Featured in the RNE Magazine, 2021 Volume 2
By Rachel Vorkink
We’re honored to share this latest family story with the RNE community and are particularly excited because this is actually the continuation of one that started many years ago. We were fortunate enough to have Rachel write for us back in 2015 about her family building experiences up to that point and are thrilled to feature her beautiful writing, and family, again. Read the first part of their family story here.
Single socks, uncapped markers, granola bar crumbs, matchbox cars with missing wheel, wooden puzzle pieces, muslin “lovey” blankets, and endless baby wipes…these items are in constant rotation in my hands as I make my way through the rooms of my house. Sometimes, I hear the word Mommy echo against these walls at least a hundred times a day. My present life is utterly unrecognizable to what it resembled in the summer of 2015, when I first wrote an article for Resolve New England. In the uncertain and menacing waters of infertility, I could not have even begun to imagine the world in which I now live.
On Christmas Eve 2015, after five years of trying for a baby by way of 18 IUIs, 9 IVF cycles and 2 miscarriages, my reproductive endocrinologist called to say that I was again, pregnant. Surprisingly, I took in this information with a fresh sense of optimism. This round we had changed course, we were now walking down a less familiar, but potentially more promising, path. In this cycle, for the first time, we had used my wife’s eggs to create our embryos instead of my own. And with a gift of altruistic proportions, my dearest brother had offered to be our donor.