The End of The Journey: By Adam Alper (2016)

The End of The Journey

My wife Monica moved from Mexico to live with me in 2009. I owned a new restaurant and felt great that I would have someone I dated from a distance and recently spent a few uninterrupted months with was coming to live with me. It would make things easier. As a Chef and restaurant owner, you spend hours in a hot, cramped environment using your body and mind equally as you pursue your art, your livelihood, your future stability. I knew with Monica close to me the bag wouldn’t affect me as much. Someone who loved me for me would be there to help. At work and at home. 

I thought I’d replace the distraction of the bag with the attraction I had to Monica. I was always so attracted to her. Her unique, one-in-a-million voice. The kind of voice whose pitch and tone play sweet, delicate, music. For her soft-spoken, kind, innocent nature was just what I needed close to me. The bag was getting the better of me. Pressed up against Monica as we lay together in the tiny bed in the tiny apartment, I paid no attention. I knew there were questions that needed to be answered. Hers. Mine. But how could I? 

From the time Monica and I met a few years’ prior I thought I’d be ok. The stones built up in my ureter perpetually. Stone after stone produced as if there was a quarry inside my lower flank, and two guys were breaking rocks inside, sending stones on a journey through my most sensitive anatomy. I was used to the physical manifestations. I was used to the surgeries. I had methods for dealing with the pain. It would be over soon and we’d start our life together. Just for now, the bag strapped to my leg with the hose coming out of the hole in my back to drain my kidney was some kind of test, or some kind of pay back. 

I wasn’t surprised when I found out I just needed to lose the kidney altogether and everything else would be fine. At least 10 surgeries in the most sensitive of areas, all to no avail- well I was glad to lose it. I’d be fine, and we’d move on, and Monica and I would get back to the reason she was here. Green card, marriage and kids. In that order. I was wrong.

The physical and emotional trauma were substantial. Just as the dependence to the painkillers was. I became depressed as I watched my restaurant ravaged by the thieves I hired to work in it. It soon closed. The financial toll beat me down too. There was one silver lining, my precious Monica, who was with me through it all, nursing me back to strength and sanity and a little over 4 years later we packed up determined to start all over again, ocean-side, in California.

Monica was 34 when she came out. Now at 38 and with someone suffering from the financial and emotional devastation of a career in shambles and insurmountable debt, how much time was left to start a family? After all that surgery and injury, and black and blue anatomy for two years I had no desire to pick up the pieces and show my wife the physical affection worthy of someone who had given so, so much to me. Everything. Unselfishly. With zero expectations in return. I felt the pressure, and I knew what I had to do.

So the new opportunity we found on the west coast was really a fresh start and a new beginning. The perfect place to put the past behind us and start putting achievements that mattered, one after the other in place, as we finally could live and more importantly love, unencumbered. 

The new job was great. And with a benefit I discovered would be of enormous value to us. $20,000 of infertility coverage, IVF included. Meds included. I felt like I could pull together something that would make my beautiful love’s life fulfilled. Something I had been failing at now for quite some time. Our obstacles weren’t all monetary. Guilt and shame snuck in there and landed a few very solid punches. Fear found its way in too. 

My only care in this life is fulfilling my love’s goal of motherhood. When we went for initial testing after choosing a doctor for IVF I found out that all the physical problems did very little damage. To me. For Monica, now 40, it’s not 2009 anymore.

The guilt and shame and fear and depression follow me, consume me, and beat me daily. I go to work, but I’m hiding something. I have energy for one thing, to inject follicle stimulating hormones into my wife’s stomach, attend every other day appointments where we count follicles, and do blood studies. We listen to the doctors tell other patients over the phone how many eggs retrieved, embryos created, and we compare ourselves to everyone we see. And everyone we read about in every forum… and we cry.

The end of the journey is the part where we either have a successful pregnancy from our 2 frozen embryos plus whatever comes from one more IVF cycle? Or is it? What about the beginning of this journey? And the middle? Right now I’m in the middle. So what can I do right now for us to make for a more peaceful end, whatever that may be? Right now, we’re working on that together. We’re stepping back to realize that our emotions pooled together and channeled toward the love that brought us together, along with the determination we know we both can summon, can fight the fear and guilt away. We can wake up resolved to journey forth in embrace, seeing the beauty in our commitment and love, and we can summon strength. Guilt is so, so strong and debilitating. But what am I guilty of? I’m guilty of loving someone so much that I will live every day to make sure that every day they live is one worthwhile. I’m guilty of finding faith in God and asking Him for strength and resolve, and to bless my wife with a smile today. In the middle of this journey, I’m seeking out spiritual awareness, self-love and compassion, so that our journey becomes one of valor, solidarity, and strengthens our life-long commitment to each other, whatever our ultimate result.

My journey has changed me as a man in some of the ways I suppose fatherhood can change a man. Unconditional, boundless, intense love and commitment for someone. The ‘nothing I won’t do for my love’s happiness and security no matter where it lands me’ is what steers me out of bed, off to work, home to happiness, preparing and planning for the end of this journey, because surely there will be others.

The end? Or the beginning of my life’s truest and most valuable work? Filling my love’s days with the results of my day to day commitment to continue to fight hard for her happiness, and to find fulfillment where it finds us. We don’t know where that will take us, but we learned and lived and loved enough so far that we know we’re nowhere near the end, and peacefully and lovingly stepping back into our beginning.