Last week, I mentioned the dearth of male voices in the infertility blogosphere. Around the same time, Exhale Magazine published Volume 1, Issue 6, featuring a new column by Paul X., creator of Adventures in Fatherland.
No, Paul's not the first guy to step forward and be counted among the TTC. I remember really reveling in the book A Little Pregnant: Our Memoir of Fertility, Infertility, and a Marriage by husband and wife team, Ed Decker and Linda Carbone, in 1999. I also published comments from a few of the guys who hung out in and around the old About.com site from back then.
And Paul admits to not being qualified as the Official Spokesman for Infertile Men. The barriers he and his wife face/d (they're cross-fingered expecting at the moment) are of the female variety, so Paul's not coming so much from a "Holy Spermatozoa, I Shoot Blanks!" angle as from a "This WAS Your Idea In The First Place, Honey" bent.
Still, there is something so incredibly freeing about reading the travails of a person who refers to the arduous infertility journey as "The Long F*"...
Kudos, again, to Monica LeMoine and staff for bringing the really hard stuff to the forefront of infertility reading.
{You can read my 2000 review of A Little Pregnant and the transcript of a chat with the authors...}
Paul is great. Funny, smart, down to earth - an awesome male infertility voice in this land of...yes...literary male dearth in that particular realm. Thanks for giving him the kudos!
Posted by: monica lemoine | July 15, 2009 at 05:18 PM