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Excerpt from "Sweet Grapes" by Jean and Michael Carter.
We never talked much about children before we got married. They were part of our distant future, and we simply expected them to come, one of life's givens, as inevitable as aging. Our immediate concerns at that time were marriage, school, and managing two careers, in that order. But when we did mention children, it was always in sentences that began, "When we have children..."
We got married when I was beginning my third year of medical school and Mike was beginning graduate school in English, so it was easy - necessary even - to postpone children. Five years later, though, as I began to hear the biological clock ticking louder and louder, and with the physically most demanding years of a residency in obstetrics and gynecology behind me, we began to talk seriously about having children. To our surprise, we discovered that we felt some ambivalence about the issue. After concentrating so long on our professional lives, we found some self doubt in the face of this new responsibility. It wasn't that either one of us expressed any desire not to have children. We wanted to affirm our belief in life and our love for each other. We may have begun with ambivalence, but we discovered that our desire for children was no less strong for it; in fact, wrestling with the issue may have strengthened that desire. We wanted children.
The story of the next three years is familiar to most couples who have faced problems with their fertility. At first we felt foolish for the disappointment we felt when my period would come. We knew it that it takes time. But when a few months became a year, we began to fear that something might be wrong. As an obstetrician, I knew all the advice that doctors gave for getting pregnant, so even before we became infertility patients, the basal temperature thermometer became a bedside fixture and sex became a routine dictated by the calendar.
© Jean W. Carter and Michael P. Carter
Credits: Perspectives Press
