A friend comes through

Yesterday morning I had an email waiting from Derek.  I know he came off sounding pretty bad in my last post, but I'm happy to report that he completely redeemed himself.  

Apparently I'm not the Oscar-worthy actress I thought I was, since he knew something was up during our phone chat.  But since he knew I was in a big shared office he didn't want to ask me about it at work.  In his email he came clean about their IVF, and told me how sorry he was that he hadn't been able to share it before but apparently his wife had sworn him to secrecy from all but their closest friends and family.  He was hesitant to even try IVF, since after months of trying with no success he had basically convinced himself that he didn't want kids anyway, since "it would make the reality easier to accept."  His wife has pretty bad endometriosis, and they actually had an ectopic pregnancy on their first IVF.  He said he knew that it was probably hard to hear his news given our situation, and he understood that but didn't want to leave me out of the notification calls because my friendship was important to him. 

I wrote him back and apologized for not being able to be as excited as I should be about their pregnancy.  I told him about our most recent failed FET and how hard I've been finding things.  I also confessed that I had put the pieces together about their IVF but didn't want to bring it up if he didn't want to share it with me.  He responded that, during our previous conversation when I told him about our situation, he really wanted to tell me but didn't want to break his wife's confidence.  Can't blame a guy for that.  But he clearly understood my reaction and how lonely it is to feel like the only one who isn't having kids.  One of the reasons Derek and I are such good friends is because we're both equally snarky and cynical, so I had to laugh when he wrote that "I was so glad when people finally stopped asking us all the time about having kids... a few people who were rude enough to keep harping on it, I just told them I was impotent with a straight face and left it at that (AWKWARD!)"

He finished with a few non-trite, totally appropriate words of encouragement, including the following:

"Of course some of it comes down to luck...we had a long run of bad luck that seemed it wouldn't end, but it did. I won't pump sunshine up your ass because you are way too smart for that, but I really do think you have good reason to be hopeful if you can stick it out for another cycle or two."

I told him that I think he's going to make a great dad.