SNWJ: Baseball Advice From Dad Equals Two Babies In Life
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Baseball Advice From Dad Equals Two Babies In Life
John Paul Derryberry
My Dad loved baseball and basketball. Still to this day, I do not remember which one he liked more. He and I connected over basketball in a more significant way, but I always remember him coaching me out of baseball slumps. It may be the toughest sporting slump to break out of. Hitting a baseball is hard, and every time you do not get a hit, the pressure mounts. My dad would calmly say, the next chance is an entirely new experience. You just have to convince your brain of that. My dad said, "Stop thinking so much and keep swinging." Not just great baseball advice but great life advice as well. We do our best when we do not think so much and keep trying.
Anne, my wife, and I were in a zero-for-life slump with trying to start our family:
One miscarriage
Two failed adoptions
Three failed in-vitro trials
And, the news that it was mathematically impossible for it to occur naturally.
The pressure mounted and all the failure began to linger. Failure after failure has a way of slinking into the stickiest parts of our thinking pattern. Sometimes the battle is keeping hope alive. We knew, after years of struggling, that we had to keep faith alive and try to break this slump. We doubled our chances. We hired another adoption agency and began talking with the University of Iowa about adopting a donor embryo. We were zero for life but we thought, if our luck changes, one of these solutions will work out.
Anne and I were on vacation in Grand Maris, Minnesota, in an area with no cell phone service. When we came into town, after the long trip home on Saturday, we got a voice mail from the new adoption agency that we had been selected to adopt. We had been here before, so our hopes rose only to just under sea level On Monday, we were asked to meet the birth mom, who was five days away from giving birth to Amelia. The meeting went well and she informed us that she had no plans to change her mind.
We walked out tingling with the idea that our family might finally begin. We realized that our donor embryo transfer was scheduled for the day before baby Amelia was due to enter our lives. We agonized over whether to cancel, to go ahead, to postpone. The conversation lasted the whole day. The birth mom could change her mind, and the embryo might not work. Both of those things had occurred before. We were firmly planted in the realm of over-thinking it. My dad would say, both a soft dongle or a home run breaks the slump just the same.
With that advice swimming in my head, I suggested that we move forward, keeping as many avenues open for a baby as possible. Anne agreed. Our mantra became:
The goal is to get a baby. We do not have a baby yet, so move forward with both. In essence, we stopped thinking so much, kept on swinging, and just went on living life.
Dad's advice never ceases to fail, even all these years later.
July 5th, we do the transfer.
July 6th, Amelia is born.
July 9th, we take Amelia home.
July 13th, we clear the first significant legal hurdle.
July 15th, we find out that the embryo survived and Anne is pregnant.
We didn't just break our slump, we smacked a game-winning, two-run homer with the crowd going nuts and the announcer shouting, " I DO NOT BELIEVE WHAT I JUST SAW!" Anne and I went from zero for life, in our attempt to have kids, to having two babies about 8-and-a-half-months apart. My dad would be proud of the majestical way we broke out of that slump.
All the worry we had about never starting a family, turned into how are we going to have two babies that close together. It's funny the places life takes us. In my wildest dreams, I never thought both scenarios would produce a positive outcome. Yet I couldn't be happier that both did. Last's week's blog comments and emails rolled in about how I made so many of you cry with the news of Amelia Jay Hansen Derryberry. I hope that this week you all get a good laugh about this turn in our lives, because we have. We laughed about wanting and doing everything to get one baby, only have it become two.
Such is life. Just when we think we know the direction we are headed, it takes us somewhere else. Just when you think you are never going to get another hit in baseball, you drill a ball harder than ever before. We swing from lows to highs. We go from crying to laughing. We go from worrying that it won't happen to excitement that it did, and back to worrying about what's next. Anne and I went from finally we have our child, to wait, we are going to have two, in less than 24 hours. It's ridiculously funny, unbelievably amazing, and the greatest gifts I have ever received. Someone contact Hallmark. I have a new, cheesy movie idea I would like to sell them.
In two months, Amelia will end her short stint as an only child. Our life will grow by more than double and I will have a fantastic story to tell my children when they get older. From a baseball field in Colebrook, Ohio, my dad taught me a lesson that has carried me into fatherhood. Don't think so much and keep swinging. Now, I get to teach my two kids that same lesson.