Still A Family

When Anaya and Dave Lee fell in love, they saw a whole future with each other. Part of that future included being parents. But when they started trying, they learned creating a family was going to be much more challenging than they expected. They eventually had to ask the question, if a baby doesn’t happen, what would our family look like?  

Note: this episode talks about pregnancy loss.
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Nora McInerny: Um, How are you? Most people answer that question with fine or good, but obviously it's not always fine. And it's usually not even that good. This is a podcast that asks people to be honest about their pain, to just be honest about how they really feel about the hard parts of life. And guess what? It's complicated. I'm Nora McInerney, and this is terrible. Thanks for asking.

Nora McInerny: I'm Nora McInerney. And this is terrible. Thanks for asking.

If the rhyme from our childhood is to be believed, life follows a simple trajectory. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes a baby in a baby carriage. It's just that simple and it's always in that order. It's not a good rhyme to say, first you look all over for love and become certain that it is a myth, then you settle down and make it work and then you have some kids who do the same thing.

It's not catchy to say not all love lasts forever and maybe that's okay and perhaps the nuclear family isn't all it's cracked up to be. It's not aspirational to say love comes when it comes and babies are not guaranteed. No child wants to sit on the playground examining the unlikely nature of their own existence.

The fact that their creation wasn't a given. That their parents may have been surprised by them or... Surprised at how hard it was to create them. That their presence could have ever been missed. And hardly any grown up wants to think about this either. That we might not get the family we thought we would have.

The one we should have had. The one we longed for, ached for, suffered for. So let's put all that aside for now and start in a place that feels good. We'll start at the beginning. 

Anaya Lee: A long time ago, in an internet far, far away, there used to be this check in app called Foursquare. Your older listeners will definitely know about it.

And you could check into places. And so, I would check in to... This local pet store, I had just gotten a new dog. So I was checking into this place and if you check in enough times. You become the mayor of the place, which is just an online bragging rights. It makes no consequence to anything significant in your real life.

But then my mayorship kept getting stolen by some guy named Dave Lee. And I said, who is this guy? And we just fought over it. Every couple of weeks, I would become the mayor. Then Dave Lee would become the mayor. And then I would. And so I just started following him. So he followed me back. And we didn't live anywhere near each other in town, but we'd be crossing paths all the time.

I checked into Target. He was just there. Um, he was going to a local brewery. I would comment and say, Oh, I just went there last week. It's so great. And I had this. And so we would chat and like, Things went back in that time, you became friends on Twitter and you became friends on Instagram and you friend them on all the things.

Nora McInerny: That's Anaya Lee, talking about the annoying guy on an app. Who would one day become her husband? 

Dave Lee: You know, I was, I was just genuinely interested in her as a person. One, that she did have a dog and I had three dogs. And so I was, I was fascinated that she was, you know, first a dog owner and that she really loved pets.

And come to find out as I followed her on, on Instagram that she was in education, that she loved the outdoors, she loved to swim. Um, you know, she, she had all these things that were in common with me. 

Nora McInerny: Dave was intrigued. And eventually, Dave's brother's band was playing at a bar in Bakersfield, California, where they all live.

So Dave invited a bunch of people that he used to chat with on Twitter to the show, including Anaya. Which, depending on how you use the internet now, or how you used it 10 or 15 years ago, is either a great idea or a weird idea. Maybe both. 

Anaya Lee: And he said, I understand how that can be stressful or awkward.How about I meet you out front? We'll walk in together. And so I said, sure, that's fine. And so I show up downtown, ate an amazing dinner with my girlfriends. Drink a pitcher of sangria. I had liquid courage. I was ready to go. And then I told them the story. Oh, I'm going to meet this guy there. It's going to be so fun.

And they said what? And they were weirded out. They insisted on escorting me over. And so here's Dave Lee standing against his truck in an alley. And I go up and I introduced myself and he didn't even know my first name because I had my first name off of all of my social media. And We went inside and we chatted and we were expecting this big meetup, all of our Twitter friends were going to meet in real life.

And so he brings me into this bar. Nobody shows up. Nobody, nobody came. It was just Dave and me at the bar the whole evening, chatting it up, hanging out. It 

Dave Lee: was great because we sat down, we, we had a beer and um, We just hit it off and we just talked for hours and hours there. I just kept being attracted to her, you know, in, in form of her, like her intellect or her style and her personality.

Anaya Lee: I met a bunch of his family, some of his friends that were all at this show. And we met the two owners of the dog or the animal pet store. That were there and they looked and they're like, wait, our friend Dave is here because he actually helped open the store. That's why he was so mad that I was stealing his mayorship because it's his friends that own it.

And so they're like, what is one of our customers doing with one of our friends? What is happening? And everybody was confused, but we insist to this day. It was not a date because we thought we were doing a group meetup and nobody else showed up. And we've been together ever since. 

Nora McInerny: This is how it works sometimes. You meet, and then you're just together. And pretty early in their relationship, Dave and Anaya realize that they want a future together. And so they started talking about what that would look like. Would they get married? Would they have kids? 

Anaya Lee: Most of my life, I didn't think that I wanted children. And, um, in my previous marriage, I, we had had that conversation. I was fine not having kids. And then, you know, I'm on my own. I'm 30 and something just happened. I can't tell you if it was one day or over time. I just thought, Oh my gosh, I really want to have children. I could be a good mom. And I was so excited about feeling these new feelings. I had never thought about wanting children before.And so I thought, well, I'm not going to put it up on a shelf just yet. I'll keep it in my mind and maybe I'll meet somebody. But when Dave Lee came around. Two years later, that was what really solidified, even though we weren't there yet. I thought, wow, this is somebody I could really have children with and he would be an amazing father. And then I knew. 

Nora McInerny: So after a few years together, they start trying after seven months. Anaya is finally pregnant. 

Anaya Lee: I actually knew the day before I took the test, I knew, but I didn't say anything. And then I took that test on a Monday morning and I showed him and I just remember us being in such shock, but so excited because we thought at that point, Oh my gosh, we're so exhausted.

And we were just so happy. And we agreed right away. That we weren't going to tell anybody because we wanted to be safe, we wanted to be smart, we wanted to be careful. And so it was just this little secret that the two of us shared. 

Nora McInerny: That's what most of us do if we've ever been pregnant. You keep the news to yourself, maybe tell a handful of people and tell the 12 week mark when you're out of that scary first trimester.

And if you're in a position like Anaya where you're having a baby with a partner you love This is also a very sweet secret to share together. The two of you know that your lives are about to completely change. And you get to spend time together, dreaming about what that will 

Dave Lee: look like. But yeah, you, you, you catch yourself thinking about, well the trip across town, when we're going grocery store, what's that going to be like when we have a kid?

When I have to take time off, are our vacations going to change? Uh, are our friends going to still come over and hang out with us? How long do we need to wait until we can invite people over? I watched soccer and I was looking forward to the time when I could wake up and let Anaya sleep in and I could hold her baby and I could be up at 4:30 in the morning and just, and just be fine with that because that was something I was really looking forward to. 

Nora McInerny: Seven weeks into her pregnancy, Anaya is at work. She teaches college classes and she was in the middle of a lecture when something just didn't feel right. She excused herself to go to the bathroom.

Anaya Lee: And I just saw so much blood. And it's weird to have that feeling where your body freezes, but you feel heat and panic set in over your entire body. And I didn't know what to do. Nobody knew at that point. And I remember, After I left the bathroom, I just rushed into my boss's office who was right next door to my classroom.

I went in there, slammed the door, sat down and started crying and said, I don't know what to do. I'm pregnant. And I think I'm having a miscarriage. And I can't even imagine what that was like for her, but I had nowhere to go. I had nobody to tell nobody knew, and I needed help. And she's a very close friend of mine.

And so I just needed. Somebody at that time to kind of catch me as I was falling. That was a Friday. We had plans on Saturday So we were out and oh, I had to work on Saturday. And so I'm sitting there bleeding trying to work putting that face on and having to be on as many educators do when their life is falling apart and I'm around probably a hundred students in this big, um, classroom working with my coworkers and just trying to keep moving all the while.

I just keep going to the bathroom and I am in excruciating pain. And then the next day was mother's day because the world is awful sometimes. So we had family over and again, it was put on the happy face, serve people food at my house. And looking back, talking about it, that would have been the time to just fall apart and tell them and say, I need you.

I think I'm going through this thing. But like you said, I didn't want to believe it. And I thought it could be something else. Lots of women bleed through their pregnancies. Maybe, maybe I'm fine, but it was the weekend. So I couldn't get into the doctor and it wasn't until Monday morning or Monday afternoon that Dave and I went to the doctor and got an ultrasound.

And we heard it from our doctor herself and she wrote Dave and me doctor's notes. I think that was one of the most compassionate things she didn't even ask. She said, I'm writing you both a doctor's note to be off this week. Do not go to work, just be home and be together and take your time and rest because you will need it.

So the week after we had been home.

All Dave had told his parents was I wasn't feeling well and he was going to be staying home with me for the week. And then we took a trip up to visit them. They live about 45 minutes away.

And I remember sitting at their dining room table,just trying to get the words out to tell them what had happened. I just remember falling apart at their table and I felt both of them wrap their arms around me and they hugged Dave and everyone was crying and just saying how sorry they were. 

Nora McInerny: In one of our conversations, Anaya said that she didn't know how anyone keeps going after a miscarriage, but she does know how people keep going because that's what she did. She and Dave want to keep trying to have a baby. They conceived this first pregnancy the old fashioned way, but after the miscarriage, their doctor says that they should talk to a fertility specialist. 

Anaya Lee: When we kind of evolved into starting infertility treatments and going to a specialist, that's when he and I looked at each other and said, we need to keep this close. I don't know how I'm. Going to deal with lots of opinions as people do give them. I don't know how I'm going to do with watching everybody else's grief because I know people will be sharing in that with us. And I barely have the capacity to hold our grief together. So I don't know that I want to carry that. And so whether or not that was a wise decision, it is what we chose for us.

Nora McInerny: And that makes sense. Makes sense to me, at least. Losing a pregnancy is a really tender moment. Unlike grieving someone you knew and had memories with, you're grieving a promise. This whole new path had emerged before Dave and Anaya, where they saw their life completely changed. And just as quickly, that path crumbled beneath them.

And when you're in that position, you feel so many things. Sadness, anger, fear, disappointment, hormonal, You don't always want a witness. You don't always know how to let people witness this. It makes sense why Aenea and Dave would want to keep this to themselves. But grieving in secret is still grieving.

And grief can be very, very lonely.

Nora McInerny: Anaya and Dave's OB GYN refers them to this fertility specialist so they can start the next phase of trying to conceive. The doctor tells them that annea getting pregnant once was a good sign. So he suggests they start with IUI, intrauterine insemination, which is A cheaper, simpler procedure compared to IVF.

Anaya Lee: So with an IUI, you will take, um, medicine to stimulate your follicles in a hopes to produce several eggs and you're taking medicine on, everything's timed. And you're on a certain schedule, you go in every couple of days, get an ultrasound, they're checking you out saying, okay, they're growing. We either want to step it up where you're good, where you're at. And then after whatever protocol you've been put on 10 days, 12 days, 15 days, they say, okay, this is an optimum size for your follicles. Then based on your cycle, wherever you're at on your cycle, and they do it to the hour, you give yourself. a shot in either your thigh or your butt. 

Nora McInerny: The first IUI procedure doesn't result in a pregnancy. So the next month they try again. Needles, doctor's appointments, more needles, inseminate, nothing. The month after, the same routine and the same results. When do you, uh, start the conversation of IVF and what does that process look like for the two  of you? 

Anaya Lee: I think my doctor didn't want to wait because, you know, I was that dreaded word, advanced maternal age. And so he didn't want to wait. He said, I want to talk to you about this next step. And so he had the big conversation where he explained the process. He talked to us about cost, about. the time expectation, the expectation for all the medicine. And he said, is this something that you want to do? And it was without a question, Dave and I said, yes.

Nora McInerny: Doing IVF is much more invasive and stressful than IUI. The entire time that they're doing it, Anaya will have to inject herself with hormones to try to produce the most eggs possible. Then she'll have a surgical procedure to extract those eggs, which will be fertilized with Dave's sperm in a lab. Then that embryo will be inserted back in Aenea and hopefully become a baby.

This is also very expensive. It can cost tens of thousands of dollars for the process to create one embryo. It's intense and it becomes all consuming for Dave and 

Anaya Lee: It is a very diligent, very time sensitive, regimented, physical, mental. Exercise of will, I don't know how else to describe it. You have to be all in and it's one of the hardest things I've ever put my body through. It's one of the hardest things to organize and keep track of. Dave and I look like we worked at a pharmacy at some point. We had this whole tray of all of our medication. We had a process, we had timers set. I had a whole planner where I would log all of my appointments, my shots, how much, how often I would take my shots, and sometimes we weren't at home. So I have given myself shots in very weird places. 

Dave Lee: Uh, one of my favorite, was it a, was it a Burger King? Bathroom, like off, like outside of LA, like on our way home one time. Um, kind of a sketchy place took us a little bit to get there. And I think you gave yourself a shot. It, a Mexican restaurant, right before we went to a show at one of our venues here in town. Um, it's like, Oh, I'll just be right back, you know, and sit in a restaurant. Like, all right, just going to go use the restroom. No wonder. And Nae is in there just. Giving shots in her belly. It was, it was some really, really odd, odd times and odd places. 

Anaya Lee: I've done one in our car in the Rose Bowl parking lot when we were watching a soccer game.

I've done several at work in the bathroom. I hope that doesn't get me in trouble for HR. I've done some at people's houses and they didn't know. is the absolute worst my body has ever felt. Imagine your worst period symptoms ever for months on end. I was tired, irritable, in constant pain, always cramping. When you're stimulating your follicles, they're so tiny and the eggs are so tiny, but I was on so much medication. I mean, I just have horrific pictures of how many medications that I took that it felt like I was walking around carrying a bag of grapefruit in my uterus all the time. And I'm still working. I'm still lightly working out because I need to keep my body moving or I'll be in complete pain all the time, but you don't want to mess anything up. I kept walking around and treating my body like I was carrying a glass of full champagne glasses on a glass tray. 

Nora McInerny: Through this whole process, Dave and Anaya still don't talk to anyone about what they're going through when she's excusing herself from dinner with Dave's parents.

Anaya doesn't say it's to go and give herself a shot so that they can have grandchildren. She just sticks herself in the bathroom stall and sits back down to make small talk over an entree. After a few treatments, Dave and Anaya did tell a few trusted friends that they were doing IVF and traveling a lot to see their doctor.

Anaya Lee: It was a really weird sneaking around kind of experience because there were times when we had to leave town and go down three and a half hours down South to have some of my treatments and some of the procedures, and we had to tell somebody we were going somewhere. It didn't feel safe to just leave town. And nobody would know. So there were a couple of close friends and family that we entrusted in and just said, Hey, we're doing this, but we kept it to a bare minimum. We didn't get deep with anybody. We didn't talk to them about the struggles and the stress and the worry and the fear and the disappointment, but we still kept it from most, most of our friends and family did not know. And as painful as that was, I felt like it protected us, but I also felt like I was living this big lie. I felt a little shameful about it that I'm going through this horrible thing that I know all of these people would want to help us with and I'm not letting them. So I carried a lot of guilt with that.

Nora McInerny: This is a lot to keep a secret, not just emotionally, but logistically. Because doing all of this IVF means a lot of travel to see this fertility specialist who is three and a half hours away. There's guilt, but there's also the knowledge that this is the right thing for them as a couple. So 

Dave Lee: when you have a doctor or a nurse or a practitioner telling you there will be loss, you automatically go into defense mode and you're like, okay, the more I share with people, the more I'm gonna have to tell them about The future loss and not just a pregnancy loss. It's a loss of, we only got four eggs during this retrieval rather than 12. Like we did last time we went and did this procedure and we only, you know, this was the outcome and it wasn't quite what we wanted. So you, you often have to relive so many of those situations and reliving that is difficult because then you flash back to an A and myself sitting in a doctor's room. Waiting for the procedure to happen to, you know, being put under for Anaya, then waking up and getting not the best news. And so you just flash back to a whole day, weeks, months of, of all of this, you know, grief and trauma that you've, you've had built up over so many months and years. 

Nora McInerny: After a month of giving herself shots and going to doctor's appointments, it's time for Anaya's first egg retrieval. She's had two embryos inserted. After the two embryos, it's time to just wait. People who are trying to conceive call this the two week wait 

Anaya Lee: and your body plays tricks on you because all of the feelings Feel like you're pregnant, which I knew I knew of being pregnant felt like and so during those two week waits Was I pregnant was I not was I pregnant was I not is this the medicine or am I pregnant because all of that? Medicine that you're taking makes you feel like you're pregnant. And then you're not 

Nora McInerny: It didn't work. Anaya was once again not pregnant. And at this point, Dave and Anaya have been trying to have a baby for two years. And after that first round of IVF, they are exhausted, emotionally and physically. 

Dave Lee: We decided to take a month off.

Our doctor was pushing us to move forward. You know, at this point, with advanced maternal age, that dreaded phrase that we hear too often, our doctor was like, you got to keep going. You can't take a break. You can't take a break. And When we decided we need a whole 30 days just to take a break from anything.

At that point, we were so, Naya was of course, physically just at her limits. Um, emotionally we had gone through a tremendous amount over the last two years. We were just so heavily focused. That was our life for so long. We just needed a chance to, to rest and breathe and just. Give our minds a break our bodies a break and just like our souls a break at the same time just to sit in the house Go out to dinner, take a drive and not think about it.

And it was refreshing. It was also the thoughts of, is this the right thing to do? We knew we needed it. Um, it was a chance for us just to kind of center ourselves and focus on us again for another 30 days. But it was, I think it was the exact break we needed. 

Nora McInerny: This break is important because at the beginning of this process, Dave and Anaya promised each other that they would protect their marriage, no matter what kind of heartbreak they went through. 

Anaya Lee: it followed a lot of women on Instagram. There's this incredibly large community for women trying to have families. They call it the TTC community trying to conceive. And I would follow these women and they would post things and I would see these stories because they shared. Everything, the good, the bad, the ugly. And they would talk about my grief. Doesn't look like his, I wish that he would do this. I wish that they would do this. I I'm feeling this way, but my partner is reacting this way. It's causing a lot of arguments. And that was something that I always thought in the back of my head. I don't want to be like that. I'm not going to lie to you and say that our relationship is perfect. And so it was sunshine and rainbows, even during the hard times. That's ridiculous, but. We made sure in the very beginning to say, we are going to talk about everything, even when it's hard, we are not going to sit, we are not going to fester, we are not going to shut down. And so we would do these check ins and just say, Hey, how are you feeling about this? How are you feeling about this? And we would sit and talk and have these exhausting, emotional, Conversations and neither of us, you know, shrugged our shoulders and said, Oh, here we go again. Do we have to talk about this?

We never did because it was always through all of this. Each other was our top priority. We wanted to have a child, sure, but keeping us intact was our absolute top priority because we had worked so hard to get to where we were. We both have had prior relationships that really left some scars and so we knew we had something good and we wanted to protect it.

Dave Lee: When it hits you, it hits you. If we watched a commercial with a mother playing with her son, or if I saw a commercial with, you know, a father playing with her daughter, like we would just cry and we would lose it. And we would pause it and say, talk to me. Let me know what's going on. How does this make you feel?

Sometimes we would just say I'm okay, and we'd move on. Sometimes it was that's the end of our night. We're gonna go in bed. We're gonna sit side by side and we're gonna talk. And so every day looked a little bit different for us. But I think We found, well, I know we found a way to get through it by making ourselves a priority by checking in with each other and just being honest and respectful about where we were in that, to that day, or to this day, it still happens that way.

Anaya Lee: So there were lots of check ins, lots of hard conversations. And through those hard conversations is when we had to have the talk of when are we going to call it quits? When are we going to say, we have to stop this to make sure that we are okay. 

Nora McInerny: IVF is expensive, and the cost of it all was definitely a factor in Dave and Anaya's decision.

The doctor they were working with had offered them a BOGO deal, a buy one get one, where they would get two embryo transfers for the price of one, which is really a bargain and yet very expensive. So after that failed transfer and the one month break, they had one more round 

Anaya Lee: to go. So I didn't have to do another retrieval because I had done two retrievals by that time and I still had eggs left for one more transfer and He said let's do it and so We said we'll give it one more shot and during that month when we had all those conversations We had said if this doesn't work It's going to be our last time because I could not physically go through another retrieval.

The retrievals were excruciating and we didn't see giving more of our life, our money, our focus on it anymore. And so we had kind of a plan of attack. Once we went into that last transfer, our sweet, sweet nurse at our doctor's Bakersfield office, she knew it was our last round. She knew we had one more shot. After the transfer, you have your two week wait, and then you go in for a blood test, and then you go home and wait. So they take your blood and they make you wait sometimes all day. Well, my nurse didn't tell me. She grabbed a pregnancy test and she dropped my blood in it. And then she said I was pregnant. She knew. And so she gave me that pregnancy test, and... I drove to Dave's work about 10 minutes away and he said, so how did the appointment go? And I handed him the test and that's how I told him that we were pregnant again. 

Nora McInerny: This happiness and hope is just for the two of them.

There are no crowds to cheer on the buzzer beater. They just sank. There is nobody else that knows that the dream is 4 30 AM wake up to watch soccer and soothe their future child. That inside of Aenea, a whole universe is forming. They get two weeks of that feeling, that hope. 

Anaya Lee: We knew that there were risks. We knew that we were a high risk pregnancy. We knew that this wasn't something that just happened by a fluke. So we knew we had to be very careful. And everything that we were putting into this made us very vulnerable, made us very, Sensitive, very tender. And so we wanted to hold this close to our chest. And so of course we're just screaming through the rooftops with each other, but that's where it stops. And I'm sure there are people out there in the world that just want to scream that they're pregnant to everyone. We didn't, it's weird to have this juxtaposition of being so excited, but also so afraid. But when it was just me and my favorite person in the universe having this special secret, something that we had worked for for so long, it felt so precious and so special. And we would just talk about it to each other all day, sending texts, phone calls. Pictures to each other. I can't believe this is happening.

I'm so excited. And you get to shut out the world a little bit and just be in your little love bubble. It was very, very special. I'll never forget those moments. 

Dave Lee: That was incredible. That was, that was a great day. And then of course, after that happens, we have to take the trip. Down to Southern California and leading up to it name was like, I feel confident, you know, this is I'm feeling good, I feel pregnant. You know, it feels like what it did before and we got our appointment to go down. It was August 16th and they is, we're trying to stay positive, but he's like, I don't think I'm pregnant. You know, it's like, I can't question. You know, she knows her body inside and out. She's, she's gonna know. And at least I, I felt like we were going down knowing the news that we were gonna get. And then we go into the doctor's office and he... They, they confirmed via ultrasound that she's not pregnant again. And, um,he confirmed via ultrasound. He's like, well, there's one other test we can do. Um, we'll get a little blood draw. We'll call you on your way home. And, uh, I'll always remember where we got that call. Um, if anybody's familiar with magic mountain, uh, it's a theme park, a lot of amusement rides, roller coasters, dip and dots, all those kinds of things.

We were driving home and the doctor's office called and we. Nea put it on speaker, the doctor's office said that we, in fact, were not pregnant. And how I kept the car on the road with my eyes completely full of tears and Nea next to me in the same state. I always have this vivid memory because it's like you have Magic Mountain next to us where people are screaming and having fun and hanging out with family and being joyous and they're just having an amazing time.

And then there's two people in a car driving home. Broken and empty and just crying. And every time I drive past that place, I think of that. And it's just the dichotomy of joy and sorrow and fun and brokenness. And like we sat quietly for the last hour, right home, just trading off who was crying the most and how we got home. I don't know, but I know that we did it together and it was. That was probably the hardest car ride because we knew, at that moment, this was the end for us. 

Anaya Lee: There was no possible way that I could not feel that this wasn't my fault because it was my body. I felt like my body was failing. I wasn't doing what I was supposed to do. You know, the medicine... does what it's supposed to do. Dave did what he was supposed to do. It was my body that wasn't working. And so I went through these horrible bouts of just being so angry at my body, angry at myself. I don't know of another time where my self esteem has been lower. And I just felt like this failure.

I didn't verbalize it a lot, but of course I can't hide anything from Dave and he knew. And I just kept telling him that I'm sorry. And it wasn't until I knew that we were closing that chapter that I told him I was truly afraid. I was truly afraid that I had let him down and I wouldn't blame him if he didn't want to be with me anymore because I couldn't give him this because I knew with every fiber of my being that Dave Lee would have been the best dad and I felt like it was my fault that he wasn't going to have that chance.And he told me, he said, I didn't marry you to have kids. We are still a family. He said, I married you to be with you. Having kids would have been an amazing addition, but he said, you are enough. 

Nora McInerny: Goddamn, we love Dave Lee. 

Anaya Lee: We really do. 

Nora McInerny: What was the last interaction with your doctor?

Anaya Lee: He personally emailed us and wrote us this long letter that I'm pretty sure I kept because it was so special. And he stated, he stated just how sorry he was about it. And that he thought we were incredible people andhe just wished us well. He knew that we tried our best and he was truly apologetic that he could not help more and he wished us well. 

Nora McInerny: And those people in that doctor's office, like you've spent so much time with them. 

Dave Lee: We still talk about them. We have funny jokes that the Ultratech would tell us and we still bring those up and we talk about how friendly the front staff were and how the nurses were amazing and we share stories about when, when Naya was going in for, um, You know, egg retrievals or, you know, anything like that is the nurses, they were funny and they were entertaining and they were real with us. And we saw them more than we got to see my parents or Anais parents over a three year period. It was, you can't substitute the love and compassion that they had for us. And that's ultimately like when we got that email from our doctor, it just, it demonstrated that. He was always looking out for us, and he always wanted the best for us.

Nora McInerny: If you've ever struggled to get pregnant, you've probably heard plenty of stories like this from well meaning people in your life. Your co worker's sister's friend did IVF for three years and eventually had twins. Or your mom's hairdresser's niece stopped doing IVF because it was so expensive, but then six months later, after a few glasses of wine on vacation, she got pregnant, also with twins.

Or you can have someone you love tell you that. It'll happen when you least expect it or that you can always adopt as if that's not its own complicated situation a whole new set of emotional and Financial costs as though the trauma of what you've been through could all be smoothed over by more trauma.

But I am NOT your mom's sister’s hairdress and this is Terrible, Thanks for Asking. 

The thing that happens to Dave and Anaya is the thing that typically stays unspoken during fertility conversations. In September 2019, three and a half years after they first started trying, Anaya and Dave closed the door to parenthood. They don't have a living baby. They don't become parents.

Nora McInerny: There's this idiom, and I'm gonna get it wrong like I got so many other things wrong, It's something like, you know, joy shared is joy multiplied, and sorrow shared is sorrow halved. And I think it's wrong for a few reasons, but one reason why I think it's wrong is because when you share your sorrow with people who really love you, it hurts them too.

Anaya Lee: We weren't worried about  who knew, we were worried about getting through it. And being able to grow a little bit stronger each day. And sometimes that came in waves. Sometimes we felt strong ish. And other days we did not feel strong at all. How 

Dave Lee: do we get to the place where we can actually talk about what we went through? It was like the best place to start. is with a group of people that have been through it and whatever that looks like been through it means, uh, do they have, do they go through miscarriages? Did they have IVF treatments? Have they had children and their second pregnancy was lost? Like it's such a unique dynamic to be in a room where everybody sees you as a father and everybody sees. You as a mother, and I think that validation alone is part of the reason why we continue to go to the support group is Knowing that they have a very comprehensive understanding of what we went through from whether it's medical procedures to the financial aspect of it, to the emotional toll, to how they utilize their support group very differently than what we did in support group, meaning their own friends, their own family.

Anaya Lee: And just hearing other people share their stories and being able to share our stories gave us this whole new outlook on the power of our story and how telling it honors the memory. of all of our loss and makes us feel a little bit stronger in our story. We're not victims of our story at all. It's something that happened to us.It's something that will always be a part of us, but it's not a make or break. We're still two pretty awesome people that love each other and plan to have a very fruitful life. And so I think that is what gave us. The courage in January, I just sat there and talked to Dave one day and I said, what if, what if we post about this finally, and we had a long talk about it as we do.

And I of course wanted to make sure that. He was on board cause I'm not about to just throw all of our stuff out there without his consent because it happened to him as well. And we, and with some help from our support group, we went and we shared it on a social media post. I did this whole production of pictures that I chose to share and I did this one picture with all of the needles that I had saved.Because I don't know if you've ever seen these pictures that people, um, who go through, uh, infertility treatments do. They'll take a picture of a onesie or their baby and they'll put it in the middle of the floor with all the needles and all the medicine around it. And so I created this huge circle of needles.

We had hundreds and hundreds of needles and I put them all in the ground. And then there was an empty space where I put a broken heart in the middle. And it just felt so raw and vulnerable and sad and real. And it was like taking a picture of myself naked and posting it on the internet. I was scared of judgment.I was scared of, but have you tried this? You should do this. I was scared of people not respecting our boundary. Of no, we're really done. We don't need your advice. We don't need your suggestions. And I even put a hard boundary in the post and I said, please don't ask us if we're going to adopt or if we have thought about adoption because obviously we've had that conversation.

And when I say we're done, it means we're done. So please accept that. And so it was, I think that's what I was afraid of, but I also, what I gained from that was seeing how much the people in our lives love us. I remember I just threw my phone down and wouldn't look at it for hours. And then when we finally picked it up and looked at the tons of comments that we had. I was just sobbing because I could feel their love. It felt like everybody you love and care about wrapping their arms around you and just giving you comfort at the same time. It was incredible. It was incredible. So that was, that was a very scary bandaid to rip off, but it honestly was the most freeing thing.

If I hadn't have done that all these years later, I wouldn't be able to talk about it still. 

Nora McInerny: When we speak, it's been three years since Dave and Anaya closed the door on parenthood. And like any kind of grief, it feels different today than it did on that day in September. It will feel different tomorrow.

It will feel different in three years. It will stay with them. Dave and Anaya will do what so many people do. They will love the life they have and mourn the life they don't. Because as truly miraculous as it is that any of us exist at all, that the stars and fallopian tubes and sperms and eggs and uterine lining and everything else, however you did it, however your parents did it, that they all work together with or without a little boost from the medical profession.

It is also equally miraculous that Dave and Anaya found each other. Of all the people, on all the apps, going to all the bars in all the world, they found each other. First came love, and then came marriage, and then came babies that they would never get to hold at 4:30 in the morning. And now comes love again, and again, and again. In all its miraculous forms.

Anaya Lee: We've never been the couple that says, well, we don't have children. So we don't want to be around yours. We absolutely want to be around your children. We love them. We care about them. We go to dance recitals. We go to soccer games. We go to rugby games. We go to whatever you ask us to go to. We are there. And we find a lot of joy in that. And of course, my students will probably cringe if they ever hear this, but I feel like a mama bear to my students. I mean, they're college age students. So it ranges anywhere from early twenties and beyond. I've had students who are older than me, but I feel like such a mama bear to them. And I care about them with my whole heart. And I know that that has grown since what we've been through and I don't care. I don't care if it's weird. I just care about 

Dave Lee: them. It's it's, it's incredible how your family gets chosen when you don't have children. And I think for me, I learned that I don't have any living children, but I have friends that have two really great girls. I have friends that have, uh, twins and we can be there. We can grow up with them. They can call us, you know, Uncle Dave and Auntie Nene and a wide variety of things and your world just looks different. And I think going through this, it allowed me to figure out that one, my emotional capacity is much higher than it is, that I'm willing to sit in it with a lot of people, but also our family structure.May not be what society continue could considers to be like the nucleus or the way of doing it, but it is our family and we get the opportunity to to be there and grow and mentor and be by their sides and we get to experience kids growing up. It's just in a very different way. One of the things that we often set boundaries around is baby showers.

And, and it's not out of disrespect for our friends that are having children. It's just something that we realize is just gonna be too difficult for us to go to. We will... Gladly go to your house afterwards. We will happily come over when you have your baby. We will bring you presents. We will fill in. We will babysit. We will do whatever. But that's one of the few things that I can recall that we just it's too hard for us.

Anaya Lee: I love when people are brave enough to ask me or us about our experience because we don't get the opportunity to talk about it enough. And we love to talk about it. And I am so reflective about it in a way that I think it changed me completely. I thought I was this evolved person through all the things that I've been through in my life. And I thought, okay, I have this adulting thing down. I figured it out. Well, the world had other plans for me. And said, well, just wait. And so I, I had to relearn who I was past all of this. And I realized that I'm not. Just a bunch of broken pieces that experienced hard things. I'm these broken pieces that have been glued back together to be this amazing, beautiful, unique, messy, complicated, but wonderful person. And it's completely changed the way I look at people, how I recognize That everybody is going through something. I've been able to sit in some really hard situations with others because when everybody else runs away from grief and sadness and loss, I am right there front of the line with my hand raised saying, I volunteer as tribute because I can do it. And it's given me this like suit of armor that I don't want. I don't want any of this, no thank you, but I also am so grateful that I have it and it makes me feel strong and powerful like it's this superpower that I have and I'm so thankful every day for what we went through. Every day I am so thankful.

Dave Lee: As a couple, we're just as solid as the day we met through everything that we've been through, you know, 10 years of being together, six years of marriage, you know, three and a half years of, of trying to have a child. I love that we can both sit here and we can look at each other and be like, we're good. Like we've made it through what feels like an impossible hill to climb and we didn't stumble on the way down an avalanche came in. Buried us, but we dug ourselves out of that. And that's what I, that's what I love the most is that we can sit here and be like, we're still here. We're still in it together through it all is what I always tell Anaya through it all, It's you and me. And we've, we've found a way of doing that. And now we have just this. Different life that her and I did not expect, but we have an amazing life. We get to travel, we get to, um, hang out on a Tuesday night and go get Taco Bell on drive thru if we want to. And we can, we can go wine tasting out of town when we want to.

And we get to go to dance recitals and plays and like so many different things that I just don't know what our life would look like if we had a child. Cause I, I, I don't know what that looks like. Um. For us, but the fact that we can sit here today and say, we've made it and we're still good and we're solid and we still sit through a lot of stuff.

We still have a lot that we're working through and we're not afraid to have those conversations about what's hard in life and the fact that we've been through what we've been through. We have so many friends that can come to us and say, you guys have been through hard things. What can we do? And we, and it's, it's amazing to feel like you're a resource to people and that they know that you're a safe place to go to and I think at the end of the day with all of our, all of the books closed and the final chapters written I think that's what I look back on the most and say We've made it.

Anaya Lee: You're amazing Dave. Oh my God. I can't top that. It just feels like we finally started living. Of course, we were still very active doing all the things when we were trying, but your head is so focused on that and nothing else. You forget that the world is turning and years are passing you by. And so it feels like we finally started living.And We just enjoy each other so much. We enjoy all of our hobbies that we love to do together. We enjoy all of the people that are in our lives and we truly get to enjoy it. There's not this dark cloud looming over all of it.

Nora McInerny: Thank you to Anaya and Dave Lee for opening up and sharing your story with us. I love this couple. I don't know what to say other than I just love them. I love them and I love their love. There are so many ways to tell these kinds of stories. There's so many more stories like this to tell. And if you have one to share with us, you can always go to our website, ttfa.org.