I Changed My Mind: My Journey from Infertile to Childfree

Part 1

Introduction

Before we get started…

What this book is and what it isn’t.

Right off the bat, I want to be clear about what you will and will not get out of this book. First, this is not a guide or a how-to book. It’s a memoir in which I share my experiences as someone who went through infertility, then chose to be childfree. You might find some of those experiences helpful or relatable in your own journey, or you might not. That’s okay.

If you are infertile and trying to make peace with a future without children, and you’re looking for a book to help you make that decision or learn how to shift your mindset from infertile to childfree, you probably won’t find it here. I mean, it’s possible you will—it’s entirely possible you’ll see yourself and your thoughts and emotions within these pages, and that might help you move forward. You just never know where you’ll find something like that. While I would be thrilled if my book does bring you peace or otherwise help you, I don’t want to raise those expectations or make those promises. They are not the intent of this book.

This is not an us vs. them book. It’s not an attempt to persuade anyone they should or should not be childfree. It is, quite simply, a recounting of my own experiences and how they led me to who and where I am today.

Also, there will be random photos from my life because this is a memoir and I want to.

Why am I telling this story?

Over the years, I’ve heard and read a lot of stories from people discussing the transition from infertility to a childfree life, but I have yet to find one I can truly relate to. All those that I’ve heard have been about accepting that infertility is here to stay and biological children aren’t happening. People either can’t afford to adopt or choose not to for any number of reasons, and thus, their future is one without children. Rather than being childless, they’ve chosen to embrace the hand they’ve been dealt and be happily childfree.

These stories are perfectly valid, of course! In fact, it’s great that people share these stories, and I hope they continue to do so.

But the story I haven’t seen is one like mine. In mine, infertility didn’t make the decision—I did. I didn’t give up. I didn’t decide to make peace with being infertile. In fact, after almost four years of various treatments, especially with some glimmers of hope that they were starting to work, it’s entirely possible I ultimately could have had biological kids.

I didn’t surrender to infertility. I literally said to myself, What am I doing? I don’t want this!

That’s the key: I didn’t give up—I changed my mind.

Ironically, people still insist to this day that I’ll change my mind about being childfree, and they get very Surprised Pikachu when I tell them I did change my mind. More on that later.

So that’s the story I want to tell—about fighting the fight of infertility, only to realize that the end goal was something I no longer wanted. I want to talk about the guilt and the relief, the shame and the elation, and the difference in my reactions to finding out I was pregnant vs. releasing myself from the pressure of getting pregnant again.

Not everyone will be able to relate to my story, and that’s okay. Hopefully, if you can relate, you feel seen and understood. If you can’t relate, then I hope you’ll still come along for the ride and find out what life is like for one person who went through infertility and came out childfree.

Also, I’ll keep the TMI to a minimum wherever possible. I try to be as open and candid as I can about my experiences, but not everything is for public consumption. Most names have been changed for privacy, and I have deliberately obscured identities or left out some stories entirely if they would cause family conflict, create embarrassment or blowback against someone, or potentially get me into legal hot water. Only people who know me will likely notice those missing pieces, but I’m mentioning it here in the name of full transparency. I’m telling my story, but out of respect and necessity, I’m not telling my whole story.

And finally, my husband, Eddie, changed his mind, too. Most of what I talk about in this book will be my own thought processes, what drove me to make my decision, etc., not because I didn’t take him into consideration, but because his thoughts and emotions are his story to tell, not mine.

Who am I and how did I get here?

It’s mid-2024. I’m writing in the place where I work every day: the couch in my living room in a rental house in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It’s a room filled with evidence of the life Eddie and I have lived together. Shelves are lined with souvenirs from the years we spent living on Okinawa and later Spain, as well as our travels to Morocco, the U.K., Austria, Finland, and myriad other places.

One wall of the living room is covered with Pittsburgh Penguins hockey memorabilia. On another, paintings I’ve created over the last few years hang beside wedding photos and Eddie’s collection of Star Wars light sabers.

On the mantel, between two display cases full of hockey pucks, are about a dozen of the books I’ve written and published, and above them is a plaque—the Romance Writers of America’s Centennial Award, given when an author publishes 100 books. Eddie’s two Master’s degrees hang on one wall. My various writing awards occupy a shelf in a curio case. There’s a drumstick I caught at a Bastille concert in Boston in 2017. Behind that, a photo of us goofing around at Medieval Times in California in 2014.

There is a lot of history on these walls and shelves. A lot of living that’s happened in twenty-two years, especially in the sixteen since we became decidedly childfree.

Most of that life did not exist when my story, such as it is in this book, began. Most of that life and those experiences—most of this reality—is the byproduct of the major turning point around which this book revolves. I’m writing from a future that the much younger me could not have foreseen as she set the wheels in motion.

The story I tell within these pages began in 2003, but first, let me go a little further back to who I was in the years leading up to that.

I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s in Woodinville, a suburb of Seattle. If you’ve ever had Chateau Ste Michelle wine, you’ve had wine from Woodinville. Back then, there were two big wineries. These days, the whole town has basically been turned into wine country, with tasting rooms and wineries of every size everywhere you turn. I don’t drink wine, but that’s my hometown’s claim to fame, so there it is.

I was raised in a strange little gray area between suburbia and rural farmland. We had horses, dirt trails, and forests to play in, but we were also only about fifteen minutes from town and maybe forty minutes from Seattle. It was a small town by Washington standards, but not one of those one-horse towns of 200 people where everybody knows everybody’s business. Basically, I lived on a small farm, but my graduating class had 400 people in it; it was a nice mix of city and country life.

My formative years also straddled a fuzzy line between the life of a civilian and that of a military brat. I never lived in base housing. We didn’t move around (I literally lived in the same house until I was twenty-two). But my dad was a reservist and a not insignificant portion of each generation of my extended family spent time in the military. My grandmother legitimately thought it was an act of rebellion when I tried to join the Peace Corps because "we are a proud military family!" if that tells you anything.

So I didn’t have all the upheaval and chaos of a military upbringing, and I didn’t spend a ton of time on/around bases, but I had more familiarity with military life than other kids I grew up with.

In 2002, about three years after I graduated high school, I met Eddie, a Sailor stationed aboard a ship in Bremerton. We dated and then—as is custom with young military couples—got married after less than a year. No, really. We met in March and married in December.

Originally, we’d gotten engaged quickly but planned to have a long engagement. The initial plan was for a wedding in 2004, but for a number of reasons, we decided to move it up to December of 2002.

Given our whirlwind meet-ring-wedding process, it was inevitable that people would suspect a shotgun wedding. At least one close relative looked me right in the eye and asked when I was due. Naturally, being a couple of young, stupid kids, that had to be the reason, right? Scandalous.

Well, it wasn’t. But once the rings were on, the tune quickly changed from Oh, you knocked her up, didn’t you? to When are you two going to have kids? I almost got whiplash from the sudden shift.

At that point, we were adamant we didn’t want kids. At all.

So began the song every childfree person knows by heart: You’ll change your miiiind!

And… we did.

Eddie was unexpectedly deployed less than a month after we got married. There’s usually quite a bit of lead-up to a deployment—sea trials, workups, etc.—and you know it’s coming. This time, the ship went out for a three-week training exercise. Ten days into it, he called and said, We’re supposed to be heading home, but I just went outside to take a picture of the sunset… and it’s setting off the wrong end of the ship.

This was when the war in Iraq started, and his three weeks at sea would turn out to be eight very long months apart.

And somewhere along the line—somewhere amidst getting through all that separation and wondering when it would be over (we didn’t know when he was coming home until a week before he arrived)—we both changed our minds about kids.

That, dear reader, is where this story begins.

Part 2

Planting the Seeds of Doubt

Chapter 1

From childfree to infertile

To this day, I can’t explain what changed. I can’t explain exactly what sent me from adamantly childfree to wanting a baby. For as much as I’d eschewed the idea of being a mother since my early teens, I was suddenly caught up in what some childfree groups refer to as the baby rabies. I really, really wanted to have a baby.

Some people say it must’ve been the societal expectation. You get married, and then you have kids. We’d checked the first box, so it was time to check the second. I don’t know if that was true for us. I really don’t. There are any number of explanations for why a person would make this shift, and any number of them could have been why I did. When I say I don’t know, I mean exactly that. Couldn’t explain it then. Won’t pretend I can explain it now.

Regardless of which synapse went rogue and why, the fact remained that I now wanted kids. So did Eddie. Our extended separation thanks to the Navy gave us a lot of time to discuss it via phone and email. Were we sure? Did we want to start trying right away or wait a while? How many kids did we want?

Now, at the time, we were not making a lot of money. He was an E4 in the Navy, and even with the housing allowance and separation pay, he wasn’t exactly rolling in cash. I was working for a company outside of Seattle that somehow believed ~$13/hour was a decent wage for a supervisor (adjusted for inflation, that’s roughly $23/hour). Even back then, the cost of living in that area was eye-watering, and our combined income simply didn’t cut it.

I’d say as much in conversations with friends and family, saying I’d love for us to have kids, but I didn’t know how we’d afford it.

This was where things got weird. See, I was educated in a very good school district that had comprehensive sex ed, and those classes included everything imaginable to deter us from teen pregnancies. I recall an assignment where we had to go to a store and tally up the prices for a long list of baby necessities (look, this was the 1990s, so no, we couldn’t just do it online). We had the rice baby project where we had to carry around a bag of rice representing a baby for a week, and woe be unto anyone whose bag got so much as a scuff. Or anyone who had to carry