As we were about to head to bed for the evening, Chris quietly asked “What if we can’t have children?”.  This is a question we have discussed before – several years ago in fact.  It’s the kind of question you ask just after your boyfriend/fiancee asks you to marry him.  It’s one of those BIG questions.  And we had much time to talk about it back then.  Chris proposed to me just 1/2 hr into our 4 day hike in the remote Italian mountains, the Dolomites.  Of course I said yes when he asked me to marry him (If I had said no it would have been a rather awkward four days in the mountains 😉 ), but this left four days of ‘just us’ to talk about ‘the big things in life’, to double check that we were in fact right for each other.  Well probably more of me doing the double checking, after all, he had been planning to propose to me for months, he had all that time to think about it.  We concluded that love conquers all, you couldn’t really argue with that logic.  Oh so naive?

This time around, Chris asked the question with a genuine sadness in his eye.  With a little bit of wine in me, my eyes welled up instantly and hit some kind of nerve.  Because yes, love does conquer all, but it hurts to think that this could be a reality in the not so distant future.  I have thought about it a bit, but I haven’t really looked into it in depth.  We discussed potential future options of donor eggs. donor sperm, gestational surrogacy, adoption and being ‘child free’.  These discussions were brief and emotionally fuelled, with neither of us having much understanding about any of them.  We concluded that we do not both agree on each of these options, we have our differences of opinions, however we recognised that these feelings are likely to change dependent on our situation and once we have done more research together.  We did agree on one thing – that we would use all of our savings if we had to, but we would not get into debt.

The discussion was brief, we were tired and emotional, it was not the best time to ask this BIG question.  But it is a question we need to be prepared to think about more if round 3 of IUI does not work.  This doesn’t mean we are not hopeful about round 3, far from it, it’s just something we might want to start smarting up about.  Education certainly never hurt anyone.