Everyone says with a new year comes a fresh start…new beginnings. Most people say their goals for the new year is to get healthy and work out more. Or get financially stable. Or travel more. Or fix that one relationship that fell away from them oh so many years ago. My New Year’s resolution? Become a mommy.

For most people that last part is the easy part. You try so hard to NOT get pregnant (am I right?) You take birth control, use condoms, only have sex at a certain time of the month…you do everything under the sun to make sure you don’t see those two pink lines. But then…you find the right guy and all of that changes. For me, I found him when I was only 16 years old (which means I’ve now known him for half my life — so crazy!) But don’t worry…I’m not 16 and pregnant…if I was I’d be writing a whole different blog 😉

Laryen and I have been married since 2008. Yes, his name is Laryen and I’m Lauren…what are the odds!

Anyway, we are high school sweethearts.

We’re from Colorado and our parents still live 5 minutes away from each other. We love being in love with each other and I honestly don’t know what I’d do without my second half.

Ok…enough of that mushy stuff, lol.

3 years ago we decided we wanted to start a family! When you start dating someone at 16, both of you have pretty much planned your life together. 3 kids. 2 dogs. A house with a yard. Successful careers. Check, check, check…for the last three items. And we couldn’t wait to start checking off the first item on our life-long list. So I got off birth control (woohoo) and we started trying. And all those years that you have tried so hard to not get pregnant catch up to you and you think in your mind, wow. What a relief! I don’t need to worry AT ALL (am I right ladies?) And after 6 months…you think to yourself, hmm…I’ll get pregnant any day now. After 12 months…hmm maybe we aren’t having sex at the right time of month. I’m going to chart my temperature EVERY SINGLE MORNING before I get out of bed so I know when I’m ovulating. People start giving you advice, “Just relax.” “Get drunk and see what happens.” “Go on vacation.” “It’ll happen when you stop thinking about it.” After 18 months…hmmm…maybe something is wrong because we should probably already be pregnant. And that’s where our infertility story begins.

Doctors say anyone who has tried for a year without birth control and doesn’t get pregnant have some sort of infertility. You always hear these stories of people who struggle for YEARS to get pregnant but you never think it’ll happen to you. I never thought it would happen to me and Laryen. But do you want to know a scary number? 1 in 8. That’s how many couples can’t get pregnant for one reason or another. Isn’t that crazy? But you don’t know the number is that high because a lot of people simply don’t talk about. There are so many emotions tied to the concept. I went through a really tough few months through all of this being mad at myself and my body. This is the one thing (scientifically speaking) I, as a woman, am here on earth to do – to reproduce. And for one reason or another, I can’t do it. It’s just not in the cards without some sort of help and that’s a hard pill to swallow.

There are so many hurdles in the game of life; we’ve all been through them. But throw infertility in the mix, those hurdles seem to get so big you can’t leap over them. You can’t even see over the top of the hurdles to know where the finish line is. The one thing that has helped us get through all of this (well a few things I guess) are faith, optimism and support. Laryen told me not too long ago, “Honey we are going to be parents, there’s no question about it.” And we are. And I think we’ll be damn good parents too. And whenever I feel like I’m going to give up I think to myself, I can’t give up. Because if we give up, then that little bundle of joy won’t ever get here. We can’t give up for our future children, our future family … and we won’t give up. That’s the easy way out, and we don’t play that game!

So…now here we are. The new year and a new perspective on this whole thing called infertility. EVERYONE has a story. Everyone. And this is ours. And the more open I am about infertility, the more I find out that a lot more people than I first thought share parts of our story. It’s not all the same story line of course, but bits and pieces of it are the same. We aren’t alone. We have so many friends who struggled to complete their family or friends of friends who went through the same thing. That’s why I want to share our story. To help others and help them know that it will all be ok.

You have to believe in possible -and that’s what Laryen and I are doing in the new year.