Why the Internet Is Collectively Rallying Behind This Couple Trying to Get Pregnant
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"Do you have a minute? I've got kind of a long story."
That's how Dan Majesky starts off a Facebook post that is 3,336 words long. A long story is an understatement, but once you get started, you won't be able to stop reading every last one of those words.
The Cincinatti man shared a refreshingly honest account of what he and his wife, Leah, have endured on their journey to become parents. All told from his perspective, at times blissfully sarcastic and at others painfully tragic, it's one not often heard in the realm of personal infertility essays.
Dan chronicles from start to (spoiler alert) finish the lengths he and Leah reached to become pregnant.
We're in our 30s. Things are probably a little bit dusty, and a little bit rusty. So, three years ago, we started using apps and calendars to track this and that. Ovulation test sticks. Old wives' tales of positions and timing. We got some late periods. And some periods that never came! But we didn't get pregnant.
From there, he outlines the medical interventions and hormone therapies his wife began and what his main purpose was in all this.
My job was to try and not say anything dumb, because she also needed to be calm. I tried to avoid triggering phrases like "Hey," or "Good morning," or "I love you," but I kept fucking up, and opening my mouth, or allowing Leah to see TV programs, or commercials, to read books, and interact with the world in any way.
He even explains in vivid detail what it's like having to make sperm deposits in an office in which everyone is aware of what's really going on.
Everyone is a little bit tittery, a little bit anxious. We all know that this is all very silly, and that I just touched my penis, and you are someone's grandmother, and that even though you have a pin in the shape of a little sperm fella to help break the tension, we all – if we really had the choice – would probably prefer to burst into flames than discuss any part of this.
All the while, Dan acknowledges the pain in waiting, the defeat and sadness that comes when finding about that the "17-year-old across the street got pregnant," and the jealousy, envy, and resentment over a "child throwing a tantrum in the cereal aisle."
He opens up about their miscarriage.
When a family member dies, you can share your grief. With a miscarriage, you would have to tell people that someone who will never be born, who they had never heard of and will never meet, but who meant the world to you, is gone. And you don't have the strength to get into it. You tell your parents, maybe a close friend, maybe your boss.
As he writes on, he talks about how he cried alone every day about their unborn child and compared its now-lapsed due date to "a car accident on the road ahead that you're trying not to look at." It becomes sometimes painful — an infinitesimal fraction of the pain being described, of course — to simply keep reading. Thankfully, this story has a happy, if not cautiously optimistic, ending: after a break from treatments, the couple tried a few more times and got the "faintest f*cking line in the whole f*cking world" on a pregnancy test.
He adds that he's heard the heartbeat, arms and legs are moving, and they're expecting a baby girl in November. Then, in two words, Dan perfectly concludes what might be one of the most thorough men's accounts of what it's like struggling to conceive:
"We're pregnant."