To Know First or to Try First

Reflections on Interview with Alex Davies

Before my husband David and I tried to have a baby, we told friends for years that we weren’t ready. The most common response was, “You’re never ready.”

To my overanalytical mind, that response always seemed off. Readiness had to matter. It matters for nearly everything in life.

Last week’s interview with Alex Davies touched on a related paradox: What do we do about the fact that sometimes it takes trying to have a baby to know whether or how much we want one?

Alex said that it wasn’t until months of trying that she realized how much she wanted to become a parent. I can relate. After 16 years with David, when we finally decided to stop trying not to become pregnant, it took many months of not succeeding to know how much we really did want this.   

Specifically, it took the devastation of becoming pregnant and miscarrying to clarify how deeply we wanted to keep trying. At the time I miscarried, we had formed a connection with that growing embryo (a boy, we later learned), and a story about what the next nine months—and the next eighteen years—would bring. The flames of that loss burned for longer than I ever would have expected, and in their wake, the path ahead was cleared of underbrush. We better knew our own hearts.

The irony is not lost on me. Having a baby is one of the biggest decisions in life. And like all big life decisions, I believe that exploring the question matters. But for me, it took trying to fully know.

I hope no one reads this as a recommendation to try to have a baby to figure out whether they want one! Instead, what I learned for myself is that readiness comes in degrees. I wasn’t ready for many years. Once I was ready to enter into the unknown and accept any outcome, trying and miscarrying and trying again made me several degrees more ready.

Alex talked about taking a leap, and I do think that any experience of trying is a leap. It is an opening to the unknown. But “leap of faith” language doesn’t mean that we trust and fly blind. It doesn’t mean that we stop thinking and feeling at all.  

I am grateful for the years I took to think and feel through the decision. I wouldn’t have been ready to take the leap and accept any outcome before that. And I am grateful that when I did leap, I learned more about what I wanted. The embryo we lost gave us that gift. We honor and thank him every year on the day he would have been born for the small, clear diamond that was his life.