Redemption is Coming

Embryo adoption through our clinic is different than most. These adoptions are closed but it was quite important to us to have some sort of relationship or communication with the donor family. We asked our clinic if they would be open in sharing first names and email addresses and they agreed to share.

I wrote out an email over a period of weeks (seriously) trying to make it perfect. Erase, rewrite, too many words, not enough words – nothing could ever be good enough or expressive enough to show our gratitude to this family for giving these embryos a chance at life and letting us be the ones to have it.

My email to them:

How do you start a letter to someone who has given you an opportunity to have your hard-fought prayer answered? 

This month marked 7 years of our journey to parenthood. Although 7 is a special number for us, we never thought it would be a journey that lasted this long. 

We met through mutual friends on Valentines Day 2015. Long story short, we got engaged in 2016, married in 2017, left home and moved states in 2018, when we started trying for baby t, then later started our IVF journey in 2021. Our first transfer was successful, but we lost our girl at 12.5 weeks. 5 more miscarriages and 3 failed transfers brought us here. 

There were several things that stuck out to us about your profile. But the biggest for both of us was y’all specifically saying you wanted to give these embryos a chance at life. 

So thank you. Thank you for choosing to donate your remaining embryos and giving us a chance to give them a chance. We remain steadfast in faith that we will bring a baby home and we promise to raise him or her in the most loving home, full of hugs, encouragement, thorough communication through the tough life lessons, and so much more. 

Being a mother is something I’ve always dreamed about. When I was little girl and asked, “what do you want to be when you grow up,” my answer was always, “a momma.” It’s my dream job, my dream title. I can’t wait to make a bottle at 3AM, constantly buy more storage on my phone from taking too many pictures, hear the first laugh, scramble to find a last-minute babysitter, watch the first steps, gag from a dirty diaper but, most of all, hear the words “momma” and “daddy” from our child. 

I’m not sure how much of a relationship y’all are willing to have but I do feel, at the very least, we’d love to share milestones. Milestone #1 – we transfer our first adopted embryo tomorrow! We are excited and nervous, the unknown is super scary, but we know who already holds our future in His hands. 

We had such high hopes with these four embryos. The hand and presence of God was felt throughout the entire process. There is absolutely no way He would lead us through more loss.

But He did.

The first transfer with the donor embryos went so smooth. We transferred one perfect little embryo with our gestational carrier. About 10 days later, it was time for bloodwork. We agreed to take a pregnancy test that morning for preparation of what the afternoon call would include. THE TEST WAS POSITIVE! Now just to wait for the clinic to call.

They called and I was so confident because of our positive at-home test so I answered. The voice on the other end of that phone call was not what I expected at all. “I’m so sorry Christa but the results were negative.” I told her there was no way that was correct because we had a positive test with a rather dark line that morning. She agreed to retest just in case in 48 hours. We did that. Again, negative.

This one was hard. It was our first donor embryo we transferred. We were so hopeful. All the God winks we received – what were they for? Were we just imagining things and seeing what we wanted to see? Grief is weird but let me tell you, it is necessary to feel it. Process it. Please don’t shove it down because it. will. come. out. And usually in the worst ways.

After a few months of grieving, we were ready for the next transfer. We transferred another single embryo – again, perfect transfer, perfect thawing. But again, failure.

We were ready to do another transfer but it was around Christmas and neither of us wanted to have to go through the emotions of Christmas AND a transfer so we waited. After lots of discussions, we decided to transfer the final remaining two embryos. If this didn’t work, this would be it. This would be the end of a pregnancy journey. This would be the end of our surrogacy journey. This would be the end of our IVF and fertility clinic journey. This was our last chance.

We transferred two embryos – funny story on this because when the embryologist came in to discuss how our embryos thawed, she said “this one was, meh, okay.” I’m sorry, what? I swear you just have to learn to take things on the chin in this journey. We laugh about it now but didn’t expect to hear that on transfer day.

About 10 days later, we went in for bloodwork and again, transfer failed. That’s it. No more embryos. The finality of that hit really hard.

All of the hopes and dreams that we envisioned – who these babies would become – are now gone. With each transfer, you immediately start picturing and planning life with children no matter how hard you try not to because the hope you have in that moment is so strong. You buy a onesie, you restart your baby registry, you look at when the baby’s birthday would be, what birthstone they would have so you can get a new piece of jewelry.

But that’s not the experience we had. We never had a full pregnancy. We never experienced going in to labor in the middle of a work day. We’ll never find out if our kids would have had my curls or Jason’s eyes. All we know and all we have experienced is loss.

A failure, a miscarriage, it all comes with grief and trauma. You see, for us, we don’t just lose a “group of cells.” We lose a baby – because that’s exactly how you envision your embryos – as your children.

People always ask me, how do y’all stay so positive with so much loss and negativity? And honestly, I don’t ever know how to answer that aside from our faith in Jesus. He keeps us going. We know He has every step counted, every date set.

But our redemption story is coming! We will be parents. We are just experiencing more detours to get there.