As told to Chandra Thomas Whitfield
Corregan Brown wants to be a father. When his wife had a miscarriage, he was devastated, and found that fathers are often forgotten, although they, too, grieve. Here, he tells his story to Chandra Thomas Whitfield:
We tied the knot when I was 37 and she was 33. Like many, we trudged on into wedded bliss and assumed that certain things would just fall into place. I wish they had.
About 18 months later, we were elated to discover that my wife appeared to be about five weeks pregnant. But as things didn’t develop as expected, we went back to the doctor and learned an unfortunate medical term that I'll never forget: blighted ovum. Essentially, it means that the lights are on, but no one’s home. The body thinks it’s pregnant, but the embryo has stopped developing and has died. All we could do was wait for her body to discover what we already knew.
She later had the awful experience of finally miscarrying during a service at the Christian church we’d attended at the time. My wife stood there on stage, literally shedding life, while singing worship songs to a Creator who, it seemed, did not see fit to let us participate in the joy of creation. We began the process of mourning and rebuilding, hoping that if we tried again, things might change.
We told the church about what happened, and my wife received a few calls of sympathy. Because I am a man, though, no one really checked in on me. After all, it wasn’t my body that had experienced the betrayal. Pregnancy and children are primarily women’s business, right? My aching and weary heart told me otherwise. And it’s not just my fellow congregants who felt that way.
In both my church and larger society, we men are expected to be iron-willed warriors. The loss of a child, even at such an early stage, it seems, is supposed to be endured stoically in quiet shame. And sadly, there was no place to go to help process the complex emotions that came with such a loss. Despite the widespread myth of manhood regarding such matters, the truth is we both suffered a massive loss that day. Years later, there are still moments that I find myself grieving. Father’s Day can be especially tough.
From June to June, each year I watch my friends’ and relatives’ children grow. I smile and hold them and teach them. I do love them, and I am not jealous that so many others around me have been blessed with the gift of parenthood. As my wife and I have been unexpectedly and unfortunately catapulted into the complexities of coping with infertility, it often feels as though we have to deal with our frustration, our anger and our sadness alone. Even as I write this, I can't help but reflect on the emptiness at my shoulder, where a little boy should be peppering me with incessant questions while I type. There’s a void at my knee, where a girl should be tapping my leg to ask if I want to hear her song again. I talk to my therapist and try to do my self-care. But there’s sometimes just nowhere for this grief to go.
Since that first loss, the odds were further stacked against our having a child who shares our genetics because of myriad health problems. Lower back issues, a recurrence of the fibroids she’d previously had surgery for, and a harrowing emergency surgery to remove them during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic that resulted in the loss of one ovary and left her uterus scarred, making carrying a child out of the question.
Our only option left is a gestational carrier, also known as a surrogate. I am grateful and I know that we are blessed to have the resources to even consider such an option. Still, a part of me mourns so many things that I never expected to mourn: knowing that I will never put my hand on my wife’s belly and feel our future squirming and kicking in there. I’ll never get to give my wife the tender healing support of a new father as her body recovers from giving birth. And we will never experience the whirlwind of terror and joy that is the labour experience, at least not first hand.
We do have a glimmer of hope to hold on to this year though. We have learned that months of IVF treatments have yielded us one perfect embryo, which I have promptly nicknamed “Cellblob”. I won’t dare risk giving it a name or a gender, but I can’t help but wonder: Will this be the one? Will the child have my wife’s smile and angelic singing voice and my bizarre sense of humour, all rolled up into one person? There have been difficult conversations since then, but we have resolved to move forward with the wildly expensive surrogacy process because, well, it’s our dream. And isn’t that cliché kind of true; that anything worth having is worth fighting for? In our social media age, whenever I talk about our embryo, I always jokingly say “#Pray4Cellblob”. As we hope and pray that our dream of parenthood won’t once again become a nightmare, we’d appreciate if you would pray for us, too.
Corregan Brown is an Atlanta-based co-founder of ProjectLocker, occasional musician, poet, pundit and wannabe dad.
Chandra Thomas Whitfield recently completed a fellowship at the Leonard C Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting.