By Sheridan Voysey
Childlessness isn’t just a “female thing.” It cuts a man up too.
I know. I’ve felt it—felt each stinging cut.
For ten years my wife, Merryn, and I dreamed of starting a family. Our journey in pursuit of that dream included special diets, courses of fertility-boosting supplements, healing prayer, and chiropractic sessions (yes, chiropractic sessions—you’ll try anything). The journey included numerous rounds of costly IVF treatment, and a year of assessment as potential adoptive parents followed by an agonising two-year wait for our hoped-for adoptive child.
We pursued our dream with all the energy we had. But our dream never eventuated.
Exhausted from a decade in the wilderness of infertility, we brought our dream of a baby to an end on Christmas Day, 2010, after doctors had told us, just days before, that our final IVF round had been successful. They’d been wrong.
I feel the loss of that hoped-for child today. I feel it when I see a father tickling his giggling daughter, or as I watch a family celebrate the birthday of their teenage son, or as I see a proud father walk his radiant, veiled daughter down the aisle. I hear a little voice at these moments that says, “You’ll never have that,” followed by a jolting sense of injustice. “It’s just not fair,” the voice says, “when we tried so hard to have a child.”
Yes, infertility can cut a man up.
It cuts a man up in more ways than the loss of fatherhood, though. Having written a book about Merryn’s and my experience of starting again after infertility, and sharing our story through speaking, I regularly have men confidentially email or pull me aside at conferences to share feelings they rarely share. “I can’t talk about this to my friends,” one guy told me. “I have low sperm count. I can’t father a child. That’ll hardly impress my football buddies.” For many men this threatened masculinity is the most difficult aspect of infertility.
The lost opportunity of fatherhood. Threatened masculinity. Infertility can bring a third kind of pain to a man too—a pain born of empathy.
Try watching your wife’s bottom lip quiver as the doctor delivers the results of those first fertility tests. Watch the sadness grow in her eyes—a sadness that may last for years.
Watch your wife’s face contort in pain as the needle extracting the eggs for your first IVF round goes in. Watch as she later recovers from the trauma in shocked silence.
Watch your wife wait in hope for the results of the blood test—for the phone call with the good news that you pray for. Watch time and again as her hope falls to the floor.
Watch as she waits, and waits, and waits for the phone call from the adoption agency. Any day now it could come—the call to collect our child. But the call never comes.
Watch as she sits on the bed, a circle of tissues around her and her eyes rubbed red. Watch as she cries night after night. Feel her body shake as you hold her.
Watch as she enters an identity crisis, wondering if she’ll ever become the person—the mother—she longs to be.
And watch as she struggles with the faith that once sustained her. Watch as she wonders if the God she prays to cares. If he cared, surely he’d give her a family.
Watch all this—watch and try not to be cut up. When the one you love most suffers so much, how can your soul not be ripped to shreds?
Over three years have passed since my wife and I brought our quest for a child to an end. We’re in a different place now—we’ve started life again. And our story is helping others who need their own new beginning after a broken dream.
But please know this: childlessness isn’t just a “female thing.” Infertility cuts a man up too. In more ways than you may know.
Sheridan Voysey is a UK-based writer, speaker, and broadcaster. His latest book, Resurrection Year: Turning Broken Dreams into New Beginnings, chronicles his and his wife’s journey to start life afresh after ten years of infertility. Follow him on Twitter @sheridanvoysey, Facebook, and get his articles and podcasts at www.sheridanvoysey.com.
Great post, hearing how infertility effects men. My partner stays strong for me and doesn’t say to much. He listens and cuddles.
Thank you so much for writing. My husband tried to be strong for me and never show how much he was hurting. That hurt too. Reading your words is everything I want to hear from my husband. I know he feels the same way but it really helps to hear it through your words.
Thank you for your candor and sharing some of the most intimate feelings. My husband I are in the same place, after infertility, and an adoption that went thru but birth mom changed her mind and we had to surrender the infant we had. We have let go of the dream of being parents and trying to re enter life and start again. I will start following you because it would be encouraging to us.
This made me want to go home and hug my fantastic husband. Thank you for the honesty in this post.
I agree completely. I think women can often recover more quickly too, because we can talk about it amongst our peers, amongst other women. So many men don’t have the outlets, don’t have anywhere to go where they don’t feel their masculinity is threatened. It is hard in different ways for men. And it is important for us all to recognise and remember that.
Great post, thank you Sheridan.
Beautifully written. The man’s perspective is too often overlooked. Thank you for sharing.
That is so well put. Thank you for sharing. It has cut me up knowing how much my husband has suffered, and knowing he has constantly tried to stay strong for me. It is now 5 years since our last course of IVF failed, and it is only now, after a great deal of turmoil, that we are starting to come back to life, and beginning to come to terms with the fact we are now going to have to live Plan B. That doesn’t feel like the end of the world now, (on most days), but my God it has been a tough road to get this far.