Help the Evans-Moyers Grow our Family

Dear friends,

If you've been in close touch with Lisa and me in the past few years, you probably have had at least some awareness of our ongoing family-building effort and fertility struggles. We've tried what feels like every route to a second baby, in the past 4 years -- I tried at home for almost two years without getting pregnant. Lisa then tried at home, and while she apparently gets pregnant fairly easily, she had three losses in less than a year, ranging from 4 weeks to 13 weeks. I got a part-time job for a year in order to do a round of IVF last November, which – devastatingly – failed to yield any viable embryos. Then this past summer Lisa did a round of IVF that yielded many eggs, but just a single chromosomally normal embryo. That lil sprout beat the odds by successfully implanting in alice's womb in early September, but – we found out recently – stopped developing around six weeks.

This sounds like a matter-of-fact, short-and-sweet enough synthesis of the timeline, but it won't surprise you that each of these losses, each of these unexpected failures brought with it tremendous, tremendous grief and overwhelm. And that each of these attempts represents hundreds of tiny, painstaking interim steps -- doctors' appointments, seemingly millions of daily shots and pills, internet deep-dives, one-shot choices big and small, agonizing waiting periods, and SO much time and money spent.

We have been so so grateful to so many of you along the way, who have listened to us while we've been spiralling, who've cooked us meals, who've offered hugs and visits and child care and so much more. Our community has truly kept us going, through all this.

But, our family doesn't feel finished -- we desperately want a second baby, and a sibling for Moss. We know there are countless stories like ours, and worse, and in a bigger picture sense, that we're writing this in a time of world crisis upon world crisis. It feels like our little problems are shamefully small.

And, we know that so many people have expressed that they care about and are personally invested in our family-building efforts. So many of y'all have asked how you can support us.

So we are taking a vulnerable step and asking you for support. We want to try another round of IVF. We aim to do it at the same clinic we used for Lisa this summer, CNY Fertility in New York, which is known for being patient-centered, friendly to those who want to use a known donor, and “affordable” -- or at least as affordable as IVF gets in this country, which is somewhere in the ballpark of $12K, all told. (Average prices nationwide exceed and sometimes far exceed $20K, which is a rant for another day.)

We have some savings to put towards this, and Lisa will be taking on extra work once her part of the process is done. We are having a yard sale in November and Lisa plans to sell some baked goods in advance of the holidays. But we have a ways yet to go, to afford this.

If you feel moved to contribute, to be part of this journey with us, we are so grateful for your support in literally any amount.

And if you can't or don't want to donate, that's okay too -- we hope that by going out on this limb we can at least bring a shred more visibility and awareness to fertility struggles. If there's anything we've learned and taken away from this struggle it's that SO MANY MORE PEOPLE THAN YOU REALIZE, have gone through unimaginable pain and loss, and we simply don't talk about it enough.

Whether or not you support monetarily, we’d love if you would leave some words of support here, and/or offer up a prayer, spell, or meditation on our behalf, if and when it feels right