I lay on the floor in my daughter’s room.  She’s almost two and a half, and has a tooth coming in, and has a cold, and a cough, and an on-and-off fever.  I’m not in much better shape.  The medication I’m taking for our upcoming IVF trip is knocking me around, and laying on the floor by her bed and holding her hand is about as active as I can make myself get.  She cries.  I want to cry.  I’ve got another pill to take soon, and I know it’s going to knock me down further.

Why am I doing this to myself?

The answer is love.

The longer answer is this: my husband and I went back and forth for a while.  We could be happy with our one child.  We are happy with our one child.  Why push our luck, right?  IVF worked the first time for us (no twins, though we used two embryos and froze the third).  Shouldn’t we be content that we got the child we desperately wanted, and leave it at that?

But I kept coming back to two things: first, from a practical standpoint, I want my daughter to have a sibling.  Not for right now necessarily.  I don’t subscribe to the idea that being an only child dooms you to a life of selfishness.  But I wanted a child for later, when hard things happen in families and you need someone by your side to help carry the load.  But on a deeper level, it came down to love.

I have so much love to give.

And sure, there are ways to share that love other than having a second child.  Charity work, making meals for others, giving when we can.  But there is something specific about the love of having a child; there’s nothing else like it.  I’m going to confess, I feel greedy, wanting to give more of my love that way.  But the heart wants what it wants.

Too often we get caught up in the pro and con sides of family building.  It’s not that the everyday practicalities (money for daycare, career impacts, bodily impacts, etc.) aren’t important.  But at the end of the day, the stuff that matters is relatively simple: do we have more love to give, and is this how we want to give it?

The first time we did IVF, we did it abroad.  Financially, it was significantly less expensive for us to fly to the Czech Republic for the procedure than it was to stay in the US.  But now, there’s an extra reason to go back: that third frozen embryo far across the ocean.  It feels right to go rescue it before turning to other options (foster-to-adopt being our next option; we applied to adopt several years ago but due to student loan debt we were not able to proceed).  So technically this time around, we’re doing a Frozen Embryo Transfer rather than the full IVF procedure.  It should be better, easier, and with fewer needles!

Yet here I am, on the floor in my daughter’s room, green from the estrogen pills I’m taking three times a day, dreading that third pill of the day as I sooth my daughter.  I think about the first trip we took, how we saw the tiniest blip of those two embryos on the monitor, how we hoped beyond hope that we would have a family.  And now that we do, I realize: the effort and tears it sometimes takes are so worth it.  Even when we’re feeling dragged down, even when there are colds and fevers and coughs and sleepless nights and tired days and tears and tantrums and bodies that are not what they once were, when there are endless bottles to wash…

I smooth my daughter’s curls away from her forehead.  “It’s going to be okay.”

And it is.  No matter what.