(JUNE 17, 2010)--Wanting a child makes no sense. It means signing up for sleepless nights, strained bank accounts and years of worry. Fortunately for the species, the wanting comes from a part of us that has nothing to do with common sense.
Wanting but not conceiving also makes no sense. It feels like a personal failure, although obviously it is not. It takes what we are taught should be natural, and romantic and inevitable, and makes it mechanical and impersonal and uncertain. Until recently, it was also assumed to be the realm of women. They have the more complicated biology, they were thought to most often be “the problem,” they felt each failed attempt more deeply.
But a man going through in fertility treatments would beg to differ. And they are doing so at increased volume. In a book out this summer, “How to Make Love to a Plastic Cup,” Greg Wolfe takes aim at the shelves full of books aimed at women. “We’re worth twenty-three out of forty-six chromosomes,” he writes in his guide for men. “Shouldn’t we be allowed a little insight and information on the process too?”
And in a guest post today, writer Mike Adamick takes on anyone who thinks that the decision to have a child, and the inability to make that happen, isn’t a deeply emotional journey for men. His daughter Emmeline is 4. He can’t imagine having a second, jostling the perfect trio. He can’t imagine not having a second, not completing the family. And he can’t understand why what he wants isn’t happening, and why that pains him so deeply.
A Father’s View of Infertility
By Mike Adamick
Emmeline and I were sitting in the lazy afternoon sunshine, almost directly behind the left-field foul pole, and I was telling her about the end of “The Natural,” pointing up to the stadium scoreboard and the light stands, waving my arms and telling her about the lightning and the bat, about Roy Hobbs and one epic home run — great shards of broken glass falling like fireworks and how the air must have smelled of filament and sulphur and something electric.
She tilted her head toward the enormous bank of lights above us, and I paused for a moment, trying to decipher whatever dilemma she was working over behind those eyes. A vendor hawking peanuts screamed, “Hot salty nuts!” A few brave seagulls circled overhead, ready to pounce on abandoned hot-dog buns. At home plate, a player ripped a ball into right field. The crack made its way to our seats a second later. And still the girl stared, aiming a furrowed brow at perfectly intact light banks and watching what I imagined must be an invisible spectacle of fireworks, popping and falling just for her.
“Like cosmic rays,” she finally whispered.
“You mean the falling glass?”
“Uh huh, cosmic rays — like fairy dust!”
Everything comes down to fairy dust. Read more...
Source: New York Times
