The Date

                                     photo courtesy of karenwhimsy.com

 

My hubby and I went on an actual date on Valentine’s Day.  That’s a shocker.  Really, it is.  Friends of ours graciously offered to watch our son so we could enjoy some couple time together for as late as we wanted.  With that sort of carte blanche offer, my hubby and I didn’t quite know what to do with ourselves.

See a movie?  Go to a concert?  Bowling?  Nice dinner?  Sit at home and stare at each other?  We opted out of a movie when we didn’t see anything that seemed even remotely interesting to us.  No good concerts available either (it was either some C-list country singer or a ‘Sublime’ tribute band , uh, no thanks).  Nixed the bowling option and hours of staring.   That left us with one contender:  dinner.

Now, we TRIED to prep for dinner out on Valentine’s Day when every other couple in the universe would be having dinner out, too.  We employed the steakhouse’s ‘call ahead’ seating option and called 45 minutes before we arrived at the restaurant.  Once we got there, we were told it would STILL take another 145-160 minutes before we could get a table.  Yeah, I had to pick my jaw up off the floor, too.  So we kept our name on the list and decided to drive around to some nearby shops to pass the time.  Picking out shoes for my hubby to wear to work and haggling with his ultra-pickyness, the EPITOME of a super romantic evening.

So then hubby decides he’s thirsty, so while we’re still waiting to get into the restaurant, we go through a DRIVE-THROUGH to get something to drink, and I had to make hubby promise he wouldn’t actually get something to eat while we were waiting either.  Anyway, got to the restaurant and were told we had another 25-35 minutes to wait, which was a total crock, as it was 45 minutes or more.

Finagled our way to the bar only to sit inches away from other people, used Martini glasses, and peanut shells strewn carelessly about.  So I thought this would be a good place to start discussing ‘our future babymaking plans’.  Actually that’s not completely true, I started the conversation in the car while we waited 20 minutes for a blessed soft drink.  I started ‘the talk’ with a hypothetical question (don’t well all?).  It went something like this:  “Honey, what do you think we should do if these next few cycles don’t work, and we have to move on to more expensive treatments?”

Now I’ve been thinking about this question, well, for about 6 years, at least in one way or another.  I’ve run through multiple scenarios in my head and how they would play out both financially, emotionally, and logistically.  I’ve researched financing options on the internet and talked to women who have been forced to make similar difficult decisions.  I’ve thought about this question so much that it just seemed logical that my hubby may have thought about it, too.

He hadn’t.

So it was probably a little unfair of me to ask such an open-ended question with so many possible answers and expect him to give me one I wanted to hear.  Right?  Because the answer I wanted  to hear was something like, “Honey, we’ll do whatever we need to do to make our family,” or something cheesy like that.  And then I would say, “But there are not guarantees!  It’s so expensive, what if the treatments don’t work?”  And then he  would say, “Money’s not an obstacle when it comes to having kids, oh Love of My Life.”  And then money would start falling from the sky and world peace would break out across the lands.

But this is actually what he said:  (shrugs his shoulders defeated-like) “I guess we’d probably just quit then.”

Now, I’ve been married almost 12 years this May, so I didn’t blow my stack at this seemingly ‘indifferent’ answer, because I KNOW that my hubby doesn’t do well being questioned under pressure (should’ve thought of that BEFORE I asked him, duh!).  I was silent for awhile, and then he started backtracking to what I think he MEANT to say, which is that he hates to see me go through all this stuff:  the emotions, the appointments, the medications, the hopes being dashed each month we get a BFN.   He would like another kid, sure, but we’re not getting any younger, so this may be what we get.

So back to the bar-sitting in the restaurant, I’m biting my lip so I don’t cry in front of all these people, and we’re just sitting there on the edge of this incredibly private conversation in a very not-private place.  Barely mumbled words between us as we sit down for dinner.  And then we talked about it some more.  What about adoption?  How much does IVF cost?  What if I have to have surgery again?  But what’s funny is I can’t remember what we actually said.   We never finish these conversations with some legimate plan, by the way.  It’s always more like, “Well we’ll know more when this month is over,” or “when we get the test back,” or “when we hear from the insurance company.”  Honestly, I’m sick of waiting to know more. 

You NEVER know more.  You always know what you know right at that time, and it’s NEVER enough.

I get that my hubby didn’t mean it to sound so flippant with his intial ‘quit I guess’ answer.  I don’t doubt his love for me or even his desire for another child.  I’m just envious of his ability to move on so easily from it all.  What he doesn’t know is that even if I go through the motions of quitting, stop the meds, give up the cycle day counts, the obligatory follie visits to my RE, the IF blog obsession, well that doesn’t mean my heart is ready to quit. 

I guess we need to have more of those hypothetical talks which never really resolve anything, huh?  I’m thinking about submitting my questions, in writing, at least 24 hours ahead of any impending ‘future babymaking’ discussions.  Or maybe a week ahead.  Or a month.

Do you think that would help?