We married five years before we decided we want to have kids. Hi my name is Rich and I’m a ROAR dad. Hi my name is Hillary and I’m A ROAR mom. We’ve been living in Germany and our friends around us started having children and I actually had a buddy who had a very bad diaper change with his son everywhere total disaster and it was like that moment like oh I think I want to have kids. It’s very strange and I had come to terms of the facts we were not gonna be having kids so this was a reverse negotiation. I don’t remember how the conversation came
up but it’s like hey honey you remember I was saying I didn’t want kids?
I think I’ve kind of changed my mind how do you feel about that? And then we started to kind of plan for that in our lives but hadn’t like really tried to have children yet so we kind of had this idea that okay once we start trying to have children that’ll happen pretty quickly and so we kind of scheduled you know, we kind of schedule that around our lives okay we’ll move back to the US and we’ll start a family. And then things didn’t really take off and so was it we’ve been trying for a year or two before we reached out to ROAR? Yeah I think well I was seeing Tristan separately for non fertility related things and then started to move in that direction about maybe three years into trying yes and I’ve gotten involved really just as a solidarity play like I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about this I’m like okay if Hillary’s going she’s doing all this work I should you know I should go too so I’ll do that just in case.
We’ve been working with ROAR for a couple years at that point we were ready to start thinking about what the next steps were and so Tristan kind of helped us navigate what to do next since we you know, what we were doing wasn’t working and how to address that. And when we had gone to the fertility clinic that we were going to they sort of couched everything in the sense of this is what you do first, and this is what you do second, and here’s what you do third even though it didn’t have anything to do with us and maybe what our situation was so I think it was helpful to have some support and guidance that was actually more tailored to who we were as people and you know, what our own situation was. Yeah and with contacts I think it felt like they were like you know giving us the bus schedule well you know the, IUI bus leaves in you know 15 minutes so you should get on that and then try that three times and so there was a very formulaic approach that was not talking about success or even likelihood but like well, you should do this three times because IVF is expensive okay and so there was some discussion about doing tests but a general acknowledgement of the tests are so expensive that it’s not really worth it you know, you don’t need to know why I just go do this thing so it was very hard to get behind.
Well and I think that you know interventions are emotionally taxing and so to do those things just because that’s what somebody has done before you wasn’t for me enough to get the energy to be invested in it personally because I didn’t have a lot of energy associated with doing this because you’re already mourning a loss of something and it’s hard to get into a mindset of excitement and commitment something that you’re kind of mad you have to do in the first place, so you sort of have limited emotional bandwidth and I think for me having support through ROAR to bolster that energy was really important and we’d ended up taking a break from that particular clinic and interviewed multiple clinics when we kind of got ourselves in a better place and then went forward with somebody else that had a different approach which was more effective for us which is where we had success.
Yeah one of the things I really appreciated was just having another lens to look at fertility so like you know, Halle pal Pathak medicine has like this is how they look at it and here’s what they know and they don’t really tell you what they don’t know or what they’re kind of guessing at. So it was nice to have some other perspectives around like you know other parts of our health kind of talking about that and thinking about that on our fertility journey so that was really helpful and has been helpful after the children and has helped me make some really good life choices with regards to my health.
I really felt like with the ROAR process we had kind of you know, forgive the analogy, but prepared the garden so I feel like we’ve done a lot of work to have our bodies be ready for this, and I was in a mindset of just focusing on the positive because I think there’s an element of trying not to get emotionally committed because you don’t want to deal with that news so you know certainly early on I was kind of like half in half out and in talking with other friends they kind of had this ideas of well when do I get excited? You know, even after they’ve conceived and so I was just like I’m all-in so I’m just gonna treat them like they’re there and any positive energy I can push towards them great and I don’t know how much I believe you know I don’t know what I believe but I do believe that optimism will get you further than pessimism, so when we found out that there were two heartbeats and it was the doctor told us immediately like, we show up they do the ultrasound, theres two heartbeats we’re like what really! And we were just over the moon.
For me it’s been great having more people on my team and having something like infertility isn’t talked about a lot and it can be embarrassing and so it’s really nice to have more people who are supporting you which was great. I’m Rich and I’m Hillary, and ROAR fertility work for us.