at and blame. But I couldn’t blame him for our infertility so I just blamed him for everything else. How much longer will he tolerate my anger? How much longer will I tolerate my anger? 

I don’t know what Justin’s grief looked like. From the outside, that man looked like he had it together. He completed his third Ironman triathlon in Phoenix, Ariz. He got a new job with a great pay raise. He was always outgoing at parties and always complimenting his wife. He was a man of character and strength. He was an athlete and a physicist and he can solve all of the problems. He can’t solve this though. All I knew is that he was argumentative at home, but so was I. Some days he would start it, the next day I would. We were a good team that way. 

How could we have grief? We hadn’t physically lost anything! We had lost everything though. We lost our entire future. Every moment of our future had been imagined since childhood and that future included children. On our first dates we spoke about children and how we would love to be parents someday. Our future had died and no one knew it except me and Justin. There was no memorial. There were no friends and family hugging us or sending condolences. Everyone around us pretended like nothing was wrong because they had no idea what we had lost. And even those that did see what we were going through, didn’t really see the suffering in our home. 

You don’t get flowers for having a broken reproductive system. 

It was New Years Eve 2011. I was holding Justin’s hand with a heavy heart. We barely made it through 2011 and I was certain we wouldn’t make it through 2012. This would be our last New Years together. I was certain of it.