The One Where We Introduce Ourselves
Olo! My name is Rebecca, and this [GESTURES] is Ted. [TED GRINS AND WAVES.] We’re trying to make a baby, and things aren’t going that well. Welcome to our story!
I imagine if you clicked on this intro piece, you’re an FB friend or Insta follower, but on the off chance that you don’t know us personally: Welcome! Yay, we’re glad you’re here. We’re a Cincinnati couple consisting of an R+D engineer and a science writer, in not-that-order.
We got married in 2017, bought a house in 2018, started a business in 2019, and adopted two moronic but highly adorable dogs along the way. Now, it’s 2020, and we clearly need something else monumental to keep us busy. (It’s not like there’s a pandemic and an ongoing civil rights movement and, like, everything happening, right?)
Enter: Project Waterbear.
(To be clear, we’ve been trying to have a kid for longer than ‘needing to have a project in 2020’; we’re not declaring challenged fertility based on, like, nothing. We are working with a doctor, as well, and I’ll go into the treatments and protocols we’re exploring via the medical field in due time.)
Anyway. As Ted and I discussed how to keep our mental health up during lots and lots and LOTS of upcoming days, months, and possible years of an ongoing fertility journey, we agreed that we needed to have our community behind us. We have reached out to some family and friends to ask for prayers and support, and we quickly got that. Everyone has been wonderful, and we thank you for everything.
However, we quickly made a discovery. I can’t emphasize this enough: I don’t want to talk about my possible infertility. Like, at all. With anyone, other than my long-suffering husband, and the pages of several long-suffering notebooks. Debatably, not even then. When I’m hanging out with friends and family, I’d rather talk about literally anything else.
However, I have no issues writing about it. Does this make sense? Probably not. [SHRUGS]
I’m a writer. I don’t talk feelings good. I tell stories with my keyboard, and I relate to people through the written word. Writing stuff out helps me process things; and I can also cite sources and show pretty graphs in an article. Aside from shoving my phone in my friends’ faces every two minutes, can’t so much do that IRL, you know?
Also: We’ve noticed that--with very few exceptions--infertility tends to be a thing that young families suffer through quietly, with a lot of guilt or shame or confusion, and with few resources that are a) truly helpful, and b) not incredibly triggering. We wanted to create a public reference space for all of the research I’m reading anyway...just to see if it’ll help anyone else, just as much as it’s helped us.
Anyway. For some reason it felt right to cover the rest of the intro information in the form of a hypothetical FAQ section, so, go here for that.