I

walked into my apartment after second seder to find my wife Devorah looking glum.

“Hi Devorah ” I said. “What’s wrong?”

“Horowitz from two blocks down had a baby.”

“Oh ” I said. “A boy?”

“Yeah.”

“And they want us to be kvatter.”

“Right.”

With our first anniversary behind us invitations to act as kvatter at brissim were pouring in furiously. At first Devorah and I had welcomed these opportunities as a segulah for having children but after the first half-dozen or so the invitations started to sting.

All the young couples around us were proudly pushing strollers or on their way to becoming parents and we felt keenly conscious of the fact that we had no baby on the horizon.

“Everyone’s looking at me ” Devorah complained. “Wherever I go I feel people’s eyes examining me to see if anything is ‘on the way.’ ”

I thought she was exaggerating. “You’re just imagining it ” I assured her.

But one day we were walking down the street together and we walked past a neighbor of ours who was friendly with Devorah. As she passed us her head dropped and her eyeballs opened wide as saucers. It was as though she completely lost herself so focused was she on making the all-important determination.

“Why is this anyone’s business?” I fumed after seeing that.

“Now you see what I go through every day ” Devorah replied.

As the months passed our desire to become parents turned into burning anxiety. Devorah was constantly talking — and thinking — about wanting to have a baby and her fretfulness weighed on me heavily. I had always been a serious masmid but now I was too stressed to concentrate on my learning. I also felt very self-conscious around my friends in kollel who were busy comparing notes about how long the baby had kept them up the night before. When a well-intentioned fellow in my kollel asked me for my name and my wife’s name so he could daven for us I wanted to bury myself in the ground.

Worst of all was when we went to Devorah’s parents for Shabbos or Yom Tov. Her mother and sisters didn’t stare exactly — it was more like sidelong glances when they thought we weren’t looking.

I went to speak to my rebbi and asked him if we should pursue fertility treatment. “What’s the rush?” he asked in surprise. “You’re married only a year and a half!

“This is the time when you should be building your relationship ” he said. “Look at it as a gift. You think it’s easy on a marriage to have a baby right away?”

He told me that a gadol from the previous generation advised couples to wait five years before seeking any medical intervention for infertility.

“Things were different when that gadol was alive ” I responded. “Nowadays everyone is busy looking over each other’s shoulders. The pressure is unbelievable. I think if that gadol were alive today he would say that a year and a half today is equivalent to five years back then.”

“I know what goes on among yungeleit today ” my rebbi said. “It’s true that there’s tremendous peer pressure and everyone’s busy measuring themselves against everyone else. That’s why there’s so much unhappiness. But you can’t succumb to that peer pressure. There’s no reason for you to do anything right now besides daven. Give it time.”

I was very disappointed with this answer. Maybe in theory Devorah and I should have been enjoying our extended honeymoon, freed as we were of morning sickness and colic, but the reality was that our entire existence was clouded by the sense that something was wrong. We weren’t moving on to the next stage, and our efforts to convince ourselves that we were still newlyweds didn’t quite succeed. Our shalom bayis was good, overall, but we were both undeniably stressed.

A couple of days after I approached my rebbi, he called me back. “I thought it over,” he said, “and I think you were right. It’s not the same today as it was 40 years ago. People today can’t wait five years, that’s the metzius. If you want, you can go for fertility testing.”

We went to see a fertility specialist, who ran tests and then prescribed some pills for Devorah. She took one round of the pills, then another. Nothing happened.

Then, Devorah’s younger sister Yehudis got engaged. Devorah started to panic. “Yehudis is going to be in maternity clothes in a few months,” she predicted. “I’m not going to be able to handle that.”

“Whoa,” I said. “It’s a few months till the wedding. And another few months before she can possibly put on maternity clothes. Let’s not get carried away.”

But Devorah was consumed with fear that her sister would precede her to motherhood. “It’s not so much that I’ll be jealous,” she explained in agitation. “It’s that I won’t be able to face my family. Or yours. It’s going to be devastating for me.”

I understood what she meant. Her mother had taken to giving us lengthy good wishes every Erev Shabbos, ending with a fervent “and you should have besuros tovos to share.” Before Yom Kippur, my father had given me a long brachah, ending with “and you should be zocheh to doros.” My mother had given me a meaningful look and added, “B’karov.”

None of our parents ever raised the subject of fertility directly, but the question of when are Yerucham and Devorah going to share good news was like static crackling in the background of every exchange.

After several rounds of pills, we went back to the doctor, who tested us for various conditions that could cause infertility. When the tests showed that we were facing a common, but not insurmountable, fertility issue, the doctor offered us the next option: injectables.

Devorah went through two rounds of injectables without success. The next level of fertility treatment was a much bigger deal, involving significant medical intervention.  “Before you do this, you need guidance from a rabbi,” the doctor said.

We asked a rav who was an expert on fertility issues if we should do the treatment, and after studying our test results, he said no. “Continue with the less aggressive treatment for now,” he instructed us. We were very disappointed.

After another two months of unsuccessful treatments, we went back to the rav. He asked that we repeat the testing, and only after seeing the second set of results did he advise us to pursue the more aggressive treatments.

These treatments were intrusive and frustrating, and we had to rearrange our entire schedules to time the treatments correctly. Devorah went to most of the appointments herself, returning each time physically and emotionally drained.

After the second round of those treatments, when we were just shy of our second anniversary, Devorah started feeling queasy. At Yehudis’s wedding, we no longer cared about the prying stares, the sidelong glances, or the heartfelt brachos. We were going to be parents!

As Devorah had predicted, Yehudis put on maternity clothes a few short months after her wedding. But by then, Devorah was already wearing maternity, much to everyone’s delight. We made a bris a couple of months before Yehudis did.

We had a baby, finally. And a stroller. Now, I could commiserate with the guys who were yawning in the morning. But we were still lagging behind our peers, most of whom were already pushing double strollers. And Yehudis put on maternity clothes a second time when her baby was less than a year old.

At that point, Devorah felt that it was time to be proactive. “Why should we sit around for another couple of years and then go through the whole process?” she said. “Let’s start now.”

This time, we went straight to the more invasive treatment, the one that had worked the first time. But we had switched to a different insurance in the interim, and while our first insurance had covered fertility treatment, this one didn’t. Each round of treatment cost $3,000, which we now had to pay out of pocket.

Once again, we were busy with appointments all the time, and we had to plan our life around the fertility treatments, which were real relationship killers. And, of course, we couldn’t talk to anyone about what we were going through.

With our baby just over a year old, we decided to go away on vacation for a couple of days. We had never gone a real vacation since we married, so we planned the vacation carefully, wanting to make the most of the two days and one night that Devorah’s mother would be watching our baby.

After we booked our hotel room and our rental car, we realized that our next treatment was going to coincide with the second morning of our vacation. Since the timing was crucial, Devorah had to be at the treatment center at 6 a.m. And the treatment center was a two-hour drive from the hotel.

“I would love to come with you,” I told Devorah apologetically the night before, “but if I get up at four, I’m going to be a complete grouch the rest of the day.”

“No problem,” she assured me. “I’ll go myself.”

I wasn’t awake at 4 a.m. when she tiptoed out of the room and drove away from the hotel, so I had no idea that it was starting to snow. At 8 a.m., I awoke feeling unusually refreshed. It was only then that I noticed that there was a blizzard outside. And Devorah was alone on the highway, driving through that blizzard.

Suddenly, I felt terribly worried about her. And thoroughly ashamed of myself. We had gone on vacation together — how could I have enjoyed a good night’s sleep while she dragged herself out of bed at an unearthly hour to go for treatment? Even if it hadn’t been snowing, I belonged there at the treatment center with her.

Come to think of it, I would have belonged at the treatment center even if we hadn’t been on vacation! The fertility treatments we were receiving were for the child that would belong to both of us, not just to her. Even before this child existed, I was already a derelict dad!

Until now, I hadn’t come with Devorah to any appointments that didn’t necessitate my presence, because I had reasoned that my learning was more important. But now that I had begged off because I wanted to sleep, I realized that I should never have allowed her to go through this alone.

The point of my Torah learning is to turn me into a mensch, I reflected. And a mensch doesn’t leave his wife alone while she goes through the roller coaster of fertility treatments.

Devorah had never actually asked me to come along with her. Good Bais Yaakov graduate that she was, she had always told me to go learn, assuring me that she’d be fine on her own. But that was for her to say. My job, as a husband, was to accompany her despite her protestations — if not every time, then at least sometimes. She should have known that I was as much a part of this as she was. She was the one bearing the brunt of the treatments; the least I could have done was shown my solidarity.

From now on things will be different, I pledged to myself.

Little did I know how different things would be the next time around.

It took Devorah six hours to drive to the treatment center and back. “Harrowing,” was the way she described the drive. “Zero visibility, ice on the road, cars skidding left and right.”

Barely half an hour after Devorah returned, the treatment center called to say that her appointment that morning hadn’t yielded the desired results. “Can you please come back this afternoon and repeat the treatment?” they asked.

By then, the snow had died down and the road conditions were no longer treacherous. We drove back to the treatment center and spent the rest of the day there.

When we returned to my in-laws’ house that evening to pick up our baby, we enthusiastically described what a grand time we had had, and how we had managed to rest up and refresh ourselves despite the blizzard.

“It’s not a total lie,” I muttered to myself. “One of us slept well last night.”

Our vacation may have been a bust, but the treatment was a success. Our little girl was born just shy of our bechor’s second birthday. Quite respectable, we agreed. No one would even have dreamed we had gone through fertility treatments to have this child.

We weren’t ready to call it quits after two kids, but the cost of fertility treatment was prohibitive. When our daughter was a year old, we decided to look for a better insurance plan, one that would cover fertility treatments. The plans that were suitable for us were far more expensive than our current plan, however, so we didn’t know whether it made sense to switch plans.

We needed advice — but from who?

I opened our local Jewish phonebook to a section called “Infertility Guidance” and found a few listings for organizations that help couples struggling to have children, along with a listing for a Rabbi Lemmer, who offered coaching to such couples. On a lark, I decided to give this fellow, Rabbi Lemmer, a call. He invited us to come for a consultation, at a fee of $150.

“If you think about how much we paid for treatments the last time around, that’s not very steep,” I told Devorah.

“Let’s go for it,” she agreed.

We met with Rabbi Lemmer and told him our entire history. It was the first time we had shared this information with anyone other than medical professionals.

“You have to understand,” he said. “The doctors and treatment centers earn huge profits from every treatment cycle. If you want treatment, they certainly won’t talk you out of it or tell you to wait. They also may not tell you about other, more economical options that exist.”

He recommended that both Devorah and I take nutritional supplements that boost fertility. “These are scientifically tested and have proven results,” he added. “It’s not just some dubious herbal remedy. But you have to give it time to work.”

We bought the supplements, which cost about $30 a bottle, and started taking them. Several months passed without results, though, so we decided to switch to the more expensive insurance.

A few days after we sent in our application for the new insurance, Devorah said she was feeling a little queasy.

“Could it be?” I wondered.

“Nah,” she scoffed.

“We can still pull back our application,” I reflected. “It’s worth finding out before we get stuck paying those sky-high premiums.”

So shocked was Devorah by the positive result on the pregnancy test that she asked me to go buy a second, more expensive test just to make sure. But the second test was equally positive.

We couldn’t believe it. We only wished we had found Rabbi Lemmer sooner.

When our third child was a year old, we ordered a new supply of the supplements, knowing that it would probably take months before they’d go into effect. This time, however, the results were immediate: just a few short weeks after we started taking these supplements, Devorah was expecting.

“I wonder if we even needed the supplements,” I mused. “Is it possible that this had nothing to do with the supplements?”

Today, baruch Hashem, we are the happy parents of four adorable children, the oldest of whom is six years old.

And yes, we do feel sheepish for charging headlong into invasive fertility treatments, when some inexpensive dietary supplements achieved the same results.

But everyone around us was having baby after baby, and we wanted a large family, too. And so, in our panicked quest to have more kids, we never stepped back to examine the options, or even to question whether we should be pursuing treatment.

Now that we are unequivocally not an infertile couple, we are able to take a step back and admit that our panic had less to do with the reality and more to do with the background static: the societal pressure, the parental worry, the familial expectations.

Can we all take a collective deep breath and relax?

The narrator may be contacted through LifeLines.

To have your story retold by C. Saphir, e-mail a brief synopsis to lifelines@mishpacha.com or call +1.718.686.9339 extension 87204 and leave a message. Details will be changed to assure confidentiality.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha Issue 690)