My Son and the Big Reveal

“So our teacher asked us, ‘What is something others may not know about you?'” my older son told me. He, at nearly fourteen, doesn’t burst forth about his day at shared school, but drips information over the rest of the week. We had just finished our homeschool day, and he was ready to share.

My son is not the “sharing” type, so I was more than curious how he handled this request.

“What did you tell your class?”

“I told them I was made in a lab.”

Talk about a big reveal. I’m sure he had his beginnings on the brain as our family had talked the night before about he and his twin brother being IVF babies. The conversation isn’t a new one, as my husband and I decided long ago that we wouldn’t drop the in vitro fertilization bombshell on our kids. Usually, the subject comes up like this:

Boys: We hate science class!

Dad/Mom: But you were the product of science! How can you hate science?

So in this way my husband and I segue into how much we wanted our boys, so much so we put ourselves through the painful rigor of shots and invasive medical procedures, a rollercoaster of hope and disappointment, and finally, a happy ending filled with relief and elation.

But. Wow. I guess my son was really listening this time. Or maybe for awhile now. He’s a thinker, an internalizer. But not a revealer. And here he told his class something really, really big. Ok, maybe that’s me talking. He doesn’t know that IVF is considered taboo in some circles, and flat-out wrong and immoral in others, but we’ve never discussed that with him and his brother. We don’t want them to feel ashamed of their beginnings, or outcast because of them. There will be a time and a place to discuss the controversy that is fertility treatment but that time hasn’t come for us yet. So I held my breath as I asked this next question:

“So what did your classmates say?”

“Well, one of them thought that was pretty cool. And my teacher said I was brave to tell something this personal.”

My son seemed pretty proud of the reaction he got. For my part, I was relieved.

“…I said I hadn’t even told my best friend about this. I mean, I don’t think about it all the time, or really that much. Then I told them a lot of the eggs (embryos) didn’t make it and that you had me frozen… by the way, how RUDE is THAT?!?”

Cryofreezing does sound harsh, I’ll give my son that. But leave it to a teenager to find fault with his parents on a standard medical protocol. I won’t argue that point now. But I reminded him that cryofreezing isn’t something to try at home, but in the right hands, well, the process did get him here, and we wouldn’t have been able to have this conversation without it.

“I imagine the lab I was made in,” my son continues. “…that it looked like the one in Jurassic World, where they made the dinosaurs.”

I let him describe what he thought the cryotank looked like and let his imagination do the talking. Making dinosaurs in a lab got me thinking: those creatures were the product of science. But they still looked like dinosaurs and acted like dinosaurs…they were dinosaurs. I told my son:

“Honey, you have a very special story to tell. But know you were still made the same way all babies are made, it’s where you were made that’s different. Know you are as much a person as anyone else…you think, feel and look just like anyone made in the traditional way. And know you are not alone, there’s lots of people who have the same story you do.”

He looked at me. I’m not sure what he was thinking and I worried I may have revealed my concerns about how others would take his unconventional beginnings. Maybe I went too far. And laid the taboo of IVF upon my child? Said something to make him feel self-conscious, as if at thirteen he needed more to feel weird about? Then he said:

“I still think it was rude you had me frozen.”

Of course. He is a teenager after all.