“A small boy’s definition of Father’s Day: It’s just like Mother’s Day only you don’t spend so much.” – Author Unknown
Last week I received a call in the morning from a patient I had not seen in a while. I called him back and he told me that he and his wife had decided to adopt, but the adoption fell through at the last minute. He said they had the baby for three days and then the birth mother changed her mind and took the baby back.
I have had this happen to my patients before but it had never seemed quite so immediate. He was anxious to talk about options and was wondering how quickly they could get in for a visit. I sensed urgency in his voice and told him I would see what I could work out. It was a Friday and after some back and forth, the only time we could all meet was around 4:45 that afternoon.
He arrived before his wife did and I brought him in. My goal was to get a sense of what they were thinking of and how his wife was feeling. Her biological clock was a little advanced and I wanted to be careful about what I said so as to not upset her. When we sat down to talk, he thanked me for fitting them in and then he told me that the baby was taken away just yesterday evening. When he told me that, I saw a deep grief and pain fill his eyes. I did not know what to say other than, “I am so sorry.” He said it felt like his baby had just died.
The words to the song, “Empty chairs at empty tables” from the musical Les Miserables kept coming to my mind…”a grief that can’t be spoken, a pain that goes on and on…”
As I write this, I can still see that look in his eyes.
As I look back on this encounter, I realized that I was so focused on how to help with the emotional trauma of his wife that I took for granted his emotional pain. As I think about this coming Father’s day, I wonder how “taken for granted” the men feel in this fertility journey.
I remember my own journey as an infertile partner. I am not sure I even acknowledged my feelings during this process. I was too focused on trying to be the knight in shining armor that was going to take control and fix everything. The only real emotion I recall was guilt that my wife had to go through all of these things while I just stood around watching.
The conventional wisdom has been that men are not as emotional or stressed about infertility. Recent research now seems to show that men have comparable responses to infertility as women(1). Unfortunately the word hasn’t really got out yet – especially to the men experiencing infertility.
I know what I see most often. In the book, “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” men are categorized as wanting to fill the role of the knight in shining armor – the one who is going to protect their princess and solve her problems. Infertility significantly hinders his ability to fill that role. There is not a lot he can do to solve the problem himself, and he is relegated to watching his princess go through procedure after procedure and heart break after heart break. He can neither solve nor protect. And sometimes it is no more complicated than the fear and sorrow of the possibility of a life without piggy back rides, catch, and butterfly kisses after bedtime stories. And then to have that hope realized for three days and then ripped away. I have no idea what that feels like, but I know now what it looks like because I saw it in that father’s eyes.
I have always thought that adoption is a beautiful thing. It turns hopelessness into happiness and fatherlessness into family. But what happened here just isn’t right. This couple spent close to $40,000 dollars to get to the point they did in the process, only to have their hearts broken. The majority of this went to pay for the birth mother’s expenses. They will only get back a small fraction of this amount.
Clearly the birth mother has a side to this story that I do not know and deserves protection during what can be a very vulnerable time . Having said this, there is too much money flowing in one direction to not ask hard questions and consider other options.
If there is no more guarantee than what this couple experienced, how does this compare to alternative solutions? One is egg donation. Egg donation is the most successful fertility treatment known to man. Success rates are routinely in the 50- to 75-percent range. They are so consistently in this range that some clinics are able to offer a complete refund if a couple does not take home a baby, usually at a cost significantly less than what this private adoption cost and failed to deliver. The couple is in complete control. They are able to pick the characteristics of the egg donor. They are able to control the environment of the baby in the womb. And with the onset of egg freezing, they can be in complete control of the schedule.
Perhaps most important of all, a couple choosing egg donation has zero chance of experiencing what this couple has had to experience.
As I sat across from this couple and discussed this kind of a path, I could see the beginnings of hope rise like a phoenix from the ashes of the despair they had felt for the last 20 or so hours. I watched this father get up off the ground, dust off his shining armor and mount his horse again. I saw something new begin to stir in his eyes. Perhaps it was a vision of butterfly kisses after bedtime stories.
1) Psychiatric Aspects of Infertility and Infertility Treatments Psychiatric Clinics of North America – Volume 30, Issue 4 (December 2007) – Copyright © 2007 W. B. Saunders Company