Photo: Tara Turnbull
?Oh my gosh, are those all yours"? That?s what everyone says when they first see me with my pack of boys. I?m now used to the looks of amazement and sympathy and horror they give me. (I usually smile and say that having two sets of twins is a very efficient way to have four kids.) They can?t tell, of course, which ones were conceived naturally and which ones were conceived in a lab. We look like a normal family. We are just a normal, albeit large, family. How I got to have such a large family was incredibly weird. If only I had known how quickly it would slide from bizarre to normal.
I had always wanted a big family. I envisioned the noise, the chaos, the fun (perhaps not, however, at this decibel level). I wanted siblings of different ages?the more kids I had, I thought, the more fun it would be. Considering how quickly and easily I got pregnant with my first set of twins, I never thought I?d have trouble conceiving again. I thought I could pick my day and month, whatever was convenient with my life, and plan to have another child. But it didn?t happen that way. After a year of trying unsuccessfully to conceive another child on our own, my husband and I sought out medical help for my secondary infertility. We tried everything. I took Clomid and then we tried in vitro fertilization (IVF). Words can?t describe how miserable the process was: It was months and months of injections, hormones, schedules, surgeries and endless tests. The absolute worst ...