Recipe for a Family – Take two happily married people, one from New Zealand, one from Ohio, see if they can endure 6 years of frustration, uncertainty, doubt, disappointment and tears, mix liberally, cross fingers (and toes), pray a lot, hope for the best, believe in magic, be brave and try one last time and then, voila……a family is born!!

I never knew how much I wanted to be a mother until my children were actually here.  Even though it took me over 6 years to finally conceive and hold a pregnancy to term – well, “almost” term, during those years I was so focused on the details of getting pregnant, I hadn’t spent much time thinking about what comes after.  My life was full of numbers – lab results, FSH – too high, HCG – high and then dropping precipitously as another miscarriage ensued, counting days to ovulation, luteal phase, optimum time for IUI (intrauterine insemination), numbers of eggs encouraged to be produced each month, doses of medicine – Estrogen, Progesterone, Clomid.  The minute details of how to become pregnant filled my mind to the point that the complexities of this process made me marvel that it ever happened at all!  Practical matters took up what little room was left to be filled in my addled brain – $2000 per cycle for medications not covered by insurance.  What could we afford?  Should we skip a cycle to give our cringing bank account and my aging body time to rest, to catch its breath – take time to work harder at more jobs to save up for another round of treatment – trying to see if I could outrun my loudly ticking biological clock speeding on towards 50?  No.  Not much to time to think about motherhood.

And then it happened.  Not long before I turned 50, pregnant with twins.  After the frenetic years of the past, a wonderful calm seemed to drape over me and I settled into being pregnant.  That’s when motherhood began for me.  That’s when I had time to think about it. 

The years since then have been jam-packed – a sort of whirlwind of activity as our babies grew from tiny premature infants in the NICU to the giggly, sweet 12 year olds they are today.  But those tough “getting pregnant” years never really leave me.  They are ever-present, lingering at the bottom of my thoughts, sitting silently, informing and influencing the kind of mother I am and serving as a constant reminder of the two remarkable gifts I’ve been given.

That’s me 5 months pregnant with twins, not long after turning 50.