Whew, OK, going to start this with a basic profile before delving into the nitty gritty posts later. I’m Erik, 33, and live in northeast Indiana. My wife and I have been married for six years and we live in a house built in 1925 with our geriatric cat, Clarence, named for saxophonist Clarence Clemons for all you Bruce Springsteen fans. We’ve both lived here all our lives, except for when I worked in Charlottesville, Va., for a few years after college. We love to read, do puzzles, play board games, spend time outside, cook, watch shows many years after they’re popular (currently on my pick, The OC, and her pick, One Tree Hill), and search for the best old fashioned around. 

I’ve attended therapy since high school and later in college after a car accident caused chronic back and neck pain and PTSD. After taking a break from therapy while in Virginia, I started therapy in 2016 back in Indiana for anxiety and depression. I continued seeing that therapist until spring 2021 when I found Robin who specialized in infertility. She was a game changer from the start as I was in a yearlong funk since March 2020 when I was diagnosed with infertility. At that point my wife and I were married for 2.5 years and we fielded many questions on when we were going to have kids. That question got more difficult to answer after the diagnosis. 

My wife and I knew that the way we planned to grow our family would be through fostering and hopefully one day, if things worked out, foster-to-adopt. I had many doubts and fears for being a good enough parent to any future kids so it took me a lot longer to get onboard than my wife needed. She was extremely patient as I worked through many obstacles in therapy I had about my ability to be a parent. It took us about a year to take the classes and various paperwork and other criteria to get licensed to be foster parents. During our first class, the agency worker said people can get licensed in as little as three months but we took our time as many things would spook me or spark questions about my readiness. We were licensed in May 2023 and accepted our first placement in June.

This blog will cover two topics that elicit many complicated emotions and thoughts, infertility and fostering. Three years passed between my infertility diagnosis and getting licensed to foster. Those three years included many obstacles and setbacks to figuring out if I could someday be a parent to a child. I spent a lot of those years carrying a lot of loneliness, sadness, guilt, and doubt. I hope writing about these two topics from a male perspective will help anyone else feeling alone in their struggles. Our first few months with a placement have elicited many similar emotions from processing the infertility diagnosis. Again, I hope this blog relates to others and it helps those working through their own journeys.